Autonomous excavators ready for around the clock real-world deployment

Researchers studying the intersection of politics and psychology have long documented a link between threat sensitivity and social conservatism: People who are more socially conservative tend to react more strongly to threats. Conversely, those who are more socially liberal tend to be less sensitive to threats, viewing the world as a generally safe place and embracing change to explore new possibilities. These findings have held across a variety of events, but during the pandemic, U.S. polls show that Democrats, who tend to be more liberal, have generally been more concerned about the COVID-19 threat than ...

URBANA, Ill. - Proteins have been quietly taking over our lives since the COVID-19 pandemic began. We've been living at the whim of the virus's so-called "spike" protein, which has mutated dozens of times to create increasingly deadly variants. But the truth is, we have always been ruled by proteins. At the cellular level, they're responsible for pretty much everything. Proteins are so fundamental that DNA - the genetic material that makes each of us unique - is essentially just a long sequence of protein blueprints. That's true for animals, plants, ...

In cases of breast cancer, bone metastasis - when cancer cells spread to new sites in the bone - causes the most breast cancer-related harm and is often incurable in advanced disease. A new study by University of Arizona Health Sciences researchers found that cancer cells become more aggressive when exposed to tissue stiffening and that these changes persist over time. Tumor stiffening, which develops as diseased breast tissue becomes fibrotic, plays a major role in how breast cancer cells spread throughout the body. The paper, "Breast tumor stiffness instructs bone metastasis via maintenance of mechanical conditioning," published today in the journal Cell Reports, ...

A pair of College of Business professors and their doctoral student at The University of Texas at Arlington are exploring how ransomware attacks sometimes pit organizations against the law enforcement agencies trying to protect them. Kay-Yut Chen, Jingguo Wang and Yan Lang are authors of a new study in the journal Management Science titled "Coping with Digital Extortion: An Experimental Study on Benefit Appeals and Normative Appeals." Chen and Wang are professors of information systems and operations management at UTA. Lang is a doctoral student in the department. A ransomware attack is like a cyber hijacking, with criminals infiltrating and seizing an organization's data or computer systems and ...

In hospitals, we know that the nurses are the first to deal with patients in pain. For any ailment, including patients needing hemodialysis, the knowledge of pain management, the nurses have, allow them to provide optimal pain management. This qualitative study aims to explore the experiences, perceptions, and beliefs of nurses serving in the hemodialysis unit in terms of pain management practices. The study helped identify the educational needs of the nurses to improve pain management in practice. A subjective sample of 16 nurses working in four out-patient hemodialysis units in Amman, Jordan, was hired for this research. Using semi-structured interviews, the data was collected. The study found five themes and fifteen subcategories ...

Oak Brook, IL - The July edition of SLAS Discovery is a Special Edition featuring the cover article, "Development of a High-Throughput Screening Assay to Identify Inhibitors of the SARS-CoV-2 Guanine-N7-Methyltransferase Using RapidFire Mass Spectrometry" by Lesley-Anne Pearson, Charlotte J. Green, Ph.D., De Lin, Ph.D., Alain-Pierre Petit, Ph.D., David W. Gray, Ph.D., Victoria H. Cowling, Ph.D., and Euan A. F. Fordyce, Ph.D., (Drug Discovery Unit, School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK). In January 2021, a survey of immunologists, infectious-disease researchers and virologists found that 90% of respondents believe SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic, continuing to circulate in pockets of the global population for years to come. Even as vaccines are ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: GSA's dynamic online journal, Geosphere, posts articles online regularly. Locations and topics studied this month include the central Appalachian Mountains; fossil pollen in Colombia; the precision and accuracy of model analyses; the Bone Spring Formation, Permian Basin, west Texas; and the geochronology of modern river sediment in south-central Alaska. You can find these articles at https://geosphere.geoscienceworld.org/content/early/recent . Spatially variable syn- and post-Alleghanian exhumation of the central Appalachian Mountains from zircon (U-Th)/He thermochronology Luke C. Basler; Jaclyn S. Baughman; Michelle L. Fame; Peter J. Haproff Abstract: To assess spatial and temporal patterns of Phanerozoic orogenic burial and subsequent ...

Key Takeaways: Research reveals consumer demand declines when product packaging and marketing materials removed the claim, "Made in USA" and increase when the claim was featured. The impact on sales is insufficient to convince some companies to manufacture more products in the United States but enough to incentivize companies to make deceptive "Made in USA" claims. CATONSVILLE, MD, June 30, 2021 - Pick up any product in just about any store and you're likely to find information that indicates the country of origin of the product. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires this for any imported product, but not for products made in the United States. When you see the words "Made in USA" on a product, it's purely for marketing purposes. So, does it work? According to a ...

LA JOLLA--(June 30, 2021) Scientists--and gardeners--have long known that plants grow taller and flower sooner when they are shaded by close-growing neighbors. Now, for the first time, researchers at the Salk Institute have shown the detailed inner workings of this process. The study, published June 17, 2021, in Nature Genetics, offers a new understanding of how gene activity directs plant growth, and how quickly plants respond to their environment--with shifting light conditions triggering molecular changes in as little as five minutes. The findings provide insights ...

When it comes to defense, the body relies on attack thanks to the lymphatic and immune systems. The immune system is like the body's own personal police force as it hunts down and eliminates pathogenic villains. "The body's immune system is very good at identifying cells that are acting strangely. These include cells that could develop into tumors or cancer in the future," says Federica Eduati from the department of Biomedical Engineering at TU/e. "Once detected, the immune system strikes and kills the cells." Stopping the attack But it's not always so straightforward as tumor cells can develop ways to hide themselves from the immune system. "Unfortunately, tumor cells can block the ...