Cambridge, UK, 7th June 2021: The Cambridge Research Laboratory of Toshiba Europe today announced the first demonstration of quantum communications over optical fibres exceeding 600 km in length. The breakthrough will enable long distance quantum-secured information transfer between metropolitan areas and is a major advance towards building the future Quantum Internet. The term Quantum Internet describes a global network of quantum computers connected by long distance quantum communication links. It is expected to allow the ultrafast solution of complex optimization problems ...

An international group of researchers has developed a new technique that could be used to make more efficient low-cost light-emitting materials which are flexible and can be printed using ink-jet techniques. The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge and the Technical University of Munich, found that by swapping one out of every one thousand atoms of one material for another, they were able to triple the luminescence of a new material class of light emitters known as halide perovskites. This 'atom swapping', or doping, causes the charge ...

Heart attacks and strokes -- the leading causes of death in human beings -- are fundamentally blood clots of the heart and brain. Better understanding how the blood-clotting process works and how to accelerate or slow down clotting, depending on the medical need, could save lives. New research by the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University published in the journal Biomaterials sheds new light on the mechanics and physics of blood clotting through modeling the dynamics at play during a still poorly understood phase of blood clotting called clot contraction. "Blood clotting is actually a physics-based phenomenon that must occur to stem bleeding after ...

The concrete world that surrounds us owes its shape and durability to chemical reactions that start when ordinary Portland cement is mixed with water. Now, MIT scientists have demonstrated a way to watch these reactions under real-world conditions, an advance that may help researchers find ways to make concrete more sustainable. The study is a "Brothers Lumière moment for concrete science," says co-author Franz-Josef Ulm, professor of civil and environmental engineering and faculty director of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, referring to the two brothers who ushered in the era of projected films. Likewise, Ulm says, the MIT team has provided a glimpse of early-stage cement hydration that is like cinema in Technicolor ...

A new technology could dramatically improve the safety of lithium-ion batteries that operate with gas electrolytes at ultra-low temperatures. Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego developed a separator--the part of the battery that serves as a barrier between the anode and cathode--that keeps the gas-based electrolytes in these batteries from vaporizing. This new separator could, in turn, help prevent the buildup of pressure inside the battery that leads to swelling and explosions. "By trapping gas molecules, this separator can function as a stabilizer for volatile electrolytes," said Zheng Chen, a ...

To describe something as slow and boring we say it's "like watching grass grow", but scientists studying the early morning activity of plants have found they make a rapid start to their day - within minutes of dawn. Just as sunrise stimulates the dawn chorus of birds, so too does sunrise stimulate a dawn burst of activity in plants. Early morning is an important time for plants. The arrival of light at the start of the day plays a vital role in coordinating growth processes in plants and is the major cue that keeps the inner clock of plants in rhythm with day-night cycles. This inner circadian clock helps plants prepare for the day such as when to make the best use of sunlight, the best time to open flowers ...

Citizen opposition to COVID-19 vaccination has emerged across the globe, prompting pushes for mandatory vaccination policies.  But a new study based on evidence from Germany and on a model of the dynamic nature of people's resistance to COVID-19 vaccination sounds an alarm: mandating vaccination could have a substantial negative impact on voluntary compliance. Majorities in many countries now favor mandatory vaccination. In March, the government of Galicia in Spain made vaccinations mandatory for adults, subjecting violators to substantial fines. Italy has made vaccinations mandatory for care workers. The University of California and California State University systems announced in late April that vaccination ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Building lights are a deadly lure for the billions of birds that migrate at night, disrupting their natural navigation cues and leading to deadly collisions. But even if you can't turn out all the lights in a building, darkening even some windows at night during bird migration periods could be a major lifesaver for birds. Research published this week in PNAS found that over the course of 21 years, one building sustained 11 times fewer nighttime bird collisions during spring migration and 6 times fewer collisions during fall migration when only half of the building's windows were illuminated, compared ...

Many mainstream depictions of immigration at the southern border of the United States paint a dark picture, eliciting imagery of violent gang members and child trafficking. But how many undocumented immigrants are really involved in this kind of activity? Many people may be surprised to learn the answer is far fewer than they think. A new study from the Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab (PCNL) at the Annenberg School for Communication found that Americans dramatically overestimate the number of migrants affiliated with gangs and children being trafficked, and that this overestimation contributes to dehumanization of migrants, lack of empathy for their suffering, and individuals' views on immigration policy. In addition, the researchers developed and tested interventions to ...

