During his time at EPFL under the Erasmus program, Romain van Wassenhove came up with an idea for a connector that could be used to make modular structures out of sustainable bamboo rather than wood, plastic or metal. "I wanted to focus my Master's on a topic that had meaning to me and that would lead to a concrete application," he says. "Working with bamboo was something I already had in mind while I was studying in Brussels." His connectors can be 3D-printed in biosourced plastic and are customizable to the type of material used for the structure. Van Wassenhove got the idea for his connector during a class at EPFL on composite materials and developed the concept further through his Master's project, co-directed at EPFL by Senior Scientist Anastasios Vassilopoulos and by associate ...

Scientists from the University of Graz (Austria), Skoltech and their colleagues from the US and Germany have developed a new neural network that can reliably detect coronal holes from space-based observations. This application paves the way for more reliable space weather predictions and provides valuable information for the study of the solar activity cycle. The paper was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Much like our life on Earth depends on the light of the Sun, our electronic "life" depends on the activity of our closest star and its interactions with Earth's magnetic field. For the ...

Carbon loss in Canadian peatland is projected to increase by 103 per cent under a high emission scenario, according to new research led by scientists from the University of Waterloo. The results of the study, which was published today in Nature's Communications Earth & Environment journal, reinforces the urgent need for a comprehensive understanding of peatlands as evolving sources of atmospheric CO2 in a warming world. Peatlands, which are a type of wetland, are some of the most valuable ecosystems globally. In addition to their role in preserving biodiversity and minimizing ...

Older Chinese immigrants who adjust to their new cultural environment by learning the language, following the country's media and socializing with local residents can reduce acculturation gap with their adult children and protect their cognitive function, according to a Rutgers study. The study, published in the journal Aging and Mental Health, is one of the first to explore the relationship between intergenerational families, acculturation and cognitive function among older Chinese Americans. Researchers looked 2,900 Chinese Americans over age 60 who had at least one child and who participated in the PINE Study, an epidemiological study of older Chinese Americans. They analyzed three areas of acculturation - language, media use and ethnic social relations - and how they corresponded ...

What's as long a basketball court, taller than a b-double and has just stomped into the record books as Australia's largest dinosaur? It's time to meet Australotitan cooperensis - a new species of giant sauropod dinosaur from Eromanga, southwest Queensland. Australotitan, "the southern titan", has been scientifically described and named by Queensland Museum and Eromanga Natural History Museum palaeontologists. It is estimated to have reached a height of 5-6.5 metres at the hip and 25- 30 metres in length and sits within the top 10-15 largest dinosaurs world-wide, representing Australia's entry into the largest species to have ever walked the Earth. The fossilised skeleton was originally nicknamed 'Cooper' after Cooper Creek, ...

An international team of scientists led from the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB, CSIC-INTA), with participation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) to study a representative sample of galaxies, both disc and spheroidal, in a deep sky zone in the constellation of the Great Bear to characterize the properties of the stellar populations of galactic bulges. The researchers have been able to determine the mode of formation and development of these galactic structures. The results of this study were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal. The researchers focused their study on massive disc and spheroidal galaxies, using imaging data from ...

Bad sleep causes severe health issues and affects our ability to concentrate, memorize, and cope with challenging situations. Individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and intellectual disability, frequently suffer from sleep problems. However, little is known about their underlying mechanisms. In Science Advances, a Dutch-American research team, coordinated by Radboudumc, now describes how these problems can arise. Mimicking two genetic causes of autism in fruit flies, they uncovered that flies show the same sleep problems as the patients, and that the disturbed ...

Ancient chickens lived significantly longer than their modern equivalents because they were seen as sacred - not food - archaeologists have found. Experts have developed the first reliable method of finding the age of fowl who lived thousands of years ago. Their research shows they lived to advanced ages, and were kept for ritual sacrifice or cockfighting rather than meat or egg production. Chickens today live for a few weeks (in the UK poultry birds live for between 33 and 81 days), but during the Iron Age, Roman and Saxon period they lived up to the age of two, three or even four years old. Calculating ...

