SPOKANE, Wash. - COVID-19 has created new problems for pregnant women in the United States, a group that already faced the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world even before the pandemic. One of their biggest concerns is their baby contracting the disease, according to a Washington State University study published recently in the journal BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth. Some women expressed fears that simply going to the hospital to deliver would cause them to get the virus and then be forced to isolate from their newborn. "Pregnant women are really stressed about contracting COVID-19," ...

Subsidising low carbon emission meals could encourage more people to choose them, according to new research. The study, led by Queen Mary University of London, investigated the impact of different interventions on encouraging people to select low carbon emission menu options in a simulated lunchtime canteen environment. This included the use of carbon taxes and subsidies, traffic light labelling (TLL) and social norms, where more sustainable options were highlighted as the most popular menu items. Carbon taxes and either behavioral intervention - TLL or social norms - had a limited effect on shifting behaviours towards meal choices with lower carbon footprints. However, when all these interventions were combined with subsidies, where the ...

The critically endangered regent honeyeater is losing its "song culture" due to the bird's rapidly declining population, according to new research from The Australian National University (ANU). Just like humans learning to speak, many birds learn to sing by associating with older birds of the same species. They risk losing this skill if adults become too rare. And if they don't learn to sing a sexy enough song, their chances of mating are reduced. "If endangered birds are unable to learn how to sing correctly, it seriously impacts their ability to communicate," lead author Dr Ross Crates said. "It ...

Machine learning can be used to comb through online reviews of substance use treatment facilities to home in on qualities that are important to patients but remain hard to capture via formal means, such as surveys, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania show. The researchers found that professionalism and staff dedication to patients were two of the top qualities that could be attributed to either a negative or positive review of the facility. Findings from this study were published today in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. "Searching ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- In a genetic surprise, ancient DNA shows the closest family members of an extinct bird known as the Haitian cave-rail are not in the Americas, but Africa and the South Pacific, uncovering an unexpected link between Caribbean bird life and the Old World. Like many animals unique to the Caribbean, cave-rails became extinct soon after people settled the islands. The last of three known West Indian species of cave-rails - flightless, chicken-sized birds - vanished within the past 1,000 years. Florida Museum of Natural History researchers sought to resolve the group's long-debated ancestry by analyzing DNA from a fossil toe bone ...

SAN FRANCISCO (March 16, 2021) - Over the course of Earth's history, several mass extinction events have destroyed ecosystems, including one that famously wiped out the dinosaurs. But none were as devastating as "The Great Dying," which took place 252 million years ago during the end of the Permian period. A new study, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows in detail how life recovered in comparison to two smaller extinction events. The international study team--composed of researchers from the China University of Geosciences, the California Academy of Sciences, the University of Bristol, ...

(Vienna, March 17, 2021) When complex systems double in size, many of their parts do not. Characteristically, some aspects will grow by only about 80 percent, others by about 120 percent. The astonishing uniformity of these two growth rates is known as "scaling laws." Scaling laws are observed everywhere in the world, from biology to physical systems. They also apply to cities. Yet, while a multitude of examples show their presence, reasons for their emergence are still a matter of debate. A new publication in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface now provides a simple explanation for urban scaling laws: Carlos Molinero and Stefan Thurner of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) derive them from the geometry of a city. Scaling laws in ...

The UK variant of SARS-CoV-2 spread rapidly in care homes in England in November and December last year, broadly reflecting its spread in the general population, according to a study by UCL researchers. The study, published as a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine, looked at positive PCR tests of care home staff and residents between October and December. It found that, among the samples it had access to, the proportion of infections caused by the new variant rose from 12% in the week beginning 23 November to 60% of positive cases just two weeks later, in the week beginning 7 December. In the south east of England, where the variant was most dominant, the proportion increased from 55% to 80% over the same period. In London, where the variant spread fastest, ...

Washington, DC, March 16, 2021 - A study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP), published by Elsevier, reports on the young adult assessment of the now 20-year longitudinal Boricua Youth Study (BYS), a large cohort that brings much needed insight about development and mental health of children from diverse ethnic background growing up in disadvantaged contexts. The present article, with its companion report on prevalence of conditions and associated factors, provides an update on the study's fourth wave, which follows-up two probability-based population samples of children of Puerto Rican heritage. ...

Certain brightly colored coral species dotting the seafloor may appear indistinguishable to many divers and snorkelers, but Florida State University researchers have found that these genetically diverse marine invertebrates vary in their response to ocean warming, a finding that has implications for the long-term health of coral reefs. The researchers used molecular genetics to differentiate among corals that look nearly identical and to understand which species best coped with thermal stress. Their research was published in the journal Ecology. "Being able to recognize the differences among these coral species that cannot be identified in the field -- which are known as 'cryptic species' -- will help us understand new ways ...

The electron is one of the fundamental particles in nature we read about in school. Its behavior holds clues to new ways to store digital data. In a study published in Nano Letters, physicists from Michigan Technological University explore alternative materials to improve capacity and shrink the size of digital data storage technologies. Ranjit Pati, professor of physics at Michigan Tech, led the study and explains the physics behind his team's new nanowire design. "Thanks to a property called spin, electrons behave like tiny magnets," Pati said. "Similar to how a bar magnet's magnetization is dipolar, pointing from south to north, ...

The Volcano Alert Level (VAL) system, standardized by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in 2006, is meant to save lives and keep citizens living in the shadow of an active volcano informed of their current level of risk. A new study published in Risk Analysis suggests that, when an alert remains elevated at any level above "normal" due to a period of volcanic unrest, it can cause a decline in the region's housing prices and other economic indicators. Because of this, the authors argue that federal policymakers may need to account for the effects of prolonged volcanic unrest -- not just destructive eruptions -- in the provision of disaster relief funding. A team of geoscientists and statistical experts examined the historical relationship ...

