A new national study finds that children in the United States with greater screen time usage at ages 9-10 are more likely to gain weight one year later. The study, publishing in Pediatric Obesity on June 28, found that each additional hour spent on virtually all forms of screen time was associated with a higher body mass index (BMI) one year later. In particular, researchers found that each extra hour spent watching or streaming television, YouTube videos, video games, video chat, and texting led to a higher risk of weight gain one year later. At the start of the study, 33.7% of children were considered overweight ...

Scientists isolated a molecule, extracted from the leaves of the European chestnut tree, with the power to neutralize dangerous, drug-resistant staph bacteria. Frontiers in Pharmacology published the finding, led by scientists at Emory University. The researchers dubbed the molecule Castaneroxy A, after the genus of the European chestnut, Castanea. The use of chestnut leaves in traditional folk remedies in rural Italy inspired the research. "We were able to isolate this molecule, new to science, that occurs only in very tiny quantities in the chestnut leaves," says Cassandra Quave, senior author of the paper and associate professor in Emory's Center for the Study of Human Health and the School of Medicine's ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Mountaintop glacier ice in the tropics of all four hemispheres covers significantly less area -- in one case as much as 93% less -- than it did just 50 years ago, a new study has found. The study, published online recently in the journal Global and Planetary Change, found that a glacier near Puncak Jaya, in Papua New Guinea, lost about 93% of its ice over a 38-year period from 1980 to 2018. Between 1986 and 2017 the area covered by glaciers on top of Kilimanjaro in Africa decreased by nearly 71%. The study is the first to combine NASA satellite imagery with data from ice cores drilled during field expeditions on tropical ...

Cunjiang Yu, Bill D. Cook Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, is reporting the development of a camera with a curvy, adaptable imaging sensor that could improve image quality in endoscopes, night-vision goggles, artificial compound eyes and fish-eye cameras. "Existing curvy imagers are either flexible but not compatible with tunable focal surfaces, or stretchable but with low pixel density and pixel fill factors," reports Yu in Nature Electronics. "The new imager with kirigami design has a high pixel fill factor, before stretching, of 78% and can retain its optoelectronic performance while being biaxially stretched by 30%." Modern digital camera systems using conventional rigid, flat imaging sensors require ...

The world's human population is expanding, which means even more agricultural land will be needed to provide food for this growing population. However, choosing which areas to convert is difficult and depends on agricultural and environmental priorities, which can vary widely. A study led by Princeton University illustrates this challenge by using several different approaches to solve the same puzzle: Given a target amount of food, where should new croplands be put to minimize environmental or biodiversity impacts? The researchers used the country of Zambia as a case study given that it currently harbors a significant ...

PHILADELPHA--Patients who had their wisdom teeth extracted had improved tasting abilities decades after having the surgery, a new Penn Medicine study published in the journal Chemical Senses found. The findings challenge the notion that removal of wisdom teeth, known as third molars, only has the potential for negative effects on taste, and represent one of the first studies to analyze the long-term effects of extraction on taste. "Prior studies have only pointed to adverse effects on taste after extraction and it has been generally believed that those effects dissipate over time," said senior author Richard L. Doty, PhD, ...

Annapolis, MD; June 28, 2021--Drones keep getting smaller and smaller, while their potential applications keep getting bigger and bigger. And now unmanned aircraft systems are taking on some of the world's biggest small problems: insect pests. From crop-munching caterpillars to disease-transmitting mosquitoes, insects that threaten crops, ecosystems, and public health are increasingly being targeted with new pest-management strategies that deploy unmanned aircraft systems (UAS, or drones) for detection and control. And a variety of these applications are featured in a new special collection published this week in ...

A new study has found baby coral reef fishes can outpace all other baby fishes in the ocean. Lead author Adam Downie is a PhD candidate at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University (Coral CoE at JCU). Mr Downie said when considering aquatic athletes, young coral reef fishes shine: they are some of the fastest babies, swimming around 15-40 body lengths per second. As a comparison, herring babies swim up to two body lengths per second, and the fastest human in the water, Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps, can only swim 1.4 body lengths ...

