A series of "sonic attacks" that sickened U.S. and Canadian government workers in Cuba last year could have been the side-effect of attempts to "eavesdrop" using high frequencies, according to University of Michigan and Chinese engineering researchers who reverse-engineered the attacks in a lab. Beginning in December 2016, at least two dozen U.S.
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In their detailed analysis of dozens of empirical studies on the effects of talking while driving, human factors researchers have provided a comprehensive and credible basis for governments seeking to enact legislation restricting drivers' use of cell phones. The analysis, just published in Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, is titled "Does Talking on a Cell Phone, With a Passenger, or Dialing Affect Driving Performance?
University of Wyoming researchers led a study that discovered that biomass smoke originating from South Africa that drifts over the southeast Atlantic Ocean significantly enhances the brightness of low-level clouds there -- creating a reflective process that actually helps cool the Earth and counteract the greenhouse effect.
PHILADELPHIA - Although certain genetic variants increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD), age is the strongest known risk factor. But the way in which molecular processes of aging predispose people to AD, or become impaired in AD remains a mystery. A team of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, publishing in Nature Neuroscience this week, profiled the epigenomic landscape of AD brains, specifically in one of the regions affected early in AD, the lateral temporal lobe.
(PHILADELPHIA) - Pulmonary fibrosis, an ongoing process of scarring that leaves patients chronically short of breath, can progress in severity until the only course of treatment is lung transplant. A new study shows that restoring the lipids that help keep lung tissue flexible and inflated can help slow disease progression in laboratory models of pulmonary fibrosis.
The recent research, led by the Krasileva Group of Earlham Institute and The Sainsbury Laboratory, used phylogenetics (the study of how DNA sequences are related) to identify how these 'bait' genes are distributed throughout various wild and domestic grasses, including important crop plants such as wheat, barley, maize and rice. This fresh evidence could help scientists and breeders especially in arming crop plants against a swathe of emerging diseases.
HOUSTON - (March 5, 2018) - Lenses are no longer necessary for some microscopes, according to Rice University engineers developing FlatScope, a thin fluorescent microscope whose abilities promise to surpass those of old-school devices.
A paper in Science Advances by Rice engineers Ashok Veeraraghavan, Jacob Robinson, Richard Baraniuk and their labs describes a wide-field microscope thinner than a credit card, small enough to sit on a fingertip and capable of micrometer resolution over a volume of several cubic millimeters.
Many of the current US Federal and State dyslexia laws should be scrapped as they ignore scientific evidence and privilege some poor readers at the expense of huge numbers of others, according to a leading expert in reading disability.
Professor Julian Elliott from Durham University in the UK says valuable resources are put into expensive and time-consuming tests to diagnose children which are not only often highly questionable, but also do not point to forms of learning support that are different from what should be provided to any other poor reader.
A new study reveals the impact of the associative meaning of a single word on how readers subsequently view and refer to suicide.
Scientists at Amherst College and Aalto University have created, for the first time a three-dimensional skyrmion in a quantum gas. The skyrmion was predicted theoretically over 40 years ago, but only now has it been observed experimentally.
University of Adelaide researchers have discovered how grapes "breathe", and that shortage of oxygen leads to cell death in the grape.
The discovery raises many questions about the potentially significant impacts on grape and wine quality and flavour and vine management, and may lead to new ways of selecting varieties for warming climates.
A KAIST team identified the basic principle of electric wind in plasma. This finding will contribute to developing technology in various applications of plasma, including fluid control technology.
Professor Wonho Choe from the Department of Physics and his team identified the main principle of neutral gas flow in plasma, known as 'electric wind', in collaboration with Professor Se Youn Moon's team at Chonbuk National University.
Researchers from Concordia University's Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering have found a way to significantly reduce carbon emissions produced by residential and non-residential buildings, while also cutting costs.
Heating, cooling, and powering hospitals, hotels, city halls, apartment complexes and other large buildings that share built energy systems makes for a complex and potentially costly climate-change problem.
Severe haze episodes with surprisingly high concentrations of fine particles (PM2.5) still occur in fall and winter seasons in Beijing, although the air quality has been improved in recent years. Air pollution often shows strong vertical differences in Beijing. For example, we can feel fresh air with a good visibility at the peak of a mountain on a hazy day, while the city is actually buried in a low visibility and severely polluted air. In the urban area, we also often observe the coexistence of haze and blue sky (Figure 1).
Kyoto, Japan -- In a study spanning twelve years, researchers from Kyoto University, and with Ryukoku University have developed a method to calculate the fluctuating stability of a natural ecological community in Maizuru Bay.
Their findings, published in Nature, provide insight into and new methodologies for ecological and population research.