DURHAM, N.C. - Researchers at Duke University have developed a method that uses machine learning, satellite imagery and weather data to autonomously find hotspots of heavy air pollution, city block by city block. The technique could be a boon for finding and mitigating sources of hazardous aerosols, studying the effects of air pollution on human health, and making better informed, socially just public policy decisions. "Before now, researchers trying to measure the distribution of air pollutants throughout a city would either try to use the limited number of existing monitors or drive sensors around a city in vehicles," said Mike ...

A team of scientists used a telescope on the International Space Station to measure the size of PSR J0740+6620 (J0740, for short), the most massive known neutron star. NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) has captured unprecedented detail from this stellar remnant to learn more about matter in its core, which is on the threshold of collapsing into a black hole. The NICER team will introduce their groundbreaking findings at a press conference during the 2021 APS April Meeting. NASA astronaut Christina Koch will join them to talk about how researchers use the space station as a science platform. From pencils to pulsars "Matter makes up everything we can see in the universe, from pencils ...

Researchers from Skoltech and a major European bank have developed a neural network that outperforms existing state-of-the art solutions in using transactional banking data for customer credit scoring. The research was published in the proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM). Machine learning algorithms are already extensively used in risk management, helping banks assess clients and their finances. "A modern human, in particular a bank client, continually leaves traces in the digital world. For instance, the client may add information about transferring money to another person in a payment system. Therefore, every person obtains a large number of connections that can be represented as a directed graph. Such a graph gives an additional ...

A new study by Texas A&M University researchers published in END ...

Smartphones get smarter every day. These "Swiss Army knives" of mobile computing become even more useful with specialized attachments and applications to improve healthcare. Based on inherent capabilities like built-in cameras, touchscreens, and 3D sensing, as well wearable peripheral devices, custom interfaces for smartphones can yield portable, user-friendly biomedical imaging systems to guide and facilitate diagnosis and treatment in point-of-care settings. What are the most effective ways to leverage and augment smartphone capabilities? Helpful guidelines are provided in a critical review of emerging smartphone-based imaging systems END ...

An imaging agent allows scientists to better visualize Enterobacterales infections in patients, helping to address pathogens that can be life-threatening and frequently resist antibiotics. The agent was safe in 26 patients and differentiated infections from either sterile inflammation or COVID-19-linked pneumonia in hamsters. Enterobacterales is the largest group of disease-causing bacteria in humans, and includes common pathogens such as Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and Klebsiella pneumoniae. These species have become increasingly resistant to common antibiotics, which has led the Centers for Disease Control to label some drug-resistant strains as urgent threats to human health. However, scientists still lack tools that can rapidly ...

New research from the Florida State University College of Medicine has found that the personality trait neuroticism is consistently associated with a higher risk of developing the brain disorder Parkinson's disease. The research by Professor of Geriatrics Antonio Terracciano and team, published in Movement Disorders, found that adults in the study who scored in the top quartile of neuroticism had more than 80% greater risk of Parkinson's, compared to those who scored lower on neuroticism. "Some clinicians think that the anxiety and depression is just the result of Parkinson's," Terracciano said. "However, our findings suggest that some emotional vulnerability is present early in life, ...

AMHERST, Mass. - Last month saw the average concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) climb to almost 418 parts-per-million, a level not seen on Earth for millions of years. In order to get a sense of what our future may hold, scientists have been looking to the deep past. Now, new research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which combines climate, ice sheet and vegetation model simulations with a suite of different climatic and geologic scenarios, opens the clearest window yet into the deep history of the Antarctic ice sheet and what our planetary future might hold. The Antarctic ice sheet has attracted the particular interest of the scientific community because it is "a lynchpin in the earth's climate system, affecting everything from ...

