The Bronze Age (2200 to 800 BC) marked a decisive step in the technological and economic development of ancient societies. People living at the time faced a series of challenges: changes in the climate, the opening up of trade and a degree of population growth. How did they respond to changes in their diet, especially in Western Switzerland? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Spain has for the first time carried out isotopic analyses on human and animal skeletons together with plant remains. The scientists discovered that manure use had become widespread over time to improve crop harvests in response to demographic growth. The researchers also found that there had ...

Optical waveguides suspended in air are capable to beat free-space laser beams in light-analyte interaction even without complex dispersion engineering. This phenomenon has been predicted more than 20 years ago, yet never observed in experiment. In a new paper published in Light Science & Application, a team of scientists, led by Professor Jana Jágerská from Department of Science and Technology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, and co-workers have devised a mid-infrared free standing solid core optical waveguide which pushes the light interaction with the surrounding air beyond what has been reported up until now: 107 % interaction strength compared to that of a free-space beam has been demonstrated. "The guided mode of our thin waveguide ...

New study found that electrons can reach ultra-relativistic energies for very special conditions in the magnetosphere when space is devoid of plasma. Recent measurements from NASA's Van Allen Probes spacecraft showed that electrons can reach ultra-relativistic energies flying at almost the speed of light. Hayley Allison, Yuri Shprits and collaborators from the German Research Centre for Geosciences have revealed under which conditions such strong accelerations occur. They had already demonstrated in 2020 that during solar storm plasma waves play a crucial role for that. However, it was previously unclear why such high electron energies are not achieved ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended many parts of daily life, one of them being our work life. Research carried out by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has studied the factors that help make efficient work teams. The explanation is multidimensional and multilevel. "Inspiring leadership builds employees' resilience and willingness to undertake new challenges," said Pilar Ficapal Cusi, professor at the UOC's Faculty of Economics and Business and one of the authors of the study, which was published in the Journal of Cleaner Production. Viewed from the group and organizational perspective, "the shared vision, the team's belief in its own creative effectiveness, the ability to reflect openly about how their members connect to adapt ...

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have discovered the individual traits of fungi, and how their hyphae - that is, the fungal threads that grow in soil - behave very differently as they navigate through the earth's microscopic labyrinths. The study was performed in a lab environment, and the underground system constructed synthetically from silicone. Using a microscope, researchers were able to follow seven species and compare their behaviour. How do they react when the maze they grow in turns sharply and forces the hyphae to grow in the direction it came from? What happens when a large space opens up in front of them? "Under a microscope, their behaviour becomes much more personal than you can ever imagine. ...

Parasitic worms could hold the key to living longer and free of chronic disease, according to a review article published today in the open-access eLife journal. The review looks at the growing evidence to suggest that losing our 'old friend' helminth parasites, which used to live relatively harmlessly in our bodies, can cause ageing-associated inflammation. It raises the possibility that carefully controlled, restorative helminth treatments could prevent ageing and protect against diseases such as heart disease and dementia. "A decline in exposure to commensal microbes and gut helminths in developed countries ...

A greater exposure to air pollution at the very start of life was associated with a detrimental effect on people's cognitive skills up to 60 years later, the research found. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh tested the general intelligence of more than 500 people aged approximately 70 years using a test they had all completed at the age of 11 years. The participants then repeated the same test at the ages of 76 and 79 years. A record of where each person had lived throughout their life was used to estimate the level of air pollution they had experienced in their early years. The team used statistical models to analyse the relationship between a person's exposure to air pollution ...

To evaluate the chemical composition of food from a physiological point of view, it is important to know the functions of the receptors that interact with food ingredients. These include receptors for bitter compounds, which first evolved during evolution in bony fishes such as the coelacanth. What 400 million years of evolutionary history reveal about the function of both fish and human bitter receptors was recently published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution by a team of researchers led by the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich and the University of Cologne. Evolutionarily, bitter receptors are a relatively recent invention of nature compared ...

A process that releases iron in response to stress may contribute to heart failure, and blocking this process could be a way of protecting the heart, suggests a study in mice published today in eLife. People with heart failure often have an iron deficiency, leading some scientists to suspect that problems with iron processing in the body may play a role in this condition. The study explains one way that iron processing may contribute to heart failure and suggests potential treatment approaches to protect the heart. "Iron is essential for many processes in the body including oxygen transport, but too much iron can lead to a build-up of unstable oxygen molecules that can kill cells," says ...

