Tech
For scientists searching for the brain's 'control room', an area called the claustrum has emerged as a compelling candidate. This little-studied deep brain structure is thought to be the place where multiple senses are brought together, attention is controlled, and consciousness arises. Observations in mice now support the role of the claustrum as a hub for coordinating activity across the brain. New research from the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) shows that slow-wave brain activity, a characteristic of sleep and resting states, is controlled by the claustrum.
A cooling system developed at KAUST has improved the efficiency of a prototype solar panel up to 20 percent and requires no external energy source to operate.
Commercial silicon photovoltaic panels are only able to transform a small portion of absorbed sunlight into electricity, while the remainder of the radiation becomes heat. Because solar panels are less efficient for every degree rise in temperature, the problem of heat dissipation becomes more acute in hot environments, such as the Arabian desert.
Some diseases exhibit a clear sex bias, occurring more often, hitting harder or eliciting different symptoms in men or women.
For instance, the autoimmune conditions lupus and Sjögren's syndrome affect nine times more women than men, while schizophrenia affects more men and tends to cause more severe symptoms in men than in women.
Likewise, early reports suggest that despite similar rates of infection, men are dying from COVID-19 more often than women, as happened during previous outbreaks of the related diseases SARS and MERS.
ATLANTA - Researchers from the Emory Consortium for Innovative AIDS Research in Nonhuman Primates and their colleagues across North America have shown a new HIV vaccine is better at preventing infection and lasts longer, continuing to protect one year after vaccination. The findings, which are published online today in Nature Medicine, provide important insights for preventing HIV, and the timeliness of the results could also help shape the scientific community's approach to developing vaccines for COVID-19.
Although the health benefits of green space are supported by a growing body of evidence, few studies on this topic have been carried out in low- and middle-income countries. A new study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, which analysed data on more than 6,000 people living in an area south of Hyderabad (India), offers evidence that urban development leading to a reduction in green space may be associated with an increase in several cardiometabolic risk factors.
A new study by researchers from IIASA and China investigated the impacts of different levels of global warming on hydropower potential and found that this type of electricity generation benefits more from a 1.5°C than a 2°C climate scenario.
Superfluids, which form only at temperatures close to absolute zero, have unique and in some ways bizarre mechanical properties, Yvan Buggy of the Institute of Photonics and Quantum Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and his co-workers have developed a new quantum mechanical model of some of these properties, which illustrates how these fluids will deform as they flow around impurities. This work is published in the journal EPJ D.
A group of researchers and engineers has created a new way for robots to pool data gathered in real time, allowing them to 'think' collectively and navigate their way through difficult, previously unmapped obstacles as a team.
Researchers published their findings in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, which is jointly published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Chinese Association of Automation (CAA).
They found spin liquid behaviour in 3D, due to a so called hyper hyperkagome lattice. The experimental data fit extremely well to theoretical simulations also done at HZB.
Tokyo, Japan - Scientists at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) used nonlinear mathematical modeling to understand the bouncing and sliding instabilities that can led to tractor accidents. This research may help protect farmers from injury, as well as better control automated agricultural systems.
Scientists around the world are intensively working on memristive devices, which are capable in extremely low power operation and behave similarly to neurons in the brain. Researchers from the Jülich Aachen Research Alliance (JARA) and the German technology group Heraeus have now discovered how to systematically control the functional behaviour of these elements. The smallest differences in material composition are found crucial: differences so small that until now experts had failed to notice them.
Cohesion, the ability to keep things together, from the scale of nanoparticles to building sites is inherent to these nanofibrils, which can act as mortar to a nearly infinite type of particles as described in the study. The ability of nanocelluloses to bring together particles into cohesive materials is at the root of the study that links decades of research into nanoscience towards manufacturing.
The research reveals the universality of cohesion led by nanocelluloses
Single-cell RNA seq developed to accurately quantify cell-specific drug effects in pancreatic islets
The pancreas is an abdominal organ that produces digestive enzymes as well as hormones that regulate blood sugar levels. This hormone-producing function is localized to the islets of Langerhans, which constitute clusters of different endocrine cell types. Among those are beta cells, which produce the hormone insulin needed to lower glucose (a type of sugar) levels in our blood, as well as alpha cells, which generate the hormone glucagon in charge of raising glucose levels in the blood.
WASHINGTON--Levels of two major air pollutants have been drastically reduced since lockdowns began in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but a secondary pollutant - ground-level ozone - has increased in China, according to new research.
Several data-driven epidemiological approaches that have been proposed or trialed for COVID-19 are justified if implemented through transparent processes that involve oversight, write Michelle M. Mello and C. Jason Wang in this Policy Forum. Though, say the authors, "we question the necessity to conduct contact tracing using cellphone and other private data without users' consent." Around the globe in select countries, a range of innovative uses of personal data from outside the health sector have been undertaken to meet the challenge posed by the novel coronavirus.