Mobility in terrestrial and underwater wireless sensor networks

Marine ecosystems are in the midst of a conservation crisis, with coral reefs in particular facing numerous challenges as a result of climate change. In an effort to better understand these environments and the threats they face, researchers collect huge image libraries of these underwater environments, using 3D imagery collected from divers and snorkelers, as well as 2D images collected from satellites. These approaches provide researchers with huge amounts of data, but to extract value from these libraries requires a method to quickly analyze for patterns or 'classifications'. In a new study in Frontiers in Marine Science, researchers at NASA's Ames Research Center's Laboratory ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (April 21, 2021)--The importance of getting a good night's sleep cannot be overstated. Lack of sleep can lead to a number of health problems and affect a woman's overall quality of life. A new study suggests that insufficient quality sleep also may lead to problems in the bedroom in the form of female sexual dysfunction. Study results are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). Both sleep and sexual function problems are common in women during midlife. More than 26% of midlife women experience significant sleep symptoms that meet the criteria for insomnia, ...

Humans and animals have a preferred walking speed. This is, in part, influenced by the amount of energy required: they prefer to walk at the speed at which they use the lowest possible amount of energy. One of the ways to achieve this is using something called resonance. You already know how it works: when you are on a swing, you can't just swing at any speed. If you want to do it properly, you have to get the timing right, and swing in the rhythm of the swing. In other words: you have to resonate with it. And when you're on a nice relaxing walk, the parts of your body resonate, too. Walking slightly slower doesn't require less energy: you ...

Listening to music before going to be can improve sleep quality among older adults, according to an analysis of all relevant published clinical trials. In the analysis, which is published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, five randomized trials met the investigators' criteria. Older adults who listened to music experienced significantly better sleep quality than those who did not listen to music. Also, older adults who listened to sedative music experienced a greater improvement in sleep quality than those who listened to more rhythmic music. Furthermore, listening to music for longer than four weeks was especially effective at improving sleep quality. "Music intervention is an effective strategy and is easy to administer by a caregiver or healthcare worker," ...

Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that superimposes virtual objects onto a live view of physical environments, helping users visualize how these objects fit into their physical world. Researchers from City University of Hong Kong and Singapore Management University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that identifies four broad uses of AR in retail settings and examines the impact of AR on retail sales. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Augmented Reality in Retail and Its Impact on Sales" and is authored by Yong-Chin Tan, Sandeep Chandukala, and Srinivas Reddy. The researchers discuss the following uses of AR in retail settings: ...

Shift-work and irregular work schedules can cause several health-related issues and affect our defence against infection, according to new research from the University of Waterloo. These health-related issues occur because the body's natural clock, called the circadian clock, can be disrupted by inconsistent changes in the sleep-wake schedule and feeding patterns often caused by shift work. To study this, researchers at Waterloo developed a mathematical model to look at how a disruption in the circadian clock affects the immune system in fighting off illness. "Because our immune system is affected by the circadian clock, our ability to mount ...

Carleton University's Marie Curie Global Fellow Dominique Roche has co-authored a paper on the barriers researchers face to publicly sharing their data, an issue that has gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article, Reported Individual Costs and Benefits of Sharing Open Data among Canadian Academic Faculty in Ecology and Evolution, was published in the journal BioScience. "The COVID-19 pandemic has made people from all over the world grasp the importance of sharing research data to speed up scientific discoveries," said Roche. "Clearly, open data have been key in fighting the pandemic, but they're also really important to tackle other urgent problems, like climate change and biodiversity loss." Roche and co-author Sandrine ...

Real-world disease and parasite monitoring is often hampered by the inability of traditional approaches to easily sample broad geographical areas and large numbers of individuals. This can result in patchy data that fall short of what researchers need to anticipate and address outbreaks. Writing in BioScience, Jessica Farrell (University of Florida), Liam Whitmore (University of Limerick), and David Duffy (University of Florida) describe the promise of novel molecular techniques to overcome these shortcomings. By sampling environmental DNA and RNA (eDNA and eRNA), the authors say, researchers will be better able to ...

A new study in laboratory rats has discovered a direct link between low oxygen in the womb and impaired memory function in the adult offspring. It also finds that anti-oxidant supplements during pregnancy may protect against this. Low oxygen in the womb - known as chronic fetal hypoxia - is one of the most common complications in human pregnancy. It can be diagnosed when a routine ultrasound scan shows that the baby is not growing properly and is caused by a number of conditions including pre-eclampsia, infection of the placenta, gestational diabetes or maternal obesity. The new results show that chronic fetal hypoxia leads to a reduced density of blood vessels, and a reduced number of nerve cells and their connections in parts of the ...

Handwashing is shaping communities of bacteria that live and grow in the plumbing of domestic sinks, scientists have found. In the largest study of sink bacteria conducted outside of hospitals, scientists at the University of Reading discovered communities of similar bacteria that largely remain down our drains after hand washing. The researchers found that there are significant differences between families of dominant bacteria depending on the location in the sink drains, and that plumbing systems such as P-trap or U-bend provides ideal environments for bacteria to grow. Dr Hyun Soon Gweon, Lecturer in Bioinformatics for Genomics at the University of Reading, said: "The mantra to 'wash your hands' to fight coronavirus transmission has highlighted the importance of ...