Embargoed: Not for Release Until 19:00 (7.00 pm) British Summer Time, Thursday, 13 April 2023 Shift to ‘flash droughts’ as climate warms ‘Flash droughts’ have become more frequent due to human-caused climate change and this trend is predicted to accelerate in a warmer future, according to research published today [13 April 2023] involving the University of Southampton. The research published in Science shows that flash droughts, which start and develop rapidly, are becoming ‘the new normal’ for droughts, making forecasting and preparing for their impact more difficult. Flash ...

First Nations populations at greater risk of severe flu, research finds Responsible for over 5 million infections and 100,000 deaths every year, influenza remains one of the most challenging public health issues for populations globally, particularly First Nations communities.  New research from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) has found that First Nations populations around the world are significantly more likely to be hospitalised and die from influenza compared to non-Indigenous populations.  Researchers from the Doherty ...

A research group led by scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science have developed a unique material, based on nanofillers embedded in a hydrogel, that can channel mechanical energy in one direction but not the other, acting in a “nonreciprocal” way. With this composite material--which can be constructed at various sizes--the team was able to use vibrational up-and-down movements to make liquid droplets rise within a material against gravity. Using this material could thus make it possible to make use of random vibrations and move matter in a preferred direction. Channeling energy in a preferred direction is an ...

They’ve been called “dream” plastics: polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs. Already the basis of a fledgling industry, they’re a class of polymers naturally created by living microorganisms, or synthetically produced from biorenewable feedstocks. They’re biodegradable in the ambient environment, including oceans and soil. But there’s a reason PHAs haven’t taken off as a sustainable, environmentally benign alternative to traditional plastics. Crystalline PHAs are brittle, so not as durable and convenient as conventional plastics. They cannot easily be melt-processed and recycled, making them expensive to produce. Colorado State ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Native bees in the Oregon Coast Range are diverse and abundant in clearcut areas within a few years of timber harvest but their numbers drop sharply as planted trees grow and the forest canopy closes, research by Oregon State University shows. The findings are important for understanding the roles forest management might play in the conservation of a crucial pollinator group, the researchers said. The study, led by graduate student Rachel Zitomer and Jim Rivers, an animal ecologist in the OSU College of Forestry, was published in Ecological Applications. “The research demonstrates ...

A new international study finds that women vaccinated for COVID-19 have a slightly higher risk for a heavier period after vaccination. The study, led by Oregon Health & Science University reproductive health services researcher Blair Darney, Ph.D., M.P.H., and physician-scientist Alison Edelman, M.D., M.P.H., published today in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. These findings build on prior work from the same research team that first identified an association between COVID-19 vaccines ...

AMES, IA – Driven by online shopping, a growing number of retailers have launched virtual fitting rooms in recent years. That includes Amazon, the top apparel seller in the U.S., along with Nike, Macy’s and Walmart. The virtual rooms allow shoppers to ‘try on’ clothes through interactive simulation technology and texture-mapped product images. It can cut down on returns and nudge hesitant shoppers to click the checkout button. But findings from a recently published study indicate virtual fitting rooms could backfire on retailers if they assume ...

The first study to examine evaluation scores for professionalism and interpersonal communication skills among physicians-in-training and what happens afterward as these doctors begin their practice is reported in JAMA Network Open. The study tracked 9,340 early-career physicians from across the country.    The study finds a strong association between lower ratings for these competencies among residents in their last year of training and greater likelihood of unsolicited patient complaints among doctors during their first year of employment ...

Amsterdam, April 13, 2023 – The Journal of Neuromuscular Diseases (JND), published by IOS Press, is pleased to announce that from July 1, 2023 (Volume 10, Issue 4), the journal will transition to a Gold Open Access publication. This means that all articles published after that date will be immediately and permanently freely available online for readers to view, download, share, and reuse, and will enable authors to more easily comply with funder and institutional mandates. “When JND launched almost 10 years ago, among our primary goals was and continues to ...

During August 2019, more than 40,000 tourists visited Hawaii’s Molokini island to snorkel or dive. In March 2020 the worldwide COVID lockdown dropped that number to zero. The sudden and prolonged drop in visitors to one of the world’s most popular snorkeling spots provided scientists with a novel opportunity to study how underwater tourism impacts marine fishes. The results of their study, published in the most recent issue of PLOS One, will help resource managers better care for Molokini and other threatened marine habitats. The study’s lead author, Dr. Kevin Weng of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science, ...

Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Florida State University (FSU), and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have demonstrated that starting intervention coaching parents of autistic toddlers as early as 18 months leads to better gains in language, social communication, and daily living skills. Their findings were recently published in the journal Autism. While prior studies provided strong evidence for the benefits of early intervention in autism, many are correlation studies rather than randomized controlled studies that ...

As Brazil seeks ways to protect its crucial Amazon Forest, a new study shows that excusing private landowners from conserving their precious land has come at a steep cost to global sustainability. In this week’s Nature Communications Earth & Environment, scientists at Michigan State University’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (MSU-CSIS) as well as Brazil and the UK found that since 2012 more than half of the deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has taken place on designated private conservation areas within rural private properties. However, ...

