Annapolis, MD; October 18, 2023—Every so often, cicadas emerge above ground and blanket the earth with their exoskeletons while emitting a high-pitched chirp from sunrise to sunset. The periodical cicadas in the genus Magicicada come every 13 or 17 years, though other types of cicadas emerge much more frequently in our neighborhoods. A long-standing agricultural query related to the periodical cicadas was recently answered by an Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) research team at West Virginia's Appalachian Fruit Research Station. Simply: Once periodical ...

SAN ANTONIO — October 18, 2023 —Southwest Research Institute will host the Life-Cycle Analysis for Transportation Symposium on Nov. 16-17 in San Antonio. This year’s symposium will be in person for the first time. The two-day event will highlight academic, industry and institutional research efforts to characterize the total greenhouse gas emissions produced during the entire life cycle of a vehicle, including its manufacture, service life and recycling or disposal. “We often talk about getting to ‘zero-emissions,’ but this definition often ...

Media Contact: Kara Flynn, 202.257.8424, press@ashg.org For Immediate Release: Wednesday, October 18, 2023, 10:00am U.S. Eastern Time ROCKVILLE, MD — More than ever before, human genetics and genomics is an essential part of making progress in research, biotechnology, and health. As a key leader supporting research innovation, the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) will convene more than 8,000 researchers and clinicians at the ASHG 2023 Annual Meeting in Washington DC, Nov. 1-5 to share emerging discoveries and celebrate the Society’s 75th anniversary. “Human genetics is transforming science and health at a rapid ...

More than 150 species of wild animals across every continent are contaminated with flame retardant chemicals, according to a new map tracking peer-reviewed research worldwide. Polluted wildlife include killer whales, red pandas, chimpanzees and other endangered species. Added to furniture, electronics, vehicles, and other everyday products to meet flammability standards, the chemicals often do not work as intended. They also migrate out of products and into wildlife—and people.   “Flame retardants don’t actually make TV enclosures and car interiors more fire-safe, but they can harm people and animals,” ...

Octopuses are fascinating animals – and serve as important model organisms in neuroscience, cognition research and developmental biology. To gain a deeper understanding of their biology and evolutionary history, validated data on the composition of their genome is needed, which has been lacking until now. Scientists from the University of Vienna together with an international research team have now been able to close this gap and, in a study, determined impressive figures: 2.8 billion base pairs - organized in ...

A collaborative research team, led by Professor Hyun-Kon Song in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST, Dr. Seo-Hyun Jung from Research Center for Advanced Specialty Chemicals at Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT), and Dr. Tae-Hee Kim from the Ulsan Advanced Energy Technology R&D Center at Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER), has achieved a groundbreaking milestone in battery technology. Their remarkable achievement in developing a non-flammable gel polymer electrolyte (GPE) is set to revolutionize the safety of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) by ...

SPOKANE, Wash. – A two-part training designed to help police officers recognize their implicit bias, revealed some behavior improvement and lowered citizen discrimination complaints in a controlled study. While a small study involving one police department, it is the first-known research to provide evidence that this type of training can produce positive behavioral effects. Led by Washington State University researcher Lois James, the study found some improvement in the anti-bias trained officers’ behavior toward homeless people in particular, ...

Researchers have invented an experimental wearable device that generates power from a user’s bending finger and can create and store memories, in a promising step towards health monitoring and other technologies. The innovation features a single nanomaterial incorporated into a stretchable casing fitted to a person’s finger. The nanomaterial enabled the device to generate power with the user bending their finger. The super-thin material also allows the device to perform memory tasks, as outlined below. Multifunctional devices normally require several materials in layers, which involves the time-consuming challenge of stacking nanomaterials with high precision. The team, led ...

 Determining whether a person is diabetic could be as easy as having them speak a few sentences into their smartphone, according to a groundbreaking study from Klick Labs that combines voice technology with artificial intelligence in a major step forward in diabetes detection. The new study, published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Health, outlines how scientists used six to 10 seconds of people’s voice, along with basic health data, including age, sex, height, and weight, to create an AI model ...

Correction (Oct. 17, 2023): The paper’s title has been corrected to “Deep Learning-Predicted Dihydroartemisinin Rescues Osteoporosis by Maintaining Mesenchymal Stem Cell Stemness through Activating Histone 3 Lys 9 Acetylation Artificial intelligence has exploded in popularity and is being harnessed by some scientists to predict which molecules could treat illnesses, or to quickly screen existing medicines for new applications. Researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have used one such deep learning algorithm, and found that dihydroartemisinin ...

Holograms that offer a three-dimensional (3D) view of objects provide a level of detail that is unattainable by regular two-dimensional (2D) images. Due to their ability to offer a realistic and immersive experience of 3D objects, holograms hold enormous potential for use in various fields, including medical imaging, manufacturing, and virtual reality. Holograms are traditionally constructed by recording the three-dimensional data of an object and the interactions of light with the object. However, this technique is computationally highly intensive as it requires ...

Ever since Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered the world of bacteria through a microscope in the late seventeenth century, humans have tried to look deeper into the world of the infinitesimally small. There are, however, physical limits to how closely we can examine an object using traditional optical methods. This is known as the ‘diffraction limit’ and is determined by the fact that light manifests as a wave. It means a focused image can never be smaller than half the wavelength of light used to observe an object. Attempts to break this limit with “super lenses” have all hit the hurdle of extreme visual losses, making the lenses opaque. ...

