Tech

Approximately 8.3 million adults in the United States reported thinking about suicide last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While thoughts and deeds are clearly different, University of Houston professor of psychology Rheeda Walker has examined both and finds that current approaches to suicide prevention are troubling, because they usually consist of a "one-size-fits- all approach."

Although peatlands make up only 3% of the Earth's surface, they store one third of the soil carbon trapped in soils globally. Preserving peatlands is therefore of paramount importance for mitigating climate change, provided that these vulnerable environments are not themselves threatened by global warming.

While perhaps not as iconic as the paper crane, the hypar origami with its sweeping opposing arcs and saddle shape has long been popular for artists working in the paper folding tradition.

Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo are looking at the shape with an eye toward leveraging its structural properties, hoping to find ways to harness its bistability to build multifunctional devices or metamaterials.

Irvine, Calif., Sept. 17, 2019 - An interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of California, Irvine has developed a new technique for predicting the final size of a wildfire from the moment of ignition.

Built around a machine learning algorithm, the model can help in forecasting whether a blaze is going to be small, medium or large by the time it has run its course - knowledge useful to those in charge of allocating scarce firefighting resources. The researchers' work is highlighted in a study published today in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

MISSOULA - Animals around the globe face rising extinction rates, but there is often a lack of data about the causes of population declines, as well as ecological and biological considerations for conservation.

For example, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) provides a catalog of the conservation status for species around the globe, but many species are listed as "data deficient" because of this lack of information.

September 17, 2019

Research Triangle Park, NC--Landscape patterns matter. The size, shape, and arrangement of fields, forests, wetlands, and human populations, and the ways these and other features interact and change across landscapes, have a multitude of implications for resource sustainability, ecosystem health, habitat connectivity, and other societal values. To fully understand the effects of these landscape patterns, we first need to know how to measure them.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., September 17, 2019 - A cross-disciplinary team of MIT researchers have published details of an artificial intelligence (AI) guided robotic platform for flow synthesis of small molecule organic compounds. The paper appeared in the August 9, 2019 issue of Science.

While human gut microbes like E. coli help digest food and regulate our immune system, they also contain toxins that could arrest cell cycle and eventually cause cell death. Scientists have long known that colibactin - a genotoxin produced by E. coli, can induce DNA double-strand breaks in eukaryotic cells and increase the risk of colorectal cancer in human. However, how colibactin causes DNA damage had remained a mystery as reconstructing colibactin metabolites is extremely difficult due to the compound's instability, low titer and complexity of its biosynthetic pathway.

A University of Queensland-led study has revealed that future demand for ethanol biofuel could potentially expand sugarcane farming land in Brazil by five million hectares by 2030.

UQ School of Earth and Environmental Sciences researcher Milton Aurelio Uba de Andrade Junior said that because Brazil produced ethanol from sugarcane, future biofuel demand would directly impact land use.

Quantum computing harnesses enigmatic properties of small particles to process complex information. But quantum systems are fragile and error-prone, and useful quantum computers have yet to come to fruition.

A research team from Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), RIKEN, and the University of Tokyo developed a novel data analysis method for prior evaluation of single crystal structure analysis. Their proposed method is based on precise estimation of a parameter inherent in preliminary-collected small data set. They demonstrated its application to guest distinction in host-guest crystals before single crystal structure analysis and measurement design for precise crystallographic observation.

Understanding how particles behave at the twilight zone between the macro and the quantum world gives us access to fascinating phenomena, interesting from both the fundamental and application-oriented physics perspectives. For example, ultra-thin graphene-like materials are a fantastic playground to examine electrons' transport and interactions.

Researchers at the University of Helsinki in collaboration with researchers from Åbo Akademi University,Finland and Huazhong University of Science and Technology,China have developed a new anti-cancer nanomedicine for targeted cancer chemotherapy. This new nano-tool provides a new approach to use cell-based nanomedicines for effcient cancer chemotherapy.

Moving through cosmic forests and spider webs in deep space in search of answers on the origin of the Cosmos. "We have tested a scenario in which dark matter is composed by non-stellar black holes, formed in the primordial Universe" says Riccardo Murgia, lead author of the study recently published in Physical Review Letters. The research was carried out together with his colleagues Giulio Scelfo and Matteo Viel of SISSA - International School for Advanced Studies and INFN - Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (Trieste division) and Alvise Raccanelli of CERN.

New research presented at this year's Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Barcelona, Spain (16-20 Sept) shows that use of the contraceptive pill and longer menstrual cycles are associated with a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2D), while later puberty and later menopause are associated with lower risk.