With the recent development of foldable mobile phone screens, research on foldable electronics has never been so intensive. One particularly useful application of the foldable technology is in solar panels. Current solar cells are restricted to rigid, flat panels, which are difficult to store in large numbers and integrate into everyday appliances, including phones, windows, vehicles, or indoor devices. But, one problem prevents this formidable technology from breaking through: to be integrated into these items, solar cells need to be foldable, to bend at will repeatedly without breaking. Traditional conducting materials used in ...

MAX-phases are the new promising class of artificially created compounds that started to be extensively studied in the last two decades. They are a family of ternary layered compounds with the general formula Mn+1AXn (n = 1, 2, 3 ...), where M is an early transition metal (Sc, Ti, V, Cr, et cetera; elements from the left side of the d-block of the periodic table from group III to group VII); A -- an element from group IIIA or IVA (the most common are Al, Ga, Si, Ge); X is carbon or nitrogen, that is, the MAX phase is carbide or nitride, respectively. Due to their structure and composition, ternary layered carbides and nitrides of d- and p-elements have a unique combination of physical properties. These compounds have high electrical and heat conductivity ...

One of the many mysteries still surrounding COVID-19 is why some people experience only mild, flu-like symptoms, whereas others suffer life-threatening respiratory problems, vascular dysfunction and tissue damage. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Analytical Chemistry have used a combination of metabolomics and machine learning to identify possible biomarkers that could both help diagnose COVID-19 and assess the risk of developing severe illness. Although some pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes or obesity, can increase the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19, some otherwise healthy people have also experienced ...

If you watch the leaves of a plant long enough, you may see them shift and turn toward the sunlight through the day. It happens slowly, but surely. Some man-made materials can mimic this slow but steady reaction to light energy, usually triggered by lasers or focused ambient light. New research from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University has discovered a way to speed up this effect enough that its performance can compete against electrical and pneumatic systems. "We wanted to create machines where light is the only source of energy and direction," explained M. Ravi Shankar, professor of industrial engineering and senior author of the paper. "The challenge is that while we could get some movement and actuation with light-driven polymers, ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - The Columbia River basin will see an increase in flooding over the next 50 years as a result of climate change, new modeling from Oregon State University indicates. The magnitude of flooding - the term used to describe flooding severity - is expected to increase throughout the basin, which includes the Columbia, Willamette and Snake rivers and hundreds of tributaries. In some areas, the flooding season will expand, as well. "The flood you're used to seeing out your window once every 10 years will likely be larger than it has been in the past," said the study's lead author, Laura Queen, a research assistant at OSU's Oregon Climate Change Research Institute. ...

A team of scientists from Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University with their colleagues from the Institute of Ecology and Genetics of Microorganisms of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Perm) studied the effect of trophoblastic β1-glycoprotein in the blood of pregnant women on pro-inflammatory immune cells. Thanks to trophoblastic β1-glycoprotein, a woman's body does not adversely react to the fetus and supports its normal development until birth. It turned out that trophoblastic β1-glycoproteins also suppressed the development of pro-inflammatory lymphocytes ...

Exposure to some odorless, colorless and tasteless gases, such as nerve agents, can be toxic or even lethal. And having the ability to detect other types of vapors could save people from eating spoiled or rotten food. Easy-to-use portable devices could, therefore, go a long way toward protecting the public. Now researchers reporting in ACS Materials Letters have created a pen-like sensor that changes color when exposed to harmful gases. Humans can't detect many toxic vapors, such as poisonous nerve agents or volatile amines released from spoiled foods, so a sensor that can notice these gases' very minute concentrations would be useful. Fluorescence-based sensors are a potential solution because they are inexpensive and can reveal trace amounts of compounds. However, some fluorescing ...

CHICAGO --- Northwestern University's Noshir Contractor will discuss team problem-solving and human systems integration for Mars exploration at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting. At a AAAS press briefing at 12 p.m. ET, Wednesday, Feb. 10, Contractor will discuss recent findings and opportunities for social science research on astronauts as exploration advances into deep space. The embargo will lift at the time of the press briefing. In addition, he will present "Pairing Teams for, and (Re)pairing Teams During, Long-Duration Space Exploration" at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, Feb. 11 ...

