For the past few decades, physicists and materials scientists around the world have been busy developing computer codes that simulate the key properties of materials, and they can now choose from a whole family of such tools, using them to publish tens of thousands of scientific articles per year. These codes are typically based on density-functional theory (DFT), a modelling method that uses several approximations to reduce the otherwise mind-boggling complexity of calculating the behavior of each individual electron according to the laws of quantum mechanics. The ...

Collaboration between the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) and Taylor & Francis (T&F) to make more books in Education open access catapulted readership six-fold in the partnership’s first year. The NCME Applications of Educational Measurement and Assessment series, available here, provides definitive research, theory, and applied insights in educational measurement, assessment, testing, and psychometrics. Topics addressed include validation, fairness, accountability, technology, natural language processing, and beyond. Ten edited volumes have been published since the partnership between NCME and T&F commenced in 2011, and the ...

WASHINGTON, DC (November 14, 2023)—The Kissick Family Foundation Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) Grant Program, in partnership with the Milken Institute, launched its first-ever request for funding proposals today. Up to $2.5 million in total funding will be made available to researchers from around the world whose work aims to increase scientific understanding of FTD. The program is accepting applications for two-year research projects and intends to award three to five grants to doctorate-level ...

In 2021, 61.2 million Americans ages 12 and older used illicit drugs and more than 106,000 died from drug-involved overuse. Florida ranks second to California, with 5,300 annual overdose deaths, outpacing the national average by about 23 percent. Excessive alcohol use is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States and is associated with numerous health issues, including heart disease, cancer and poor mental health. Although individuals with substance use disorder use outpatient sober support services and resources, relapse rates are still as high as 70 percent, indicating a need for more treatment modalities.  A new Florida Atlantic ...

Images  A new breed of semiconductors that could enable breakthroughs in solar cells and LEDs will benefit from cutting-edge manufacturing approaches, through a new project led by the University of Michigan.    Backed by $3 million from the National Science Foundation, it includes partners at the University of California San Diego.   The effort combines hands-on work that improves upon the process of layer-by-layer deposition of semiconductor materials during production with an information-sharing ...

Mount Sinai’s Cardiovascular Research Institute is sending bioengineered human heart muscle cells and micro-tissues into space for the first time on NASA’s 29th SpaceX commercial resupply services mission, which launched Thursday, November 9. The “SpaceX CRS-29” mission is sending scientific research to the International Space Station (ISS), where the samples will stay for approximately 30 days before returning to Earth. Through this experiment, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai researchers aim to gain a better understanding of how cardiac muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, adapt to extreme biological stresses, and how microgravity and other features of ...

Two papers describe the genetic basis of long-term heat tolerance in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, with implications for crop breeding. Teruaki Taji and colleagues evaluated dozens of lines of the model mustard weed for both long term (37 °C for 36 days) and short term (42°C for 50 minutes) heat stress. The authors found considerable variation within the species, but little overlap between responses to the two different heat challenges, suggesting that long-term heat stress tolerance is controlled by different cellular mechanisms than the more commonly studied short-term heat stress. Chromosomal mapping using the F2 progeny of a cross between a long-term-heat ...

Three out of every four older adults say they have experienced a fraud attempt by phone, text, email, mail or online in the last two years, a new poll shows. Three in ten say they’ve been victims of at least one scam. The poll reveals an especially strong link between an older adult’s health and their vulnerability to scams – both being able to spot one and becoming the victim of one. Across the board, people aged 50 to 80 who reported being in fair or poor physical or mental health, those with disabilities, and those who rate their memory as fair or poor were more likely than others their age to say they’d experienced ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Nov. 14, 2023 — An innovative approach to artificial intelligence (AI) enables reconstructing a broad field of data, such as overall ocean temperature, from a small number of field-deployable sensors using low-powered “edge” computing, with broad applications across industry, science and medicine. “We developed a neural network that allows us to represent a large system in a very compact way,” said Javier Santos, a Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher who applies ...

Patents and licenses safeguard the intellectual property of the rights holder from being copied or sold without their permission. Companies and individuals who want to make use of the patented or licensed invention must make a formal request to do so. In industries where oligopolies operate—a small number of producers who control the supply of a good or commodity and can determine prices—the profitability of licensing a patent depends on two critical factors: the chosen method of payment for license access and the relative number of firms granted the license as opposed to those left ...

New research sheds light on the dining habits of ancient carnivorous dinosaurs from Jurassic rocks of the USA. A recent scientific study published in PeerJ Life & Environment by Roberto Lei (Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia) and colleagues explores the bite marks left on the ancient bones of the giant long-necked sauropod dinosaurs like Diplodocus and Brontosaurus by carnivorous theropod dinosaurs. Tooth-marked bones provide invaluable insights into the feeding behaviors of long-extinct carnivorous creatures. While it is commonly thought that the giant tyrannosaurs were the primary culprits behind these tell-tale marks on dinosaur ...

San Francisco, November 14, 2023 – A new study summarizing exposures to asbestos during the installation and removal of asbestos cement products demonstrates that these construction activities almost always exceed U.S. occupational limits.  The study focused on airborne asbestos exposures from existing uses of asbestos that are still allowed in most countries. Average task-specific asbestos exposures during the cutting of asbestos cement pipe were more than 50 times the Occupational Safety and ...

The €500,000 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research honors researchers and institutions whose work helps to fundamentally advance the quality and robustness of research findings. The award is bestowed jointly with the QUEST Center for Responsible Research at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH). “The Einstein Foundation Award is the first of its kind in the world to recognize efforts to improve research quality. Now in its third year, the award shines a spotlight on individuals and projects that exhibit outstanding dedication, but also the ...

