Although the problem of gender discrimination is already found in the music industry, music recommendation algorithms would be increasing the gender gap. Andrés Ferraro and Xavier Serra, researchers of the Music Technology research group (MTG) of the UPF Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC), with Christine Bauer, of the University of Utrecht (Netherlands), have recently published a paper on gender balance in music recommendation systems in which they ask themselves how the system should work to avoid gender bias. At the outset, the authors identified that gender justice was one of the artists' main concerns Initially, the work by Ferraro, Serra and Bauer ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (04/20/2021) -- University of Minnesota Medical School researchers have offered new ways to think about the immune system thanks to a recent study published in END ...

PHILADELPHIA - Renter protection policies that have curbed mass evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic have played a key role in preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in U.S. cities, according to a new study published in Nature Communications. Using an epidemiological model to predict how evictions and eviction moratoria would impact the epidemic, the researchers found, for instance, that in a city of 1 million in which 1 percent of households experience eviction monthly, this could lead to up to 49,000 excess COVID-19 infections. In Philadelphia alone, a fivefold increase in ...

An overgrowth of yeast in the gut within the first few months of life may cause changes to the immune system that increase the risk of asthma later on, shows a study published today in eLife. Asthma is a common and sometimes difficult-to-manage, life-long lung condition that affects one in 10 children in developed countries. The findings explain a possible cause of asthma and may help scientists develop new strategies to prevent or treat the condition. The period just after birth is a critical window for the development of a healthy immune system and gut microbiome. ...

Charcot Marie Tooth and Dejerine-Sottas syndrome are groups of diseases that involve the breakdown of the myelin sheath covering nerve axons. As this myelin sheath breaks down, people who have these disorders suffer nerve damage in the arms and legs--those with Dejerine-Sottas disease may never walk or may lose the ability to walk by the time they are teenagers. Researchers have known that a protein called PMP22, which is important for nerve myelin, is likely involved in the disease. But because the protein is so small and part of the cell membrane, ...

Scientists have produced a comprehensive roadmap of muscle aging in mice that could be used to find treatments that prevent decline in muscle mobility and function, according to a report published today in eLife. The study reveals which molecules in the muscle are most significantly altered at different life stages, and shows that a molecule called Klotho, when administered to mice in old, but not very old, age, was able to improve muscle strength. Age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass and function - called sarcopenia - is associated with loss of mobility and increased risk of falls. Yet, although scientists know how sarcopenia affects the appearance and behaviour of muscle tissues, the underlying molecular mechanisms for sarcopenia remain poorly understood. Current treatments ...

Diodes are widely used electronic devices that act as one-way switches for current. A well-known example is the LED (light-emitting diode), but there is a special class of diodes designed to make use of the phenomenon known as “quantum tunneling”. Called resonant-tunneling diodes (RTDs), they are among the fastest semiconductor devices and are used in countless practical applications, such as high-frequency oscillators in the terahertz band, wave emitters, wave detectors, and logic gates, to take only a few examples. RTDs are also sensitive to light and can be used as photodetectors or optically active elements in optoelectronic circuits. Quantum tunneling (or the tunnel ...

Philadelphia, April 20, 2021 - Intestinal epithelial tight junctions (TJs) act as a functional and structural barrier against harmful antigens that promote intestinal inflammation in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and other inflammatory conditions of the gut. A defective intestinal TJ barrier, sometimes known as "leaky gut," plays an important role in exacerbating and prolonging intestinal inflammation. New research reported in The American Journal of Pathology, published by Elsevier, shows that the probiotic Lactobacillus acidophilus (L. acidophilus) strain known as LA1 can generate a rapid and sustained enhancement of this defective intestinal barrier and effectively treat intestinal inflammation by preserving and restoring ...

Current national strategies for bridge maintenance favor replacement over maintenance. A fairly simple depreciation formula is used, resulting in overly conservative assessments of a bridge's long-term health. In a study published in the American Society of Civil Engineers' Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities, researchers from UGA's College of Engineering propose a new model for the first time. This new approach considers the interaction of 60 to 80 bridge components in predicting long-term bridge performance and focuses on maintenance instead of replacement. "Rather than considering a bridge as a monolithic structure, the bridge coactive model assesses a bridge as a system in which changes in the condition of each coactive element not only directly affects the ...