Political polarization is having far-reaching impacts on American life, harming consumer welfare and creating challenges for people ranging from elected officials and policymakers to corporate executives and marketers. That's one of the conclusions of a new scholarly paper by researchers from the University of Wyoming and five other universities across the country. The paper appears in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing of the American Marketing Association. "I think we're all aware of how political polarization has affected our elections and system of government, but the impacts go far beyond the political arena," ...

Oncotarget recently published "Evaluation of cancer-derived myocardial impairments using a mouse model" which reported that Myocardial damage in cancer patients is emphasized as a cause of death; however, there are not many murine cachexia models to evaluate cancer-derived heart disorder. Using the mouse cachexia model that they established previously, the authors investigated myocardial damage in tumor-bearing mice. When rat cardiomyoblasts were treated with mouse cachexia model ascites and subjected to flux analysis, both oxidative phosphorylation and glycolysis were suppressed, and the cells were in a quiescent state. These results are in good agreement with those previously reported on cancerous myocardial damage. The established mouse cachexia ...

Amsterdam, NL, February 10, 2021 - Neuroplasticity, the remarkable ability of the brain to modify and reorganize itself, is affected by or in response to excessive alcohol, whether through individual consumption or exposure in the womb. It is now well accepted that the birth and integration of new neurons continue beyond development and into adulthood. New discoveries and insights on how alcohol impacts this and other plastic processes are discussed in " END ...

10th of February, Wednesday, Hong Kong - Deep Longevity, a fully-owned subsidiary of Regent Pacific (SEHK:0575.HK), specializing in the development and the application of next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) for aging and longevity research, today announced the publication of an article in Lancet Healthy Longevity titled "The potential of rapalogs to enhance resilience against SARS-CoV-2 infection and reduce the severity of COVID-19". While the pandemic continues to unfold, targeted therapeutic solutions for COVID-19 are still not established. The extremely rapid development of various vaccines as a preventative approach provides ...

New Rochelle, NY, February 9, 2021--The rapid upscaling of a telemonitoring program in which health care providers performed daily telemedicine check-ins on COVID-19 patients faced a unique set of challenges. How these were resolved, and early outcomes are reported in the peer-reviewed journal Telemedicine and e-Health, Click here to read the article now. "Kaiser Permanente's Virtual Home Care Program (VHCP) was able to rapidly establish a telemedicine-based program for the management of COVID-19 positive patients in the DC and Baltimore Metro regions. Preliminary data suggest that such a program may be effective ...

Mini-Neptunes and super-Earths up to four times the size of our own are the most common exoplanets orbiting stars beyond our solar system. Until now, super-Earths were thought to be the rocky cores of mini-Neptunes whose gassy atmospheres were blown away. In a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, astronomers from McGill University show that some of these exoplanets never had gaseous atmospheres to begin with, shedding new light on their mysterious origins. From observations, we know about 30 to 50 percent of host stars have one or the other, and the two populations appear in about equal proportion. But where did they come from? One theory is that most exoplanets ...

Lung ultrasound, considered a simple method for diagnosing lung disease, can also help predict the clinical progression of severe COVID-19 patients, according to a study conducted at the University of São Paulo's Medical School (FM-USP) in São Paulo City, Brazil. The principal investigator for the study was Heraldo Possolo de Souza, a professor at FM-USP and an attending physician at its teaching and general hospital, Hospital das Clínicas (HC). The researchers applied an ultrasound examination protocol covering 12 lung regions in 180 COVID-19 patients undergoing treatment at HC. The results showed that the higher the lung ultrasound score, the greater the risk of admission to an intensive care unit (ICU), intubation, and death. The study was supported ...

Gulls are one of the main wild birds that act as reservoirs of Campylobacter and Salmonella, two most relevant intestinal antibiotic-resistant bacteria causing gastroenteritis in humans. Therefore, according to an article published in the journal Science of the Total Environment seagulls could act as sentinels of the antibiotic pressure in the environment. The study was carried out by experts of the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona, and the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology (IRTA). Resistant bacteria to antibiotics represent a serious problem for human health and other species since they can harden the treatment ...

