Despite increasing concern over the intrusion of algorithms in daily life, people may be more willing to trust a computer program than their fellow humans, especially if a task becomes too challenging, according to new research from data scientists at the University of Georgia. From choosing the next song on your playlist to choosing the right size pants, people are relying more on the advice of algorithms to help make everyday decisions and streamline their lives. "Algorithms are able to do a huge number of tasks, and the number of tasks that they are able to do is expanding practically every day," said Eric Bogert, a Ph.D. student in the Terry College of ...

A recent case study from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill demonstrates that, with training, neural control of a powered prosthetic ankle can restore a wide range of abilities, including standing on very challenging surfaces and squatting. The researchers are currently working with a larger group of study participants to see how broadly applicable the findings may be. "This case study shows that it is possible to use these neural control technologies, in which devices respond to electrical signals from a patient's muscles, to help patients using robotic prosthetic ankles move more naturally and intuitively," says Helen Huang, corresponding author of the study. Huang ...

The immune response to tuberculosis (TB) differs in adults and newborn babies due to the way immune cells use energy to kick into gear in a bid to kill the bacteria. This fresh discovery - just published in leading journal, Frontiers in Immunology - offers hope for improving treatments for what remains a deadly disease. TB is still one of the biggest infectious killers in the world and babies are more likely than adults to get this infection and for it to spread outside of the lungs. Thanks to the work of scientists in Professor Joseph Keane's TB Immunology lab, based ...

An observational study of patients in London hospitals suggests that the B.1.1.7. variant is not associated with more severe illness and death, but appears to lead to higher viral load, consistent with emerging evidence that this lineage is more transmissible than the original COVID-19 strain. A separate observational study using data logged by 37,000 UK users of a self-reporting COVID-19 symptom app found no evidence that B.1.1.7. altered symptoms or likelihood of experiencing long COVID. Authors of both studies acknowledge that these findings ...

It has been long been known that cannabis users develop psychosis more often than non-users, but what is still not fully clear is whether cannabis actually causes psychosis and, if so, who is most at risk. A new study published in Translational Psychiatry by researchers at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and King's College London helps shed light on both questions. The research shows that while cannabis users had higher rates of psychotic experiences than non-users across the board, the difference was especially pronounced among those with high genetic predisposition to schizophrenia. "These results are significant because ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio ¬- New data published by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC - James) suggests that an oral drug currently used in the clinical setting to treat neuromuscular diseases could also help prevent a common form of skin cancer caused by damage from ultraviolet-B (UVB) radiation from the sun. While this data was gathered from preclinical studies, senior author Sujit Basu, MD, PhD, says preliminary results in animal models are very promising and worthy of immediate further investigation through phase I human studies. ...

Studies show wearing masks and social distancing can contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus, but their combined effectiveness is not precisely known. In Chaos, by AIP Publishing, researchers at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and Politecnico di Torino in Italy developed a network model to study the effects of these two measures on the spread of airborne diseases like COVID-19. The model shows viral outbreaks can be prevented if at least 60% of a population complies with both measures. "Neither social distancing nor mask wearing alone are likely sufficient to halt the spread of COVID-19, unless almost the entire population adheres to the single measure," author Maurizio Porfiri said. "But if a significant fraction of the ...

Extremely precise measurements are possible using atom interferometers that employ the wave character of atoms for this purpose. They can thus be used, for example, to measure the gravitational field of the Earth or to detect gravitational waves. A team of scientists from Germany has now managed to successfully perform atom interferometry in space for the first time - on board a sounding rocket. "We have established the technological basis for atom interferometry on board of a sounding rocket and demonstrated that such experiments are not only possible on Earth, but also in space," said Professor Patrick Windpassinger of the Institute of Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), whose team was involved in the investigation. The results of their analyses have been ...

Scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research demonstrated the potential of a novel blood test for cathepsin B, a well-studied protein important to brain development and function, as an indicator for a range of disease states. Cathepsin B plays an important role in the body, regulating the metabolism, immune responses, degradation of improperly produced proteins and other functions. Under certain conditions, such as metastatic cancers, infections, trauma and neurological disease, cathepsin B production is upregulated. Recent research published by WRAIR researchers highlighted the potential of cathepsin B as an indicator, or biomarker, of the severity of traumatic brain injury. In this study, published in ACS Omega, researchers demonstrated an ultrasensitive ...

It cannot be denied that, over the past few decades, the miniaturization of electronic devices has taken huge strides. Today, after pocket-size smartphones that could put old desktop computers to shame and a plethora of options for wireless connectivity, there is a particular type of device whose development has been steadily advancing: wearable biosensors. These tiny devices are generally meant to be worn directly on the skin in order to measure specific biosignals and, by sending measurements wirelessly to smartphones or computers, keep track of the user's health. Although materials scientists have developed many types ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have found a way to fine-tune the molecular assembly line that creates antibiotics via engineered biosynthesis. The work could allow scientists to improve existing antibiotics as well as design new drug candidates quickly and efficiently. Bacteria - such as E. coli - harness biosynthesis to create molecules that are difficult to make artificially. "We already use bacteria to make a number of drugs for us," says Edward Kalkreuter, former graduate student at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the ...

University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers have shown that psilocybin--the active chemical in "magic mushrooms"-- still works its antidepressant-like actions, at least in mice, even when the psychedelic experience is blocked. The new findings suggest that psychedelic drugs work in multiple ways in the brain and it may be possible to deliver the fast-acting antidepressant therapeutic benefit without requiring daylong guided therapy sessions. A version of the drug without, or with less of, the psychedelic effects could loosen restrictions on who could receive the therapy, and lower costs, making the benefits of psilocybin more available to more people in need. In all clinical ...

The "three-body problem," the term coined for predicting the motion of three gravitating bodies in space, is essential for understanding a variety of astrophysical processes as well as a large class of mechanical problems, and has occupied some of the world's best physicists, astronomers and mathematicians for over three centuries. Their attempts have led to the discovery of several important fields of science; yet its solution remained a mystery. At the end of the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton succeeded in explaining the motion of the planets around the sun through ...

PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA [April 13, 2021] -- The April 2021 issue of JNCCN--Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network publishes new research from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and Gustave Roussy Institute, which suggests that baseline brain imaging should be considered in most patients with metastatic kidney cancer. The researchers studied 1,689 patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC) who had been considered for clinical trial participation at either of the two institutions between 2001 and 2019 and had undergone brain imaging in this context, without clinical suspicion for brain involvement. The researchers discovered 4% had asymptomatic brain metastases in this setting. This group was found to have a low median 1-year ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - We've all seen them: political ads on television that promise doom gloom if Candidate X is elected, and how all your problems will be solved if you choose Candidate Y. And Candidate Y, of course, approves this message. Beyond attempting to move a large swath of the population to vote one way or another, the seemingly constant bombardment of negativity in the name of our democratic process is anxiety-inducing, researchers have found. "Many of my friends and family members wind up quite stressed out, for lack of a better word, during each election season," said Jeff Niederdeppe, professor in the Department of Communication in the College of ...

With 'Eyecam' they now present the prototype of a webcam that not only looks like a human eye, but imitates its movements realistically. "The goal of our project is not to develop a 'better' design for cameras, but to spark a discussion. We want to draw attention to the fact that we are surrounded by sensing devices every day. That raises the question of how that affects us," says Marc Teyssier. In 2020, the French scientist completed his doctorate on the topic of anthropomorphic design in Paris. Now he is a postdoctoral researcher in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Saarland University in Germany. The research team at Saarland Informatics Campus has developed ...

Human non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a little-understood condition that significantly increases the risk of inflammation, fibrosis and liver cancer and ultimately requires liver transplant. "NAFLD has been difficult to study mainly because we had no good animal model," said corresponding author Dr. Karl-Dimiter Bissig, who was at Baylor during the development of this project and is now at Duke University. The disease has both genetic and nutritional components, which have been hard to understand in human studies, and murine models ...