Brazilian researchers have simultaneously demonstrated the mechanism linking high blood pressure to elevated intracranial pressure, validated a non-invasive intracranial pressure monitoring method, and proposed a treatment for high blood pressure that does not affect intracranial hypertension. The study was supported by FAPESP and involved collaboration between researchers at São Paulo State University (UNESP) and Brain4care, a startup based in São Carlos. It could result in novel treatments for intracranial hypertension and its complications, including stroke. The main findings are reported in the journal Hypertension. The researchers monitored blood pressure and intracranial pressure in rats for six weeks. “We set out to investigate ...

Biomolecules regulate the biological functions inside every living cell. If scientists can understand the molecular mechanisms of such functions, then it is possible to detect the severe dysfunction which can lead to illness. At a molecular level, this can be achieved with fluorescent markers that are specifically incorporated into the respective biomolecules. In the past, this has been achieved by incorporating a marker in the bio-molecule by completely rebuilding it from the beginning, necessitating a large number of steps. Unfortunate-ly, this approach not only takes a lot of time and resources, but also produces unwanted waste products. Researchers at the Universities of Göttingen and Edinburgh have now ...

If you're a beer drinker, you've noticed that hoppy beers have become increasingly popular. Most of the nation's hops come from the Pacific Northwest. However, commercial hop production regions have expanded significantly. In Michigan hop production nearly tripled between 2014 and 2017 and in 2019, Michigan growers harvested around 720 acres of hops. Michigan hop growers contend with unique challenges as a result of frequent rainfall and high humidity during the growing season. In 2018, growers approached Michigan State University researchers and the Michigan State University's Plant & Pest Diagnostics lab with concerns about a leaf blight ...

ORLANDO, June 2021 - A new study co-authored by University of Central Florida researchers shows that pre-Columbian people of a culturally diverse but not well-documented area of the Amazon in South America significantly altered their landscape thousands of years earlier than previously thought. The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show evidence of people using fire and improving their landscape for farming and fishing more than 3,500 years ago. This counters the often-held notion of a pristine Amazon during pre-Columbian times before the arrival of Europeans in the late 1400s. The study, ...

Climate change and social inequality are two pressing issues that often overlap. A new study led by Princeton researchers offers a roadmap for cities to address inequalities in energy use by providing fine-grained methods for measuring both income and racial disparities in energy use intensity. Energy use intensity, the amount of energy used per unit floor area, is often used as a proxy for assessing the efficiency of buildings and the upgrades they receive over time. The work could guide the equitable distribution of rebates and other measures that decrease energy costs and increase efficiency. Examining inequality in cities has been hampered ...

"The big mystery about plankton is what controls its distribution and abundance, and what conditions lead to big plankton blooms," said Dennis McGillicuddy, Senior Scientist and Department Chair in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Two new papers explore this question and provide examples of conditions that lead to massive plankton blooms with vastly different potential impacts on the ecosystem, according to McGillicuddy, co-author of both papers. Both papers also point to the importance of using advanced technology--including Video Plankton Recorders, autonomous underwater vehicles, and the Ocean Observatories Initiative's Coastal Pioneer Array--to find and monitor these blooms. In one paper, Diatom Hotspots Driven ...

Key Takeaways: Study finds non-tiered customer loyalty programs create a more sustainable customer base. Non-tiered customer loyalty programs are not as likely to generate increases in spending per transaction or accelerate transactions. CATONSVILLE, MD, June 7, 2021 - Customer loyalty programs have been around for decades and are used to help businesses, marketers and sellers build a sustainable relationship with their customers. But do they work? A recent study sought to find out and researchers learned that while yes, customer loyalty programs do work, perhaps not in ways most may assume. There are two basic ...

