Inspired by the workings of a bat's ear, Rolf Mueller, a professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, has created bio-inspired technology that determines the location of a sound's origin. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buFM5KkAnEo Mueller's development works from a simpler and more accurate model of sound location than previous approaches, which have traditionally been modeled after the human ear. His work marks the first new insight for determining sound location in 50 years. The findings were published in Nature Machine Intelligence ...

There is no cheaper way to generate electricity today than with the sun. Power plants are currently being built in sunny locations that will supply solar electricity for less than two cents per kilowatt hour. Solar cells available on the market based on crystalline silicon make this possible with efficiencies of up to 23 percent. Therefore they hold a global market share of around 95 percent. With even higher efficiencies of more than 26 percent, costs could fall further. An international working group led by photovoltaics researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich ...

More than 20 years after the launch of a landmark clinical trial, follow-up examinations and analyses found that not all patients with elevated eye pressure need pressure-lowering treatment to prevent vision loss from glaucoma. When the study was launched, it was universally accepted that all patients with elevated eye pressure should be given medication to lower that pressure. The Ocular Hypertension Treatment Study -- funded by the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine ...

Prime editing (PE), a "search-and-replace" CRISPR-based genome editing technique, has great potential for gene therapy and agriculture. It can introduce desired base conversions, deletions, insertions, and combination edits into target genomic sites. Prime editors have been successfully applied in animals and plants, but their off-target effects, which can be a major hindrance to real-life application, have not been thoroughly evaluated until now. Prof. GAO Caixia from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and her research team recently performed a comprehensive and genome-wide analysis of the off-target effects of PEs in rice plants. Off-target ...

It is an old-standing theory in evolutionary ecology: animal species on islands have the tendency to become either giants or dwarfs in comparison to mainland relatives. Since its formulation in the 1960s, however, the 'island rule' has been severely debated by scientists. In a new publication in Nature Ecology and Evolution on April 15, researchers solved this debate by analysing thousands of vertebrate species. They show that the island rule effects are widespread in mammals, birds and reptiles, but less evident in amphibians. Dwarf hippos and elephants in the Mediterranean islands are examples of large ...

Using a new single-cell technique, WEHI researchers have uncovered a way to understand the programming behind how stem cells make particular cell types. The research uncovered 30 new genes that program stem cells to make the dendritic cells that kick-start the immune response. By uncovering this process, the researchers hope they will be able to find new immunotherapy treatments for cancer, and plan to expand this technique in other areas such as discovering new drug targets in tumour initiation. At a glance WEHI researchers have developed a new single cell method to understand the programming behind what causes stem cells to make ...

El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an irregular periodic variation in winds and sea surface temperatures (SSTs) over the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean. It may lead to extreme weather events across the globe due to its ability to change global atmospheric circulation. Thus, determining how ENSO responds to greenhouse warming is crucial in climate science. However, quantifying and understanding ENSO-related changes in a warmer climate remains challenging due to the complexity of air-sea feedbacks in the tropical Pacific Ocean and to model bias. An international team of scientists ...

Antibodies are not only produced by our immune cells to fight viruses and other pathogens in the body. For a few decades now, medicine has also been using antibodies produced by biotechnology as drugs. This is because antibodies are extremely good at binding specifically to molecular structures according to the lock-and-key principle. Their use ranges from oncology to the treatment of autoimmune diseases and neurodegenerative conditions. However, developing such antibody drugs is anything but simple. The basic requirement is for an antibody to bind to its target molecule in an optimal way. At the same time, an antibody drug must fulfil a host of additional criteria. For example, it should not trigger ...

COVID-19 has been associated with increases in opioid overdose deaths, which may be in part because the pandemic limited access to buprenorphine, a treatment used for opioid dependency, according to a new study led by Princeton University researchers. The researchers found that Americans who were already taking opioids did not experience disruptions in their supply. Patients who were not previously taking opioids for pain management were less likely to receive a new prescription in the first months of the pandemic, but prescriptions for new patients soon bounced back to previous levels. At the same time, fewer ...