Trees are by far the tallest organisms on Earth. Height growth is made possible by a specialized vascular system that conducts water from the roots to the leaves with high efficiency, while simultaneously providing stability. The so-called xylem, also known as wood, is a network of hollow cells with extremely strong cell walls that reinforce the cells against the mechanical conflicts arising from growing tall. These walls wrap around the cells in filigree band and spiral patterns. So far, it is only partly known, how these patterns are created. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm/Potsdam and from ...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the major greenhouse gases causing global warming. If carbon dioxide could be converted into energy, it would be killing two birds with one stone in addressing the environmental issues. A joint research team led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has developed a new photocatalyst which can produce methane fuel (CH4) selectively and effectively from carbon dioxide using sunlight. According to their research, the quantity of methane produced was almost doubled in the first 8 hours of the reaction process. The research was led by Dr Ng Yun-hau, Associate Professor in the ...

King Richard III's involvement in one of the most notorious and emotive mysteries in English history may be a step closer to being confirmed following a new study by Professor Tim Thornton of the University of Huddersfield. Richard has long been held responsible of the murder of his nephews King Edward V and his brother, Richard, duke of York - dubbed 'the Princes in the Tower' - in a dispute about succession to the throne. The pair were held in the Tower of London, but disappeared from public view in 1483 with Richard taking the blame following his death two years later. It has become of the most ...

In the United States only about 1.3 percent of all vehicles sold last year were battery powered. And about 90 percent of those sales were by one company -- Tesla. What has Tesla done right and where have other electric vehicle makers gone wrong? Electric vehicles cannot succeed without developing a nationwide network of fast-charging networks in parallel with the cars. Current EV business models are doomed unless manufacturers that have bet their futures on them, like General Motors and VW, invest in or coordinate on a robust supercharger network. These are the observations in an in-depth study of the industry by management professors at the University of California, Davis, and Dartmouth College. The researchers explain that big ...

As the scientific community continues researching the novel coronavirus, experts are developing new drugs and repurposing existing ones in hopes of identifying promising candidates for treating symptoms of COVID-19. Scientists can analyze the molecular dynamics of drug molecules to better understand their interactions with target proteins in human cells and their potential for treating certain diseases. Many studies examine drug molecules in their dry, powder form, but less is known about how such molecules behave in a hydrated environment, which is characteristic of human cells. Using neutron experiments and computer ...

University of Queensland researchers have discovered a new 'seeding' process in brain cells that could be a cause of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. UQ's Queensland Brain Institute dementia researcher Professor Jürgen Götz said the study revealed that tangled neurons, a hallmark sign of dementia, form in part by a cellular process that has gone astray and allows a toxic protein, tau, to leak into healthy brain cells. "These leaks create a damaging seeding process that causes tau tangles and ultimately lead to memory loss and other impairments," Professor Götz said. Professor Götz said until now researchers did not understand how tau seeds were able to escape after ...

Research into a new drug which primes the immune system in the respiratory tract and is in development for COVID-19 shows it is also effective against rhinovirus. Rhinovirus is the most common respiratory virus, the main cause of the common cold and is responsible for exacerbations of chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In a study recently published in the European Respiratory Journal (LINK), the drug, known as INNA-X, is shown to be effective in a pre-clinical infection model and in human airway cells. Treatment with INNA-X prior to infection with rhinovirus significantly reduced viral load and inhibited harmful inflammation. University of Newcastle and Hunter Medical Research Institute (HMRI) researcher Associate Professor ...

With the importance of non-contact environments growing due to COVID-19, tactile electronic devices using haptic technology are gaining traction as new mediums of communication. Haptic technology is being applied in a wide array of fields such as robotics or interactive displays. haptic gloves are being used for augmented information communication technology. Efficient piezoelectric materials that can convert various mechanical stimuli into electrical signals and vice versa are a prerequisite for advancing high-performing haptic technology. A research team led by Professor Seungbum Hong confirmed the potential of tactile devices by developing ceramic piezoelectric materials that are three times more deformable. For the fabrication of highly deformable nanomaterials, the ...

