Water oxidation reaction involves a four-electron and four-proton transfer process, which requires an uphill energy transformation and limits the efficiency of the overall photocatalytic water splitting reaction. Although loading appropriate water oxidation cocatalysts can enhance the performance of water oxidation reactions, the interfacial barrier between the semiconductor and the water oxidation cocatalyst can impede the transfer and utilization of photogenerated charges. Recently, a research team led by Profs. LI Can and LI Rengui from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) ...

The Southwest Rural Health Research Center at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health has published a peer-reviewed paper detailing Healthy People 2030 priorities that will be most critical for rural America in the upcoming decade. These priorities were identified by rural health stakeholders across the United States. This publication comes ahead of the center’s release of Rural Healthy People 2030 — a continuation of a long-standing tradition of the Southwest Rural Health Research Center in which multidisciplinary authors ...

Do you hate the camera bumps on the back of your smartphone? A new optical component called metalens – which was named one of the top 10 future technologies by the World Economic Forum in 2019 – may be the answer. Composed of a nanostructured array, this incredibly thin and lightweight optical device is currently the focus of much attention in the scientific community, even featured in a special issue of Nature Photonics. However, the production of metalenses requires highly precise techniques and can be expensive, posing a challenge for their scalable manufacturing.   In ...

Video anomaly detection is a research hotspot in the field of computer vision, attracting many researchers.Video anomaly detection differs from traditional video analysis. Usually, abnormal events occur only in a small percentage of the video pixels and therefore, it is unnecessary to focus on all the video pixels as most of them are harmless—called “the background”. Therefore, in the video feature extraction process, attention should be focused on a few detectable partial objects. Object detection is very complicated and consumes a significant amount of time during video processing. Therefore, ...

As the executor of life activities, proteins exert their specific biological functions through interactions such as forming protein complexes. The localization effects, crowding effects, and organelle microenvironments within cells are crucial for maintaining the structure and function of protein complexes. Recently, a research team led by Prof. ZHANG Lihua from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has developed a glycosidic-bond-based mass-spectrometry-cleavable cross-linker, which improves the data ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted the unnecessary use of antimicrobial chemicals linked to health problems, antimicrobial resistance, and environmental harm, warn more than two dozen scientists in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology. Their critical review details how quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs) are increasingly marketed and used in home, healthcare, education, and workplace settings despite the availability of safer alternatives and in some cases limited evidence of reduced disease transmission. “Disinfectant wipes containing ...

The race is on to provide high speed satellite internet to the Earth’s most remote areas. New tech companies such as Starlink, One Web, and Amazon’s Kuiper are competing with traditional, established “satcomm” companies such as Thuraya and Inmarsat to provide global high speed, low latency satellite internet across the globe. These new mega-constellations rely on tens of thousands of small low earth orbit satellites flying at a few hundred miles altitude. Network interconnectivity is a basic building block for providing the fastest, more reliable coverage to end users. While all these mega-constellations are driven to provide high ...

Considering the millions of research papers and reports from open domains such as biomedicine, agriculture, and manufacturing, it is humanly impossible to keep up with all the findings. Constantly emerging world events present a similar challenge because they are difficult to track and even harder to analyze without looking into thousands of articles.  To address the problem of relying on human effort in situations such as these, Lifu Huang, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and core faculty at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence ...

“Importantly, the expression of several LY6 genes is elevated in UCEC [uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma] when compared to the expression in normal uterine tissue.” BUFFALO, NY- May 8, 2023 – A new research paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 14 on May 4, 2023, entitled, “Human LY6 gene family: potential tumor-associated antigens and biomarkers of prognosis in uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma.” The human Lymphocyte antigen-6 (LY6) gene family has recently gained interest for its possible role in tumor progression. In this new study, researchers Luke A. Rathbun, Anthony M. Magliocco ...

Woods Hole, Mass. (Monday, May 8, 2023) -- New research provides clear evidence of a human “fingerprint” on climate change and shows that specific signals from human activities have altered the temperature structure of Earth’s atmosphere. Differences between tropospheric and lower stratospheric temperature trends have long been recognized as a fingerprint of human effects on climate. This fingerprint, however, neglected information from the mid to upper stratosphere, 25 to 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. “Including this information improves the detectability of a human fingerprint by a factor of five. Enhanced detectability occurs because the mid ...

Irvine, Calif., May 8, 2023 – While conducting a study of Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland, researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory uncovered a previously unseen way in which the ice and ocean interact. The glaciologists said their findings could mean that the climate community has been vastly underestimating the magnitude of future sea level rise caused by polar ice deterioration. Using satellite radar data from three European missions, the UCI/NASA team learned that Petermann Glacier’s grounding line – where ice detaches from the land bed and begins floating in the ocean – shifts substantially ...

It is often desirable to restrict flows—whether of sound, electricity, or heat—to one direction, but naturally occurring systems almost never allow this. However, unidirectional flow can indeed be engineered under certain conditions, and the resulting systems are said to exhibit chiral behavior. The concept of chirality is traditionally limited to single direction flows in one dimension. In 2021, however, researchers working with Taylor Hughes, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, ...