A number of SARS-CoV-2 variants have emerged from immunocompromised hosts, research has identified. It is thought that variants of concern - including B.1.1.7, a variant first identified in Kent - were a result of long-term infection in people with a weakened immune system. Persistent infections in immunocompromised people could cause the virus to mutate more frequently because the person's immune system cannot clear the virus as quickly as the immune system of a healthy person. Authors Professor Wendy Barclay, Dr Thomas Peacock, Professor Julian Hiscox and Rebekah Penrice-Randal explain the importance of monitoring genetic changes in SARS-CoV-2 for future control of the virus: ...

Besides enabling more potent smartphones and higher download speeds while riding the subway, cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and wireless communications are on the verge of revolutionizing well-established industrial fields. A remarkable example is "smart agriculture," which has seen a tremendous increase in the use of drones for various tasks, especially in Japan. Drones, or "unmanned aerial vehicles" (UAVs), have been the focus of extensive research for agricultural applications. For example, they can take aerial images of a field and, through subsequent image processing, identify problems in specific areas of the crop fields. Another notable use case for UAVs that has been quickly gaining traction is the spraying of pesticides. In ...

The extreme summer drought of 2018 was a special situation for both nature and scientists. It was very hard on the forest. At the same time, it offered researchers from the Universities of Basel (Switzerland) and Würzburg (Germany) the opportunity to study the reaction of trees to this climatic phenomenon. Research in the treetops "The summer of 2018 was hotter and drier than in any other year since weather records began," says ecophysiologist Professor Bernhard Schuldt from the University of Wuerzburg. Together with Dr Matthias Arend and Professor Ansgar Kahmen from the University of Basel, he was significantly involved in the study, which is published in the scientific journal PNAS. "A unique opportunity arose for us to study the influence of ...

A new paper in the Review of Economic Studies indicates that disease can alter the social networks and economic growth of countries for generations, even after the disease itself is eradicated. Social networks are an important determinant of a country's growth as they affect the diffusion of ideas and the rate of technological progress. But social networks also diffuse diseases that can rapidly spread and dampen growth. As ideas and germs diffuse through the same human interactions, the network structure of a country ultimately depends on its epidemiological environment. In countries with low prevalence of infectious diseases, high diffusion networks ...

An estimated 334,000 COVID-19 cases are attributable to meatpacking plants, resulting in $11.2 billion in economic damage, according to a new study led by a researcher at the University of California, Davis. The study was published in the journal Food Policy. It found that beef- and pork-processing plants more than doubled per capita infection rates in counties that had them. Chicken-processing plants increased transmission rates by 20 percent. The study looked specifically at large meatpacking plants generating more than 10 million pounds per month. Conservative estimate Researchers said both the economic impact ...

LAWRENCE -- How did the first humans migrate to populate North America? It's one of the great scientific puzzles of our day, especially because forbidding glaciers covered most of Canada, Alaska and Pacific Northwest during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). These glaciers limited human movements between northern ice-free areas, like the Beringia Land Bridge, and southern ice-free areas, like the continental United States. Now, research from the University of Kansas into the whole genomes of the American pine marten and Pacific pine marten -- weasel-like mammals that range today from Alaska to the American Southwest -- could shed light ...

Philadelphia, April 15, 2021 - A new study shows that markers of fear recall differ between men and women, but in a hormone-dependent manner. Aberrant fear-memory processing in the brain is thought to underlie anxiety disorders, which affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The neurobiological mechanisms underlying these disorders remain poorly understood, but recent studies suggest that neural oscillations in the prefrontal cortex can reflect the strength of fear recall activity, providing a physiological measure. Women suffer from anxiety disorders at twice the rate of men and indeed ...

Researchers in Sweden have developed a more eco-friendly way to remove heavy metals, dyes and other pollutants from water. The answer lies in filtering wastewater with a gel material taken from plant cellulose and spiked with small carbon dots produced in a microwave oven. Reporting in the journal Sustainable Marials and Technologies, researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in collaboration with Politecnico di Torino, engineered a more sustainable technique for producing hydrogel composites, a type of material that is wteidely studied for wastewater decontamination. Minna Hakkarainen, who leads ...