A new study verifies the age and origin of one of the oldest specimens of Homo erectus--a very successful early human who roamed the world for nearly 2 million years. In doing so, the researchers also found two new specimens at the site--likely the earliest pieces of the Homo erectus skeleton yet discovered. Details are published today in the journal Nature Communications. "Homo erectus is the first hominin that we know about that has a body plan more like our own and seemed to be on its way to being more human-like," said Ashley Hammond, an assistant curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Anthropology and the lead author of the new study. "It had longer lower limbs than upper limbs, a torso ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - The muon is a tiny particle, but it has the giant potential to upend our understanding of the subatomic world and reveal an undiscovered type of fundamental physics. That possibility is looking more and more likely, according to the initial results of an international collaboration - hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory - that involved key contributions by a Cornell team led by Lawrence Gibbons, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences. The collaboration, which brought together 200 scientists from 35 institutions in seven countries, set out to confirm the findings of a 1998 experiment that startled physicists by indicating that muons' magnetic ...

In the Cascadia subduction zone, medium and large-sized "intraslab" earthquakes, which take place at greater than crustal depths within the subducting plate, will likely produce only a few detectable aftershocks, according to a new study. The findings could have implications for forecasting aftershock seismic hazard in the Pacific Northwest, say Joan Gomberg of the U.S. Geological Survey and Paul Bodin of the University of Washington in Seattle, in their paper published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. Researchers now calculate aftershock forecasts in the region based in part on data from subduction zones around the world. ...

In a series of experiments that began with amoebas -- single-celled organisms that extend podlike appendages to move around -- Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists say they have identified a genetic pathway that could be activated to help sweep out mucus from the lungs of people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease a widespread lung ailment. "Physician-scientists and fundamental biologists worked together to understand a problem at the root of a major human illness, and the problem, as often happens, relates to the core biology of cells," says Doug Robinson, Ph.D., professor of cell ...

Circularly polarized light exhibits promising applications in future displays and photonic technologies. Traditionally, circularly polarized light is converted from unpolarized light by the linear polarizer and the quarter-wave plate. During this indirectly physical process, at least 50% of energy will be lost. Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) from chiral luminophores provides an ideal approach to directly generate circularly polarized light, in which the energy loss induced by polarized filter can be reduced. Among various chiral luminophores, organic micro-/nano-structures have attracted increasing attention owing to the high quantum efficiency ...

Tsukuba, Japan - Tropical cyclones like typhoons may invoke imagery of violent winds and storm surges flooding coastal areas, but with the heavy rainfall these storms may bring, another major hazard they can cause is landslides--sometimes a whole series of landslides across an affected area over a short time. Detecting these landslides is often difficult during the hazardous weather conditions that trigger them. New methods to rapidly detect and respond to these events can help mitigate their harm, as well as better understand the physical processes themselves. In a new study published in Geophysical Journal International, a research team led ...

Hokkaido University researchers have clarified different causes of past glacial river floods in the far north of Greenland, and what it means for the region's residents as the climate changes. The river flowing from the Qaanaaq Glacier in northwest Greenland flooded in 2015 and 2016, washing out the only road connecting the small village of Qaanaaq and its 600 residents to the local airport. What caused the floods was unclear at the time. Now, by combining physical field measurements and meteorological data into a numerical model, researchers at Japan's Hokkaido ...

The semiconductor industry and pretty much all of electronics today are dominated by silicon. In transistors, computer chips, and solar cells, silicon has been a standard component for decades. But all this may change soon, with gallium nitride (GaN) emerging as a powerful, even superior, alternative. While not very heard of, GaN semiconductors have been in the electronics market since 1990s and are often employed in power electronic devices due to their relatively larger bandgap than silicon--an aspect that makes it a better candidate for high-voltage and high-temperature applications. Moreover, current travels quicker through GaN, which ensures fewer switching losses during switching applications. Not everything about GaN is perfect, however. While impurities are usually desirable ...