LA JOLLA--(June 7, 2021) Type 1 diabetes, which arises when the pancreas doesn't create enough insulin to control levels of glucose in the blood, is a disease that currently has no cure and is difficult for most patients to manage. Scientists at the Salk Institute are developing a promising approach for treating it: using stem cells to create insulin-producing cells (called beta cells) that could replace nonfunctional pancreatic cells. In a study published on June 7, 2021, in the journal Nature Communications, the investigators reported that they have developed a new way to create beta cells that is much more efficient than previous methods. Additionally, when these beta cells were tested in a mouse model of type 1 diabetes, ...

WHAT: New findings published in JAMA Neurology suggest there is no difference in cognitive outcomes at age 2 among children of healthy women and children of women with epilepsy who took antiseizure medication during pregnancy. The findings are part of the large research project Maternal Outcomes and Neurodevelopmental Effects of Antiepileptic Drugs (MONEAD), which is a prospective, long-term study looking at outcomes in pregnant women with epilepsy and their children. The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health. ...

Youth brain activation data from the largest longitudinal neuroimaging study to date provides valuable new information on the cognitive processes and brain systems that underlie adolescent development and might contribute to mental and physical health challenges in adulthood. The study published today online in END ...

Artificial intelligence natural language computer applications are becoming increasingly sophisticated, raising the possibility that they could assume a greater role in health care, including interacting with patients. But before these applications enter the clinic, their potential and pitfalls need thoughtful exploration, states a new article in NPJ Digital Medicine. The authors are Diane M. Korngiebel, a Hastings Center research scholar, and Sean D. Mooney, chief research information officer at University of Washington Medicine. "There is compelling promise and serious hype in AI applications that generate natural language" Korngiebel and Mooney write, referring to OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) ...

LEBANON, NH - Previous work by a team of researchers led by Steven N. Fiering, PhD, Immunology and Cancer Immunotherapy researcher at Dartmouth's and Dartmouth-Hitchcock's Norris Cotton Cancer Center and Nicole Steinmetz, PhD, Jacobs School of Engineering and Moores Cancer Center, University of California San Diego, showed that a plant virus that does not infect mammals, cowpea mosaic plant virus (CPMV), when injected into cancerous tumors, strongly stimulated the immune system to attack and often eliminate the tumor. However, very little was understood about immune recognition of plant viruses and how and why CPMV is exceptionally immuno-stimulating. In a new study, the team identifies ...

Extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs), also known as gun violence restraining orders, are civil court orders that grant temporary restrictions on purchasing and possessing firearms for individuals determined by a civil court judge to be at extreme risk of committing violence against themselves or others. A new study examined ERPO use in Oregon in the first 15 months after it was adopted. The study found that while ERPOs are commonly considered as a tool to remove guns from dangerous individuals, they should also be considered as a tool to prevent gun purchases by dangerous individuals. The study was conducted by researchers at Michigan State University (MSU), Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins University. It appears in ...

The threat of antibiotic resistance rises as bacteria continue to evolve to foil even the most powerful modern drug treatments. By 2050, antibiotic resistant-bacteria threaten to claim more than 10 million lives as existing therapies prove ineffective. Bacteriophage, or "phage," have become a new source of hope against growing antibiotic resistance. Ignored for decades by western science, phages have become the subject of increasing research attention due to their capability to infect and kill bacterial threats. A new project led by University of California San Diego Biological Sciences graduate ...

To investigate factors that can jeopardize pregnancy success in cattle, researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil used a kind of chip to mimic the environment of the endometrium, the tissue that lines the inside of the uterus.  The study was conducted by biologist Tiago Henrique Camara de Bem, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of São Paulo's School of Animal Science and Food Engineering (FZEA-USP), in collaboration with four researchers at the University of Leeds in the UK. Their findings are reported in an article in the journal Endocrinology. The researchers focused on analyzing alterations in levels of insulin and glucose in maternal ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- About 60 percent of drugs on the market have hydrophobic molecules as their active ingredients. These drugs, which are not soluble in water, can be difficult to formulate into tablets because they need to be broken down into very small crystals in order to be absorbed by the human body. A team of MIT chemical engineers has now devised a simpler process for incorporating hydrophobic drugs into tablets or other drug formulations such as capsules and thin films. Their technique, which involves creating an emulsion of the drug and then crystallizing it, allows for a more powerful dose to be loaded per tablet. "This is very important because if we can achieve high drug loading, it means that we can ...