As researchers push the boundaries of battery design, seeking to pack ever greater amounts of power and energy into a given amount of space or weight, one of the more promising technologies being studied is lithium-ion batteries that use a solid electrolyte material between the two electrodes, rather than the typical liquid. But such batteries have been plagued by a tendency for branch-like projections of metal called dendrites to form on one of the electrodes, eventually bridging the electrolyte and shorting out the battery cell. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found ...

Even though a fruit fly doesn't have ears, it can hear with its antennae. In a END ...

The first known study to explore optimal outpatient exam scheduling given the flexibility of inpatient exams has resulted in shorter wait times for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) patients at END ...

FINDINGS A new UCLA study shows that while men and women who have high muscle mass are less likely to die from heart disease, it also appears that women who have higher levels of body fat -- regardless of their muscle mass -- have a greater degree of protection than women with less fat. The researchers analyzed national health survey data collected over a 15-year period and found that heart disease-related death in women with high muscle mass and high body fat was 42% lower than in a comparison group of women with low muscle mass and low body fat. However, women who had high muscle mass and low ...

A global review of coastal drowning science has found there is only one study worldwide that has evaluated beach safety education programs in schools. Researchers from UNSW's Beach Safety Research Group have conducted the first in-depth review specific to coastal drowning. The study, published in PLOS ONE, reviewed 146 coastal drowning studies from around the world. "We found that evaluation of coastal drowning prevention strategies is rare," said William Koon, the lead author of the study and a PhD candidate in the School of Biological, Earth ...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) selected an NYU Tandon School of Engineering professor who is developing new approaches to training deep learning (DL) artificial intelligence frameworks, to receive its most prestigious award for promising young academics. Anna Choromanska, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), received a 2021 NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award, more widely known as a CAREER Award, which supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. A five-year, $532,892 grant will support a project that focuses on new, more efficient ways of training ...

The continuous improvement of imaging technology holds great promise in areas where visual detection is necessary, such as with cancer screening. Three-dimensional imaging in particular has become popular because it provides a more complete picture of the target object and its context. "More doctors and radiologists are looking at these 3D volumes, which are new technologies that allow you to look not just at one image, but a set of images," said UC Santa Barbara psychology professor Miguel Eckstein(link is external), whose expertise lies in the field of visual search. "In some imaging modalities this gives doctors information about volume and it allows them to segment what they're interested in." Common wisdom is that with all ...

Bring on Twilight. Lee Child's Jack Reacher? Yes, please. More of James Patterson's Alex Cross while we're at it. And let's finish off with revisiting the million-plus words of the Harry Potter saga. No one will confuse the above book series with high literature. But a new study published in the journal Reading and Writing shows that the more people read any kind of fiction -- even mass market stuff sniffily derided as pulp -- the better their language skills are likely to be. The piece was written by Sandra Martin-Chang, professor of education in the Faculty of Arts and Science, and PhD student Stephanie Kozak. They found that people who enjoyed reading fiction for leisure and who identified as a reader scored higher on language tests, whereas ...

It's not uncommon for crescent-shaped swaths of sand to dot the shorelines of meandering rivers. These swaths usually appear along the inner side of a river bend, where the bank wraps around the sandy patch, forming deposits known as a "point bars." When they appear along an outer bank, which curves the opposite way, they form "counter-point" bars, which are usually interpreted by geoscientists as an anomaly: a sign that something - such as a patch of erosion-resistant rocks - is interfering with the river's usual manner of sediment deposition. But according to research led by The University of Texas at Austin, counter-point bars are not the oddities they're often ...

PHILADELPHIA (March 16, 20201) - After a traumatic injury, returning to work (RTW) can be a strong indication of healing and rehabilitation and may play a pivotal role in promoting physical and functional recovery. But how does RTW after a traumatic injury affect mental health recovery, particularly in individuals who experience social and economic marginalization? In a new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing), researchers investigated the ways that RTW after an injury predict mental health outcomes in Black men living and recovering in Philadelphia. The study found that men ...

AI has, for some time, been applied to diagnose medical conditions in specific fields. It can build on knowledge of particular disciplines to hone in on details such as the shape of a tumor that suggests breast cancer or abnormal cells that indicate cervical cancer. While AI is very good when trained on years of human data in specific domains, it has not been able to deal with the huge number of diagnostic tests (about 5000) and disorders (about 14,000) of modern clinical practice. Now, a new algorithm developed by engineers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering can think and learn just like a doctor but with essentially infinite experience. The work comes out of the lab of Gerald Loeb, a professor ...

BOSTON - In addition to lowering risk of heart disease, maintaining a heart-healthy lifestyle may pay off in lower risk for developing cancer, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and other centers in the United States and the Netherlands have found. Looking at the potential link between cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer among participants in two large population-based health studies, Emily S. Lau, MD, and Jennifer E. Ho, MD, from the division of Cardiology at MGH and their co-authors found that traditional risk factors for CVD, including older age, male ...

The discovery of a rare bone artefact near the Lower Murray River casts more light on the rich archaeological record on Ngarrindjeri country in southern Australia. Details of the Murrawong bone point, dated between c. 5,300-3,800 years old, has have been described by Flinders University, Griffith University and other experts in a new paper in Australian Archaeology. Probably made from a macropod (kangaroo or wallaby) bone, the point was likely used for piercing soft materials - for example, used as a pin on a cloak made of possum furs - or possibly as a projectile point, say the research leaders ...