Large-scale heavy metal pollution, coastal erosion and seawater intrusion pose an existential threat to the Nile River Delta and endanger 60 million people (about twice the population of Texas) in Egypt who depend on its resources for every facet of life, according to new research from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Furthermore, the Nile River Delta is a critical stopover for migrating birds across their journey along the East African flyway.  The study, led by Essam Heggy from the USC Viterbi Innovation Fund Arid Climates ...

Many industries rely on metal additive manufacturing to rapidly build parts and components. Rocket engine nozzles, pistons for high performance cars, and custom orthopedic implants are all made using additive manufacturing, a process that involves building parts layer-by-layer using a 3D printer. Additive manufacturing allows users to build complex parts quickly, but structural defects that form during the building process is one of the reasons that have prevented this approach from being widely adopted. Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne ...

An advanced imaging method is showing promise as a way to improve the diagnosis of prostate cancer by giving clinicians a clearer view of suspected tumours during biopsy. A trial conducted at the University Hospital Bonn, in Germany, has been testing the benefit of a scanning method known as PSMA-PET/CT to help target where to take biopsy samples. Interim results reveal that when used alongside standard imaging techniques, the additional scans might help clinicians make improved decisions about subsequent courses of treatment. Compared to the standard scans alone, when PSMA-PET/CT was used clinicians changed ...

Black Caribbean-British women in the UK are 58% more likely than white women to be given general anaesthesia for elective caesarean births; for Black African-British women, they are 35% more likely to have general anaesthesia For emergency Caesarean births, Black Caribbean-British women are 10% more likely than white women to be given general anaesthesia For vaginal births, Bangladeshi-British (by 24%), Pakistani-British (by 15%) and Black Caribbean-British (by 8%) women less likely than white women to receive an epidural Black women are approximately 40% less likely to have an assisted vaginal birth (forceps/ventouse [suction] delivery) compared to white women but instead are more likely ...

EMBARGOED UNTIL 4:30 PM MST, MARCH 9 Calgary, AB – Even though pediatric emergency department visits decreased greatly overall during the COVID-19 pandemic, a newly published study led out of the University of Calgary shows there was also a sharp increase in emergency department visits for attempted suicide and suicide ideation among children and adolescents in that same period of social isolation.  Dr. Sheri Madigan, a clinical psychologist in the Department of Psychology, is the lead author on the study, published today (March 9) in Lancet Psychiatry, which ...

Eliminating hazards around the home, such as clutter, stairs without railings and poor lighting, can reduce the risk of falls for older people by around a quarter, according to a new Cochrane review. The review did not find any compelling evidence for other measures to reduce falls, such as making sure older people have the correct prescription glasses, special footwear, or education on avoiding falls. It also found that decluttering and reducing hazards had the most benefit for older people who are at risk of falls, ...

New research reveals how Generation Z perceive online ‘personal brands’ as a crucial tool to gain more advantage in job markets. The study, led by the University of East Anglia in collaboration with the University of Greenwich, demonstrates the importance of authentically building online personal branding strategies and tactics to bridge the gap between Gen Z’s desired and perceived images on social media when job seeking. Gen Z - the generation of people born between the late 1990s and early 2010s - are also in favour of a more dynamic, interactive, work-in-progress style of authentic personal brands, which may not necessarily show them as “perfect”, ...

Sophia Antipolis, 10 March 2023:  The first evidence that exceeding the World Health Organization (WHO) ozone limit is associated with substantial increases in hospital admissions for heart attack, heart failure and stroke is published today in European Heart Journal, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1 Even ozone levels below the WHO maximum were linked with worsened health.   “During this three-year study, ozone was responsible for an increasing proportion of admissions ...

An exponential increase in the amount of information required in society is making the development of new optoelectronic devices increasingly important. Recently, photonic crystals have emerged as an alternative to overcome the limitations of conventional photonic devices thanks to their ability to control photons freely in microscopic space to introduce the next generation of highly integrated devices. A research team at POSTECH has developed a photonic dispersion solver that may act as the foundation of studies on photonic crystals.   Professor Junsuk Rho (Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering) at POSTECH along with a team from Gwangju Institute ...

Although autism is a common neurodevelopmental disorder, the multiple factors behind its onset are still not fully understood. Animal models of idiopathic autism*1, especially mice, are often used to help researchers understand the complicated mechanisms behind the disorder, with BTBR/J being the most commonly used mouse model in the world. Now, an international research collaboration including Kobe University’s Professor TAKUMI Toru and Researcher Chia-wen Lin et al. have made new discoveries regarding autism onset in mouse models. In their detailed series of experiments and analyses of BTBR/J mice and the other subspecies BTBR/R, they revealed that endogenous ...

How can people be incentivized to drive more fuel-efficient cars, be more innovative at work, and get to the gym on a regular basis? Uri Gneezy, professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego explains this in his new book “Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work.” In the book, Gneezy, a pioneering behavioral economist, reveals how we can create reward systems that minimize unintended consequences and maximize happiness, health, wealth and success. “Mixed Signals” was recently included in Adam Grant’s ...

American Geophysical Union 9 March 2023 AGU Release No. 23-10 For Immediate Release  This press release and accompanying multimedia are available online at: https://news.agu.org/press-release/the-worlds-atmospheric-rivers-now-have-an-intensity-ranking-like-hurricanes/ AGU press contact: Rebecca Dzombak, +1 (202) 777-7492, news@agu.org (UTC-5 hours) Contact information for the researchers: Bin Guan, University of California Los Angeles and California Institute of Technology, bin.guan@jpl.nasa.gov (UTC-8 hours) WASHINGTON — Atmospheric rivers, which are long, narrow bands of water vapor, are becoming more intense and frequent with climate ...