On Friday, 11 June, Europe's men's football teams will start the European Championship a year later than planned. The favourite this time is France with a probability of winning of 14.8 per cent. This is what an international team of researchers consisting of Andreas Groll and Franziska Popp (both TU Dortmund, Germany), Gunther Schauberger (TU Munich, Germany), Christophe Ley and Hans Van Eetvelde (both Ghent University, Belgium), Achim Zeileis (University of Innsbruck, Austria) and Lars Hvattum (Molde University College, Norway) has shown with the help of machine learning. Their forecast combines several statistical models for ...

For years, psychology researchers have treated peer rejection and social network isolation as being somewhat interchangeable when it comes to early adolescence; it was thought that if kids fell into one of those two groups, they fell into the other. A recent study finds there is actually little overlap between the groups - and socially isolated kids face different risks. "Broadly speaking, there are two types of socially marginalized groups in early adolescence," says Kate Norwalk, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. "There are kids who face peer rejection, meaning they are disliked by other kids; and there are kids who are experiencing social network isolation, meaning they don't have a ...

Many contemporary political conflicts are between those who would prioritize the needs of local or national communities and those with a more universal outlook. According to a new study by IASS researcher Silvia Weko, this split between "communitarian" and "cosmopolitan" Europeans is also evident in their attitudes towards European climate policy. Achieving climate neutrality without exacerbating societal divisions within and between countries will require the EU to strike a careful balance. In political philosophy cosmopolitans and communitarians are frequently characterized as "winners" and "losers" of globalization. ...

UPTON, NY--What happens when very short pulses of laser light strike a magnetic material? A large international collaboration led by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory set out to answer this very question. As they just reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the laser suppressed magnetic order across the entire material for several picoseconds, or trillionths of a second. Understanding how magnetic correlations change on ultrafast timescales is the first step in being able to control magnetism in application-oriented ways. For example, with such control, we may be able to more quickly write data to memory devices or enhance superconductivity ...

The lack of data is a major bottleneck for many kinds of research, and especially for the development of better medical treatments and drugs. This data is extremely sensitive and, understandably, people and companies alike are often unwilling to share their information with others. Researchers at the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence have developed a machine learning-based method that produces synthetic data on the basis of original data sets, making it possible for researchers to share their data with one other. This could solve the ongoing problem of data scarcity in medical research and other fields where information is sensitive. The generated data preserves privacy, remaining similar enough to the original data to be used for statistical ...

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have tested an algorithm on 700,000 patient records in east London, to find out if the data routinely collected by GPs can reveal cases of Familial Hypercholesterolemia - a leading cause of heart attack in young people. Familial Hypercholesterolemia (FH) is a condition passed down through families that causes extremely high levels of cholesterol in the blood. Without treatment, it can lead to a heart attack at a very young age. FH affects 320,000 people in the UK, the vast majority of whom are unaware they have it. One method of detection is the 'FAMCAT' (Familial Hypercholesterolemia Case Assertation Tool) which analyses data in GP records - including ...

The ability of stem cells to fix impaired functions of host tissues after transplantation has been a lifesaving breakthrough in treating previously incurable conditions. Much like a coin toss, however, the fate of the transplanted stem cells is unpredictable. They may choose self-renewal, grow into a different kind of tissue, or die. Spermatogonial stem cells follow the same stochastic fate of unpredictability in outcomes. But a group of fertility scientists led by Hiroshima University's Yoshiaki Nakamura discovered a new method that has favorably flipped the odds and successfully reversed male infertility in mice -- showing great promise for future applications in regenerating human sperm after cancer treatment ...

Normally, the ACE2 enzyme helps regulate our blood pressure. The enzyme sits on the surface of cells, including cells in the lungs, but in connection with COVID-19 it has been found that ACE2 also functions as a gateway for the virus. "Different viruses have different ways of accessing our cells - as the virus must, of course, get into the cell to be able to replicate, and the coronavirus uses ACE2 to gain access. For this reason, we're investigating what the concentration of ACE2 means for the course of the disease, if you get COVID-19," explains MD and PhD Tue Wenzel Kragstrup from the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University. The preliminary results have just been published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE. As mentioned, ACE2 is part of the surface of the cells, but ...

