Women who experience partner violence at a young age don't always show physical signs of abuse and don't always disclose -- or recognize -- the dangerous position they're in. A new study from Michigan State University is one of the first to examine multiple factors that influence young women's disclosure of partner violence that occurred during their first relationships, when they were just under 15 years old, on average. "Physical abuse is widely understood as unhealthy, wrong and abusive, but sexual violence and coercive control are less understood and still pretty hidden, especially among young women," said Angie C. Kennedy, MSU associate professor of ...

East Hanover, NJ. April 21, 2021. Kessler Foundation researchers showed that people with multiple sclerosis (MS) experience subtle language impairments that standard neuropsychological tests may incorrectly attribute to impaired executive functions. The article, "The role of language ability in verbal fluency of individuals with multiple sclerosis" (doi: 10.1016/j.msard.2021.102846) was published on February 16, 2021, in Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders. The authors are Nancy D. Chiaravalloti, PhD, director of the Centers for Neuropsychology, Neuroscience, and Traumatic Brain Injury Research at Kessler Foundation, Lauren B. Strober, PhD, senior research scientist at the Center for Neuropsychology and Neuroscience ...

Washington, DC-- A team of astronomers including Carnegie's Alycia Weinberger and former-Carnegie postdoc Meredith MacGregor, now an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, spotted an extreme outburst, or flare, from the Sun's nearest neighbor--the star Proxima Centauri. Their work, which could help guide the search for life beyond our Solar System, is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Proxima Centauri is a "red dwarf" with about one-eighth the mass of our Sun, which sits just four light-years, or almost 25 trillion miles, from the center of our Solar System and hosts at least two planets, one of which may look something like Earth. In a worldwide campaign carried out ...

A new study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society has found that listening to music can help older adults sleep better. Researchers from the National Cheng Kung University Hospital in Taiwan combined the results of past studies to understand the effect that listening to music can have on the quality of older adults' sleep. Their work suggests that: - Older adults (ages 60 and up) living at home sleep better when they listen to music for 30 minutes to one hour at bedtime. - Calm music improves older adults' sleep quality better than rhythmic music does. - ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - 3D printing is transforming everything from fashion and health care to transportation and toys. But this rapidly evolving technology, also known as additive manufacturing, can threaten national security and intellectual property rights. To reduce illicit use of 3D printers, Zhanpeng Jin, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, is developing a way to track the origin of 3D-printed items. His concern was that, as long as people have the digital design for an item, which can be downloaded from the internet, sometimes as open-source material, people can print out anything they want, which can range from computer parts and toys to fully functional handguns and assault rifles. "So, ...

A fire in Central Park seems to appear as a smoke plume and a line of flames in a satellite image. Colorful lights on Diwali night in India, seen from space, seem to show widespread fireworks activity. Both images exemplify what a new University of Washington-led study calls "location spoofing." The photos -- created by different people, for different purposes -- are fake but look like genuine images of real places. And with the more sophisticated AI technologies available today, researchers warn that such "deepfake geography" could become a growing problem. So, using satellite photos of ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Treatment of an injured or diseased joint may require precise insertion of a syringe needle -- musculoskeletal sonography can help guide clinicians as they drain fluid from arthritic knees or inject corticosteroids into trigger fingers. However, there is a need for training simulators that allow practice on an inert model, before attempting treatment on a patient. For ultrasound, such simulation trainers are called phantoms. Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and University of South Carolina have now made a 3D-printed ...

Decades-old aerial photos of Yudong District, Datong City in Shanxi Province, Northern China have helped researchers in their search for a fault hidden underneath the city's buildings and cement roads, researchers said at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting. Analyzing these photos from the 1960s and 1970s allowed Junjie Ren and colleagues to reconstruct a digital elevation model along the Shuiyu fault, helping them identify the fault trace as it passes through Datong City. Trenching along the revealed fault trace found evidence of ...

