Tech
If some regions become hot spots and hospitals reach maximum capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals have plans for how to decide who gets critical care resources, such as a bed in the intensive care unit or a respirator. Many hospitals recommend distributing resources to the healthiest patients who are most likely to survive. However, Johns Hopkins Medicine physicians and bioethicists say that using this kind of selection method preferentially chooses people who are white or affluent over patients who are Black, Latino or from the inner city.
RENO, Nev.- After several years of experimentation, scientists have engineered thale cress, or Arabidopsis thaliana, to behave like a succulent, improving water-use efficiency, salinity tolerance and reducing the effects of drought. The tissue succulence engineering method devised for this small flowering plant can be used in other plants to improve drought and salinity tolerance with the goal of moving this approach into food and bioenergy crops.
JUNE 30, 2020, NEW YORK CITY -- In molecular biology, chaperones are a class of proteins that help regulate how other proteins fold. Folding is an important step in the manufacturing process for proteins. When they don't fold the way they're supposed to, it can lead to the development of diseases such as cancer.
Parametric oscillators are a driven harmonic oscillator that based on nonlinear process in a resonant cavity, which are widely used in various areas of physics. In the past, parametric oscillators have been designed in pure optical and pure electrical domain, i.e., an optical parametric oscillator (OPO) and a varactor diode, respectively.
No touching: Skoltech researchers find contactless way to measure thickness of carbon nanotube films
Scientists from Skoltech and their colleagues from Russia and Finland have figured out a non-invasive way to measure the thickness of single-walled carbon nanotube films, which may find applications in a wide variety of fields from solar energy to smart textiles.
Wear and friction are crucial issues in many industrial sectors: What happens when one surface slides across another? Which changes must be expected in the material? What does this mean for the durability and safety of machines?
What happens at the atomic level cannot be observed directly. However, an additional scientific tool is now available for this purpose: For the first time, complex computer simulations have become so powerful that wear and friction of real materials can be simulated on an atomic scale.
UCLA bioengineers have designed a glove-like device that can translate American Sign Language into English speech in real time though a smartphone app. Their research is published in the journal Nature Electronics.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- By folding DNA into a virus-like structure, MIT researchers have designed HIV-like particles that provoke a strong immune response from human immune cells grown in a lab dish. Such particles might eventually be used as an HIV vaccine.
Barth syndrome is a rare condition that occurs almost exclusively in males. Symptoms include an enlarged and weakened heart. The condition is present at birth or becomes evident early in life. Life expectancy is shortened and there is no treatment.
The laboratory of Madesh Muniswamy, PhD, in the Long School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, found a clue about the processes that underlie this devastating condition.
[Vienna, 29 June 2020] The ever-deepening rift between the political left- and right-wing has long been puzzling theorists in political science and opinion dynamics. An international team led by researchers of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) now offers an explanation: Their newly developed "Weighted Balance Theory" (WBT) model sees social emotions as a driving force of political opinion dynamics. The theory is published in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS).
The group of associate professor Hitoshi Tamura and others of the National Institute of Natural Sciences (NINS) National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) first applied topology optimization technique to the concept design of a helical fusion reactor which aims to demonstrate power generation. The group successfully achieved a weight reduction of about 2,000 tons of the support structure surrounding helically twisted coils while maintaining the strength of the structure.
A new study by the Section Neurology, Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychiatry of the Institute of Movement Therapy and Movement-oriented Prevention and Rehabilitation at the German Sport University Cologne, has now found that, contrary to previous assumptions, losers express themselves nonverbally more strongly than winners. "Losers make more spontaneous nonverbal head movements after losing points in tennis than after winning points. They carry out nonverbal head-shaking movements upwards as well as side-to-side," explains scientist Dr. Ingo Helmich.
ITHACA, N.Y. - Like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, critical spin fluctuations in a magnetic system haven't been captured on film. Unlike the fabled creatures, these fluctuations - which are highly correlated electron spin patterns - do actually exist, but they are too random and turbulent to be seen in real time.
Genoa (Italy), 29 June 2020 - Researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) has led to the revolutionary development of an artificial liquid retinal prosthesis to counteract the effects of diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration that cause the progressive degeneration of photoreceptors of the retina, resulting in blindness.
HOUSTON - (June 29, 2020) - Seeing light emerge from a nanoscale experiment didn't come as a big surprise to Rice University physicists. But it got their attention when that light was 10,000 times brighter than they expected.
Condensed matter physicist Doug Natelson and his colleagues at Rice and the University of Colorado Boulder discovered this massive emission from a nanoscale gap between two electrodes made of plasmonic materials, particularly gold.