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - The fearsome tyrannosaur dinosaurs that ruled the northern hemisphere during the Late Cretaceous period (66-100 million years ago) may not have been solitary predators as popularly envisioned, but social carnivores similar to wolves, according to a new study. The finding, based on research at a unique fossil bone site inside Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument containing the remains of several dinosaurs of the same species, was made by a team of scientists including Celina Suarez, University of Arkansas associate professor of geosciences. "This supports our hypothesis ...

TAMPA, Fla (April 20, 2021) — Chaperone protein imbalance can play a significant role in initiating toxic accumulation of tau in the aging brain - an early step in the development of Alzheimer's disease and related neurodegenerative disorders known as tauopathies, a new preclinical study by University of South Florida Health (USF Health) neuroscientists suggests. In humans, misfolding of the protein tau leads to its toxic accumulation inside brain cells, the formation of these tau aggregates into hallmark neurofibrillary tangles, neuron death, and eventually symptoms of cognitive decline such as memory loss and diminished thinking skills. In this study the ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., April 19, 2021 -- A recent series of experiments at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (National MagLab) at Los Alamos National Laboratory leveraged some of the nation's highest-powered nondestructive magnets to reveal an exotic new phase of matter at high magnetic fields. The experiments studied the unusual Kondo insulator ytterbium dodecaboride (or YbB12) and were the first results from the new 75-tesla duplex magnet housed at the National MagLab's Pulsed Field Facility at Los Alamos. "This magnet and the resulting experiments are the first fruits of the National Science Foundation-supported pulsed magnet surge," said Michael Rabin, director of the Pulsed Field Facility at Los ...

Radiation at terahertz frequencies (wavelengths between 0.03 and 0.3 mm) can be used successfully to analyze the structural dynamics of water and biomolecules. But applying the technique to aqueous solutions and tissues remains challenging, since terahertz (THz) radiation is strongly absorbed by water. While this absorption enables certain analyses, such as the structure of water and its interactions with biological solutes, it limits the thickness of samples that can be analyzed, and it drowns out weaker signals from biomolecules of interest. Strong absorption of THz ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Four decades after their capture more than a half-mile below the ocean's surface, three snailfish species have received their scientific names, two of them from school children on Guam in the island's native Chamorro language. The rare specimens of liparids were collected in the early 1980s in traps set in the Mariana Archipelago in the western Pacific Ocean, deposited with NOAA's Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center in Hawaii and did not get examined until recently, when they were noticed during the center's move to a new location. ...

As the back-to-school rush begins, podiatry experts at the University of South Australia are encouraging parents to get their children's school shoes professionally fitted, as new research confirms that ill-fitted footwear can significantly impede foot movement and comfort. In a new study, researchers tested the effect of shoe size on foot motion and comfort among children aged 8 to 12 years, finding that shoes that were one size too small restricted the normal movement of the heel, arch and big toe joint during walking. The study also confirmed that a comfortable shoe fit can be determined by a 'rule of thumb', where the wearer's thumb width from their longest toe to the end of their shoe is an effective and accurate measure ...

Metals are one of the most widely used materials in the world - they are used in cookware, tools, electric appliances, electric wires, computer chips, jewelry and so on. With the growing demand for metal products, it is crucial to promote sustainable and environmentally-friendly methods of recycling metal waste to help reduce the environmental impact of using metals in the economy. The conventional approaches for recycling metal waste are energy intensive and some of these methods also generate environmentally harmful by-products, such as ammonia and methane during aluminium recycling. To address this challenge, a team of researchers from the National ...

With inherent orthogonality, both SAMs and OAMs of light have been utilized to expand the dimensions of optical communications and signal processing, wherein unambiguous SAM and OAM identification is one of the significant topics. Conventional sorting approaches suffer from complicated optical setups, multiple bulky devices, repeated projection measurements, and cannot simultaneously distinguish SAM and OAM. In a new paper published in Light Science & Application, a team of scientists, led by Professor Xiangang Luo from State Key Laboratory of Optical Technologies on Nano-Fabrication and Micro-Engineering, Institute of Optics and Electronics Chinese Academy of Sciences, and co-workers have showed that a single spin-decoupled metasurface that merges the geometric ...