Scientists at Université de Montréal’s Department of Chemistry have developed a new fluorogenic probe that can be used to detect and study interactions between two families of biomolecules essential to life: sugars and proteins. The findings by professor Samy Cecioni and his students, which open the door to a wide range of applications, were published in mid-October in the prestigious European journal Angewandte Chemie. Found in all living cells Sugar is omnipresent in our lives, present in almost all the foods we eat. But the importance of these simple carbohydrates extends far beyond tasty desserts. Sugars ...

HOUSTON – (Nov. 14, 2023) – As the primary element of life on our planet, carbon is constantly journeying from living creatures down into the Earth’s crust and back up into the atmosphere, but until recently, quantifying this journey was virtually impossible. To help unravel the mystery of how the Earth cycles fossil carbon, Rice University’s Mark Torres and collaborators studied the chemistry of a river system extending from the Peruvian Andes to the Amazon floodplains. Together with collaborators from five other institutions, Torres helped show that high rates of carbon breakdown persist from mountaintop to floodplain, ...

A University of Adelaide and Oxford University study has discovered asbestos exposure led to a higher incidence of asbestos-related lung cancers in British and Australian naval personnel than in other armed forces. The data were collected from 30,085 United Kingdom and Australian personnel who served in the ’50s and ’60s, a time when asbestos-containing materials were present in British and Australian naval vessels. Three of the four cohorts had previously been studied by the University of Adelaide and the UK Health Security Agency to identify the effects of radiation exposure from British nuclear testing; however, a raised incidence of mesothelioma, a cancer strongly linked ...

From scorching heatwaves to torrential downpours and devastating storms, the disastrous effects of global warming are sweeping across the world. Being the predicted outcome of burning fossil fuels, our best and only plan to limit warming is to reduce CO2 emissions from human activities to ‘net zero’ – where the amount of CO2 we emit into the atmosphere is equal to the amount we remove from it. To keep within the 1.5°C limit of the 2015 Paris Agreement, this needs to happen as soon as possible. Though the ...

Eating in a ten-hour window is associated with higher energy and mood and lower hunger levels, new results from the largest UK community science study of its kind shows1 . Results from the trial are presented today by researchers from King’s College London at the European Nutrition Conference. Intermittent fasting (IF), or restricting your food consumption to a set window, is a popular weight loss regime. A ten-hour window means limiting your daily eating schedule to ten hours and fasting for the ...

IOP Publishing (IOPP) is now offering peer reviewers feedback on their reviewer reports to enhance the quality of peer review and to strengthen best practice in the physical sciences.   IOPP have rolled out the new programme on an opt-in basis across all its proprietary journals. Where reviewers opt-in for feedback on their report, IOPP will share a numerical evaluation of how useful the report was to the in-house editors on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being outstanding and 1 indicating that ...

The collapse of FTX clearly highlights the importance of being able to evaluate the solvency of cryptocurrency exchanges. Currently, this is only possible to a limited extent. That's why researchers from the Complexity Science Hub (CSH), in collaboration with the Financial Market Authority (FMA) and the Austrian National Bank (OeNB), are now proposing a new approach. Recently, a New York jury found Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, guilty of money laundering and fraud, among other charges. FTX was one of the largest trading platforms for crypto-assets and was valued at $32 billion before unexpectedly filing for insolvency in November ...

Medical cannabis legalization is associated with a decrease in the frequency of nonmedical prescription opioid use, according to a Rutgers study.   The study, published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, examined data from a nationally representative survey of adults who reported nonmedical prescription opioid use – or using prescription medications without a prescription or in a manner other than prescribed.   According to the study, when states implement medical cannabis laws, there is ...

Cancer stem cells cause the aging of macrophages in mice with healthy immune systems, creating conditions for the formation of tumors. Cancerous tumors consist of a mixture of cells, the most important of which are cancer stem cells. These cells are capable of establishing new cancerous tumors by evading the immune response. Research has focused on identifying biomarkers for cancer stem cells and developing therapies that target these cells. Unfortunately, candidate drugs developed from these efforts have so far not been very effective in clinical trials. A research team led by Associate Professor Haruka Wada ...

Researchers from ICIQ in Spain have designed micromotors that move around on their own to purify wastewater. The process creates ammonia, which can serve as a green energy source. Now, an AI method developed at the University of Gothenburg will be used to tune the motors to achieve the best possible results. Micromotors have emerged as a promising tool for environmental remediation, largely due to their ability to autonomously navigate and perform specific tasks on a microscale. The micromotor is comprised of a tube made of silicon and manganese dioxide in which chemical reactions cause the release of bubbles from one end. These bubbles ...

AUSTIN – TAMEST (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology) is pleased to announce the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) as the recipient of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Distinguished Service Award. TAMEST is recognizing CPRIT for their work improving the lives of Texans, advancing cancer research and prevention, and recruiting National Academy members to Texas. CPRIT’s success in attracting top-tier cancer scientists and companies to the state ...

Osaka, Japan – Commonly known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS are notorious for persisting in the environment and in our bodies. Osaka Metropolitan University chemists may put an end to the “forever” life of PFAS with their simple yet innovative technique that converts these harmful substances into valuable compounds. A research group led by Professor Masato Ohashi and Assistant Professor Kenichi Michigami of the Graduate School of Science at Osaka Metropolitan University has successfully synthesized ligands called fluorine-decorated ...