Tech
Researchers have discovered that the same gene which increases your risk of depression following financial stress as you grow older also reduces your chance of depression associated with friendship and relationships stresses when young- your social network.
This may have implications for treatment, but also offers a possible answer to a question which has puzzled scientists: why has depression survived through evolution? This work is presented at the ECNP Congress in Barcelona.
Publishing a high-impact scientific article is a significant achievement for researchers. Being featured on the journal cover is even better.
A new study outlines advances in the field of catalysis research, with broad applications for innovative energy technology.
Underestimating combined threats of deforestation and wildlife trade will push Southeast Asian birds
The combined impact of deforestation and wildlife exploitation on bird numbers is severely underestimated and could lead to some species becoming extinct, a joint study by the University of Sheffield and National University of Singapore has found.
Scientists focused on Sundaland - a hotspot of biodiversity in Southeast Asia, spanning Borneo, Sumatra, Java and Peninsular Malaysia - where habitat loss, and hunting and wildlife trades are particularly intense.
The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite passed over Tropical Storm Kong-Rey and analyzed the rates in which rain was falling throughout the storm.
At the time GPM passed overhead, GPM's Microwave Imager (GMI) instruments collected data that revealed moderate convective rainfall northwest of Kong-Rey's center. GPM indicated that rain was falling at over 1.8 inches (45.7 mm) per hour within two areas of storms northwest of Kong-Rey's center.
Engineers at UC San Diego used wearable off-the-shelf technology and machine learning to predict, for the first time, an individual's blood pressure and provide personalized recommendations to lower it based on this data.
Their work earned the title of Best Paper at IEEE Healthcom 2018. To the researchers' knowledge, this is the first work investigating daily blood pressure prediction and its relationship to health behavior data collected by wearables.
Horns have evolved independently multiple times in scarab beetles, but distantly related species have made use of the same genetic toolkit to grow these prominent structures, according to a study publishing October 4, 2018 in the open-access journal PLOS Genetics by Teruyuki Niimi at the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki, Japan, and colleagues.
The inability to alter intrinsic piezoelectric behavior in organic polymers hampers their application in flexible, wearable and biocompatible devices, according to researchers at Penn State and North Carolina State University, but now a molecular approach can improve those piezoelectric properties.
"Morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) is an important concept developed a half-century ago in ceramic materials," said Qing Wang, professor of materials science and engineering. "This concept has never before been realized in organic materials."
NASA's IMERG combines data from many satellites to provide a look at rainfall occurring around the world. Those rainfall data were combined with visible imagery from NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite to create a composite or fuller picture of Kong- Rey in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean as it weakened to a tropical storm.
New research being presented at this year's European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) Annual Meeting in Berlin, Germany (1-5 October), suggests that insulin is often stored at the wrong temperature in patients' fridges at home, which could affect its potency.
Many injectable drugs and vaccines are highly sensitive to heat and cold and can perish if their temperature shifts a few degrees. To prevent loss of effectiveness, insulin must stay between 2-8°C/36-46°F in the refrigerator or 2-30°C/30-86°F when carried about the person in a pen or vial.
Lately the fact-checking world has been in a bit of a crisis. Sites like Politifact and Snopes have traditionally focused on specific claims, which is admirable but tedious - by the time they've gotten through verifying or debunking a fact, there's a good chance it's already traveled across the globe and back again.
Social media companies have also had mixed results limiting the spread of propaganda and misinformation: Facebook plans to have 20,000 human moderators by the end of the year, and is spending many millions developing its own fake-news-detecting algorithms.
Oct. 9, 2018 -- You can't see nasty microscopic air pollutants in your home, but what if you could?
Engineers from the University of Utah's School of Computing conducted a study to determine if homeowners change the way they live if they could visualize the air quality in their house. It turns out, their behavior changes a lot.
Is biofortification the best thing since sliced bread? Well, biofortified wheat could certainly make it easier to help some humans get proper nutrition.
Biofortification is the process of naturally increasing the nutritional value of a crop. Unlike fortification, which might add a mineral like iron directly to something like bread dough, the goal of biofortification is to have the wheat in the dough naturally contain more iron in the first place.
Beneficial effects, and possible harm, of exposure to weak pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMFs) may be mediated by a protein related to one that helps birds migrate, according to a study publishing on October 2 in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Margaret Ahmad of Xavier University in Cincinnati and colleagues. The discovery provides a potential mechanism for the benefits of PEMF-based therapies, used to treat depression and Parkinson's disease, and may accelerate development of magnetic stimulation for other applications.
The National Hurricane Center noted that Tropical Storm Sergio was on the verge of becoming a hurricane in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and NASA's Aqua satellite confirmed very powerful storms within.
NASA provided an infrared view of Tropical Depression Rosa's remnants that showed strongest storms with heaviest rainfall potential were over east central Arizona on Oct. 2. The National Hurricane Center noted that although Rosa had dissipated by 11 a.m. EDT on Oct. 2, the threat of heavy rains and flash flooding continues over the Desert Southwest.