Tech
The proportion of young people in Finland diagnosed with depression in specialised services is increasing, showed a study based on an extensive set of national data. An increasing number of adolescents seek and get help, but the increase in service use burdens specialised services. The study was conducted by the Research Centre for Child Psychiatry at the University of Turku in Finland.
The frigid waters of the Antarctic may yield a treatment for a deadly disease that affects populations in some of the hottest places on earth. Current medications for that scourge -- malaria -- are becoming less effective as drug resistance spreads. But researchers report in ACS' Journal of Natural Products that a peptide they isolated from an Antarctic sponge shows promise as a lead for new therapies.
URBANA, Ill. - Bacterial leaf streak, a foliar disease in corn, has only been in the United States for a handful of years, but Tiffany Jamann says it's a major problem in the Western Corn Belt.
Back in 2015, an interdisciplinary group of research scientists made their case during a business pitch competition: They want to create a subscription-based service, much like 23andMe, through which people could send in samples for detailed analyses. The researchers would crunch that big data fast, using a speedy algorithm, and would send the consumer a detailed report.
But rather than ancestry testing via cheek swab, the team sought to determine the plethora of diverse bacterial species that reside inside an individual's gut in their ultimate aim to improve public health.
Its size and surface gravity are much larger than Earth's, and its radiation environment may be hostile, but a distant planet called K2-18b has captured the interest of scientists all over the world. For the first time, researchers have detected water vapor signatures in the atmosphere of a planet beyond our solar system that resides in the "habitable zone," the region around a star in which liquid water could potentially pool on the surface of a rocky planet.
An evolution revolution has begun after scientists extracted genetic information from a 1.77 million-year-old rhino tooth - the largest genetic data set this old to ever be confidently recorded.
Researchers identified an almost complete set of proteins, a proteome, in the dental enamel of the now-extinct rhino and the resulting genetic information is one million years older than the oldest DNA sequenced from a 700,000-year-old horse.
"We eat first with our eyes."
This comment has been attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius, a 1st Century Roman gourmand. Two thousand years later, academic research backs up Apicius' statement, as a team of marketing professors at the Fowler College of Business at San Diego State University (SDSU) have studied the sensory impact of food and the evolution of healthy eating.
There's a whole world behind the scenes at natural history museums that most people never see. Museum collections house millions upon millions of dinosaur bones, pickled sharks, dried leaves, and every other part of the natural world you can think of--more than could ever be put on display. Instead, these specimens are used in research by scientists trying to understand how different kinds of life evolved and how we can protect them. And a new study in PLOS ONE delves into how scientists are using digital records of all these specimens.
An initial baseline healthy gut microbiome database and abundance profile is described in a study published September 11, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Charles Hadley King from George Washington University Medical Center, USA, and colleagues.
ITHACA, N.Y. - A new synthetic material that creates a linked sensory network similar to a biological nervous system could enable soft robots to sense how they interact with their environment and adjust their actions accordingly.
The stretchable optical lace material was developed by Ph.D. student Patricia Xu through the Organics Robotics Lab at Cornell University.
In Switzerland, more than 400,000 people suffer from type 2 diabetes, a serious metabolic disorder that is constantly increasing. Obesity, by promoting the resistance to the action of insulin - one of the hormones that regulate blood sugar levels - is a major risk factor. However, insulin imbalance may not be the only cause of the onset of diabetes. Indeed, researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have highlighted another mechanism: indeed, the liver appears to have the ability to produce a significant amount of glucose outside of any hormonal signal.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia but the changes in brain cell function underlying memory loss remains poorly understood. Researchers at the University of Bristol have identified that calcium channel blockers may be effective in treating memory loss.
The team's findings, published in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience, found treating a diseased brain cell with a blocker of the L-type channel reduced the number of calcium ions able to flow into the brain cell.
Since 2012, researchers at the Division of Bedrock Geology in the Department of Geology of Tallinn University of Technology Aivo Lepland and Tõnu Martma have been engaged in the research of an international research group investigating the factors controlling methane seepages and reconstructing the chronology of past methane emissions in one of the world's most climate-sensitive regions - the Barents Sea in the Arctic.
The strength of teeth is told on the scale of millimeters. Porcelain smiles are kind of like ceramics -- except that while china plates shatter when smashed against each other, our teeth don't, and it's because they are full of defects.
Some creatures, such as chameleons and neon tetra fish, can alter their colors to camouflage themselves, attract a mate or intimidate predators. Scientists have tried to replicate these abilities to make artificial "smart skins," but so far the materials haven't been robust. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano have taken a page from the chameleon's playbook to develop a flexible smart skin that changes its color in response to heat and sunlight.