BOSTON - How often a person takes daytime naps, if at all, is partly regulated by their genes, according to new research led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and published in Nature Communications. In this study, the largest of its kind ever conducted, the MGH team collaborated with colleagues at the University of Murcia in Spain and several other institutions to identify dozens of gene regions that govern the tendency to take naps during the day. They also uncovered preliminary evidence linking napping habits to cardiometabolic health. "Napping is somewhat controversial," says Hassan Saeed Dashti, PhD, RD, of the MGH Center for Genomic Medicine, co-lead author of the report with Iyas Daghlas, a medical student at ...

Alongside the effects of lifestyle, including physical exercise and diet, on ageing, research has increasingly turned its attention to the potential cognitive benefits of musical hobbies. However, such research has mainly concentrated on hobbies involving musical instruments. The cognitive benefits of playing an instrument are already fairly well known: such activity can improve cognitive flexibility, or the ability to regulate and switch focus between different thought processes. However, the cognitive benefits of choir singing have so far been investigated very little. Now, a study recently ...

BOSTON - When patients arrive in emergency departments and hospitals with symptoms consistent with COVID-19, it's critical to isolate them to avoid the potential spread of infection, but keeping patients isolated longer than needed could delay patient care, take up hospital beds needed for other patients, and unnecessarily use up personal protective equipment. A team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has now created a tool to guide frontline clinicians through diagnostic evaluations of such patients so that they'll know when it's safe to discontinue precautions. The tool was developed and validated in a study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases. In the spring of 2020, due to the risk of false-negative ...

UPTON, NY--Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stony Brook University (SBU), and other collaborating institutions have uncovered dynamic, atomic-level details of how an important platinum-based catalyst works in the water gas shift reaction. This reaction transforms carbon monoxide (CO) and water (H2O) into carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen gas (H2)--an important step in producing and purifying hydrogen for multiple applications, including use as a clean fuel in fuel-cell vehicles, and in the production of hydrocarbons. But because ...

A team of Russian scientists from NUST MISIS, Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) and Boreskov Institute of Catalysis has suggested a new approach to modifying the combustion behavior of coal. The addition of copper salts reduces the content of unburnt carbon in ash residue by 3.1 times and CO content in the gaseous combustion products by 40%, the scientists found. The research was published in Fuel Processing Technology. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), coal is the predominant energy resource used as the primary fuel for power generation. According to reports, coal supplied over one-third of global electricity generation in ...

Oncotarget published "Combination of copanlisib with cetuximab improves tumor response in cetuximab-resistant patient-derived xenografts of head and neck cancer" which reported that HNSCC is frequently associated with either amplification or mutational changes in the PI3K pathway, making PI3K an attractive target, particularly in cetuximab-resistant tumors. Here, the authors explored the antitumor activity of the selective, pan-class I PI3K inhibitor copanlisib with predominant activity towards PI3Kα and δ in monotherapy and in combination with cetuximab using a mouse clinical trial set-up with 33 patient-derived xenograft models with known HPV and PI3K mutational status and available data ...

Scientists and public health experts have long known that certain individuals, termed "super-spreaders," can transmit COVID-19 with incredible efficiency and devastating consequences. Now, researchers at Tulane University, Harvard University, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have learned that obesity, age and COVID-19 infection correlate with a propensity to breathe out more respiratory droplets -- key spreaders of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Their findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using data from an observational study of 194 healthy people and an experimental study of nonhuman primates with COVID-19, researchers found that exhaled aerosol particles vary greatly ...

(New York, NY) February 10, 2021 - A research team led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (Icahn Mount Sinai) has built the first cellular model to depict the evolution of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), from its early to late stages. By using gene editing technologies to alter genes that make cells malignant, the team was able to identify potential therapeutic targets for early disease stages. The study was reported in the journal Cell Stem Cell in February. The therapeutic targets could be applicable not just to AML but also to the blood cancer myelodysplastic syndrome and clonal hematopoiesis, which is often a preleukemic condition. "We essentially built from scratch a model of leukemia that characterizes the ...

Global emissions of a potent substance notorious for depleting the Earth's ozone layer - the protective barrier which absorbs the Sun's harmful UV rays - have fallen rapidly and are now back on the decline, according to new research. Two international studies published today in Nature, show emissions of CFC-11, one of the many chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) chemicals once widely used in refrigerators and insulating foams, are back on the decline less than two years after the exposure of their shock resurgence in the wake of suspected rogue production. Dr Luke Western, from the University of Bristol, a co-lead author of one ...