SAN ANTONIO -- Feb. 24, 2021 -- A Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®) scientist examined 11 Mars years of image data to understand the seasonal processes that create linear gullies on the slopes of the megadune in the Russell crater on Mars. In early spring images, captured by two different cameras on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, SwRI's Dr. Cynthia Dinwiddie noticed airborne plumes of dusty material associated with the linear dune gullies on the sand dune's downwind slope. These clues point to active processes involving chunks of frozen CO2, or dry ice, sliding down the sand dune, kicking up sand and dust along the way. Russell crater, on Mars, ...

Meat alternatives are officially mainstream. To wit, Burger King added the plant-based Impossible Burger to its menu nationwide in 2019, and McDonald's plans to unveil its own McPlant in 2021. Alongside these vegetarian options, many companies are also working to culture meat outside of animals grown from cell lines. Proponents highlight a range of potential environmental and health benefits offered by this emerging industry, and several companies believe that these benefits could also play out with seafood. A multidisciplinary team of researchers has taken a good, hard look at what it would take for cell-based seafood to deliver conservation benefits. They have ...

Immunologists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have discovered that tumors use a unique mechanism to switch on regulatory T cells to protect themselves from attack by the immune system. Surprisingly, the mechanism does not affect regulatory T cell function outside the tumor and may therefore limit the immune-associated toxicities of targeting regulatory T cells. The finding offers the promise of drug treatment to selectively shut down regulatory T cells in a tumor, rendering the tumor vulnerable to cancer immunotherapies that activate the immune ...

BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, February 24, 2021 -The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering released a report, "The Power of Virtual Communities," which examines the role online groups play in creating opportunities for people to build new kinds of meaningful communities they often could not form in real space. This first-of-its-kind research was built on interviews with 50 Facebook community leaders in 17 countries, 26 global experts from academia and industry, unique access to Facebook's underlying research and an original global survey conducted by YouGov of 15,000 people in 15 countries who are currently members of online and ...

Aged cheeses pack a punch of nutty, sharp flavor. Before they're fully mature, aged cheeses are either waxed or placed in brine for weeks to create a natural rind. However, the high salt content in brined cheeses deters some consumers. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Food Science & Technology present a shortened brining time for Parmigiano Reggiano that results in a less salty product, while still potentially maintaining the cheese's distinctive texture and flavor compounds. Parmigiano Reggiano is a lactose-free, crumbly and hard cheese. Manufactured ...

Scientists have made a pivotal breakthrough in the quest to understand how single-cell green algae are able to keep track of the light as they swim. A team of researchers from the University of Exeter's flagship Living Systems Institute has discovered how the model alga Chlamydomonas is seemingly able to scan the environment by constantly spinning around its own body axis in a corkscrewing movement. This helps it respond to light, which it needs for photosynthesis. The tiny alga, which is found abundantly in fresh-water ponds across the world, swims by beating its two flagella, hair-like structures that adopt a whip-like movement to move the cell. These flagella beat in much the same way as the cilia in the human respiratory ...

NEW YORK (February 24, 2021) -- Nearly half of women with uncomplicated urinary tract infections received the wrong antibiotics and almost three-quarters received prescriptions for longer than necessary, with inappropriately long treatment durations more common in rural areas, according to a study of private insurance claims data published today in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. "Inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions for uncomplicated urinary tract infections are prevalent and come with serious patient- and society-level consequences," said Anne Mobley Butler, PhD, lead author of the study and assistant professor ...

In the first few months of their lives, babies cry, babble, gurgle and make a variety of other peculiar sounds. It can be difficult to imagine that they are actually laying the foundations for later speech with these utterances. However, there is a determining element that proves that even their cries can be assigned to a particular language: the speech melody - or, more accurately: prosody. "Every language is characterised by specific musical elements, which we call prosody," says Kathleen Wermke. Prosody, in simple terms, is the combination of intonation (melody) and rhythm. Earlier studies have shown that even newborns are able to distinguish different languages, like German ...

