A study by the Hydrology and Agricultural Hydraulics group at the University of Cordoba analyses the potential of rock in dehesas as a source of water for vegetation Soil is an essential reservoir of the water cycle, not so much because of the volume it represents, but rather due to its continuous renewal and because of humanity's ability to take advantage of it. Although the evolution of the climate in the medium and long term may modify current conditions, thevariability of precipitation can cause notable changes in the natural systems of arid and semi-arid areas, accelerating their degradation, especially ...

Many meteorological satellite networks are constantly scanning Earth, providing vital research data and real-time life-saving weather information. Since China began its initial development in 1970, the Fengyun (FY) series of meteorological satellites have advanced considerably throughout more than 50 years. While FY satellites primarily focus on the atmosphere, they are capable of observing complex variables within the Earth-atmosphere system. Since the initial FY dispatch, China has successfully launched 17 FY satellites, seven of which are currently operating in orbit. The Fengyun Meteorological Satellite Ground Application System generates more than 90 Earth observation products every day, producing more than ...

Claiming that something has a defect normally suggests an undesirable feature. That's not the case in solid-state systems, such as the semiconductors at the heart of modern classical electronic devices. They work because of defects introduced into the rigidly ordered arrangement of atoms in crystalline materials like silicon. Surprisingly, in the quantum world, defects also play an important role. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago and scientific institutes and universities in Japan, Korea and Hungary have established guidelines that will be an invaluable resource for the discovery of new defect-based ...

A compound in avocados may ultimately offer a route to better leukemia treatment, says a new University of Guelph study. The compound targets an enzyme that scientists have identified for the first time as being critical to cancer cell growth, said Dr. Paul Spagnuolo, Department of Food Science. Published recently in the journal Blood, the study focused on acute myeloid leukemia (AML), which is the most devastating form of leukemia. Most cases occur in people over age 65, and fewer than 10 per cent of patients survive five years after diagnosis. Leukemia cells have higher amounts of an enzyme called VLCAD involved in their metabolism, said Spagnuolo. "The cell relies on that pathway to ...

Coral reefs provide shelter, sustenance and stability to a range of organisms, but these vital ecosystems would not exist if not for the skeletal structure created by stony corals. Now, KAUST scientists together with an international team have revealed the underlying genetic story of how corals evolved from soft-bodied organisms to build the myriad calcified structures we see today. "While the processes involved in coral calcification are well understood, it is less clear how corals' ability to grow calcium carbonate skeletons actually evolved," says Xin Wang, a former KAUST Ph.D. student who worked on the project under the supervision of Manual Aranda. "How did a squishy anemone-like organism begin to build reefs?" ...

CLEVELAND - In a Correspondence article published in the April 29, 2021 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from University Hospitals (UH) Cleveland Medical Center, and New York Presbyterian Hospital - Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, found a substantial reduction in the use of minimally invasive surgery for cervical cancer after publication of the results a major study called the Laparoscopic Approach to Cervical Cancer (LACC) in November 2018. The earlier study, which compared minimally invasive surgery with open abdominal radical hysterectomy in patients with early-stage cervical cancer, found that minimally invasive surgery was associated with worse disease-free and overall ...

LAWRENCE -- Researchers commonly work with the criminal justice system to implement reforms, bringing with them the latest science and data pointing to why a certain practice will help improve outcomes. New research from the University of Kansas shows if community corrections agencies are to sustain evidence-based reforms, they need to view them as legitimate. Researchers worked with eight federal community corrections agencies to implement Contingency Management, an evidence-based practice used to help people convicted of drug offenses set and achieve goals to end addiction, avoid repeat offenses and increase pro-social behavior. Such evidence-based practices and reforms are frequently put in place across the criminal justice system. Shannon Portillo"We've ...

Nanopore technology shows promise for making it possible to develop small, portable, inexpensive devices that can sequence DNA in real time. One of the challenges, however, has been to make the technology more accurate. Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have moved closer toward this goal by developing a nanopore sequencing platform that, for the first time, can detect the presence of nucleobases, the building blocks of DNA and RNA. The study was published online Feb. 11 and is featured on the back cover of the April print edition of the ...

