Radiation at terahertz frequencies (wavelengths between 0.03 and 0.3 mm) can be used successfully to analyze the structural dynamics of water and biomolecules. But applying the technique to aqueous solutions and tissues remains challenging, since terahertz (THz) radiation is strongly absorbed by water. While this absorption enables certain analyses, such as the structure of water and its interactions with biological solutes, it limits the thickness of samples that can be analyzed, and it drowns out weaker signals from biomolecules of interest. Strong absorption of THz ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Four decades after their capture more than a half-mile below the ocean's surface, three snailfish species have received their scientific names, two of them from school children on Guam in the island's native Chamorro language. The rare specimens of liparids were collected in the early 1980s in traps set in the Mariana Archipelago in the western Pacific Ocean, deposited with NOAA's Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center in Hawaii and did not get examined until recently, when they were noticed during the center's move to a new location. ...

As the back-to-school rush begins, podiatry experts at the University of South Australia are encouraging parents to get their children's school shoes professionally fitted, as new research confirms that ill-fitted footwear can significantly impede foot movement and comfort. In a new study, researchers tested the effect of shoe size on foot motion and comfort among children aged 8 to 12 years, finding that shoes that were one size too small restricted the normal movement of the heel, arch and big toe joint during walking. The study also confirmed that a comfortable shoe fit can be determined by a 'rule of thumb', where the wearer's thumb width from their longest toe to the end of their shoe is an effective and accurate measure ...

Metals are one of the most widely used materials in the world - they are used in cookware, tools, electric appliances, electric wires, computer chips, jewelry and so on. With the growing demand for metal products, it is crucial to promote sustainable and environmentally-friendly methods of recycling metal waste to help reduce the environmental impact of using metals in the economy. The conventional approaches for recycling metal waste are energy intensive and some of these methods also generate environmentally harmful by-products, such as ammonia and methane during aluminium recycling. To address this challenge, a team of researchers from the National ...

With inherent orthogonality, both SAMs and OAMs of light have been utilized to expand the dimensions of optical communications and signal processing, wherein unambiguous SAM and OAM identification is one of the significant topics. Conventional sorting approaches suffer from complicated optical setups, multiple bulky devices, repeated projection measurements, and cannot simultaneously distinguish SAM and OAM. In a new paper published in Light Science & Application, a team of scientists, led by Professor Xiangang Luo from State Key Laboratory of Optical Technologies on Nano-Fabrication and Micro-Engineering, Institute of Optics and Electronics Chinese Academy of Sciences, and co-workers have showed that a single spin-decoupled metasurface that merges the geometric ...

Hand, Foot & Mouth Disease (HFMD) is a generally mild, contagious viral infection common in young children. In Singapore, HFMD is endemic and is most commonly caused by intestinal viruses known as coxsackieviruses and enteroviruses. While most HFMD patients experience common symptoms such as sore throat, fever, ulcers inside the mouth and blisters and lesions on the palms and soles, infection with Enterovirus-A71 (EV-A71) may lead to serious neurological complications that can be potentially fatal or lead to long-term neurological deficits (cognitive and motor deficits). These complicated HFMD cases are mainly seen in young children. Researchers from NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine's Infectious Diseases ...

New FLEET research confirms the potential for topological materials to substantially reduce the energy consumed by computing. The collaboration of FLEET researchers from University of Wollongong, Monash University and UNSW have shown in a theoretical study that using topological insulators rather than conventional semiconductors to make transistors could reduce the gate voltage by half, and the energy used by each transistor by a factor of four. To accomplish this, they had to find a way to overcome the famous 'Boltzmann's tyranny' that puts a lower limit on transistor switching energy. They found a surprising result: gate voltage applied to a topological insulator could create a barrier to electron flow larger than the voltage itself times the electron charge, ...

Chronic pain is among the most common chronic conditions in the United States, but estimates of its prevalence and impact vary widely. In 2019, the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added a new set of questions relating to pain to its National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), a large household-based annual survey that offers valuable insights into the health statuses of U.S. adults nationwide. In an article published in Pain, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Mass Eye and Ear report that 50.2 million (20.5 percent) ...

