Tech
American writer and humorist Mark Twain, a master of language and noted lecturer, once offered, "The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause."
Electric fish and today's TED talk speakers take a page from Twain's playbook. They pause before sharing something particularly meaningful. Pauses also prime the sensory systems to receive new and important information, according to research from Washington University in St. Louis.
What The Study Did: Researchers compared reporting practices for race, sex and socioeconomic status in randomized clinical trials published in general medical journals in 2015 with those published in 2019.
Authors: Asad Siddiqui, M.D., of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.11516)
DURHAM, N.H.—Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have conducted two of the first studies in New England to collectively show that toxic man-made chemicals called PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances), found in everything from rugs to product packaging, end up in the environment differently after being processed through wastewater treatment facilities—making it more challenging to set acceptable screening levels.
Several indicators point to the adverse impacts of climate change on the planet’s vegetation, but a little-known positive fact is the existence of climate-change refugia in which trees are far less affected by the gradual rise in temperatures and changing rainfall regimes. Climate-change refugia are areas that are relatively buffered from climate change, such as wetlands, land bordering water courses, rocky outcrops, and valleys with cold-air pools or inversions, for example.
A new study looking across a large body of research finds further evidence for the safety of vaccines that are Food and Drug Administration-approved and routinely recommended for children, adults and pregnant women. The study updates a vaccine safety review that was released by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in 2014.
"This in-depth analysis found no evidence of increased risk of serious adverse events following vaccines, apart from a few - previously known - associations," said Susanne Hempel, director of the Southern California Evidence Review Center.
In cities, heavy rains wash away the gunk collecting on sidewalks and roads, picking up all kinds of debris. However, the amount of microplastic pollution swept away by this runoff is currently unknown. Now, researchers in ACS ES&T Water report that stormwater can be a large source of microplastics and rubber fragments to water bodies and, with a proof-of-concept experiment, show that a rain garden could keep these microscopic pieces out of a storm drain.
Scientists have got up close and personal with human sewage to determine how best to measure hidden and potentially dangerous plastics.
As the way microplastics are measured and counted varies from place to place, there is no agreed understanding of the weight of the problem. Until scientists can agree on one way of measuring them, life on land and sea will continue to ingest who knows how much plastic, affecting health for generations.
"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it". This concept is also true within the context of climate policy, where the achievement of the objectives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is dependent on the ability of the international community to accurately measure greenhouse gas (GHG) emission trends and, consequently, to alter these trends.
Even though people stayed in touch during the pandemic's stay-at-home orders and social distancing, it was easy to feel out of touch with loved ones.
Technology and the internet have expanded the way humans communicate and added much to that communication -- think emojis, GIFs and memes. But they can still fall short of being physically with someone.
The energy available from sunlight is 10,000 times more than what is needed to supply the world's energy demands. Sunlight has two main properties that are useful in the design of renewable energy systems. The first is the amount power falling on a fixed area, like the ground or a person's roof. This quantity varies with the time of day and the season. The second property is the colors or spectrum of the sunlight.
A new report by Skoltech scientists and their colleagues describes an organic material for the new generation of energy storage devices, which structure follows an elegant molecular design principle. It has recently been published in ACS Applied Energy Materials and made the cover of the journal.
LED lightbulbs offer considerable advantages over other types of lighting. Being more efficient, they require much less electricity to operate. They do not give off unwanted heat the way old-school incandescent bulbs do, and the best of them long outlast even fluorescent lightbulbs.
But LEDs are not problem-free. Questions linger over suspected links between health concerns such as fatigue, mood disorders, and insomnia from overexposure to the blue-tinted light produced by today's standard LED bulbs. Plus, higher prices can prompt lightbulb shoppers to weigh other options.
ITHACA, N.Y. - It stands to reason that the more one is compensated for performing a task, the greater the incentive to do a good job and the better one feels about doing it.
But what if the task is writing an objective review of a company or service? Does the compensation blur the lines of objectivity?
Kaitlin Woolley, assistant professor of marketing in the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, wondered the same thing.
Army ants form some of the largest insect societies on the planet. They are quite famous in popular culture, most notably from a terrifying scene in Indiana Jones. But they are also ecologically important. They live in very large colonies and consume large amounts of arthropods. And because they eat so much of the other animals around them, they are nomadic and must keep moving in order to not run out of food. Due to their nomadic nature and mass consumption of food, they have a huge impact on arthropod populations throughout tropical rainforests floors.
Over the years, robots have gotten quite good at identifying objects -- as long as they're out in the open.
Discerning buried items in granular material like sand is a taller order. To do that, a robot would need fingers that were slender enough to penetrate the sand, mobile enough to wriggle free when sand grains jam, and sensitive enough to feel the detailed shape of the buried object.