PITTSBURGH, April 15, 2021 - Oncologists faced with treating older women with breast cancer often must decide if the treatment may be more detrimental than the cancer. A study published today in JAMA Network Open by researchers at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine sheds new light on this choice and suggests the rate of cancer recurrence or survival may be no different in treated vs. untreated elderly patients diagnosed in the early stages of the cancer diagnosed most commonly in women. "As a breast surgeon, I want to give my patients the best chance of survival with the best quality ...

LIBREVILLE, Gabon (April 15 2021) - A team of scientists led by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and working closely with experts from the Agence Nationale des Parcs Nationaux du Gabon (ANPN) compared methodologies to count African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis), which were recently acknowledged by IUCN as a separate, Critically Endangered species from African savannah elephants. The study is part of a larger initiative in partnership with Vulcan Inc. to provide the first nationwide census in Gabon for more than 30 years. The results of the census are expected later this year. Contrary to savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) which can be counted directly, usually through aerial survey, accurately censusing elusive forest ...

The processing of information inside the brain is one of the body's most complex processes. Disruption of this processing often leads to severe neurological disorders. The study of signal transmission inside the brain is therefore key to understanding a myriad of diseases. From a methodological point of view, however, it creates major challenges for researchers. The desire to observe the brain's nerve cells operating 'at the speed of thought', but without the need to place electrodes inside the brain, has led to the emergence of two techniques featuring high temporal resolution: electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). Both methods enable the visualization ...

A technique called percutaneous peripheral nerve stimulation yields "impressive" reductions in pain scores and opioid use during the first week after common orthopedic surgery procedures, concludes a randomized clinical trial published Online First in Anesthesiology, the official peer-reviewed journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), today. The benefits of postoperative nerve stimulation were "much greater than what we had anticipated, concurrently reducing pain scores by more than 50 percent and opioid consumption by 80 percent," according to the randomized trial report by Brian M. Ilfeld, M.D., MS, and colleagues. With further study, they believe that ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. - A deep learning algorithm accurately predicts the risk of death from cardiovascular disease using information from low-dose CT exams performed for lung cancer screening, according to a study published in Radiology: Cardiothoracic Imaging. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality worldwide. It even outpaces lung cancer as the leading cause of death in heavy smokers. Low-dose CT lung scans are used to screen for lung cancer in high-risk people such as heavy smokers. These CT scans also provide an opportunity to screen for cardiovascular disease by extracting information about calcification ...

Key takeaways Pancreatic, liver, bile duct, and stomach cancer operations are inherently complex and initially often take place at large cancer centers where surgical teams perform a large volume of procedures. Readmission to a different hospital from where patients had these operations initially performed markedly increases death risk. There are ways to address care fragmentation with newly identified risk factors for readmission; cancer hospitals should seek to determine safe sites of care for readmissions after these types of operations. CHICAGO: New research reveals that 28 percent of patients who are readmitted ...

Patients who are overweight or obese have more severe COVID-19 and are highly likely to require invasive respiratory support, according to a new international study. The research, led by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) and The University of Queensland and published in Diabetes Care, found obese or overweight patients are at high risk for having worse COVID-19 outcomes. They are also more likely to require oxygen and invasive mechanical ventilation compared to those with a healthy weight. MCRI researcher Dr Danielle Longmore said the findings, which highlighted the relationship between obesity and increased COVID-19 disease burden, showed the need to urgently introduce strategies to address ...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/acta-pharmaceutica-sinica-b/vol/11/issue/3 The Journal of the Institute of Materia Medica, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association, Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B (APSB) is a monthly journal, in English, which publishes significant original research articles, rapid communications and high quality reviews of recent advances in all areas of pharmaceutical sciences -- including pharmacology, pharmaceutics, medicinal chemistry, natural products, pharmacognosy, pharmaceutical analysis and pharmacokinetics. Featured papers in this issue are: Isorhapontigenin protects against doxorubicin-induced ...