The year 2020 was a period of economic hardship and significant change in a wide range of sectors for most countries. A team of authors from HSE University has explored how Russia will recover from this crisis and which industries will be affected by the economic recovery. Their study was published in the journal Voprosy ekonomiki. Last year, the global economy experienced a crisis due to the coronavirus pandemic, with output falling by 3.5% compared to 2019. Russia's decline from the coronavirus measures was more moderate than in many developed countries (industrial ...

Almost all of the nitrogen that fertilizes life in the open ocean of the Gulf of Mexico is carried into the gulf from shallower coastal areas, researchers from Florida State University found. The work, published in Nature Communications, is crucial to understanding the food web of that ecosystem, which is a spawning ground for several commercially valuable species of fish, including the Atlantic bluefin tuna, which was a focus of the research. "The open-ocean Gulf of Mexico is important for a lot of reasons," said Michael Stukel, an associate professor in the Department of Earth, ...

LAWRENCE -- Despite facing cultural and political pushback, the evidence remains clear: Face masks made a difference in Kansas. "These had a huge effect in counties that had a mask mandate," said Donna Ginther, the Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of Economics and director of the Institute for Policy & Social Research at the University of Kansas. "Our research found that masks reduced cases, hospitalizations and deaths in counties that adopted them by around 60% across the board." Ginther's article "Association of Mask Mandates and COVID-19 ...

Washington, DC--Location, location, location--when it comes to the placement of wind turbines, the old real estate adage applies, according to new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Carnegie's Enrico Antonini and Ken Caldeira. Turbines convert the wind's kinetic energy into electrical energy as they turn. However, the very act of installing turbines affects our ability to harness the wind's power. As a turbine engages with the wind, it affects it. One turbine's extraction of energy from the wind influences the ability of its neighbors to do the same. "Wind is never going to 'run dry' as an energy resource, but our ability to harvest it isn't infinitely scalable either," Antonini explained. "When wind turbines ...

The ability to precisely control the various properties of laser light is critical to much of the technology that we use today, from commercial virtual reality (VR) headsets to microscopic imaging for biomedical research. Many of today's laser systems rely on separate, rotating components to control the wavelength, shape and power of a laser beam, making these devices bulky and difficult to maintain. Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed a single metasurface that can effectively tune the different properties of laser light, ...

In the context of recent debate over the FDA's approval of aducanumab, it's refreshing to learn about a model of Alzheimer's neurodegeneration that doesn't start with the pathogenic proteins amyloid or Tau. A new paper in Alzheimer's & Dementia from Emory neuroscientist Shan Ping Yu and colleagues focuses on an unusual member of the family of NMDA receptors, signaling molecules that are critical for learning and memory. Their findings contain leads for additional research on Alzheimer's, including drugs that are already FDA-approved that could be used preventively, and genes ...

Deployable structures -- objects that transition from a compact state to an expanded one -- are used everywhere from backyards to Mars. But as anyone who has ever struggled to open an uncooperative folding chair knows, transforming two-dimensional forms into three-dimensional structures is sometimes a challenge. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Harvard Graduate School of Design have developed a deployable system that is light, compact, inexpensive, easy to manufacture, and, most importantly, easy to deploy. By harnessing the mechanical instabilities in curved beams, the system can transform objects into elaborate and customizable 3D configurations on a range of scales, from large-scale furniture to small medical ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: Subsurface carbon sequestration--storing carbon in rocks deep underground--offers a partial solution for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Used alongside emissions reductions, geologic carbon sequestration could help mitigate anthropogenic climate change. But like other underground operations, it comes with risks--including earthquakes. Geophysicists are still working to understand what can trigger human-induced earthquakes, which have been documented since the 1960s. A new study, published in Geology on Thursday, explores why part of a heavily produced oilfield in the U.S. has ...

Middle ear infections, also known as otitis media, affect more than 80% of the children in the U.S. In a new study, researchers have designed a miniaturized 3D-printed device to inactivate Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a common bacterium that causes the infection. The device--a microplasma jet array--generates plasma, which is composed of charged particles and reactive molecules that have been previously shown to inactivate various pathogens. "This is the first time anyone has tried treating middle ear infections using plasma technology," said Jungeun Won, a graduate student in the Boppart lab. "Usually, the treatment involves using ...