Durham, NC - A phase 2 clinical trial whose results were released today in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine might point to a way to overcome bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), a major cause of death in preterm infants. The study, conducted by researchers at Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University and Asan Medical Center Children's Hospital in Seoul, evaluates the effectiveness of treating these infants by transplanting umbilical cord blood-derived mesenchymal stem cells (UCB-MSCs) directly into their tracheas. Early results showed signs of improvement for the most immature infants included in the trial. BPD is a serious breathing disorder in which the lungs do not develop normally. Most infants who develop BPD are born more than ...

Embargoed press materials are now available for the virtual Experimental Biology (EB) 2021 meeting, featuring cutting-edge multidisciplinary research from across the life sciences. EB 2021, to be held April 27-30, is the annual meeting of five scientific societies bringing together thousands of scientists and 25 guest societies in one interdisciplinary community. Complete a Press Registration Form for complimentary meeting registration and full access to our virtual newsroom. We encourage advance registration as it may take up to a day to receive access. Join Our Virtual Press Conference Reporters are invited to join a live Q&A discussion of selected research announcements during a virtual EB press conference held ...

Eyes play an important role in social communication by expressing the intentions of our interlocutors, and even more so in times of pandemic when half of the face is hidden. But is this eye contact automatic and rapid? Is it based on a priority attentional reaction or, on the contrary, on a particular emotional reaction? To answer these questions, researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, looked at the way we process human gaze, focusing on the estimation of the temporal duration of social interactions. They discovered that when we make eye contact with another person, our attention is directly solicited, causing a distortion in our temporal perception. As a result, time seems shorter than it really is. ...

A biomimicking "spiking" neural network on a microchip has enabled KAUST researchers to lay the foundation for developing more efficient hardware-based artificial intelligence computing systems. Artificial intelligence technology is developing rapidly, with an explosion of new applications across advanced automation, data mining and interpretation, healthcare and marketing, to name a few. Such systems are based on a mathematical artificial neural network (ANN) composed of layers of decision-making nodes. Labeled data is first fed into the system to "train" the model to respond a certain way, then ...

LA JOLLA, CALIF. - April 20, 2021 Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys have identified, at an atomic level, how a part of a protein called PLEKHA7 interacts with a cell's membrane to regulate important intercellular communications. The research, published in the journal Structure, points to hotspots within PLEKHA7 as targets for drugs. These targets could be key in designing treatments for advanced colon, breast and ovarian cancers. The region, or domain, in PLEKHA7 that the researchers examined, pleckstrin homology (PH), is commonly found in proteins ...

A long-awaited, high-tech analysis of the upper body of famed fossil "Little Foot" opens a window to a pivotal period when human ancestors diverged from apes, new USC research shows. Little Foot's shoulder assembly proved key to interpreting an early branch of the human evolutionary tree. Scientists at the END ...

Recent growth in the number of healthcare workers providing home care for Medicare patients is "small and inadequate" compared with the increasing demand in an aging America, a new study suggests. To have hope of keeping up, Medicare likely will need to reconsider how it compensates providers for home care, the researchers say. "Only 0.7 percent of physicians in Medicare provided home care regularly," said Nengliang "Aaron" Yao, PhD, a researcher with the University of Virginia School of Medicine's Section of Geriatric Medicine. "Targeted policies are needed to support home-based medical care." Trends in Home Care Growth in the field of home care was "modest but steady" between 2012 and 2016, with most of the growth coming from increasing numbers of nurse practitioners providing home ...

A novel system of chilled panels that can replace air conditioning can also help reduce the risk of indoor disease transmission, suggests new analysis from the University of British Columbia, University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. The researchers computed air conditioning requirements in 60 of the world's most populous cities--with the additional ventilation required due to COVID-19. Then, they compared the energy costs with their cooling method, using the chilled panels and natural ventilation. The results, published in the COVID-19 edition of Applied Energy, showed that the alternative solution can save up to 45 per cent of the required energy, while ensuring building occupants are comfortable ...

Nearly three-quarters of Earth's land had been transformed by humans by 10,000BC, but new research shows it largely wasn't at the expense of the natural world. A study involving University of Queensland researchers combined global maps of population and land use over the past 12,000 years with current biodiversity data, demonstrating the effective environmental stewardship of Indigenous and traditional peoples. UQ's Professor James Watson said the findings challenged the modern assumption that human 'development' inevitably led to environmental destruction. "There's a paradigm among natural scientists, conservationists and policymakers that ...

