A Perspective sheds light on why megaprojects take so long and cost so much—and what can be done to prevent the problem. Why did Boston’s “Big Dig” building project go 19 billion dollars over budget and take 9 years longer than anticipated? Globally, between $6 trillion and $9 trillion is spent on megaprojects every year, including everything from space telescopes to wind farms. In the United States, the recently passed $1 trillion infrastructure bill means a new era of megaprojects is at hand. In a Perspective, Guru Madhavan and colleagues review the causes behind ballooning costs and extended timelines for such megaprojects. Problems include premature ...

Researchers have developed an energy-efficient computing-based chip with smell-sensing units that can detect food spoilage and provides real-time conditions continuously throughout the spoilage process. The system is described in a study published in Advanced Science. Other electronic noses, or artificial olfactory systems (AOSs), have been developed in the past, but they have numerous limitations, including high energy consumption, time delays, and data loss. The AOS developed in this study requires little energy and integrates sensing and computing units on the same chip. It detects food spoilage by employing thin zinc oxide ...

Sending an email with a forged address is easier than previously thought, due to flaws in the process that allows email forwarding, according to a research team led by computer scientists at the University of California San Diego.  The issues researchers uncovered have a broad impact, affecting the integrity of email sent from tens of thousands of domains, including those representing organizations in the U.S. government–such as the majority of U.S. cabinet email domains, including state.gov, ...

Sept. 5, 2023 – In a new report posted online in the  American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, a global consensus conference of 32 critical care experts with broad international representation and from diverse backgrounds has proposed a new definition of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In addition to the experts, critical care societies from around the world provided input,  once they received feedback from their members. The report, which builds on the 2012 Berlin Definition of ARDS, will be published Jan. 1, 2024 in the American Thoracic Society’s AJRCCM. ARDS is a life-threatening illness in which the lungs ...

AMES, IA – During Frito-Lay's first "Crash the Super Bowl" contest in 2006, thousands of participants submitted 30-second videos promoting Doritos. Entries were winnowed down to five finalists, and a public vote selected the winning commercial, which aired during the most watched American television broadcast of the year. The ad boosted Doritos sales and pulled in awards, sparking other big brands, like Nestlé, BMW and Fisher-Price, to launch their own crowdsourcing contests. "Crowdsourcing has become more prevalent over the last decade. It can generate innovative ideas and solutions and engage ...

A new opinion piece published in Health Affairs Forefront raises questions around current approaches to assess drug safety and effectiveness in people with obesity. The article sheds light on how increased body fat can modify the effects of drugs used to treat common conditions, in some cases rendering the drugs ineffective or unsafe for people with obesity. The article, titled “Assessments Of Drug Safety And Effectiveness Continue To Fail People With Obesity,” argues that drug manufacturers should be required to show correct dosing instructions on their labels ...

Over the course of four weeks this summer, a motley crew of biologists, engineers, entrepreneurs and programmers gathered at predetermined sites within Windsor Nature Park, a 185-acre tropical rainforest located in the heart of Singapore. They’d traveled from all over the world to participate in a one-of-a-kind competition hosted by the XPRIZE Foundation, in which 13 teams would have three days to identify as many organisms within the forest as possible. Up to 10 winning teams would equally split $2 million and advance to the 2024 finals, where they’d vie for the first-place prize of $5 million. But there was a catch: All observations and data collection ...

Approximately 95% of the world’s food supply is directly or indirectly produced on soil, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Soil health is therefore critical to the health of all living organisms—especially plants. Equally as critical, resources that consider the overlap between soil’s mineral nutrition and plant diseases have been scarce, until members of the American Phytopathological Society (APS) recognized this gap. APS PRESS has newly published an updated edition of the first book to successfully combine the two important plant science disciplines of nutrition and pathology. Mineral Nutrition and Plant Disease, ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Seven years after an initial $17.9 million award from the National Institutes of Health, the Illinois Kids Development Study at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will receive approximately $13.7 million – awarded in two phases – to continue its work for another seven years. The money coming to Illinois is part of a national collaborative effort to explore how environmental exposures influence child development, cognition, growth and health. IKIDS is part of Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes, a national initiative to study five ...

Gratitude is a strong emotion, usually felt by a person who benefits from an intentional good deed of another person. Receiving gifts or benefits can instill a feeling of gratitude in people who receive them, i.e., beneficiaries, encouraging them to be more prosocial, while also helping to create a bond with their benefactors. This has led several researchers to examine the determinants of gratitude. Interestingly, beneficiaries often have preconceived beliefs about receiving a benefit. For instance, they may have no prior expectations of receiving a ...

Two scientists at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences have received prestigious ERC Starting Grants from the European Commission: Clarissa Campbell and Barbara Maier. In Clarissa Campbell's laboratory, researchers are working to better understand the interplay between the immune system and metabolism. Barbara Maier and her team are researching the role of lymph nodes in the context of cancer. (Vienna, 5 September 2023) The ERC grants are among the most prestigious and competitive research grants offered ...

PULLMAN, Wash. – A more efficient U.S. Postal Service can increase voter turnout in all states regardless of their mail voting laws, according to a Washington State University study. WSU researcher Michael Ritter analyzed election data from 2012 through 2020, when the pandemic encouraged many more people than usual to vote by mail. He found that in general more accessible mail voting laws, such as universal mail-in voting and no-excuse mail voting, increased the probability that individuals would vote. Restrictive laws, such as requiring ...