Hand, Foot & Mouth Disease (HFMD) is a generally mild, contagious viral infection common in young children. In Singapore, HFMD is endemic and is most commonly caused by intestinal viruses known as coxsackieviruses and enteroviruses. While most HFMD patients experience common symptoms such as sore throat, fever, ulcers inside the mouth and blisters and lesions on the palms and soles, infection with Enterovirus-A71 (EV-A71) may lead to serious neurological complications that can be potentially fatal or lead to long-term neurological deficits (cognitive and motor deficits). These complicated HFMD cases are mainly seen in young children. Researchers from NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine's Infectious Diseases ...

New FLEET research confirms the potential for topological materials to substantially reduce the energy consumed by computing. The collaboration of FLEET researchers from University of Wollongong, Monash University and UNSW have shown in a theoretical study that using topological insulators rather than conventional semiconductors to make transistors could reduce the gate voltage by half, and the energy used by each transistor by a factor of four. To accomplish this, they had to find a way to overcome the famous 'Boltzmann's tyranny' that puts a lower limit on transistor switching energy. They found a surprising result: gate voltage applied to a topological insulator could create a barrier to electron flow larger than the voltage itself times the electron charge, ...

Chronic pain is among the most common chronic conditions in the United States, but estimates of its prevalence and impact vary widely. In 2019, the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added a new set of questions relating to pain to its National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), a large household-based annual survey that offers valuable insights into the health statuses of U.S. adults nationwide. In an article published in Pain, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Mass Eye and Ear report that 50.2 million (20.5 percent) ...

Durham, NC - A phase 2 clinical trial whose results were released today in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine might point to a way to overcome bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), a major cause of death in preterm infants. The study, conducted by researchers at Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University and Asan Medical Center Children's Hospital in Seoul, evaluates the effectiveness of treating these infants by transplanting umbilical cord blood-derived mesenchymal stem cells (UCB-MSCs) directly into their tracheas. Early results showed signs of improvement for the most immature infants included in the trial. BPD is a serious breathing disorder in which the lungs do not develop normally. Most infants who develop BPD are born more than ...

Embargoed press materials are now available for the virtual Experimental Biology (EB) 2021 meeting, featuring cutting-edge multidisciplinary research from across the life sciences. EB 2021, to be held April 27-30, is the annual meeting of five scientific societies bringing together thousands of scientists and 25 guest societies in one interdisciplinary community. Complete a Press Registration Form for complimentary meeting registration and full access to our virtual newsroom. We encourage advance registration as it may take up to a day to receive access. Join Our Virtual Press Conference Reporters are invited to join a live Q&A discussion of selected research announcements during a virtual EB press conference held ...

Eyes play an important role in social communication by expressing the intentions of our interlocutors, and even more so in times of pandemic when half of the face is hidden. But is this eye contact automatic and rapid? Is it based on a priority attentional reaction or, on the contrary, on a particular emotional reaction? To answer these questions, researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, looked at the way we process human gaze, focusing on the estimation of the temporal duration of social interactions. They discovered that when we make eye contact with another person, our attention is directly solicited, causing a distortion in our temporal perception. As a result, time seems shorter than it really is. ...

A biomimicking "spiking" neural network on a microchip has enabled KAUST researchers to lay the foundation for developing more efficient hardware-based artificial intelligence computing systems. Artificial intelligence technology is developing rapidly, with an explosion of new applications across advanced automation, data mining and interpretation, healthcare and marketing, to name a few. Such systems are based on a mathematical artificial neural network (ANN) composed of layers of decision-making nodes. Labeled data is first fed into the system to "train" the model to respond a certain way, then ...

LA JOLLA, CALIF. - April 20, 2021 Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys have identified, at an atomic level, how a part of a protein called PLEKHA7 interacts with a cell's membrane to regulate important intercellular communications. The research, published in the journal Structure, points to hotspots within PLEKHA7 as targets for drugs. These targets could be key in designing treatments for advanced colon, breast and ovarian cancers. The region, or domain, in PLEKHA7 that the researchers examined, pleckstrin homology (PH), is commonly found in proteins ...