Everyone knows 2 + 2 = 4, but what about mosquitoes plus malaria? Lauren Childs, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Virginia Tech, says there's an equation for that too. Childs recently co-authored a report with a team from Harvard University on the role of natural mosquito behavior on transmission of a disease that threatens half the world's population. The study, "Multiple blood feeding in mosquitoes shortens the Plasmodium falciparum incubation period and increases malaria transmission potential," was published in the December 2020 issue of PLOS Pathogens. "Worldwide there are about 400,000 deaths and 200 million cases each year from malaria," said Childs, a faculty member with the Virginia Tech College ...

Prisons with more green space have lower levels of violence and self-harm, according to new research at the University of Birmingham and Utrecht University. The study is the first to attempt large-scale mapping of green space within prison environments and link it to well-being in a robust, statistically significant way. The results are published in Annals of the American Association of Geographers. The researchers used GIS mapping to identify the percentages of green space (such as trees, lawns and shrubbery) within prisons in England and Wales. They ...

A new report shows that British citizens who are missing abroad were more than twice as likely to be found by UK police as police in the country of disappearance. Research by the Centre for the Study of Missing Persons (CSMP) at the University of Portsmouth also shows they were likely to be missing for much longer than if they'd disappeared in the UK. The study found that British people who vanish abroad tend to be missing for extended periods, on average 134 days. This compares with 88 percent of people who go missing in the UK being found within the first 48 hours. Dr Karen Shalev-Greene, Director of the ...

Extreme weather driven by climate change is making power outages more commonplace even as the need for electricity-dependent home health equipment grows. In this context, battery storage can help protect medically vulnerable households, according to researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The article is published in the journal Futures. For the millions reliant on electricity for home medical equipment, even short-term power outages can lead to a potentially life-threatening situation. Society's most vulnerable populations--elders, ...

Heads or tails? If we toss two coins into the air, the result of one coin toss has nothing to do with the result of the other. Coins are independent objects. In the world of quantum physics, things are different: quantum particles can be entangled, in which case they can no longer be regarded as independent individual objects, they can only be described as one joint system. For years, it has been possible to produce entangled photons - pairs of light particles that move in completely different directions but still belong together. Spectacular results have been achieved, for example in the field of quantum teleportation or quantum cryptography. Now, a new method has been ...

Knowing the environmental and human-related variables that characterize the favorable areas for the incidence of the West Nile virus, a flavivirus that is transmitted from birds to humans by mosquitoes, is essential to identify those places in Europe at high risk of experiencing outbreaks, even before these are registered, thus enabling preventive measures to be taken. Researchers of the Biogeography, Diversity and Conservation Group of the University of Malaga have developed risk models for West Nile Fever, the disease caused in humans by this virus, which, based on historical incidence data, may predict areas of future outbreaks a year in advance, as well as detect their intensity. Artificial intelligence to develop risk ...

Leesburg, VA, February 24, 2021--An open-access article in ARRS' American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR) describes the clinical and imaging features of axillary adenopathy detected during screening or diagnostic breast imaging after recent coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccination to inform the development of follow-up recommendations. Shabnam Mortazavi of the University of California at Los Angeles reviewed electronic medical records to identify women with post-COVID-19 vaccination adenopathy found from December 2020 to February 2021. For mammography, Mortazavi considered a node abnormal when its size, shape, or density was deemed disproportionate to other axillary nodes (ipsilateral or contralateral). On ultrasound, she deemed ...

With the voice commands "Alexa Skills," users can load numerous extra functions onto their Amazon voice assistant. However, these Skills can often have security gaps and data protection problems, as a team of researchers from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and North Carolina State University discovered, together with a former PhD student who started to work for Google during the project. They will present their work at the "Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)" conference on 24 February 2021. More than 90,000 Skills analyzed In their study, the researchers ...