Financial stress can have an immediate impact on well-being, but can it lead to physical pain nearly 30 years later? The answer is yes, according to new research from University of Georgia scientists. The study, published in Stress & Health, reveals that family financial stress in midlife is associated with a depleted sense of control, which is related to increased physical pain in later years. "Physical pain is considered an illness on its own with three major components: biological, psychological and social," said Kandauda A.S. Wickrama, first author and professor in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences. "In older adults, it co-occurs with other health problems like limited physical functioning, loneliness and cardiovascular ...

Florida State University researchers have discovered a novel way to improve the performance of electrical wires used as high-temperature superconductors (HTS), findings that have the potential to power a new generation of particle accelerators. An image of Bi-2212, bismuth-based superconducting wires. (Mark Wallheiser/FAMU-FSU College of Engineering) Researchers used high-resolution scanning electron microscopy to understand how processing methods influence grains in bismuth-based superconducting wires (known as Bi-2212). Those grains form the underlying ...

Amyloid fibrils are deposits of proteins in the body that join together to form microscopic fibres. Their formation has been linked to many serious human diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Type 2 diabetes. Until today, scientists have been unable to reliably measure the speed of fibril growth, as there have been no tools that could directly measure growth rate in solution. However, researchers from the UK's University of Bath and the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source have now invented a technique that does just that. Results from their study are published in RSC Chemical Biology. "This is an important breakthrough, ...

In a newly released study, researchers found that remote and virtual care models can negatively impact small physician offices. Three researchers from END ...

To better understand the psychological and physical impact caused by the profound consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic - and also inform priorities for interventions and policy changes to address the mental health consequences of the pandemic -- researchers from the Center for the Developing Brain at the Child Mind Institute developed and deployed the CoRonavIruS health and Impact Survey (CRISIS). This questionnaire covered key topics relating to mental distress and resilience during the pandemic. According to a newly-published manuscript of the findings, perceived risk of COVID-19, prior mental health status, and lifestyle changes were key predictors of mental health during the pandemic in adults and children surveyed in the U.S. and U.K. In the study, supported by the Morgan Stanley ...

URBANA, Ill. - Agricultural producers deal firsthand with changing weather conditions, and extreme events such as drought or flooding can impact their productivity and profit. Climate change models project such events will occur more often in the future. But studies of the economic consequences of weather and climate on agriculture typically focus on local impacts only. A new study from the University of Illinois looks at how changes in weather - including extreme events - may decrease crop profit in one state while increasing profits in other states. The secret ingredient: U.S. interstate trade. It is expected to mitigate ...

The field of ancient DNA has revealed important aspects of our evolutionary past, including our relationships with our distant cousins, Denisovans and Neandertals. These studies have relied on DNA from bones and teeth, which store DNA and protect it from the environment. But such skeletal remains are exceedingly rare, leaving large parts of human history inaccessible to genetic analysis. To fill these gaps, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology developed new methods for enriching and analyzing human nuclear DNA from sediments, which are abundant at almost every archaeological site. Until now, only ...

The widespread proliferation of the internet and information and communication technologies (ICT) has drawn people into urban centres, according to new research. Despite being able to access data at the drop of a hat or speak face-to-face to people on the other side of the world, the evolution of technological capabilities hasn't led to an exodus from cities. In fact experts at the University of Bristol have found quite the opposite; that the increased adoption of ICT has resulted in national urban systems - cities within a country - that are characterised by higher population concentrations. ...

A new generation of miniature recording probes can track the same neurons inside tiny mouse brains over weeks -- and even months. The new tools build on the success of the original Neuropixels probes released in 2017 and currently used in more than 400 labs. Neuropixels 2.0 are much smaller -- about a third the size of their predecessors. They're designed to record the electrical activity from more individual neurons and have the unique ability to track this activity over extended time periods. That makes them especially useful for studying long-term phenomena like learning and memory in small animals such as mice, says Tim Harris, a senior fellow at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus who led the project. Harris and his colleagues describe the advance in a paper published online ...

