Tech
A team led by a social work researcher at The University of Toledo has published the first empirical evidence that emotional support animals can provide quantifiable benefits to individuals with serious mental illness who are experiencing depression, anxiety and loneliness.
The research brings credence to the many anecdotal reports of emotional support animals having positive impacts on chronic mental health issues.
In April 2017, a landslide in Mocoa, Colombia, ripped through a local town, killing more than 300 people. Nicolás Pérez-Consuegra grew up about 570 miles north in Santander, Colombia, and was shocked as he watched the devastation on television. At that time, he was an undergraduate intern at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. As a budding geologist raised hiking the tropical mountains of Colombia, he wondered, what causes greater erosion in some areas of the mountains than in others?
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Solid-state batteries pack a lot of energy into a small space, but their electrodes are not good at keeping in touch with their electrolytes. Liquid electrolytes reach every nook and cranny of an electrode to spark energy, but liquids take up space without storing energy and fail over time. Researchers are now putting solid electrolytes in touch with electrodes made of strategically arranged materials - at the atomic level - and the results are helping drive better solid-state battery technologies.
Melting glaciers and polar ice sheets are among the dominant sources of sea-level rise, yet until now, the water beneath them has remained hidden from airborne ice-penetrating radar.
For the first time, researchers have successfully sequenced the entire genome from the skull of Peştera Muierii 1, a woman who lived in today's Romania 35,000 years ago. Her high genetic diversity shows that the out of Africa migration was not the great bottleneck in human development but rather this occurred during and after the most recent Ice Age. This is the finding of a new study led by Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University and being published in Current Biology.
Juvenile salmon migrating to the sea in the Sacramento River face a gauntlet of hazards in an environment drastically modified by humans, especially with respect to historical patterns of stream flow. Many studies have shown that survival rates of juvenile salmon improve as the amount of water flowing downstream increases, but "more is better" is not a useful guideline for agencies managing competing demands for the available water.
Microfluidic technologies have seen great advances over the past few decades in addressing applications such as biochemical analysis, pharmaceutical development, and point-of-care diagnostics. Miniaturization of biochemical operations performed on lab-on-a-chip microfluidic platforms benefit from reduced sample, reagent, and waste volumes, as well as increased parallelization and automation. This allows for more cost-effective operations along with higher throughput and sensitivity for faster and more efficient sample analysis and detection.
Our reliance on fossil fuels as a primary energy source has pushed air pollution to an all-time high, resulting in several environmental and health concerns. Among the major pollutants, nitrogen oxide (NOx) accumulation can cause severe respiratory diseases and imbalance in the Earth's nitrogen cycle. Reducing NOx accumulation is, therefore, an issue of utmost importance.
Building more homes and buildings with wood has been on the radar for years as a way to offset carbon emissions, though construction companies have been hesitant to take the material in broader use. A study at Aalto University in Finland is now the first to show that building with wood can be a sound investment.
A team of Spanish researchers have developed, at the laboratory level, a prototype of a new biosensor to help detect breast cancer in its earliest stages. One of the team coordinators has been Ramón Martínez Máñez, a professor at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and the scientific director of the Networking Biomedical Research Centre in Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER BBN).
MSU researcher is studying, raising awareness about the role of sex in the efficacy of vaccines that make use of nanomedicine.
If there's one take-home message for the general public about the coronavirus vaccines approved in the U.S., it's that they are remarkably effective.
But Michigan State University's Morteza Mahmoudi is raising awareness about an important subtlety: The vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech appear to work slightly better for men than for women.
In a time of a global crisis such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it is easy to note how people move through different phases to buckle up for such unprecedented and arduous times.
Researchers have long been interested in finding ways to use simple hydrocarbons, chemicals made of a small number of carbon and hydrogen atoms, to create value-added chemicals, ones used in fuels, plastics, and other complex materials. Methane, a major component of natural gas, is one such chemical that scientists would like to find to ways to use more effectively, since there is currently no environmentally friendly and large-scale way to utilize this potent greenhouse gas.
HOUSTON - (May 20, 2021) - It's always good when your hard work reflects well on you.
With the discovery of the giant polarization rotation of light, that is literally so.
The ultrathin, highly aligned carbon nanotube films first made by Rice University physicist Junichiro Kono and his students a few years ago turned out to have a surprising phenomenon waiting within: an ability to make highly capable terahertz polarization rotation possible.
In spite of decades of research, cancer remains an enigma. Conventional wisdom holds that cancer is driven by random mutations that create aberrant cells that run amok in the body.