Addressing a much-debated question about the impact of stress on survival in wild, nonhuman primates, a new multi-decadal study involving 242 wild female baboons found evidence to support chronic stress as a significant factor affecting survival. The study found that a female baboon with a stress response - as reflected in fecal glucocorticoid concentrations, a biomarker of stress response - in the top 90% for her age throughout adulthood was expected to lose 5.4 years of life compared to a female with glucocorticoid concentrations in the bottom 10% for her age group. The findings, which leveraged more than 14,000 fecal glucocorticoid measurements over a ...

MADISON, Wis. -- Tens of millions of people worldwide are affected by diseases like macular degeneration or have had accidents that permanently damage the light-sensitive photoreceptors within their retinas that enable vision. The human body is not capable of regenerating those photoreceptors, but new advances by medical researchers and engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may provide hope for those suffering from vision loss. They described their work today in the journal Science Advances. Researchers at UW-Madison have made new photoreceptors from human pluripotent stem cells. However, it remains challenging to precisely deliver those photoreceptors within the diseased or damaged eye so that ...

Water is abundant in our solar system. Even outside of our own planet, scientists have detected ice on the moon, in Saturn's rings and in comets, liquid water on Mars and under the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus, and traces of water vapor in the scorching atmosphere of Venus. Studies have shown that water played an important role in the early evolution and formation of the solar system. To learn more about this role, planetary scientists have searched for evidence of liquid water in extraterrestrial materials such as meteorites, most of which originate from asteroids that formed in the early history of the solar system. Scientists have even found water as hydroxyls and molecules in meteorites in the context ...

Two of the COVID-19 vaccines currently approved in the United States require two doses, administered three to four weeks apart, however, there are few data indicating how best to minimize new infections and hospitalizations with limited vaccine supply and distribution capacity. A study published on 21st April, 2021 in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Seyed Moghadas at York University in Toronto, Canada, and colleagues suggests that delaying the second dose could improve the effectiveness of vaccine programs. The emergence of novel, more contagious SARS-CoV-2 variants has led to a public health debate on whether to vaccinate more individuals with the first ...

Swing voters in battleground states delivered Donald Trump his unexpected victory in the 2016 presidential election, suggests a new study coauthored by Yale political scientist Gregory A. Huber. The study, published on April 21 in the journal Science Advances, compares the outcomes of the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in six key states: Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The analysis merged voter turnout records of 37 million individuals with precinct-level election returns to determine the sources of Trump's electoral success. It examined the relative roles of conversion -- voters switching their support from one party to the ...

Boston, MA - In a worldwide survey, pregnant and postpartum women reported high levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and post-traumatic stress during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Such high levels of distress may have potential implications for women and for fetal and child health and development, according to the study. The study will be published online in PLOS ONE on April 21, 2021. "We expected to see an increase in the proportion of pregnant and postpartum women reporting mental health distress, as they are likely to be worried or have questions about their babies' health and development, ...

In the field of robotics, researchers are continually looking for the fastest, strongest, most efficient and lowest-cost ways to actuate, or enable, robots to make the movements needed to carry out their intended functions. The quest for new and better actuation technologies and 'soft' robotics is often based on principles of biomimetics, in which machine components are designed to mimic the movement of human muscles--and ideally, to outperform them. Despite the performance of actuators like electric motors and hydraulic pistons, their rigid form limits how they can be deployed. As robots transition to more ...

Researchers of the University of Barcelona, together with researchers from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and Brown University (United States), have analysed more than 10,000 evaluations that were carried out to candidates who wish to hold a public teaching permanent in Catalonia. The objective was to study how the decision by the committee of evaluators is affected by the fact that each candidate holds a certain position in the lists of people to be assessed. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, identifies a new cognitive bias that researchers have named "generosity-erosion effect". It involves that once the evaluators have scored one candidate generously, ...

Brandi Wren was studying social distancing and infections before masking tape marks appeared on the grocery store floor and plastic barriers went up in the post office. Wren, a visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University, spent a year studying wild vervet monkey troops in South Africa, tracking both their social grooming behavior and their parasite load. Her results, some of which were published Wednesday (April 21) in PLOS ONE showed evidence that monkeys carrying certain gastrointestinal parasites do not groom others as much as those without the parasite, and that routes of transmission may not be as clear cut as biologists think. With implications for both animal behavior and human health, Wren's results open new avenues for research and ...

Making the speed of electronic technology as fast as possible is a central aim of contemporary materials research. The key components of fast computing technologies are transistors: switching devices that turn electrical currents on and off very quickly as basic steps of logic operations. In order to improve our knowledge about ideal transistor materials, physicists are constantly trying to determine new methods to accomplish such extremely fast switches. Researchers from the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg have now figured out ...

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 ...