Study details how Middle East dust intensifies summer monsoons on Indian subcontinent

Meat and fish fraud are global problems, costing consumers billions of dollars every year. On top of that, mislabeling products can cause problems for people with allergies, religious or cultural restrictions. Current methods to detect this fraud, while accurate, are slower than inspectors would like. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have optimized their handheld MasSpec Pen to identify common types of meat and fish within 15 seconds. News stories of food fraud, such as beef being replaced with horse ...

SAN ANTONIO (March 31, 2021) -- Insomnia and obstructive sleep apnea have increased dramatically among active-duty military members over a 14-year period, 2005 through 2019. Insomnia increased 45-fold and sleep apnea went up more than 30-fold, according to a study led by The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio). The study found that the most likely military member to be diagnosed with either sleep disorder was married, male, white, a higher-ranking enlisted Army service member and age 40 or older. The researchers compared medical codes that represent diagnosis of sleep apnea or insomnia in active-duty Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force personnel. No medical ...

Risks of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection for long-stay nursing home residents were mainly dependent on factors in their nursing homes and surrounding communities, according to a large study led by a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. By contrast, the study found that the risks of being hospitalized with, and of dying from, COVID-19, depended more on patient-specific characteristics such as age and body mass index--although the mix of factors linked to hospitalization was distinct from the mix of factors linked to mortality. The study, which appears online March 31 in JAMA Network Open, detailed COVID-19 risk factors among more than 480,000 long-stay nursing home residents in the ...

Roughly five years ago, Institute Head Prof. Dr. William (Bill) Martin and his team introduced the last universal common ancestor of all living organisms and named it "LUCA". It lived approximately 3.8 billion years ago in hot deep sea hydrothermal vents. Now the evolutionary biologists in Duesseldorf have described a further ancient cell named "LBCA" ("Last Bacterial Common Ancestor"). It is the ancestor of today's largest domain of all living organisms: Bacteria. In Communications Biology, they report on their new research approaches which led to the successful prediction ...

Every day, people are exposed to microplastics from food, water, beverages and air. But it's unclear just how many of these particles accumulate in the human body, and whether they pose health risks. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have developed a lifetime microplastic exposure model that accounts for variable levels from different sources and in different populations. The new model indicates a lower average mass of microplastic accumulation than previous estimates. Microplastics, which are tiny pieces of plastic ranging in size from 1 μm to 5 mm (about the ...

In Brazil, researchers are puzzling over socioeconomic and environmental indicators that do not add up. They are concerned with what they call the São Paulo Macrometropolitan Area, a mega-region comprising five metropolitan areas in the state of São Paulo with a total of 180 municipalities, some of which provide ecosystem services while others receive them. The problem is that the former, which provide the others with water, food and power generation inputs, suffer from steep inequities in terms of defective human development and lack of social inclusion. "Urban centers have always been ...

Glass, rubber and plastics all belong to a class of matter called amorphous solids. And in spite of how common they are in our everyday lives, amorphous solids have long posed a challenge to scientists. Since the 1910s, scientists have been able to map in 3D the atomic structures of crystals, the other major class of solids, which has led to myriad advances in physics, chemistry, biology, materials science, geology, nanoscience, drug discovery and more. But because amorphous solids aren't assembled in rigid, repetitive atomic structures like crystals are, they have defied researchers' ability to determine their atomic structure with the same level of precision. Until now, that is. ...

Sugar practically screams from the shelves of your grocery store, especially those products marketed to kids. Children are the highest consumers of added sugar, even as high-sugar diets have been linked to health effects like obesity and heart disease and even impaired memory function. However, less is known about how high sugar consumption during childhood affects the development of the brain, specifically a region known to be critically important for learning and memory called the hippocampus. New research led by a University of Georgia faculty member in collaboration with a University ...

LAWRENCE, KANSAS -- The phrase "to see red" means to become angry. But for investors, seeing red takes on a whole different meaning. William BazleyThat's the premise behind a new article by William Bazley, assistant professor of finance at the University of Kansas. "Visual Finance: The Pervasive Effects of Red on Investor Behavior" reveals that using the color red to represent financial data influences individuals' risk preferences, expectations of future stock returns and trading decisions. The effects are not present in people who are colorblind, and they're muted in China, where red represents prosperity. Other colors do not generate the same outcomes. The ...

As demand for low-carbon electricity rises around the world, nuclear power offers a promising solution. But how many countries are good candidates for nuclear energy development? A new study in the journal Risk Analysis suggests that countries representing more than 80 percent of potential growth in low-carbon electricity demand--in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa--may lack the economic or institutional quality to deploy nuclear power to meet their energy needs. The authors suggest that if nuclear power is to safely expand its role in mitigating climate change, countries need to radically improve their ability to manage the technology. "Efforts to enhance institutional quality in these countries must be redoubled and could well be one of the ...