Tech

Oil and gas production has doubled in some parts of the United States in the last two years, and scientists can use satellites to see impacts of that trend: a significant increase in the release of the lung-irritating air pollutant nitrogen dioxide, for example, and a more-than-doubling of the amount of gas flared into the atmosphere.

Satellite data of Tropical Cyclone Claudia's cloud top temperatures revealed that the storm was weakening.

One of the ways NASA researches tropical cyclones is using infrared data that provides temperature information. The AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a look at those temperatures in Claudia's cloud tops and got insight into the storm's strength.

MINNEAPOLIS, MN- January 15, 2020 - New University of Minnesota Medical School research discovers a novel potential target for treating drug addiction through "the hidden stars of the brain."

Dopamine is one of the major reward molecules of the brain and contributes to learning, memory and motivated behaviors. Disruption of dopamine is associated with addiction-related disorders, such as amphetamine substance use and abuse.

As Thailand transitions to a high-middle-income country, noncommunicable chronic diseases such as diabetes are on the rise.

A new study by researchers from Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and Chulalongkorn and Mahidol Universities in Bangkok identifies the strengths and weaknesses of diabetes care in Thailand's universal health system. Published in the journal PLOS ONE, the study found that the majority of Thai adults with diabetes were never diagnosed, but that most of those who were diagnosed did receive treatment and got the condition under control.

Whether you are trying to detect a possible radiation signature from a suspicious package or vehicle, or you are measuring power output in a nuclear reactor, being able to detect neutrons efficiently and precisely represents a significant challenge.

Remoras are among the most successful marine hitchhikers, thanks to powerful suction discs that allow them to stay tightly fastened to the bodies of sharks, whales and other hosts despite incredible drag forces while traveling through the ocean. But how do these suckerfish sense the exact moment when they must "stick their landing" and board their speedy hosts in the first place?

A team of biologists at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Friday Harbor Labs at University of Washington (FHL-UW) and The George Washington University (GWU) now offers an answer.

In a time of aging infrastructure and increasingly smart control of buildings, the ability to predict how buildings use energy--and how much energy they use--has remained elusive, until now.

Researchers from Saudi Arabia, China and the United States collaborated to develop a smarter way to predict energy use through a method that involved artificial systems, computational experiments and parallel computing. They published their results in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.

It is well-known that LEDs and transistors should not be connected in parallel as slight differences in resistance can lead to imbalanced current flow. This effect gets even stronger if the devices heat up as their resistance changes with temperature. For organic LEDs (OLEDs), this is a big issue: Every large-area OLED lighting panel can be understood as a parallel connection of numerous individual tiny OLEDs. As a consequence, these devices show inhomogeneous light emission if they heat up.

Cambridge, Massachusetts - In today's world, most workers are highly specialized, but this specialization can come at a cost - especially for those on the wrong team. New research by Harvard's Growth Lab uncovers the importance of teams and coworkers when it comes to one's productivity, earning potential, and stays of employment.

Scientists have transferred a collection of genes into plant-colonizing bacteria that let them draw nitrogen from the air and turn it into ammonia, a natural fertilizer.

The work could help farmers around the world use less man-made fertilizers to grow important food crops like wheat, corn, and soybeans.

The group of scientists, including two from Washington State University, published the study "Control of nitrogen fixation in bacteria that associate with cereals" late last month in Nature Microbiology.

Robots are becoming an increasingly important part of human care, according to researchers based in Japan. To help improve the safety and efficacy of robotic care, the scientists have developed a control method that could help robots better replicate human movement when lifting and moving a patient. They published their results in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.

Characterized by alligators, airboats and catfish, the Everglades is a region of swampy wetlands in southern Florida. In addition to the area's role in Florida's tourism industry, the Everglades play a significant part in protecting our environment - through carbon sequestration.

Over a quarter of the Everglades are encompassed in the Everglades Agricultural Area. The Everglades Agricultural Area includes 700,000 acres of farmland where sugar cane, winter vegetables and other crops are grown.

During the past decade, our human evolutionary tree has turned into something more resembling an unwieldy bush. Scientists have discovered swapped segments of DNA that we shared from mating between two other hominids, Neanderthals and Denisovans, which were first sequenced in 2010 and 2014, respectively.

How much of our hominid cousins remains in each of us today, and whether or not the presence of ancient hominid DNA has conferred any adaptation advantages or disadvantages has been a prime area of exploration.

Researchers at Princeton University have successfully recreated a key process involved in cell division in a test tube, uncovering the vital role played by a protein that is elevated in over 25% of all cancers. The researchers' findings, described in a pair of papers published in the journals eLife and Nature Communications, are a key step toward recreating the entire cell division machinery and could lead to new therapies aimed at preventing the growth of cancer cells.

Employing advanced technologies that allow whole brain imaging at single-cell resolution, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine report that in an alcohol-dependent mouse model, the rodent brain's functional architecture is substantially remodeled. But when deprived of alcohol, the mice displayed increased coordinated brain activity and reduced modularity compared to nondrinker or casual drinker mice.