Tech
Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have collaborated with British economists to study how energy consumption by Swiss industry develops depending on energy pricing. To this end, they examined in particular the prices and consumption of both electricity and natural gas over the past decades. One result: For the most part, price increases have only long-term effects on energy consumption. Furthermore, the researchers worked out possible scenarios for future development up to the year 2050 in which they address, among other things, aspects of climate protection.
The yellow-legged gull has a high ability to adapt to human activities and benefit from these as a food resource during all year. This is stated in a scientific article published in the journal Ecology and Evolution whose first author is the researcher Francisco Ramírez, from the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona.
Having positive health beliefs--specifically, the perception that you can protect yourself from having another stroke--is linked to lower blood pressure among stroke survivors, especially women, according to a new study led by researchers at NYU School of Global Public Health. The findings are published in a spotlight issue on psychosocial factors in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
GIS - LandScan goes public
Oak Ridge National Laboratory's high-resolution population distribution database, LandScan USA, became permanently available to researchers in time to aid the response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
LandScan, widely considered the gold standard of population and mapping data in the United States, captures daytime and nighttime activity of the U.S. population at a resolution of roughly 90 meters or about 300 feet.
Amsterdam, NL, May 5, 2020 - Two purines, caffeine and urate, have been associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson's disease (PD) in multiple study groups and populations. Analysis of data from the Harvard Biomarkers Study shows that lower levels of caffeine consumption and lower blood urate are inversely associated with PD, strengthening the links between caffeine intake and urate levels and PD, reports a study in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease (JPD).
Daily symptoms logged by more than two and a half million users of the COVID-19 Symptom Tracker, a mobile application launched in March 2020, suggest the tool could help to predict geographical hotspots of COVID-19 incidence up to a week in advance of official public health reports.
Most electrical activity in vertebrates and invertebrates occurs at extremely low frequencies, and the origin -- and medical potential -- of these frequencies have eluded scientists. Now a Tel Aviv University study provides evidence for a direct link between electrical fields in the atmosphere and those found in living organisms, including humans.
Hamilton, ON (May 5, 2020) - Media pressure on chiropractors advocating against vaccinations has led to the removal of vaccine-related information from their websites.
A McMaster University study has found that a small minority of chiropractors provide vaccine information on their websites. In the past three years, half of the online vaccination information, mostly negative, has been removed from surveyed websites of the regulated health-care group.
The details of the study were published in Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) Open.
An international team of researchers has developed a new mathematical tool that could help scientists to deliver more accurate predictions of how diseases, including COVID-19, spread through towns and cities around the world.
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, N95 face masks have been in short supply. Health care workers, in particular, desperately need these masks to protect themselves from the respiratory droplets of infected patients. But because of the shortage, many have to wear the same mask repeatedly. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano have tested several methods for disinfecting N95 materials, finding that heating them preserves their filtration efficiency for 50 cycles of disinfection.
Ann Arbor, May 5, 2020 - According to a new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier, homelessness among US military veterans rarely occurs immediately after military discharge, but instead takes years to manifest with risk increasing over subsquent years.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Wide-scale use of insecticide-treated bed nets has led to substantial declines in global incidences of malaria in recent years. As a result, mosquitos have been shifting their biting times to earlier in the evening and later in the morning. In a new study, an international team of researchers has found that mosquitoes are most likely to transmit malaria in the early evening, when people are exposed, then at midnight, when people are protected by bed nets, or in the morning. The findings may have implications for malaria prevention initiatives.
Overuse of antibiotics, high animal numbers and low genetic diversity caused by intensive farming techniques increase the likelihood of pathogens becoming a major public health risk, according to new research led by UK scientists.
An international team of researchers led by the Universities of Bath and Sheffield, investigated the evolution of Campylobacter jejuni, a bacterium carried by cattle which is the leading cause of gastroenteritis in high income countries.
Campylobacter facts:
Causes bloody diarrhoea in humans
While the global average number of tropical cyclones each year has not budged from 86 over the last four decades, climate change has been influencing the locations of where these deadly storms occur, according to new NOAA-led research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
New research indicates that the number of tropical cyclones has been rising since 1980 in the North Atlantic and Central Pacific, while storms have been declining in the western Pacific and in the southern Indian Ocean.
Blood flow in the human body is generally assumed to be smooth due to its low speed and high viscosity. Unsteadiness in blood flow is linked to various cardiovascular diseases and has been shown to promote dysfunction and inflammation in the inner layer of blood vessels, the endothelium. In turn, this can lead to the development of arteriosclerosis--a leading cause of death worldwide--where arterial pathways in the body narrow due to plaque buildup. However, the source of this unsteadiness is not well understood.