Concrete efforts to bring racial equity to the geosciences are receiving significant attention in the wake of new grassroots efforts and increased awareness of social justice issues in 2020, speakers said at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting. Last year's Black in Geoscience Week, for instance, began as a grassroots movement to increase representation and raise visibility among Black researchers, as well as to foster networks and connections across the world, said Louisa Brotherson, a leader of the Black in Geoscience group. The need for community and awareness ...

Ever wondered why your virtual home assistant doesn't understand your questions? Or why your navigation app took you on the side street instead of the highway? In a study published April 21st in the journal iScience, Italian researchers designed a robot that "thinks out loud" so that users can hear its thought process and better understand the robot's motivations and decisions. "If you were able to hear what the robots are thinking, then the robot might be more trustworthy," says co-author Antonio Chella, describing first author Arianna Pipitone's idea that launched the study at the University of Palermo. "The robots will be easier to understand for ...

Using a novel molecular-data-storage technique, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have encoded a quote from Jane Austen's classic novel Mansfield Park in a series of oligomers, which a third party could read back without prior knowledge of the structures that encoded the passage. The findings, published April 21st in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, illustrate a method to encode data that allows for greater information density than DNA-based approaches and that relies on urethane-like plastics--highly accessible and structurally modifiable chemical feedstocks--instead of nucleic acids. "This work is another step toward the long-term goal of using synthetic sequence-defined polymers for information storage," says Eric Anslyn, a chemistry ...

Biodegradable plastics have been advertised as one solution to the plastic pollution problem bedeviling the world, but today's "compostable" plastic bags, utensils and cup lids don't break down during typical composting and contaminate other recyclable plastics, creating headaches for recyclers. Most compostable plastics, made primarily of the polyester known as polylactic acid, or PLA, end up in landfills and last as long as forever plastics. University of California, Berkeley, scientists have now invented a way to make these compostable plastics break down more easily, with just heat and water, within a few weeks, solving a problem that has flummoxed the plastics industry and environmentalists. "People are now prepared to move into biodegradable polymers for single-use ...

It isn't only myriads of currently unknown species that await discovery in the Amazon rainforests. As a new study by German scientists at the Ruhr-University (Bochum) and the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology (Munich), published in the open-access peer-reviewed scientific Journal of Orthoptera Research, concludes, it seems that so do plenty of unusual behaviours. "When I saw the maggot-like structures peeking out from the back of the praying mantis and then withdrew, I immediately thought of parasites that eat the animal from the inside, because that is not really uncommon in insects," says Frank Glaw, a reptile and amphibian expert from the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology, who discovered ...

Categorization is the brain's tool to organize nearly everything we encounter in our daily lives. Grouping information into categories simplifies our complex world and helps us to react quickly and effectively to new experiences. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have now shown that also mice categorize surprisingly well. The researchers identified neurons encoding learned categories and thereby demonstrated how abstract information is represented at the neuronal level. A toddler is looking at a new picture book. Suddenly it points to an illustration and shouts 'chair'. The kid made the right call, but that does not seem particularly noteworthy to us. We recognize all kinds of chairs as 'chair' without any difficulty. ...

Central Africa is home to the world's second-largest area of dense tropical rainforest. This major reservoir of biodiversity stretches out over five main countries: Cameroon, Gabon, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. It provides numerous ecosystem services, such as regulating exchange cycles between the earth and the atmosphere, and helps to ensure food supply for local populations. Due to the threats from climate change and demographic pressure expected in Africa by the end of the 21st century, the protection and sustainable management of these forests is a challenge for policy ...

The disastrous consequences of climate "tipping points" could be averted if global warming was reversed quickly enough, new research suggests. Once triggered, tipping points may lead to abrupt changes such as the dieback of the Amazon rainforest or melting of major ice sheets. Until now, crossing these thresholds has been assumed to be a point of no return, but the new study - published in the journal Nature - concludes that thresholds could be "temporarily exceeded" without prompting permanent shifts. The research team, from the University of Exeter and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH), say the time available to act would depend on the level ...

