Volcanologists do what they can to provide the public enough warning about impending eruptions, but volcanoes are notoriously unpredictable. Alerts are sometimes given with little time for people to react. That may soon change. Work led by research assistant professor Társilo Girona, with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, has revealed a method by which scientists -- and the public -- can have perhaps years of advance warning about a potential eruption. The solution lies in regular and widespread monitoring of the radiant temperature of a volcano's flanks before the appearance of any of the usual warning ...

DALLAS, March 11, 2021-- Silent heart attacks appear to increase stroke risk in adults 65 and older, according to preliminary research to be presented at the American Stroke Association International Stroke Conference 2021. The virtual meeting is March 17-19, 2021 and is a world premier meeting for researchers and clinicians dedicated to the science of stroke and brain health. A silent heart attack, also known as a silent myocardial infarction, has no, minimal or unrecognized symptoms. An electrocardiogram (ECG) or some form of imaging of the heart like ...

DALLAS, March 11, 2021 -- Black and Hispanic women ages 65-74 years old hospitalized with stroke had more severe strokes than their white counterparts, according to preliminary research to be presented at the American Stroke Association International Stroke Conference 2021. The virtual meeting is March 17-19, 2021 and is a world premier meeting for researchers and clinicians dedicated to the science of stroke and brain health. According to the American Heart Association, Black women have a higher rate of stroke (3.8%) when compared to white women (2.5%) of similar age, which could lead to a higher death rate or worse quality of life. "The Black and Hispanic female stroke survivors 65-84 years old were younger and had ...

Polarization control is essential for tailoring light-matter interactions and is the foundation for many applications such as polarization imaging, nonlinear optics, data storage, and information multiplexing. A linear polarizer, which is a polarization optical element that filters a specific linear polarization from unpolarized light, plays an important role in both polarization generation and manipulation. However, the generation of arbitrary polarization states other than linear polarization usually requires cascading of multiple optical polarization elements, ...

In contemporary society, the demand for high-bandwidth optical communication, including mobile high-definition videos, autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, telepresence, and interactive 3D virtual reality gaming, is sharply increasing. The electro-optical modulator is the key component for optical fiber communication, which modulates the light signal for loading information through electricity. Lithium niobate (LiNbO3, LN) exhibits a high-performance electro-optic effect and high optical transparency. On the other hand, the ferroelectric domain engineering on LN crystals has been ...

A team of researchers from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research's (A*STAR) Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) have developed a CRISPR-based gene editor, C-to-G Base Editor (CGBE), to correct mutations that cause genetic disorders. Their research was published in Nature Communications on 2 March 2021. One in seventeen people in the world suffers from some type of genetic disorder. Chances are, you or someone you know - a relative, friend, or colleague - is one of approximately 450 million people affected worldwide. Mutations responsible for these disorders can be caused by ...

The Healthy Diet Index developed by Finnish nutrition experts facilitates the assessment of diet quality. Its effectiveness was demonstrated in a recently published study. Dietary counselling plays a crucial role in the prevention and treatment of chronic lifestyle diseases. In healthcare settings, dietary counselling is often provided by professionals without specific training in nutrition, and there is a demand for tools for reliable and easy assessment of diet quality. One such tool is the Healthy Diet Index developed in the recently completed Stop Diabetes (StopDia) project. The Healthy Diet ...

Dietary and infant feeding guidelines should be strengthened to include more practical advice on the best ways to support children to learn to like and eat vegetables, say nutrition and dietetics researchers from the Flinders University Caring Futures Institute. With the Australian Health Survey showing only 6% of children aged 2-17 years are eating the recommended amount of veggies, experts say more tailored practical advice is needed on how to offer vegetables to young children through repeated exposure and daily variety in order to increase their intake. A recent paper co-authored by researchers from Caring Futures Institute and CSIRO, Australia's national ...