Torino, February 24, 2021 - The eukaryotic cell is the basic unit of animals and plants. At the microscope, it looks highly structured and subdivided in many membrane-bound compartments. Each compartment has a specific function, and its membrane is populated by specific molecules. How does the cell preserve this amazing internal order, and (in the absence of pathologies) does not degrade into a shapeless bunch of molecules? Such degradation is countered by a continuous process of molecule sorting by which similar molecules are collected and dispatched to the "right" destinations, similarly to what happens when a house is kept clean and ...

COVID-19, the disease caused by the pandemic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, is primarily regarded as a respiratory infection. Yet the virus has also become known for affecting other parts of the body in ways not as well understood, sometimes with longer-term consequences, such as heart arrhythmia, fatigue and "brain fog." Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine are using stem cell-derived organoids -- small balls of human cells that look and act like mini-organs in a laboratory dish -- to study how the virus interacts with various organ systems and to develop therapies to block infection. "We're finding that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't infect the entire body in the same way," said Tariq Rana, PhD, professor ...

If Affordable Care Act protections for pre-existing condition coverage are no longer available, the coronavirus pandemic would leave many Americans - a disproportionate number of whom are people of color - without health insurance, a new Oregon Health & Science University study indicates. Published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, the study's findings reveal a third of the more than 7,500 COVID-19 patients who received care at U.S. community health centers between March and October 2020 did not have a pre-existing condition prior to contracting the novel ...

UCLA RESEARCH BRIEF Enrique Rivero FINDINGS Older people correctly ascertained basic information such as dosage and duration of use for more than 70% of the medications they were prescribed, regardless of whether their physician explained it during an office visit. But when physicians failed to verbally provide information about potential side effects, people incorrectly assumed that about 55% of their prescribed medications had none. Even when physicians did discuss possible side effects, their patients incorrectly assumed there were no side effects for 22% of the medications. BACKGROUND There is a shortage of data about how well people understand basic information about the medications they are prescribed. This information ...

The development of low-energy-consumption and user-friendly electronic displays has become a long-term goal for future global sustainable development. Bistable electronic display, which requires very little electric drive to turn pages without consuming additional power to continuously display information/images, is one of the very good potential alternatives. Reflective display technologies with partial/complete bistable characteristics include e-ink, cholesteric liquid crystal, and electrochromic technologies, etc. They display information in light reflection mode, which can still be read under high-brightness outdoor sunlight and relatively dark indoor environments. It is also very friendly to the ...

The yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti) is a main vector of deadly diseases like dengue fever, chikungunya, and the Zika virus, which result in hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide each year. Because Ae. aegypti prefers to bite humans and there are no vaccines for many of these diseases they carry, developing methods to control these insects is imperative in the fight to control illness. In a study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a Yale-led research team developed a new method to track how Ae. aegypti move through the environment. ...

Live tracking and analyzing of the dynamics of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells targeting cancer cells can open new avenues for the development of cancer immunotherapy. However, imaging via conventional microscopy approaches can result in cellular damage, and assessments of cell-to-cell interactions are extremely difficult and labor-intensive. When researchers applied deep learning and 3D holographic microscopy to the task, however, they not only avoided these difficultues but found that AI was better at it than humans were. Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping researchers decipher images from a new holographic microscopy technique needed to investigate ...

The finding, recently published in the prestigious scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), has provided the scientific community a novel understanding to the molecular regulatory mechanisms behind the function of the blood-CSF barrier and lays the groundwork for developing novel therapeutic strategies for preventing and treating neurodevelopmental disorders. Dysfunction of blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier is common in various neurological diseases CSF is a clear, colourless body fluid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord, providing them a cushion against injuries. It also ...

In Japan, the suppression of Christianity increased from the end of the 16th century to the beginning of the 17th century, and many missionaries and Japanese believers were martyred during this period. New research has uncovered a letter indicating that Hosokawa Tadaoki, lord of the Kokura domain from 1600 to 1620, ordered the execution of Diego Hayato Kagayama, a chief vassal of the Hosokawa family, and the banishment of Genya Ogasawara, both Christians. The punishment and martyrdom of both men was previously known only from reports by Jesuit missionaries to Rome. The discovery of primary historical documents created within the Hosokawa ...