Tech
Computer scientists are focused on adding enhanced functionality to make the "reality" in virtual reality (VR) environments highly believable. A key aspect of VR is to enable remote social interactions and the possibility of making it more immersive than any prior telecommunication media. Researchers from Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) have developed a revolutionary system called Codec Avatars that gives VR users the ability to interact with others while representing themselves with lifelike avatars precisely animated in real-time.
ANAHEIM, CA (Embargoed until 9 a.m. PDT, Tuesday, June 25, 2019) - Acute kidney injury (AKI) often complicates the treatment outcomes of hospitalized patients, resulting in dangerous levels of toxic chemicals accumulating in the blood and causing numerous deaths annually. Currently, only supportive treatment is available for AKI, but two related research studies presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging offer hope for effective treatment and prevention.
Some of what we learn through the compassionate treatment of dogs with cancer goes on to help human patients.
One way that heat damages electronic equipment is it makes components expand at different rates, resulting in forces that cause micro-cracking and distortion. Plastic components and circuit boards are particularly prone to damage due to changes in volume during heating and cooling cycles. But if a material could be incorporated into the components that compensates for the expansion, the stresses would be reduced and their lifetime increased.
Can water freeze at room temperature or even higher temperatures at which ordinary water boils? Formation of so-called "Warm Ice" maybe an unfamiliar phenomenon to the general public and yet can be made possible by controlling the crystallization process in which liquid turns into a solid. In principle, such manipulation could be achieved not only by changing temperature but also pressure. However, the latter requires exerting extreme level of pressure (10,000 times the atmospheric pressure) on water.
Humans began cultivating crops about 12,000 years ago. Ants have been at it rather longer. Leafcutter ants, the best-known insect farmers, belong to a lineage of insects that have been running fungus farms based on chopped-up vegetable matter for over 50 million years. The ant farming of flowering plants, however, started more recently, about 3 million years ago in the Fiji Islands.
A 10 per cent tax on sugary drinks has cut the purchase and consumption of sugary drinks by an average of 10 per cent in places it has been introduced, a just published major review has found.
The English National Health Service (NHS) reduced post-operative deaths by 37.2% following the introduction of globally recognised surgical guidelines - paving the way for life-saving action in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), a new study reveals.
Researchers at the University of Birmingham have confirmed that the NHS achieved the reduction between 1998 and 2014, coinciding with the introduction of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Surgical Safety Checklist in 2008.
Eleven-month-old infants can learn to associate the language they hear with ethnicity, recent research from the University of British Columbia suggests.
The study, published April 22 by Developmental Psychobiology, found that 11-month-old infants looked more at the faces of people of Asian descent versus those of Caucasian descent when hearing Cantonese versus English--but not when hearing Spanish.
Researchers from the School of Chinese Medicine (SCM) at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) have found that the abnormal rise of a soluble protein called Nerve Growth Factor is a key factor linking early life stress to the development of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). The study, which is the first to demonstrate the link between traumatic psychological events occurring in childhood and lifelong health repercussions, could lead to the development of new treatments for gastrointestinal diseases.
Long-term exposure to air pollution has been previously associated with a higher risk of hypertension in high-income countries, where air pollution levels are generally lower than in low- and middle-income countries. A team led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by "la Caixa", set out to study this association in India, a lower middle-income country where burdens of air pollution and hypertension are projected to increase. The results show that women exposed to higher levels of air pollution at residence have a higher hypertension prevalence.
Better care and more research into treatments for people experiencing a first manic episode are urgently needed, according to researchers at the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre.
The study, published today in The Lancet Psychiatry by a team of international experts, describes patchy and inconsistent care, widespread failure to detect bipolar disorder early enough, and a lack of guidance on how to treat people experiencing mania for the first time.
Thousand-year-old tropical soil unearthed by accelerating deforestation and agriculture land use could be unleashing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to a new study from researchers at Florida State University.
In an investigation of 19 sites in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, researchers discovered that heavily deforested areas leach organic carbon that is significantly older and more biodegradable than the organic carbon leached from densely forested regions.
Multi-junction solar cells are both the most efficient type of solar cell on the market today and the most expensive type of solar cell to produce. In a proof-of-concept paper, researchers from North Carolina State University detail a new approach for creating multi-junction solar cells using off-the-shelf components, resulting in lower cost, high-efficiency solar cells for use in multiple applications.
Brazilian and German scientists have completed a collaborative project to sequence and analyze the whole genome of Arapaima gigas, a giant freshwater fish known in Brazil as pirarucu and elsewhere as arapaima or paiche. Its growth rate is the fastest among known freshwater fish species. Its natural distribution covers most of the Amazon River basin in Peru and Brazil.