Tech
More than one million plant and animal species worldwide are facing extinction, according to a recent United Nations report. Now, a new UBC-led study suggests that Indigenous-managed lands may play a critical role in helping species survive.
The researchers analyzed land and species data from Australia, Brazil and Canada - three of the world's biggest countries - and found that the total numbers of birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles were the highest on lands managed or co-managed by Indigenous communities.
All matter consists of one or more phases -- regions of space with uniform structure and physical properties. The common phases of H2O (solid, liquid and gas), also known as ice, water and steam, are well known. Similarly, though less familiar, perhaps, polymeric materials also can form different solid or liquid phases that determine their properties and ultimate utility. This is especially true of block copolymers, the self-assembling macromolecules created when a polymer chain of one type ("Block A") is chemically connected with that of a different type ("Block B").
A wireless, wearable monitor built with stretchable electronics could allow comfortable, long-term health monitoring of adults, babies and small children without concern for skin injury or allergic reactions caused by conventional adhesive sensors with conductive gels.
Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Leibniz-Institute for Food Systems Biology have developed a new methodology for the simultaneous analysis of odorants and tastants. It could simplify and accelerate the quality control of food in the future.
Whether a food tastes good or not is essentially determined by the interaction of odors and tastants. A few trillionths of a gram per kilogram of food is enough to perceive some odorants. Tastants, on the other hand, we only recognize at significantly higher concentrations.
JULY 30, 2019, NEW YORK AND LONDON - An international collaborative led by Ludwig Cancer Research and Cancer Research UK has identified key areas that are central to uncovering the complex relationship between nutrition and cancer. Advancing research on these core areas using a holistic, cross-disciplinary approach could catalyze progress urgently needed to prevent cancer and improve public health globally. Their main observations and conclusions are reported in a Forum article published online today in BMC Medicine.
When two studies attempting to identify new colon cancer treatment methods found different results, a researcher at the University of Arizona Cancer Center was asked to help settle the uncertainty.
Curtis Thorne, PhD, an assistant professor, cellular and molecular medicine, accepted the challenge and called upon one of his doctoral students, Carly R. Cabel, to assist in the project.
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 2019 - Nuclear power plants can withstand most inclement weather and do not emit harmful greenhouse gases. However, trafficking of the nuclear materials to furnish them with fuel remains a serious issue as security technology continues to be developed.
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 2019 -- Advances in organic phosphorescent materials are opening new opportunities for organic light-emitting diodes for combined electronics and light applications, including solar cells, photodiodes, optical fibers and lasers.
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 2019 -- Recent advances in solar cell technology use polycrystalline perovskite films as the active layer, with an increase to efficiency of as much as 24.2%. Hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites are especially successful, and they have been used in optoelectronic devices including solar cells, photodetectors, light-emitting diodes and lasers.
A team from the Ruhr Explores Solvation Cluster of Excellence at Ruhr-Universität Bochum has created new molecules with magnetic properties. In contrast to many earlier organic magnets, the molecules were stable in the presence of water and oxygen. Their magnetic properties were retained up to minus 110 degrees Celsius - which is relatively warm for these compounds.
People are often much better at giving useful advice to a friend in trouble than they are in dealing with their own problems. Although we typically have continuous internal dialogue, we are trapped inside our own way of thinking with our own history and point of view, and find it difficult to take an external perspective regarding our own problems. However, with friends, especially someone we know well, it is much easier to understand the bigger picture, and help them find a way through their problems.
A team of scientists from the School of Engineering of Far Eastern Federal University, Institute of Marine Technology Issues, and Institute of Automation and Management Processes of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences developed software allowing industrial AI robots with technical vision to set out and adjust the movement trajectories of their tools in real time without reducing given precision levels.
The report of the team was recognized as the best in its session at the ICCAD'19 conference that took place in Grenoble (France) on July 2-4.
A study of how dung beetles survive deforestation in Borneo suggests that species with more competition among males for matings are less likely to go extinct, according to research led by scientists from Queen Mary University of London and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
An antimicrobial agent called Defensin kills tumour cells and shrinks tumour size in fruit flies, with help from a pathway that flags the cells for destruction.
These findings, published in eLife, provide the first evidence in live animals that antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), which help protect against infection, also defend against cancer. If confirmed in further studies in animals and humans, the discovery could one day lead to new cancer treatment strategies.
A group of microorganisms known as kinetoplastids includes the parasites that cause devastating diseases such as African sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, and leishmaniasis. They share an ability to adhere to the insides of their insect hosts, using a specialized protein structure. But what if scientists could prevent the parasite from adhering? Would the parasites pass right through the vectors, unable to be passed on to a human?