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. - According to researchers at Marshall University, a maternal diet rich in Omega-3 fatty acids protects from breast cancer development in offspring. In a new study recently published by Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, researchers noted a significant difference in mice from mothers that were fed a diet rich in canola oil, compared with mothers fed a diet rich in corn oil. A maternal Omega 3-rich diet affected genome-wide epigenetic landscape changes in offspring and potentially modulated gene expression patterns. Dr. Ata Abbas, a former postdoctoral research fellow in Marshall's Department of Biological Sciences, headed a research team under the leadership ...

New Brunswick, N.J. (June 28, 2021) - A Rutgers-led study sheds new light on the evolution of photosynthesis in plants and algae, which could help to improve crop production. The paper appears in the journal New Phytologist. The scientists reviewed research on the photosynthetic amoeba Paulinella, which is a model to explore a fundamental question about eukaryote evolution: why was there a single origin of algae and plants? That is, why did photosynthesis by primary plastid endosymbiosis not originate multiple times in the tree of life? Photosynthesis is the process by which plants and other organisms use sunlight to synthesize ...

A first-of-its-kind longitudinal study of infant curiosity found that months-old babies most captivated by magic tricks became the most curious toddlers, suggesting a pre-verbal baby's level of interest in surprising aspects of the world remains constant over time and could predict their future cognitive ability. "Something about a baby's curiosity about magic tricks is predicting how curious they become as preschoolers," said Lisa Feigenson, co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Laboratory for Child Development. "What the data suggest is that some three-year-olds have a leg up or seem particularly well positioned to learn a lot about the world." The findings appear today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Until this study, little was known about curiosity ...

New Brunswick, N.J. (June 28, 2021) - COVID-19's socio-economic effects will likely cause another severe production crisis in the coffee industry, according to a Rutgers University-led study. The study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, included researchers from the University of Arizona, University of Hawaii at Hilo, CIRAD, Santa Clara University, Purdue University West Lafayette and University of Exeter. "Any major impacts in the global coffee industry will have serious implications for millions of people across the globe, including the coffee retail ...

An Australian mammal thought to have been wiped out over 150 years ago can now be crossed off our list of extinct animals, following a new study. Researchers compared DNA samples fromeight extinct Australian rodents, as well as 42 of their living relatives, to look at the decline of native species since the arrival of Europeans in Australia. The study showed the extinctGould's mouse was indistinguishable from the Shark Bay mouse, still found on several small islands off the coast of Western Australia. According to lead author Dr Emily Roycroft ...

Scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding the process that leads to a blood clot forming in the lungs - a condition that kills more than two thousand people in the UK each year. The clot forms a pulmonary embolism or blockage, cutting off blood flow to major blood vessels in the lungs. In many cases, the blockage is caused by fragments that have broken away from a blood clot elsewhere in the body, such as a deep vein thrombosis in one of the legs. The fragments are transported to the lungs via the blood stream. In a paper published today (28 June) in the scientific ...

The billions of microbes living in your gut could play a key role in supporting the formation of new nerve cells in the adult brain, with the potential to possibly prevent memory loss in old age and help to repair and renew nerve cells after injury, an international research team spanning Singapore, UK, Australia, Canada, US, and Sweden has discovered. The international investigating team led by Principal Investigator Professor Sven Pettersson, National Neuroscience Institute of Singapore, and Visiting Professor at Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), and Sunway University, Malaysia, found that gut microbes that metabolise tryptophan - an essential amino acid - secrete small molecules called ...

Researchers from Tallinn University of Technology, Grete Raba, Signe Adamberg, and Kaarel Adamberg showed that an acidic environment enhances the production of butyric acid from apple pectin by faecal bacterial consortia - microbiota. Pectin is a dietary fibre abundant in apples, berries, fruits, and vegetables. Pectin is used in jellies and desserts. As human digestive enzymes are not able to degrade pectin, it is metabolized by the microbes of the large intestine. The main conclusions of the research, published in FEMS Microbiology Letters, was the importance of environmental acidity (pH) on the composition and metabolism of colon bacteria. The colonic pH is, however, strongly related to one's diet. Fibre-rich diets that contain plenty of whole-grain ...