Patients suffering from dry eye disease symptoms have a lower quality of life compared to those without symptoms, a new study reports. The findings showed that patients with the condition reported negative effects on visual function, their ability to carry out daily activities and their work productivity. Dry eye disease is a common condition and a frequent reason for patients to seek medical care. It can affect people of any age but is most prevalent in women and in older people. Symptoms include irritation and redness in the eyes, blurred vision, and a sensation of grittiness or a foreign body in the eye. It has been reported that up to a third of adults over 65 years old have the condition, although the actual number is likely to be higher as there is no established ...

Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors can host a rich set of excitonic species because of the greatly enhanced Coulomb interactions. The excitonic states can exhibit large oscillator strengths and strong light-matter interactions, and dominate the optical properties of 2D semiconductors. In addition, because of the low dimensionality, excitonic dynamics of 2D semiconductors can be more susceptible to various external stimuli, enriching the possible tailoring methods that can be exploited. Understanding the factors that can influence the dynamics of the optically-generated excited states represents an important aspect of excitonic physics in 2D ...

Today, machine learning based methods are of our everyday life, with millions of users every day unlocking their phones through facial recognition or passing through AI-enabled automated security checks at airports and train stations. Traditionally, the processing of information native to the optical domain is being executed in the electronic domain, requiring energy-hungry specialized electronic hardware and conversion between the two realms. Optical machine learning is emerging as an important field, where the processing of optical information is done directly within the optical domain, power-efficient and at the speed of light. Machine learning tasks, such as pattern recognition or image classification, rely heavily on the multiplication of large matrices, a resource-hungry ...

Spatiotemporal metasurfaces, driven by ultrafast dynamic modulations, opened up new possibilities for manipulating the harmonic modes of electromagnetic waves and generations of exotic physical phenomena, such as dispersion cancellation, Lorentz reciprocity broken, and Doppler illusions. In recent years, rapid development of information technologies have stimulated many information processing applications for metasurfaces, including computational imaging, wireless communications, and performing mathematical operations. With increasing amount of researches focused on the topic of information processing ...

Optical nonreciprocity, which prohibits the light field returning along the original path after passing through the optical system in one direction, is not only of vast interest to fundamental science, which brings us a deeper understanding of Lorentz reciprocity, time-reversal symmetry, and topological effects, but is also of great importance for realizing nonreciprocal optical and electromagnetics devices such as isolators, circulator and directional amplifiers, which are indispensable for applications ranging from optical communication to optical information processing. However, realizing nonreciprocity is rather difficult as it requires breaking of the Lorentz reciprocity ...

Looking at the night sky, one's thoughts might be drawn to astrochemistry. What molecules inhabit the vast spaces between the stars? Would we see the same molecules that surround us here on Earth? Or would some of them be more exotic--something rarely observed or even unknown? Recent research by a multinational team led by Prof. Robert Ko?os from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences has revealed an unusual molecule obtained and detected for the first time in laboratory conditions and also paved a smooth path to produce and further study another. Now that they can be seen and studied, they may prove worthy ...

Until now, it was only possible to optimize an acoustic cloaking structure for the air-environment. However, with this latest research, Acoustic cloak designed by topology optimization for acoustic-elastic coupled systems, published in the latest Applied Physics Letters, it is possible to design an acoustic cloak for underwater environments. In the conventional topology optimization of acoustic cloaking, the design method was based on an analysis that approximated an elastic body in the air as a rigid body. However, since the approximation holds only for materials that are sufficiently ...

Two types of materials are better than one when it comes to solar cells, as revealed by an international team that has tested a new combination of materials and architecture to improve solar-cell efficiency. Silicon has long dominated as the premier material for solar cells, helped by its abundance as a raw material. However, perovskites, a class of hybrid organic-inorganic material, are a viable alternative due to their low-cost and large-scale manufacture and potentially higher performance. While still too unstable for full commercialization, they might become available to the market by 2022. KAUST's Michele ...

It was not the fly itself that caught the scientists' attention, but its bulging abdomen suggesting it was still full with the fly's last food intake. Surprisingly, analysis of the stomach content revealed it was full with pollen from different plants. The fossil pollen from the fly's stomach was used to reconstruct the ancient environment inhabited by the fly, the biotic interactions between plant and fly, and the fly's behaviour during feeding. Flies as pollinators Today, bees, butterflies and bumblebees are the typical pollinators, which are also known to feed on pollen. That flies also play an important role in pollination ...