As the COVID-19 pandemic scattered and isolated people, researchers across Virginia Tech connected for a data-driven collaboration seeking improved drugs to fight the disease and potentially many other illnesses. A multidisciplinary collaboration spanning several colleges at Virginia Tech resulted in a newly published study, “Data Driven Computational Design and Experimental Validation of Drugs for Accelerated Mitigation of Pandemic-like Scenarios,” in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. The study focuses on using computer algorithms to generate adaptations to ...

A research study led by University of Oklahoma assistant professor Chenghao Wang and recently published in the journal Nature Communications tackled the critical issue of how city-scale building energy consumption in urban environments will evolve under the influence of climate change. Fossil fuels account for approximately 40% of all building energy use in urban city centers in the United States, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that residential and commercial buildings in U.S. cities are one of the major energy ...

Sweden is far ahead when it comes to promoting open access to scholarly publications. But there is risk of getting stuck in a permanent transformation that favours large commercial publishers. A new report from the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions develops a strategy on how to work in negotiations with the publishers. In 2021, the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (Sveriges universitets- och högskoleförbund, SUHF) convened a “Beyond transformative agreements” working group (the BTA group) to lay the foundation for further advancing the transition to open access. Now, the group ...

The use of e-scooters has increased significantly in recent years, but so has the number of accidents involving this relatively new form of transport. At the same time, knowledge about injury mechanisms in this area was still very limited. In the project SURF, funded by Zukunftsfonds Steiermark, the Vehicle Safety Institute at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) investigated this topic using Human Body Models and derived recommendations to reduce the injury risk in e-scooter accidents. Put on a helmet, decrease speed and get off the pavement As ...

Research conducted by marine biologists from the University of Sydney has found juvenile crown-of-thorns starfish can withstand tremendous heatwaves well above levels that kill coral. These starfish then develop into carnivorous predators that devour reefs just as they begin to regrow. Crown-of-thorns starfish are native to the Great Barrier Reef and found in the Indo-Pacific region, but they are classified as a species of concern because the damage large populations cause to coral is more significant than any other species. ...

Research published in the Journal of Internal Medicine indicates that SARS-CoV-2 infection may worsen lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) in men. The study included 17,986 men receiving medication for LUTS within the public healthcare system of Hong Kong in 2021–2022, half of whom had SARS-CoV-2 infection. The group with SARS-CoV-2 had significantly higher rates of retention of urine (4.55% versus 0.86%); blood in the urine (1.36% versus 0.41%); clinical urinary tract infection (4.31% versus 1.49%); bacteria in the urine (9.02% versus 1.97%); and addition of 5-alpha reductase inhibitors, which are drugs prescribed for enlarged prostate. (0.50% versus 0.02%). These urological ...

New research published in Economic Inquiry reports substantial increases in psychological distress in the UK during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mental health effects were more pronounced for females; younger individuals; Black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities; and migrants. Also, people who had financial worries, loneliness, or were living in overcrowded dwellings experienced significantly worse mental health deterioration during the first wave. The study used data from the UKHLS, also known as Understanding Society, which is a household panel dataset that captures, among other things, information from adults about their economic and social circumstances, ...

Population outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns sea star (COTS), a predator of coral, can cause widespread coral mortality. COTS are herbivorous as juveniles but then switch to coral consumption as they grow to adulthood. When researchers exposed juvenile COTS to heat stress scenarios at time and temperature durations designed to reflect conditions that cause coral bleaching and mortality, juveniles exhibited tolerance to heatwave conditions well above levels that kill coral. The findings, which are published in Global Change Biology, indicate that juvenile COTS are likely to persist as major coral predators in reefs already vulnerable to the effects of climate change. “This ...

The various neurological symptoms that patients with COVID-19 have experienced suggest that viral infections may increase the risk of neurodegeneration, which could in turn contribute to the development of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). A review in the Journal of Neurochemistry highlights the potential mechanistic links between COVID-19 and AD. The authors note that age is the largest contributing factor to AD and COVID-19, and both appear to enhance the effects of the other, with potentially synergistic effects on neurodegeneration. “I believe over the next several ...

Agricultural management has typically focused on increasing yields, but there is an increasing need for sustainable food production that limits negative impacts on the environment. A new study published in Grassland Research provides insights into the potential benefits of diversifying agricultural practices, revealing how different mixtures of plant species can improve production, quality, and conservation. For the study, investigators planted multiple species in different grassland plots, manipulating plant species richness from one to six species spanning three functional groups ...

Identifying different types of body fluids can help forensic experts reconstruct a crime scene, but it’s difficult to do so. In a study published in Electrophoresis, researchers developed a method using two different types of RNA—called microRNA (miRNA) and messenger RNA (mRNA)—to determine five common body fluids. Compared with previously reported single mRNA or miRNA assays, the combination of several mRNAs and miRNAs showed significant advantages for labeling human body fluids. “Our findings indicate that this combined mRNA and miRNA system may provide a scientific ...

It is often claimed that using the snooze button can have negative effects on sleep and cognitive processes, but there has been no direct evidence to this effect. New research from the Department of Psychology at Stockholm University shows that snoozing may actually support the waking process for regular snoozers. It's common to want to stay in bed, potentially even go back to sleep, when the alarm goes off in the morning. The snooze button has been a function in alarm clocks and cell phones for decades and is ...

Now that improvements in technology mean that some robots work alongside humans, there is evidence that those humans have learned to see them as team-mates — and teamwork can have negative as well as positive effects on people’s performance. People sometimes relax, letting their colleagues do the work instead. This is called ‘social loafing’, and it’s common where people know their contribution won’t be noticed or they’ve acclimatized to another team member’s high performance. Scientists at the Technical University of Berlin investigated whether humans social loaf when they work with robots. “Teamwork ...