Tokyo, Japan - A research team from the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo has conducted a detailed analysis of the uncertainties associated with flood risk modeling at the global scale. They found large uncertainties were mainly associated with runoff data. Flood magnitude is large in wet regions, but uncertainties in flood depth is larger in dry and mountainous regions affected by rare, extreme floods. The results of the study can be used to identify the key areas for improvement in hydrological modeling and improve future predictions of flood risk. Assessment of the risk of rare and extreme floods is essential ...

A team of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) researchers has designed a 'smart' device to harvest daylight and relay it to underground spaces, reducing the need to draw on traditional energy sources for lighting. In Singapore, authorities are looking at the feasibility of digging deeper underground to create new space for infrastructure, storage, and utilities. Demand for round-the-clock underground lighting is therefore expected to rise in the future. To develop a daylight harvesting device that can sustainably meet this need, the NTU team ...

Japan is a country known for its continuous quality improvement (KAIZEN) in manufacturing. Now doctors are bringing this philosophy to the medical field. In pediatric intensive care units (PICU), quality improvement (QI) is needed to ensure complex medical care is provided to critically ill patients in a timely manner. A research group led by Associate Professor Etsuko Nakagami-Yamaguchi and Graduate Student Yu Inata of the Department of Medical Quality and Safety Science, Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine, set out to understand and assess the literature describing quality improvement in PICUs. "Although ...

Researchers from University of Tübingen (Tübingen, Germany) and Ural Federal University (Ekaterinburg, Russia) have developed and experimentally tested new method to understand how the brain builds associations between previously unrelated words. The findings are published in Journal of Neurolinguistics. The scientists conducted used electroencephalography to measure how the brain responds to the incongruent sentence endings. So, the brain responses to the last word in the phrase "I like my coffee with cream and sugar" have much smaller magnitude as compared to the phrase "I like my coffee with cream and socks". The brain reacts in a similar way to words ...

The protein Asc-1 regulates whether fat-burning beige or fat-storing white adipocytes are formed, which can have an impact on the development of metabolic diseases. This is shown by a current study of the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD). The results open up new approaches to prevent the development of metabolic diseases. The study has now been published in Nature Communications. Not all fat is the same: there is white, brown and beige adipose tissue *. While white fat cells serve as energy stores, excess energy is burned in brown and beige fat tissue. Too much white fat is considered unhealthy. If the white adipose ...

A thermos bottle has the task of preserving the temperature - but sometimes you want to achieve the opposite: Computer chips generate heat that must be dissipated as quickly as possible so that the chip is not destroyed. This requires special materials with particularly good heat conduction properties. In collaboration with groups from China and the United States, a research team from TU Wien therefore set out to find the optimal heat conductor. They finally found what they were looking for in a very specific form of tantalum nitride - no other known metallic material has a higher thermal conductivity. In order to be able to identify this record-breaking material, they first had to analyse which processes play a role in heat conduction in such materials at the ...

Ishikawa, Japan - The focus and ultimate goal of computational research in materials science and condensed matter physics is to solve the Schrödinger equation--the fundamental equation describing how electrons behave inside matter--exactly (without resorting to simplifying approximations). While experiments can certainly provide interesting insights into a material's properties, it is often computations that reveal the underlying physical mechanism. However, computations need not rely on experimental data and can, in fact, be performed independently, an approach known as "ab initio calculations". The density functional theory (DFT) is a popular example of such an approach. For most material ...

A new report is highlighting ways we can fight COVID-19 while indoors during cold weather periods. At the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, there was a lack of empirical evidence on the virus's airborne transmission. However, an increasing body of evidence - gathered particularly from poorly ventilated environments - has given the scientific community a better understanding of how the disease progresses. Information on the asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission of the virus strongly supports the case for airborne transmission of COVID-19. In a study published by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, scientists from the University of Surrey, together with other members of the Royal Society's Rapid Action in Modelling ...

Skyrmions - tiny magnetic vortices - are considered promising candidates for tomorrow's information memory devices which may be able to achieve enormous data storage and processing capacities. A research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has developed a method to grow a particular magnetic thin-film material that hosts these magnetic vortices. A central aspect of this new method is the abrupt heating of the material with short, very bright flashes of light, as the international team, consisting of scientists from HZDR, the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden, TU Dresden (TUD), and Chinese partners, describes in the journal Advanced Functional Materials (DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202009723). In 2009, a research team had made a remarkable discovery: ...