BOs describe the periodic movement of electrons in solids to which an external static electric field is applied. However, it is challenging to measure the BOs directly in natural solids since the relaxation time of electrons is usually much shorter than the oscillation period. To date, analogies of electron BOs have been extended to the synthetic dimensions of time, frequency and angular momenta. In previous studies, the frequency BOs have been experimentally demonstrated in a nonlinear fibre with cross-phase modulation. However, the frequency spectrum has ...

An innovative analysis of two-dimensional (2D) materials from engineers at the University of Surrey could boost the development of next-generation solar cells and LEDs. Three-dimensional perovskites have proved themselves remarkably successful materials for LED devices and solar panels in the past decade. One key issue with these materials, however, is their stability, with device performance decreasing quicker than other state-of-the-art materials. The engineering community believes the 2D variant of perovskites could provide answers to these performance issues. In a study published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, researchers from Surrey's Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) detail how to improve the physical properties of 2D perovskite called Ruddlesden-Popper. The study ...

Recently, a research group led by Prof. WAN Yinhua from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a novel targeted modification strategy to improve the separation selectivity of polyamide NF membranes. The study was published in Journal of Membrane Science on March 10. The low selectivity of commercial nanofiltration (NF) membranes to monosaccharides and monovalent salts is mainly due to the nonuniform pore size distribution and strong electronegativity. Targeted modification can regulate the pore size distribution and electronegativity of polyamide NF membranes, and thus improve the separation selectivity. In the strategy, carboxyl groups (-COOH) on the surface are activated by N-(3-Dimethylaminopropyl)-N'-ethyl ...

An international collaboration headed by researchers from iPSYCH has found genetic variants that increase the risk of aggression in children with ADHD. In the same study, the researchers also discovered that the genetics which increase aggression in some children with ADHD, are the same genetics that affect aggression in children without a diagnosis. For the first time, researchers have found positions in the genome that increase the risk of getting ADHD with disruptive behaviour disorders (DBDs). DBDs are child psychiatric disorders characterised by antisocial and ...

Most new achievements in artificial intelligence (AI) require very large neural networks. They consist of hundreds of millions of neurons arranged in several hundred layers, i.e. they have very "deep" network structures. These large, deep neural networks consume a lot of energy in the computer. Those neural networks that are used in image classification (e.g. face and object recognition) are particularly energy-intensive, since they have to send very many numerical values from one neuron layer to the next with great accuracy in each time cycle. Computer scientist Wolfgang Maass, together with his PhD student Christoph Stöckl, has ...

The genetics of human eye colour is much more complex than previously thought, according to a new study published today. An international team of researchers led by King's College London and Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam have identified 50 new genes for eye colour in the largest genetic study of its kind to date. The study, published today in Science Advances, involved the genetic analysis of almost 195,000 people across Europe and Asia. These findings will help to improve the understanding of eye diseases such as pigmentary glaucoma and ocular albinism, where eye pigment levels play a role. In addition, the team found ...

Extremely preterm infants can suffer from a life-threatening inflammation of the gut. A new clinical study has shown that supplements of a lactic acid bacterium may have positive effects by increasing the diversity of intestinal bacteria in these infants. The study has been led by researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, and published in the scientific journal Cell Reports Medicine. A litre of milk weighs a kilogram. Most infants who are born extremely prematurely weigh less than that. An infant who should have developed and grown for three more months in the protective environment of the mother's womb is, of course, extremely vulnerable. As a consequence of advances in neonatal care, many premature infants survive, although one out of four of the extremely ...

Robots solving computer games, recognizing human voices, or helping in finding optimal medical treatments: those are only a few astonishing examples of what the field of artificial intelligence has produced in the past years. The ongoing race for better machines has led to the question of how and with what means improvements can be achieved. In parallel, huge recent progress in quantum technologies have confirmed the power of quantum physics, not only for its often peculiar and puzzling theories, but also for real-life applications. Hence, the idea of merging the two fields: on one hand, artificial intelligence ...