A study by University of Guam researchers has found that shade can mitigate the effects of heat stress on corals. The study, which was funded by the university's National Science Foundation EPSCoR grant, was published in February in the peer-reviewed Marine Biology Research journal. "We wanted to see what role light has in coral bleaching," said UOG Assistant Professor Bastian Bentlage, the supervisor and co-author of the study. "Usually, people talk about temperature as a cause for bleaching, but we show that both light and temperature work together." Previous UOG research led by Laurie J. Raymundo found that more than one-third of all coral reefs in Guam were killed from 2013 to 2017 over the ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Hispanic Americans have died of COVID-19 at a disproportionately high rate compared to whites because of workplace exposure to the virus, a new study suggests. It's widely documented that Hispanics are overrepresented among workers in essential industries and occupations ranging from warehousing and grocery stores to health care and construction, much of which kept operating when most of the country shut down last spring. The analysis of federal data showed that, considering their representation in the U.S. population, far higher percentages of Hispanics of working ...

New Haven, Conn. -- Researchers at Yale and Princeton say the scientific community sorely needs a new way to compare the cascading effects of ecosystem loss due to human-induced environmental change to major crises of the past. For too long, scientists have relied upon metrics that compare current rates of species loss with those characterizing mass extinctions in the distant past, according to Pincelli Hull, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Yale, and Christopher Spalding, an astrophysicist at Princeton. The result has been projections of extinction rates in the next few decades that are on the order ...

DALLAS - April 28, 2021 - Depression screening among cancer patients improved by 40 percent to cover more than 90 percent of patients under a quality improvement program launched by a multidisciplinary team at UT Southwestern Medical Center and Southwestern Health Resources. Cancer patients with depression are at an increased risk of mortality and suicide compared with those without depression. Although rates vary based on cancer type and stage, depression is estimated to affect 10 to 30 percent of patients with cancer compared with 7 to 8 percent of adults without a diagnosis or history of cancer, and impact both men and women equally. Due to the higher risk, medical ...

LAWRENCE -- For thousands of years during the last ice age, generations of maritime migrants paddled skin boats eastward across shallow ocean waters from Asia to present-day Alaska. They voyaged from island to island and ultimately to shore, surviving on bountiful seaweeds, fish, shellfish, birds and game harvested from coastal and nearshore biomes. Their island-rich route was possible due to a shifting archipelago that stretched almost 900 miles from one continent to the other. A new study from the University of Kansas in partnership with universities in Bologna and Urbino, Italy, documents the newly named Bering Transitory Archipelago and then points to how, when and where the first Americans ...

NEW YORK, NY (April 29, 2021)--A new study is drawing the most detailed picture yet of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the lung, revealing mechanisms that result in lethal COVID-19, and may explain long-term complications and show how COVID-19 differs from other infectious diseases. Led by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, the study found that in patients who died of the infection, COVID-19 unleashed a detrimental trifecta of runaway inflammation, direct destruction and impaired regeneration of lung cells involved in gas exchange, and accelerated lung scarring. Though the study looked at lungs from patients who had died of the disease, ...

Primary care practitioners often over-estimate the likelihood of a patient having a medical condition based on reported symptoms and laboratory test results. Such overestimations can lead to overdiagnosis and overtreatment, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) published in JAMA Internal Medicine. "A large gap exists between practitioner estimates and scientific estimates of the probability of disease," said study leader Daniel Morgan, MD, a Professor of Epidemiology & Public Health at UMSOM. "Practitioners who overestimate ...

The discovery of ancient kumara pits just north of Dunedin dating back to the 15th century have shone a light on how scientific evidence can complement mātauranga Maori around how and where the taonga were stored hundreds of years ago. A new study published in the science journal PLOS ONE reports that early Polynesians once stored kumara - American sweet potato - in pits dug into sand dunes at Purākaunui, eastern Otago, less than 30km north of Dunedin. The pits were first discovered in 2001 and are found over 200km south of the currently accepted South Island limit of cooler-climate Māori kumara storage. These Purākaunui features have the novel form of semi-subterranean, rectangular pits used for the cool seasonal storage ...