New research by the University of Kent has found that using low-cost psychological interventions can reduce vehicle engine idling and in turn improve air quality, especially when there is increased traffic volume at railway level crossings. A team of psychologists led by Professor Dominic Abrams, Dr Tim Hopthrow and Dr Fanny Lalot at the University's School of Psychology, found that using carefully worded road signage can decrease the number of drivers leaving engines idling during queues at crossing barriers. The research, which was funded by ...

Helsinki, Finland -- The EU will be home to 30 million electric cars by 2030 and the European Commission is preparing tough targets for recycling these and other batteries. Yet the impacts of battery recycling, especially for the sizeable lithium-ion batteries of the electric cars soon filling our streets, has been largely unstudied. In a new study, researchers at Aalto University have investigated the environmental effects of a hydrometallurgical recycling process for electric car batteries. Using simulation-based life-cycle analysis, they considered energy and water consumption, as well as process emissions. 'Battery recycling processes are still developing, so their environmental footprints haven't yet been studied in detail. To be beneficial, recycling must be ...

The nucleus is the headquarters of a cell and molecules constantly move across the nuclear membrane through pores. The transport of these molecules is both selective and fast; some 1,000 molecules per second can move in or out. Scientists from the University of Groningen and Delft University of Technology, both in the Netherlands, and a colleague from the Swedish Chalmers University of Technology, have developed an artificial model of these pores using simple design rules, which enabled them to study how this feat is accomplished. Their results were published on 31 March in Nature Communications. Nuclear pores are extremely complicated structures. The pore itself is a big protein complex and the opening of the pore is filled with a dense network of ...

First study in bereaved relatives' experience during Covid-19 pandemic lockdown published today The study makes important recommendations for health and social care professionals providing end-of-life-care Bereaved families highlighted their need for practical and emotional support when a family member was at end of life The study found families have increased communication needs when a family member was at end of life, encompassing holistic as well as clinical connections Phone calls between patients and their relatives should be prioritised during the pandemic to allow loved ones to say goodbye, a new study providing recommendations to healthcare professionals has suggested. The ...

Gustavo Aguirre and William Beltran, veterinary ophthalmologists and vision scientists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, have studied a wide range of different retinal blinding disorders. But the one caused by mutations in the NPHP5 gene, leading to a form of Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), is one of the most severe. "Children with this disorder are not visual," says Aguirre. "They have a wandering, searching look on their faces and are usually diagnosed at a young age." A nearly identical disease naturally occurs in dogs. In a new paper in the journal Molecular Therapy, Aguirre, Beltran, and colleagues at Penn and other institutions have demonstrated that a canine gene therapy can restore both normal structure and function to the retina's ...

University of California, Irvine, biologists have discovered that plants influence how their bacterial and fungal neighbors react to climate change. This finding contributes crucial new information to a hot topic in environmental science: in what manner will climate change alter the diversity of both plants and microbiomes on the landscape? The paper appears in Elementa: Sciences of the Anthropocene. The research took place at the Loma Ridge Global Change Experiment, a decade-long study in which scientists simulate the impacts of climate change on neighboring grasslands and coastal scrublands in Southern California. Experimental treatments there include nitrogen addition, a common result of local fossil fuel burning, ...

The human brain regions responsible for speech and communication keep our world running by allowing us to do things like talk with friends, shout for help in an emergency and present information in meetings. However, scientific understanding of just how these parts of the brain work is limited. Consequently, knowledge of how to improve challenges such as speech impediments or language acquisition is limited as well. Using an ultra-lightweight, wireless implant, a University of Arizona team is researching songbirds - one of the few species that share humans' ability to learn new vocalizations - to improve scientific ...

Cone snails aren't glamorous. They don't have svelte waistlines or jaw-dropping good looks. Yet, some of these worm-hunting gastropods are the femme fatales or lady killers of the undersea world, according to a new study conducted by an international team of researchers, including University of Utah Health scientists. The researchers say the snails use a previously undetected set of small molecules that mimic the effects of worm pheromones to drive marine worms into a sexual frenzy, making it easier to lure them out of their hiding places so the snails can gobble them up. "In essence, these cone snails have found a way to turn the natural sex drive of their prey into a lethal weapon," says Eric W. ...