A recent study from Oregon State University has found that to best help kids with autism maintain healthy rates of physical activity, interventions should be targeted during the ages of 9 to 13, as that's when kids show the biggest drop in active time. The study is one of the first to look at this issue on a longitudinal scale. It relied on a dataset of families in Ireland spanning three in-depth interviews between 2007 and 2016. Kids in the survey had their first interview at age 9, the second at 13 and the third at 17 or 18. The OSU study compared 88 children with autism to 88 children without autism over the nine-year survey period to gauge both how physical activity changed over time, and how much ...

Oxygen evolution reaction (OER), as a vital half-reaction in some clean energy storage and conversion technologies including rechargeable metal-air batteries, regenerative fuel cells and electrochemical water splitting, has been of crucial importance for exploring highly efficient sustainable energy to substitute exhaustible fossil fuels. Among them, electrochemical water splitting can effectively produce clean and reproducible hydrogen fuels through renewable energy sources as power input like solar energy, etc. Unfortunately, the efficiency of water splitting is mainly impeded by the high anodic overpotential of OER, in which seeking efficient and stable electrocatalysts is highly desirable. It has been considered that spinel-structure materials can be meaningful alternative catalysts ...

Tsunamis are one of the most destructive disasters in the ocean. Large tsunamis are mostly generated by earthquakes, and they can propagate across the ocean without significantly losing energy. During the shoaling process in coastal areas, the wave amplitude increases dramatically, causing severe life loss and property damage. There have been frequent tsunamis since the 21st century, drawing the attention of many countries on the study of tsunami mechanism and warning. Tsunami records also play an essential role in deriving earthquake rupture models in subduction zones. A recent paper entitled "Tsunamis and tsunami warning: recent progress and future prospects" by Dr. Chao An from Shanghai Jiao Tong University reviews the recent research progress of earthquake-generated ...

Sedative medications used in intensive care are associated with increased delirium, which is in turn connected with higher medical costs and greater risk of death and ICU-related dementia. A study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine provides the most definitive evidence to date that, of the two drugs recommended for light sedation of patients receiving mechanical ventilation in the ICU, one is as effective and safe as the other. Mechanical ventilation is a life-saving intervention often involving a breathing tube inserted in the patient's windpipe, typically entailing light sedation to quell the attendant discomfort, anxiety and psychological stress. Several studies have sought evidence of which ...

Boston, Mass. - COVID-19 has caused more than 2 million deaths worldwide since the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic in March 2020. Patients with severe COVID-19 frequently experience respiratory distress and require assistance breathing. For patients whose lungs are so injured that even a ventilator is unable to deliver enough oxygen, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) -- which does the work of the lungs by removing carbon dioxide and adding oxygen to blood outside the body -- may improve the odds of survival for certain patients with severe COVID-19. A study by physician-researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) provides new evidence that critically ill patients with ...

FOLSOM, Calif., February 2, 2021 - Researchers, from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in collaboration with investigators from Rovira i Virgili University and the University of Navarra, Spain, used machine learning models, a subset of artificial intelligence, to identify more precisely the components in walnuts that may be responsible for potentially reducing the risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases - two of the leading causes of death in the U.S. This study, supported by the California Walnut Commission and published in the Journal of Nutrition, used a novel machine learning model to identify 19 metabolites that were associated with walnut consumption. The body forms specific metabolites based on what food is consumed. The walnut ...

Over the last three decades, the United States prison population has exploded from 300,000 to more than 2 million. More than 1.1 million are African American men - the vast number of whom have returned within one to three years of their release. In fact, according to the World Prison Brief, America boasts the highest recidivism rate at more than 50 percent. Although African American men are more likely to participate in re-entry programs, they continue to struggle with recidivism and reunification at higher rates. The common conception of assisting individuals impacted by incarceration is to provide practical needs such as housing, food and employment. Often, these services are insufficient when the core of their issues is related to psychological factors. ...

Scientists at The Marine Mammal Center - the world's largest marine mammal hospital - have found that viral-caused cancer in adult California sea lions is significantly increased by their exposure to toxins in the environment. The study is the result of over 20 years of research and examination of nearly 400 California sea lion patients by The Marine Mammal Center. The Marine Mammal Center has been on the forefront of researching and understanding cancer in California sea lions and its connection to both ocean and human health. Since the cancer in sea lions was first discovered in 1979, between 18-23 percent of adult sea lions admitted to the Center's hospital have died of the fatal disease - the ...