Scientists have provided the first evidence to show that eradicating rats from tropical islands effects not just the biodiversity on the islands, but also the fragile coral seas that surround them. The new study led by scientists at Lancaster University and published in the journal Current Biology shows that critical cycles of seabird nutrients flowing to coral reefs are re-established within relatively short time periods after rats are removed - even around islands that have been infested for hundreds of years. The findings offer encouragement that rat eradication can benefit coral ...

What The Study Did: Researchers looked at whether short-term exposure to air pollution from a 2018 California wildfire was associated with changes in the number of clinic visits for eczema or itch and medications prescribed for eczema. Authors: Maria L. Wei, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, 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/jamadermatol.2021.0179) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts 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 disclosures, ...

Wildfire smoke can trigger a host of respiratory and cardiovascular symptoms, ranging from runny nose and cough to a potentially life-threatening heart attack or stroke. A new study suggests that the dangers posed by wildfire smoke may also extend to the largest organ in the human body, and our first line of defense against outside threat: the skin. During the two weeks in November 2018 when wildfire smoke from the Camp Fire choked the San Francisco Bay Area, health clinics in San Francisco saw an uptick in the number of patients visiting with concerns of eczema, also known as atopic dermatitis, and general itch, compared to the same time of the year ...

A mechanistic understanding of brain development requires a systematic survey of neural progenitor cell types, their lineage specification and maturation of postmitotic neurons. Cumulative evidences based on single-cell transcriptomic analysis have revealed the heterogeneity of cortical neural progenitors, their temporal patterning and the developmental trajectories of excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the developing neocortex. Nevertheless, the developmental hierarchy of the hypothalamus, which contains an astounding diversity of neurons that regulate endocrine, autonomic and behavioral functions, has not been well understood. Recently, however, Prof. WU Qingfeng's ...

WHO Peter Libby, MD, cardiovascular medicine specialist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Mallinckrodt Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; author of a new review paper published in Nature. WHAT Atherosclerosis -- hardening of the arteries -- is now involved in the majority of deaths worldwide, and advances in our understanding of the biology of the disease are changing traditional views and opening up new avenues for treatment. The picture of who may be at risk for a heart attack has evolved considerably in recent decades. At one time, a heart attack might have conjured up the image of a middle-aged white man with high cholesterol and high blood pressure who smoked cigarettes. Today, traditional concepts of what contributes to risk have changed. These ...

In 2016, an inflatable arch wreaked havoc at the Tour de France bicycle race when it deflated and collapsed on a cyclist, throwing him from his bike and delaying the race while officials scrambled to clear the debris from the road. Officials blamed a passing spectator's wayward belt buckle for the arch's collapse, but the real culprit was physics. Today's inflatable structures, used for everything from field hospitals to sporting complexes, are monostable, meaning they need a constant input of pressure in order to maintain their inflated state. Lose that pressure and the structure ...

What is the cost of 1 ton of a greenhouse gas? When a climate-warming gas such as carbon dioxide or methane is emitted into the atmosphere, its impacts may be felt years and even decades into the future - in the form of rising sea levels, changes in agricultural productivity, or more extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods, and heat waves. Those impacts are quantified in a metric called the "social cost of carbon," considered a vital tool for making sound and efficient climate policies. Now a new study by a team including researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) ...

Despite our efforts to sort and recycle, less than 9% of plastic gets recycled in the U.S., and most ends up in landfill or the environment. Biodegradable plastic bags and containers could help, but if they're not properly sorted, they can contaminate otherwise recyclable #1 and #2 plastics. What's worse, most biodegradable plastics take months to break down, and when they finally do, they form microplastics - tiny bits of plastic that can end up in our oceans, fish, and even our bodies. Now, as reported in the journal Nature, scientists at the Department ...

A study that appeared today on Current Biology sheds new light on the continental migrations which shaped the genetic background of all present Europeans. The research generates new ancient DNA evidence and direct dating from a fragmentary fossil mandible belonging to an individual who lived ~17,000 years ago in northeastern Italy (Riparo Tagliente, Verona). The results backdate by about 3,000 years the diffusion in Southern Europe of a genetic component linked to Eastern Europe/Western Asia previously believed to have spread westwards during later major warming shifts. "By looking into the past of this particular individual, ...