Passing down shared knowledge from one generation to the next is a hallmark of culture and allows animals to rapidly adapt to a changing environment. While widely evident in species ranging from human infants to naked mole rats or fledgling songbirds, early social learning has now been documented in insects. Publishing in the journal Science, a University of California San Diego researcher and his colleagues uncovered evidence that social learning is fundamental for honey bees. Professor James Nieh of the School of Biological Sciences and his collaborators discovered that the “waggle dance,” which signals the location ...

Social learning plays an important role in a honey bee’s ability to “waggle dance,” report researchers, who observed that honey bees not exposed to the dances of older, more experienced nestmates produced disordered dances full of errors. The findings demonstrate that social learning shapes this complex form of insect communication, just as it does in humans, birds, and other social vertebrate species. The waggle dance is a behavior that honey bee foragers use to communicate spatial information about the precise location of a food source to other nestmates. ...

Island dwarfs and giants are more susceptible to extinction than other species, particularly following the arrival of humans to their insular homes, according to a new analysis of island species over millions of years. The findings highlight the vulnerability of some of Earth’s most unique species and could be used to inform conservation strategies to preserve them. Although they cover less than 7% of the planet’s surface, islands are hotspots of biodiversity. Due to their isolation, islands often contain species ...

Researchers have presented the connectome – or synaptic wiring diagram – of an entire Drosophila larva brain. This first-ever insect whole-brain connectome is larger and more complex than previously reported connectomes and represents a valuable resource for future experimental and theoretical studies of neural circuits and brain function. The brain comprises complex networks of interconnected neurons that communicate through synapses. Understanding the brain’s network architecture is critical to understanding brain function. However, due to technological constraints, imaging entire brains with electron microscopy (EM) and reconstructing ...

To help improve the discovery and characterization of elusive interactions between proteins and metabolites, researchers present MIDAS (Mass spectrometry Integrated with equilibrium Dialysis for the discovery of Allostery Systematically). According to the authors, MIDAS represents a powerful new tool to “identify, understand, and exploit previously unknown modes of metabolic regulation across the protein-metabolite interactome.” The interactions between proteins and small-molecule metabolites are among the most common and fundamental types of biological interaction and play vital ...

Leipzig/Halle. Islands are “laboratories of evolution” and home to animal species with many unique features, including dwarfs that evolved to very small sizes compared to their mainland relatives, and giants that evolved to large sizes. A team of researchers from the German Centre of Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) has now found that species that evolved to more extreme body sizes compared to their mainland relatives have a higher risk of extinction than those that evolved to less extreme sizes. Their study, which was published in Science, also shows that extinction rates of mammals ...

In a study published in Science, researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California San Diego have shown that honey bees use social signal learning to improve their ability to waggle dance. Social learning shapes honey bee signaling, as it does communication in human infants, birds, and several other vertebrate species, according to the researchers. Social learning occurs when one individual learns by observing or interacting with another. Eusocial insects (i.e., insects with an advanced level of social ...

Scientists have called for a legally-binding treaty to ensure Earth’s orbit isn’t irreparably harmed by the future expansion of the global space industry. In the week that nearly 200 countries agreed to a treaty to protect the High Seas after a 20-year process, the experts believe society needs to take the lessons learned from one part of our planet to another.  The number of satellites in orbit is expected to increase from 9,000 today to over 60,000 by 2030, with estimates suggesting there ...

Researchers have built the first ever map showing every single neuron and how they’re wired together in the brain of the fruit fly larva. This huge step forwards in science will ultimately help us understand the basic principles by which signals travel through the brain at the neural level and lead to behaviour and learning.   The map of the 3016 neurons that make up the larva’s brain and the detailed circuitry of neural pathways within it is known as a ‘connectome’. It’s the largest complete brain connectome described yet. Professor Marta Zlatic ...

Researchers have analysed image and genomic data from the UK Biobank to find insights into rare diseases of the human eye. These include retinal dystrophies – a group of inherited disorders affecting the retina – which are also the leading cause of blindness certification in working-age adults. The retina is found at the back of the eye. It’s a layered tissue that receives light and converts it into a signal that can be interpreted by the brain. Each retinal layer comprises different cell types that play a unique role in this light conversion process. For this study published in the journal PLOS Genetics, the researchers focused ...

Dr. Natasha Kekre is this year’s national winner of a “young investigator award” from the Canadian Society for Clinical Investigation (north_eastexternal linkCSCI), an organization that represents early career healthcare researchers across the country. An exceptionally motivated scientist, Dr. Kekre is an associate professor at the uOttawa Faculty of Medicine, as well as a scientist and hematologist at The Ottawa Hospital. Dr. Kekre says she’s been “very fortunate” to be in Ottawa’s dynamic medical research hub and benefit from having internationally ...

A phase 3 clinical trial (research study) of a targeted therapy called nirogacestat has found that the drug significantly shrank desmoid tumors in 41% of patients. Desmoid tumors (also known as aggressive fibromatosis) are a rare type of soft tissue tumor, and MSK has a team of doctors who are dedicated to treating them. When Dana Avellino, now 36, first noticed a lump near her groin in the summer of 2018, she thought it was related her recent cesarean section. Her younger daughter was only 2 months old at the time. When a biopsy revealed that the lump was a sarcoma, a type of tumor that ...

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have detected the existence of a charge density wave of electrons that acquires mass as it interacts with the background lattice ions of the material over long distances. This new research, led by assistant professor Fahad Mahmood (Physics, Materials Research Laboratory) and postdoc Soyeun Kim (current postdoc at Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), is a direct measurement of the Anderson-Higgs mechanism (of mass acquisition) and the first known demonstration of a massive phason in a charge ...