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have shown for the first time that animal DNA shed within the environment can be collected from the air. The proof-of-concept study, published in the journal PeerJ, opens up potential for new ecological, health and forensic applications of environmental DNA (eDNA), which to-date has mainly been used to survey aquatic environments. Living organisms such as plants and animals shed DNA into their surrounding environments as they interact with them. In recent years, eDNA has become an important tool to help scientists identify species found within different environments. However, whilst a range of environmental samples, including ...

Tomatoes are an important and popular crop, but the tasty ketchup, salsa and pasta sauce they yield comes at a price: overuse of chemical fertilizers. Now, researchers report in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry they have recruited a fungus to bolster fertilizer efficiency, meaning tastier tomatoes can be grown with less fertilizer. Tomato plants have a long growth period and need more nutrients -- particularly nitrogen and phosphorus-- than many other crops. Supplying these nutrients through a chemical fertilizer is inefficient, because the nutrients can leach away, evaporate or get trapped in insoluble compounds in the soil, among other problems. Some farmers react by overusing ...

Key Points The PURE study is the first multinational study exploring the association between unprocessed and processed meat intakes with health outcomes in low-, middle-, and high-income countries. The consumption of unprocessed red meat and poultry was not found to be associated with mortality nor major cardiovascular disease events. In contrast, higher processed meat intake was associated with higher risks of both total mortality and major cardiovascular disease. Rockville, MD - Red meat is a major source of medium- and long-chain saturated fatty acids, which may lead to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Processed meat, which has been modified to improve taste or extend its shelf-life, has also been associated with an increased ...

Hamilton, ON (March 31, 2021) - A global study led by Hamilton scientists has found a link between eating processed meat and a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. The same study did not find the same link with unprocessed red meat or poultry. The information comes from the diets and health outcomes of 134,297 people from 21 countries spanning five continents, who were tracked by researchers for data on meat consumption and cardiovascular illnesses. After following the participants for almost a decade, the researchers found consumption of 150 grams or more of processed meat a week was associated with a 46 per cent higher risk of cardiovascular disease and a 51 per cent ...

Tilapias living in crowded aquaculture ponds or small freshwater reservoirs adapt so well to these stressful environments that they stop growing and reproduce at a smaller size than their stress-free counterparts. A new study by researchers at the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka and the University of British Columbia, explains that while most fishes die when stressed, tilapias survive in rough environments by stunting and carrying on with their lives in dwarf form. "Tilapia and other fish in the Cichlidae family do not spawn 'earlier' than other fishes, as it is commonly believed," Upali S. Amarasinghe, lead author of the study and professor at the University of Kelaniya, said. "Rather, they are uncommonly tolerant of stressful ...

DALLAS, March 31, 2021 -- Following a routine of regular physical activity combined with a diet including fruits, vegetables and other healthy foods may be key to middle-aged adults achieving optimal cardiometabolic health later in life, according to new research using data from the Framingham Heart Study published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access journal of the American Heart Association. Cardiometabolic health risk factors include the metabolic syndrome, a cluster of disorders such as excess fat around the waist, insulin resistance and high blood pressure. Presence of the metabolic syndrome may increase the risk of developing heart disease, stroke and Type 2 diabetes. Researchers noted it has been unclear ...

More research is needed on the environmental impact of sunscreen on the world's coral reefs, scientists at the University of York say. The concerns over the number of cases of cancer as a result of overexposure to UV solar radiation, has led to extensive production and use of skin protection products. The chemical compounds used in these products, however, can enter the environment at the points of manufacture as well as through use by the consumer. It is already understood that UV-filter compounds have toxic effects on marine organisms, but research in this area ...

WASHINGTON, DC - March 31, 2021 -- Nearly 20% of Americans, or more than 46 million adults, say they did not seek treatment for a health problem in the last year due to cost, and an equal number say that if they needed some form of healthcare today they would not be able to afford it, according to a new West Health-Gallup survey. The findings come as Americans struggle through a year-plus long pandemic that has claimed over 550,000 lives and put millions of people out of work. Americans who found themselves unemployed were about twice as likely ...