Unless you've studied chemistry in college, it's unlikely you've come across the name aziridine. An organic compound with the molecular formula, C2H4NH, aziridines are well-known among medicinal chemists, who make use of the compound to prepare pharmaceutical drugs such as Mitomycin C, a chemotherapeutic agent known for its anti-tumor activity. Specifically, aziridines are what chemists call "enantiomers"--molecules that are mirror images of each other and cannot be superposed on one another. A peculiarity with enantiomers is that the biological activity ...

A team headed by Dr. Phillip M. Maffettone (currently at National Synchrotron Light Source II in Upton, USA) and Professor Andrew Cooper from the Department of Chemistry and Materials Innovation Factory at the University of Liverpool joined forces with the Bochum-based group headed by Lars Banko and Professor Alfred Ludwig from the Chair of Materials Discovery and Interfaces and Yury Lysogorskiy from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Materials Simulation. The international team published their report in the journal Nature Computational Science from 19 April 2021. Previously manual, time-consuming, error-prone Efficient analysis of X-ray diffraction data (XRD) plays a crucial role in the discovery of new materials, for example for the energy ...

A new study at Tel Aviv University found that the British variant (termed: B.1.1.7) of Covid-19 is 45% more contagious than the original virus. The researchers relied on data from about 300,000 PCR tests for Covid-19 obtained from the COVID-19 testing lab, which was established in collaboration with the Electra Group. The new study was conducted by Prof. Ariel Munitz and Prof. Moti Gerlitz of the Department of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, together with Dr. Dan Yamin and PhD student Matan Yechezkel from the Laboratory for Epidemic Modeling and Analysis (LEMA) at the Department of Industrial Engineering, all at Tel Aviv University. The study's results were published in the prominent scientific ...

Musty, moldy, smoky or horse dung-like smelling cocoa is not suitable for chocolate production. As part of a larger research project, a team of scientists led by Martin Steinhaus from the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich has identified the odorants responsible for such off-flavors. The food industry can now use these results to objectively assess the sensory quality of fermented cocoa based on odorant concentrations. The research team published the data in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Who likes chocolate ...

An international group of scientific experts co-directed by CNRS oceanographer Jean-Pierre Gattuso* has stated the requirements for coral reef survival in an article published in Biological Conservation. Over 500 million people rely on coral reefs for the protection they confer against submersion, the fishing resources they offer, and the tourism they help attract. Yet these ecosystems are among the most threatened by global warming: since the 1980s, there has been a rise in the number of bleaching episodes, during which corals expel the microscopic algae that keep them alive. While these events are reversible if the temperature change is only ...

The largest study of its type in the UK has identified differences in the immune response to COVID-19, between people with no symptoms, compared to those suffering a more serious reaction to the virus. Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Newcastle University, University College London, University of Cambridge, EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and their collaborators within the Human Cell Atlas initiative, found raised levels of specific immune cells in asymptomatic people. They also showed people with more serious symptoms had lost these protective cell types, but gained inflammatory cells. These differences in the immune response could help explain serious lung inflammation and blood clotting symptoms, and could be used to identify potential ...

Scientists have developed a new biomaterial that regrows blood vessels and bone, potentially providing a single-stage approach when repairing large bone defects. The study, led by researchers from RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences and SFI AMBER Centre, is published in the Journal of Controlled Release. Previous RCSI-led research had found that activating a mechanosensitive gene, called placental growth factor (PGF), at different doses promoted bone regeneration and grew new blood vessels. Using this knowledge, the researchers developed a biomaterial that delivers PGF at different concentrations. Inspired by the natural way in ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- A new Mayo Clinic study bolsters evidence that colorectal cancer is often imprinted in family genes and passed on from one generation to the next. In the study, published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, researchers within the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine found 1 in 6 patients with colorectal cancer had an inherited cancer-related gene mutation, which likely predisposed them to the disease. In addition, the researchers discovered that 60% of these cases would not have been detected if relying on a standard guideline-based approach. "We found that 15.5% of the 361 patients with colorectal cancer had an inherited mutation in a gene associated with the development of their cancer," says Niloy Jewel Samadder, M.D., a Mayo ...