AUSTIN, Texas -- Puerto Rico is not ready for another hurricane season, let alone the effects of climate change, according to a new study that shows the island's outstanding capacity to produce record-breaking floods and trigger a large number of landslides. The latest research, appearing in the journal END ...

Jet packs, robot maids and flying cars were all promises for the 21st century. We got mechanized, autonomous vacuum cleaners instead. Now a team of Penn State researchers are exploring the requirements for electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles and designing and testing potential battery power sources. "I think flying cars have the potential to eliminate a lot of time and increase productivity and open the sky corridors to transportation," said Chao-Yang Wang, holder of the William E. Diefender Chair of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Electrochemical Engine Center, Penn State. "But electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles are very challenging technology for the batteries." The researchers define the technical requirements ...

Bdelloid rotifers are multicellular animals so small you need a microscope to see them. Despite their size, they're known for being tough, capable of surviving through drying, freezing, starvation, and low oxygen. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on June 7 have found that not only can they withstand being frozen, but they can also persist for at least 24,000 years in the Siberian permafrost and survive. "Our report is the hardest proof as of today that multicellular animals could withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, the state of almost completely arrested metabolism," says Stas Malavin ...

The aurora borealis, or northern lights, that fill the sky in high-latitude regions have fascinated people for thousands of years. But how they're created, while theorized, had not been conclusively proven. In a new study, a team of physicists led by University of Iowa reports definitive evidence that the most brilliant auroras are produced by powerful electromagnetic waves during geomagnetic storms. The phenomena, known as Alfven waves, accelerate electrons toward Earth, causing the particles to produce the familiar atmospheric light show. The study, published online June 7 in the journal Nature Communications, concludes a decades-long quest to demonstrate experimentally the physical mechanisms for the acceleration of electrons by Alfven waves under ...

What The Study Did: In this study, short-term effectiveness of the first dose of the BNT162b2 (BioNTech/Pfizer) vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 infection 13 to 24 days after immunization in a real-world setting was assessed. Authors: Gabriel Chodick, Ph.D., of the Maccabi Institute for Research & Innovation, Maccabi Healthcare Services, in Tel Aviv, Israel, 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.2021.15985) Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, ...

What The Study Did: Among children with a COVID-19 diagnosis, researchers in this study examined what other conditions are common and which are associated with severe COVID-19 illness. Authors: Lyudmyla Kompaniyets, Ph.D., of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, 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.2021.11182) Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, ...

What The Study Did: Researchers analyzed conversations on public Facebook groups to explore automated misinformation. Authors: John W. Ayers, Ph.D., M.A., of the University of California, San Diego, in LaJolla, 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/jamainternmed.2021.2498) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial ...

La Jolla, Calif. (June 07, 2021) -- "The coronavirus pandemic has sparked what the World Health Organization has called an 'infodemic' of misinformation," said Dr. John W. Ayers, a scientist who specializes in public health surveillance. "But, bots --like those used by Russian agents during the 2016 American presidential election-- have been overlooked as a source of COVID-19 misinformation." A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine led by Dr. Ayers, Co-Founder of the Center for Data Driven Health and Vice Chief of Innovation within the Division of Infectious Diseases ...

While DNA provides the genetic recipe book for biological form and function, it is the job of the body's proteins to carry out the complex commands dictated by DNA's genetic code. Stuart Lindsay, a researcher at the Biodesign Institute at ASU, has been at the forefront of efforts to improve rapid DNA sequencing and has more recently applied his talents to explore the much thornier problem of sequencing protein molecules, one molecule at a time. In a new overview article, Lindsay's efforts are described along with those of international colleagues, who are applying a variety of innovative strategies for protein sequencing at the single-cell, and even single-molecule ...