Defense mechanisms in aphids can become a double-edged sword, sharpened by the seasons

DES PLAINES, IL - The diagnostic value of the Head-Impulse, Nystagmus, Test of Skew (HINTS) exam in the emergency department setting is limited. This is the result of a study titled END ...

It's been hailed as a wonder drug and it's certainly creating wonder profits. By some estimates, the Cannabidiol (or CBD) market could be worth $20 billion dollars by 2024. While users tout its effectiveness in pain relief, up until now there's been limited experimental human research on the actual effectiveness of the drug. However, a new study led by researchers at Syracuse University sheds light on the ability of CBD to reduce pain along with the impact that the so-called placebo effect may have on pain outcomes. "For science and the public at large the question remained, is the pain relief that CBD users claim to experience due to pharmacological effects or placebo effects," asked Martin De Vita, a researcher in the psychology department at Syracuse University's ...

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have discovered that some skeletal defects associated with a lack of movement in the womb during early development may still be ameliorated after such periods of immobility if movement resumes. The researchers' discovery was made using chicken embryos, which develop similarly to their human equivalents and which can be easily viewed as development takes place - raising hopes that the finding may also apply to humans and thus have important implications for therapeutic interventions. The research has just been published in leading international journal, Disease Models and Mechanisms. Why babies need to move in the womb Foetal movement in the uterus is a normal part of a healthy ...

The new alloys created by NUST MISIS scientists in cooperation with LG Electronics will help reduce the weight of radiators and heat removal systems in electric vehicles and consumer electronics by one third. The research results are published in the Journal of Magnesium and Alloys. According to experts, with the development of electronics the problem of efficient heat removal is becoming more and more acute -- with an increase in the productivity of equipment, heat generation also grows. Reducing the temperature directly affects the prolongation of the devices' life cycle. This is especially important for household appliances, electric vehicles, LED panels. Scientists from NUST MISIS, in collaboration with LG Electronics, ...

"Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water." It's a silly rhyme, but one that highlights a simple fact: Humans have long relied on wells -- such as the one on the hill visited by Jack and Jill -- for their primary drinking water supply. Although the number of people who draw their water by pail is declining as pumps become ever more widespread, groundwater wells still supply drinking water to more than half of the world's population and sustain over 40% of irrigated agriculture. But this vital resource underfoot often gets overlooked. UC Santa Barbara assistant professors Debra Perrone and Scott Jasechko have compiled the most comprehensive assay of groundwater wells to date, spanning 40 countries that collectively account for half of all global groundwater ...

A team of researchers from the Africa Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI) led a global team of 21 climate risk scholars to better understand and inform decision making around climate change risks in Africa and globally by examining how the drivers of risk interact. Their work extends on existing risk frameworks with the hope that this research could help decision makers, managers and researchers understand the inherent complexity of climate change. "Understanding the interactions among risks holds potential to change the way we respond to the risks. This is important because policy makers may worry about the risk of implementing a response as much, or more so, than the risk ...

A Southern California high school junior has built a low-cost seismometer device that delivers earthquake early warnings for homes and businesses. Costing less than $100 for her to make today, the seismometer could someday be a regular household safety device akin to a smart smoke detector, says its inventor Vivien He. About the size of a Rubik's cube and encased in clear acrylic, the seismometer has a sleek, consumer-ready look. The device's geophone detects incoming ground motion, while onboard hardware and software translate the geophone's electrical signals into a digital waveform. The device has detected all earthquakes over magnitude 3.0 around Los Angeles since September 2020. When ...

At the Seismological Society of America's 2021 Annual Meeting, researchers shared how they are using fiber optic cable to detect the small earthquakes that occur in ice in Antarctica. The results could be used to better understand the movement and deformation of the ice under changing climate conditions, as well as improve future monitoring of carbon capture and storage projects, said Anna Stork, a geophysicist at Silixa Ltd. Stork discussed how she and her colleagues are refining their methods of distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, for microseismicity--earthquakes too small to be felt. DAS works by using the tiny internal flaws within an optical fiber as thousands of seismic ...

A deep spatiotemporal neural network trained on more than 36,000 earthquakes offers a new way of quickly predicting ground shaking intensity once an earthquake is underway, researchers report at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting. DeepShake analyzes seismic signals in real time and issues advanced warning of strong shaking based on the characteristics of the earliest detected waves from an earthquake. DeepShake was developed by Daniel J. Wu, Avoy Datta, Weiqiang Zhu and William Ellsworth at Stanford University. The earthquake data used to train ...

The SEIS seismometer package from the Mars InSight lander has collected its first continuous Martian year of data, revealing some surprises among the more than 500 marsquakes detected so far. At the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting, Savas Ceylan of ETH Zürich discussed some of the findings from The Marsquake Service, the part of the InSight ground team that detects marsquakes and curates the planet's seismicity catalog. Marsquakes differ from earthquakes in a number of ways, Ceylan explained. To begin with, they ...