CLEVELAND–By discovering how zebrafish use their hair cells to detect distant movement, a team of Case Western Reserve scientists may have found a path to help explain human hearing loss.   Even though the tiny water creatures and humans would appear to have nothing in common, the structure and function of the hair cells on zebrafish skin are nearly identical to cochlear hair cells found in the human inner ear.   In addition, both the fish and human cell receptors have a type of protein known as an “ion channel,” which converts the waves that the cells detect into electrical impulses that carry useful information.   However, in humans, ...

Wildfires. Many see them as purely destructive forces, disasters that blaze through a landscape, charring everything in their paths. But a study published in the journal Ecology Letters reminds us that wildfires are also generative forces, spurring biodiversity in their wakes. “There’s a fair amount of biodiversity research on fire and plants,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist with UC CooperativeExtension who is based at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and is the study’s lead author. Research has shown that in ecosystems where fire is a natural and regular occurrence, there ...

A key source of information underpinning the upcoming National Climate Assessment suggests that heavy precipitation days historically experienced once in a century by Americans could in the future be experienced on several occasions in a lifetime.  Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) report that extremely intense days of rain or snow will be more frequent by the end of this century than previously thought ...

A spin-out company from the graphene innovation ecosystem at The University of Manchester has formed an international partnership that will spearhead an unprecedented scale-up of graphene-based technologies intended “to make a substantial impact on global CO2 emissions”.            UK-based Graphene Innovations Manchester Ltd (GIM), founded by University of Mancheser graduate Dr Vivek Koncherry, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Quazar Investment Company to create a new company in the UAE. Graphene innovation has " This agreement - ...

“ChatGPT is a very impressive tool,” said paper author Zijian Hong, professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, China. “As a computational materials scientist, I’m always eager to embrace new tools, in particular, new tools in computer science and AI. Since the born of the new ChatGPT, I’m just wondering whether such a tool can assist us in computational materials science”   Hong explained that for a computational materials task, there are three main steps: building a model or a structure, writing ...

Three-dimensional simulations shed light on how energy dissipates within non-Newtonian fluids (fluids in which viscosity depend on the shear rate.)  The result is valuable in the context of disaster forecast and management or industrial production.  Elastoviscoplastic (EVP) fluids like mud, concrete, and lava are a type of non-Newtonian fluid that exhibit both solid and fluid-like behavior depending on the forces they are subjected to (i.e., applied stress). Their flow behavior is more complex than that of Newtonian fluids, such as water and air, which have a constant viscosity. In a recent study, researchers ...

Researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California San Diego have revealed that receiving an inhibitory signal (stop signal) associated with negative food conditions can decrease brain dopamine levels in dancing honeybees. The study was published in Current Biology on April 13. Dopamine is known as the feel-good neurotransmitter—a chemical that ferries information between neurons. In multiple animals, dopamine is involved in arousal, cognition, and sensitivity to stimuli. It is also associated with seeking and wanting behavior, particularly ...

About The Study: In this analysis of more than 5 million hospitalizations between 2020 and 2022, health care–associated infection (HAI) occurrence among inpatients without COVID-19 was similar to that during 2019 despite additional pressures for infection control and health care professionals. The findings suggest that patients with COVID-19 may be more susceptible to HAIs and may require additional prevention measures.  Authors: Kenneth E. Sands, M.D., M.P.H., of HCA Healthcare in Nashville, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.8059) Editor’s ...

About The Study: The findings of this study including more than 3 million patients receiving the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine suggest that retinal vascular occlusion (RVO) diagnosed acutely after vaccination occurs extremely rarely at rates similar to those of two different historically used vaccinations, the influenza and tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis (Tdap) vaccines. No evidence suggesting an association between the mRNA COVID-19 vaccination and newly diagnosed RVO was found. Authors: Rishi P. Singh, M.D., of ...

In the run-up to the 2020 election, people appear to have become savvier in spotting misinformation online: clicks onto unreliable websites have declined, according to a new Stanford study published April 13 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. According to prior research, some 44.3 percent of Americans visited websites during the 2016 U.S. election that repeatedly made false or misleading information.  During the 2020 election, Stanford scholars saw that number drop by nearly half to 26.2 percent. While these findings ...

Researchers at Curtin University have identified the genetic signature of pre-malignant liver cells, offering potentially significant implications for the almost 3,000 Australians diagnosed with the deadly cancer each year. The study, published in the prestigious journal Cell Genomics, found that quantifying pre-malignant liver cells in patients with liver disease could help determine their future risk of developing liver cancer. First author Dr Rodrigo Carlessi, from the Curtin Medical School and the Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute, said the discovery had the potential to save lives by changing how chronic liver disease patients ...

Choosing a checkout line in a supermarket might seem like a no-brainer, but it can actually involve a complex series of cerebral computations. Maybe you count the number of shoppers in each line and pick the shortest, or estimate the number of items on each conveyor belt. Perhaps you quickly weigh up both shoppers and items and maybe even the apparent speed of the cashier... In fact, there are a multiplicity of strategies for solving this problem.  So how does the brain know how to make decisions ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- 'Tis the season for hiking now that spring has arrived and temperatures are on the upswing. But with hikes come insect bites and on the increase in North America is babesiosis, a malaria-like disease spread especially between May and October by a tick. Indeed, recent research suggests an increase in the incidence of diseases transmitted by ticks around the world, not just the United States and Canada, due likely to climate change and other environmental factors. Among the tick-borne pathogens, Babesia parasites, which infect and destroy red blood cells, are considered a serious ...