The brain possesses a complex architecture of functional networks as its information-processing machinery. Is the brain's network architecture itself a target of disease? If so, which networks are associated with which diseases? What can this tell us about the underlying causes of brain disorders? Building on the extraordinary progress in neuroscience made over the past 30 years, researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) published a study of 43 brain disorders - both psychiatric and neurologic - and strongly affirmed ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- April 29, 2021 -- An analysis of Twitter activity between March 1 and Aug. 1, 2020, found strong support by U.S. users for wearing face coverings and that a media focus on anti-mask opinions fueled the rhetoric of those opposed, report University of Oregon researchers. The study, published April 28 in the journal PLOS ONE, initially focused on linguistics, zeroing in on the language associated with hashtags during the study period, which began a month before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended mask-wearing to protect against COVID-19 infection. However, to better understand that semantics, which were found to be polarized, angry and emotionally ...

Adult mantis shrimp pack an explosive punch that can split water, but no crustacean emerges fully formed. Minute larvae can undergo six or seven transformations before emerging as fully developed adults and limbs and manoeuvres develop over time. So, when do mantis shrimp larvae acquire the ability to pulverise their dinner and how powerful are the punches that these mini crustaceans pack? 'We knew that larval mantis shrimp have these beautiful appendages; Megan Porter and Eve Robinson at the University of Hawaii had captured normal videos of a couple of strikes a few years ago', says Jacob Harrison from Duke University, USA. So, he packed up ...

Adult heterosexual women and men are often jealous about completely different threats to their relationship. These differences seem to establish themselves far sooner than people need them. The finding surprised researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) who studied the topic. "You don't really need this jealousy until you need to protect yourself from being deceived," says Professor Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair at NTNU's Department of Psychology. Romantic jealousy can be experienced as horrible at its worst. But jealousy associated with a partner's infidelity has clearly been ...

More than a quarter of American infants in 2018 had not received common childhood vaccines that protect them from illnesses such as polio, tetanus, measles, mumps and chicken pox, new research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine reveals. Only 72.8% of infants aged 19-35 months had received the full series of the seven recommended vaccines, falling far short of the federal government's goal of 90%. Those less likely to complete the vaccine series include African-American infants, infants born to mothers with less than a high-school education and infants in families with incomes below the federal poverty line. The researchers warn that failure to complete the vaccine series leaves children at increased risk of infection, illness and death. It also reduces the herd ...

Human decision-making depends on the flexible processing of complex information, but how the brain may adapt processing to momentary task demands has remained unclear. In a new article published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development have now outlined several crucial neural processes revealing that our brain networks may rapidly and flexibly shift from a rhythmic to a "noisy" state when the need to process information increases. Driving a car, deliberating over different financial options, or even pondering different life paths requires us to process an overwhelming amount of information. But not all decisions pose equal demands. In some situations, decisions are easier because we already know which ...

People with diabetes are at increased risk of developing a severe course of COVID-19 compared to people without diabetes. The question to be answered is whether all people with diabetes have an increased risk of severe COVID-19, or whether specific risk factors can also be identified within this group. A new study by DZD researchers has now focused precisely on this question and gained relevant insights. The COVID-19 pandemic poses unprecedented challenges to science and the health sector. While in some people with a SARS-CoV-2 infection the disease is hardly noticeable, in others ...

Exposure before birth to persistent organic pollutants (POPs)-- organochlorine pesticides, industrial chemicals, etc.--may increase the risk in adolescence of metabolic disorders, such as obesity and high blood pressure. This was the main conclusion of a study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a research centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation. The study was based on data from nearly 400 children living in Menorca, who were followed from before birth until they reached 18 years of age. POPs are toxic, degradation-resistant ...

A top-level international research team including researchers from the University of Eastern Finland has developed a new algorithm for the diagnostics of dementia. The algorithm is based on blood and cerebrospinal fluid biomarker measurements. These biomarkers can be used to aid setting of an exact diagnosis already in the early phases of dementia. Researchers from the University of Eastern Finland and the University of Oulu in collaboration with an international team have created a new diagnostic biomarker-based algorithm for the diagnostics of dementia. The team is led by Professor Barbara Borroni from the University of Brescia, Italy. The article was published in the Diagnostics journal. The accurate diagnosis ...