Irvine, Calif., -- By analyzing gains and losses in the genes of phytoplankton samples collected in all major ocean regions, researchers at the University of California, Irvine have created the most nuanced and high-resolution map yet to show where these photosynthetic organisms either thrive or are forced to adapt to limited quantities of key nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and iron. As part of the new Bio-GO-SHIP initiative, the UCI scientists made eight deployments on six different research vessels, spending 228 days at sea in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. They generated nearly 1,000 ocean metagenomes from 930 locations around the globe, with an average distance between collection points at 26.5 kilometers (about 16.5 miles). ...

University of California, Berkeley, chemists have discovered a way to simplify the removal of toxic metals. like mercury and boron. during desalination to produce clean water, while at the same time potentially capturing valuable metals, such as gold. Desalination -- the removal of salt -- is only one step in the process of producing drinkable water, or water for agriculture or industry, from ocean or waste water. Either before or after the removal of salt, the water often has to be treated to remove boron, which is toxic to plants, and heavy metals like arsenic and mercury, which are toxic to humans. Often, the process leaves ...

Being constantly hungry, no matter how much you eat - that's the daily struggle of people with genetic defects in the brain's appetite controls, and it often ends in severe obesity. In a study published in Science on April 15, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, together with colleagues from the Queen Mary University of London and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have revealed the mechanism of action of the master switch for hunger in the brain: the melanocortin receptor 4, or MC4 receptor for short. They have also clarified how this switch is activated by setmelanotide (Imcivree), ...

Hafnium-based thin films, with a thickness of only a few nanometres, show an unconventional form of ferroelectricity. This allows the construction of nanometre-sized memories or logic devices. However, it was not clear how ferroelectricity could occur at this scale. A study that was led by scientists from the University of Groningen showed how atoms move in a hafnium-based capacitor: migrating oxygen atoms (or vacancies) are responsible for the observed switching and storage of charge. The results, which were published online by the journal Science on 15 April, point the way to new ferroelectric materials. Ferroelectric ...

Researchers from King's College London have created 3D replicas of full-sized healthy adult hearts from Computed Tomography (CT) images and analyzed how cardiac shape relates to function. Published today in PLOS Computational Biology, the study also includes 1000 new synthetic hearts that have been made open access allowing researchers to download and use them to test new algorithms, test in-silico therapies, run more statistical analyses or generate specific shapes from the average models. Statistical shape analysis is a technique that allows the rigorous study of the anatomical changes of the heart across different subjects. Using this technique, from a cohort of 20 healthy adult hearts the researchers created an average heart and ...

PHILADELPHIA--People who have recovered from COVID-19 had a robust antibody response after the first mRNA vaccine dose, but little immune benefit after the second dose, according to new research from the Penn Institute of Immunology. The findings, published today in Science Immunology, suggest only a single vaccine dose may be needed to produce a sufficient antibody response. The team found that those who did not have COVID-19--called COVID naïve--did not have a full immune response until after receiving their second vaccine dose, reinforcing the importance of completing the two recommended doses for achieving strong levels of immunity. The study provides more insight on the underlying immunobiology of mRNA vaccines, ...

Even the mention of parasites can be enough to make some people's skin crawl. But to recent UC Santa Barbara doctoral graduate Dana Morton these creepy critters occupy important ecological niches, fulfilling roles that, in her opinion, have too often been overlooked. That's why Morton has just released the most extensive ecological food web that includes parasites. Eight years in the making, the dataset includes over 21,000 interactions between 942 species, all thoroughly annotated. The detailed description, published in the journal Scientific Data, is a boon for basic research, conservation efforts and resource management. Understanding ...

The abundant biological and mineral diversity of the Rio Grande Rise, a seamount in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean about 1,500 km from the coast of Brazil, is probably due to a great extent to little-known microscopic creatures.  Researchers affiliated with the University of São Paulo's Oceanographic Institute (IO-USP), collaborating with colleagues at the UK's National Oceanography Center, investigated the microorganisms inhabiting the seamount's ferromanganese crusts and concluded that bacteria and archaea are probably responsible for maintaining the abundant local life, ...