Organometallic compounds, molecules made up of metal atoms and organic molecules, are often used to accelerate chemical reactions and have played a significant role in advancing the field of chemistry.  Metallocenes, a type of organometallic compound, are known for their versatility and special "sandwich" structure. Their discovery was a significant contribution to the field of organometallic chemistry and led to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1973 to the scientists who discovered and explained their sandwich structure.  The ...

Opposites don’t actually attract. That’s the takeaway from a sweeping CU Boulder analysis of more than 130 traits and including millions of couples over more than a century. “Our findings demonstrate that birds of a feather are indeed more likely to flock together,” said first author Tanya Horwitz, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Institute for Behavioral Genetics (IBG). The study, published Aug. 31 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, confirms what individual studies have hinted at for decades, defying the age-old adage that “opposites ...

A new study published in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters examines the links between drinking water quality violations and social vulnerability in the United States, revealing that these violations disproportionately affect the most vulnerable communities. Approximately 70% of the population affected ranked in the highest social vulnerability category, with many different social parameters, beyond income, linked to different drinking water quality violations.  The study, led by researchers from the Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas in Austin, used new water quality data ...

A new study showing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigation strategies used to manage the virus on emergency department (ED) visits in British Columbia can help with future planning. The study is published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.221516. "Evaluation of the effects of the pandemic and associated measures can provide a historical account and inform health care service planning for both postpandemic recovery and mitigation of potential consequences ...

Peer-reviewed / Empirical study New study challenges political claims that some high-income countries have achieved “green growth”– revealing that under current growth-oriented strategies, emission reductions in these nations fall drastically short of meeting the climate goals and fairness requirements of the Paris Agreement. If current trends continue, even the 11 high-income countries that have "decoupled" carbon emissions from GDP growth would on average take over 200 years to get their emissions close to zero, and would emit more than 27-times their fair share of the “global carbon budget” ...

Embargoed for release until 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday 04 September 2023 Annals of Internal Medicine Tip Sheet @Annalsofim Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, but also on behalf of the organization they represent. ---------------------------- 1. New ACP paper addresses ethical issues in determining death; recommends clarification to the Uniform Determination ...

It seems intuitive that forests would provide better habitat for forest-dwelling wildlife than farms. Yet, in one of the longest-running studies of tropical wildlife populations in the world, Stanford researchers found that over 18 years, smaller farms with varying crop types – interspersed with patches or ribbons of forest – sustain many forest-dependent bird populations in Costa Rica, even as populations decline in forests. In a paper published Sept. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nicholas Hendershot and colleagues ...

For those fortunate enough to walk normally, wandering is such an expected behavior that we hardly consider that it involves complex, partly involuntary processes. “Animals move to explore their environment in search of food, interaction with others, or simply out of curiosity. But the perception of danger or a painful stimulus can also activate an automatic flight reflex”, Martin Carbo-Tano, a post-doctoral fellow at Paris Brain Institute, explains. In both cases, movement initiation relies on the activation of so-called reticulospinal control neurons, which form an intertwined network in ...

Halle/Saale, Fort Lauderdale. More than 100 years of observations in nature have revealed a universal pattern of species abundances: Most species are rare but not very rare, and only a few species are very common. These so-called global species abundance distributions have become fully unveiled for some well-monitored species groups, such as birds. For other species groups, such as insects, however, the veil remains partially unlifted. These are the findings of an international team of researchers led by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg ...

Extreme El Niño weather saw South America’s forest carbon sink switch off Hot and dry conditions resulted in increased tree death  Evidence that most forest areas withstand periods of severe drought Greatest impact in forests with drier climates  Tropical forests in South America lose their ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere when conditions become exceptionally hot and dry, according to new research.    For a long time, tropical forests have acted as a carbon sink, taking more ...

When it comes to global warming trends, the Arctic is a troubling outlier. The Arctic warms nearly four times faster than the global average, and aerosols play an important role in that warming. Scientists have long known that pollutants from other regions can accumulate in the Arctic atmosphere where they alter atmospheric chemistry, absorb sunlight, and affect local weather patterns, leading to localized warming that melts ice and snow. Sea salt particles dominate aerosol mass concentration, but their production mechanisms and impact on Arctic climate have remained unclear. Atmospheric scientists led by Jian Wang, director of the Center for Aerosol ...

In a review published in Engineering, scientists explore the burgeoning field of machine learning (ML) and its applications in chemistry. Titled “Machine Learning for Chemistry: Basics and Applications,” this comprehensive review aims to bridge the gap between chemists and modern ML algorithms, providing insights into the potential of ML in revolutionizing chemical research. Over the past decade, ML and artificial intelligence (AI) have made remarkable strides, bringing us closer to the realization of intelligent machines. The advent of deep learning methods and enhanced data storage capabilities has played a pivotal role in this progress. ML has already demonstrated success ...

Around 5.2% of the global population carries abnormal hemoglobin genes [1]. Each year, 300,000 to 500,000 children are born with severe hemoglobinopathies worldwide, with approximately 80% of these cases occurring in developing countries [2]. Thalassemia is the most common hereditary hemoglobinopathy and occurs in 4.4 out of every 10,000 live births [3]. It is prevalent in Mediterranean coastal areas, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and southern China. A previous study indicated that Ganzhou, the southernmost city in Jiangxi province, had a thalassemia prevalence ...