ITHACA, NY – A decline in New York’s childbirth rate is showing no sign of reversing and many women are waiting longer to have children, according to newly compiled data from the Program in Applied Demographics (PAD) in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. In 2011, about 241,312 were born in New York. In 2021, that number was 210,742 – a 13% decline. New York state’s total fertility rate (TFR) – the average number of births a woman would have in her lifetime if current patterns continue – dropped from ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, at the celebration ceremony of the historic achievement of fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced a plan to provide up to $45 million to support Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) research and development. Fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars, has the potential to provide clean, safe, and reliable carbon-free energy on earth. Harnessing fusion energy is one of the greatest scientific and technological challenges of the 21st century. Fusion requires the fuel to ...

For release: May 8, 2023 Contact: Mary Durlak, durlak@buffalo.edu University at Buffalo 716-645-4595 The ability to chew properly may improve blood sugar levels in patients with Type 2 diabetes BUFFALO, N.Y. – If you’re a health care provider treating people with Type 2 diabetes (T2D), University at Buffalo researcher Mehmet A. Eskan has this suggestion for you: check your patients’ teeth. In a study published in PLOS ONE on April 14, Eskan demonstrates that patients with T2D who have full chewing function have a blood glucose level that is significantly lower ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – In a first-of-its-kind analysis, Cornell University researchers and partners found that pharmaceutical producers could reduce their environmental impact by roughly half by optimizing manufacturing processes and supply chain networks and by switching to renewable energy sources. Pharmaceutical manufacturing is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, similar in magnitude to the automotive industry, though it has not received anywhere near the level of academic or regulatory ...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists led the development of a supply chain model revealing the optimal places to site farms, biorefineries, pipelines and other infrastructure for sustainable aviation fuel production. The project focused on carinata, a hardy, oil-rich plant targeted as a winter bioenergy crop in Georgia. Scientists used geographical data to model facilities to grow, harvest, store, process and deliver carinata-based fuel at the lowest cost and carbon intensity. “Our model is unique in capturing the fuel’s life-cycle carbon footprint,” said ...

The combined use of satellite and climate data has rapidly become critical for scientists and resource managers seeking to accurately assess changes in land cover and land use over time and across space. Unfortunately, processing such vast amounts of data can be time and cost-prohibitive, which is why researchers teamed up with Google and federal agencies to create ClimateEngine.org. Climate Engine’s innovative web application allows scientists, natural resource agencies, and other users to create maps and time series plots that integrate satellite and climate data, providing an indispensable ...

Mass shooters pursuing fame often plan their attacks as “surprises," carefully crafting them in ways that set them apart from previous incidents, which makes them uniquely challenging to prevent. That is a key finding in a groundbreaking new study from NYU Tandon School of Engineering, about the subset of mass shooters in the U.S. for whom notoriety is a primary objective. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Led by Maurizio Porfiri, NYU Tandon Institute Professor and Director of the Center for Urban Science and ...

NOTE TO EDITORS: PHOTO AVAILABLE AT https://news.uci.edu/2023/05/08/uc-irvine-scientists-develop-gene-silencing-dna-enzyme-that-can-target-a-single-molecule/ Irvine, Calif., May 8, 2023 — Researchers from the University of California, Irvine have developed a DNA enzyme – or DNAzyme – that can distinguish between two RNA strands inside a cell and cut the disease-associated strand while leaving the healthy strand intact. This breakthrough “gene silencing” technology could revolutionize the development of DNAzymes for treating cancer, infectious diseases and neurological disorders. DNAzymes ...

Computer models are increasingly used to make decisions that affect nearly every aspect of modern life. This may include how to plan for the sustainable management of environmental resources to responding to pandemics. And while these models are often based on scientific data and research, they also incorporate subjective values, political interests, and human bias. With a prestigious national grant, a Virginia Tech researcher will dive into the ways that modeling processes can become more transparent while also incorporating diverse sources of information. Theodore Lim, an assistant professor ...

Wetlands, coastal areas and offshore waters near Alabama, Louisiana and Texas have more inactive oil and gas wells than producing ones, and the cost to permanently plug and abandon them could be $30 billion, University of California, Davis, researchers suggest. A paper published today in the journal Nature Energy examines the cost to plug 14,000 wells that are inactive, have not produced for five years and are unlikely to be reactivated in the Gulf of Mexico region, which is the epicenter of U.S. offshore oil and gas operations. The wells could pose future environmental and financial risks ...

PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA [May 8, 2023] — New research in the May 2023 issue of JNCCN—Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network from Moffitt Cancer Center finds that telemedicine consistently outperformed in-person visits for both access to care and provider response, according to a long-term study on patient experience. Researchers analyzed survey responses from 39,268 patients across more than 50,000 visits. Telemedicine experiences were compared to in-person visits during and after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, starting April 1, 2020, and running ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Astronomers have revealed new evidence about the properties of the giant bubbles of high-energy gas that extend far above and below the Milky Way galaxy’s center.  In a study recently published in Nature Astronomy, a team led by scientists at The Ohio State University was able to show that the shells of these structures – dubbed “eRosita bubbles” after being found by the eRosita X-ray telescope – are more complex than previously thought.  Although they bear a striking similarity in shape to Fermi bubbles, eRosita bubbles are larger and more energetic than their counterparts. Known together as the “galactic ...

Contact: Kelly Craine, Baylor University Media and Public Relations, 254-297-9065 Follow us on Twitter: @BaylorUMedia WACO, Texas (May 3, 2023) – Instagram and TikTok are two of the fastest-growing social media outlets in the U.S., offering entertainment and connection to a world-wide community with the ease of a finger swipe. Despite their growing popularity, little research has focused on the association between the specific use of Instagram and TikTok and a person’s psychological well-being. Noted Baylor University smartphone researchers Meredith E. David, Ph.D., ...