Astronomers have curated the most complete list of nearby brown dwarfs to date thanks to discoveries made by thousands of volunteers participating in the Backyard Worlds citizen science project. The list and 3D map of 525 brown dwarfs -- including 38 reported for the first time -- incorporate observations from a host of astronomical instruments including several NOIRLab facilities. The results confirm that the Sun's neighborhood appears surprisingly diverse relative to other parts of the Milky Way Galaxy. Mapping out our own small pocket of the Universe is a time-honored quest within astronomy, and ...

NEW YORK (January 14) -- A new study co-authored by researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Global Conservation Program and the University of British Columbia (UBC) Faculty of Forestry introduces a classification called Resistance-Resilience-Transformation (RRT) that enables the assessment of whether and to what extent a management shift toward transformative action is occurring in conservation. The team applied this classification to 104 climate adaptation projects funded by the WCS Climate Adaptation Fund over the past decade and found differential responses toward transformation ...

A wide breadth of behaviors surrounding oral sex may affect the risk of oral HPV infection and of a virus-associated head and neck cancer that can be spread through this route, a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center suggests. These findings add nuance to the connection between oral sex and oropharyngeal cancer -- tumors that occur in the mouth and throat -- and could help inform research and public health efforts aimed at preventing this disease. The findings were reported Jan. 11 in the journal Cancer. In the early 1980s, researchers realized that nearly all cervical cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV), a DNA virus from the Papillomaviridae family. Although about 90% of HPV infections ...

The higher a person's income, the more likely they were to protect themselves at the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, Johns Hopkins University economists find. When it comes to adopting behaviors including social distancing and mask wearing, the team detected a striking link to their financial well-being. People who made around $230,000 a year were as much as 54% more likely to increase these types of self-protective behaviors compared to people making about $13,000. "We need to understand these differences because we can wring our hands, and we can blame and shame, but in a way it doesn't matter," said Nick Papageorge, the Broadus Mitchell Associate Professor of Economics. "Policymakers just need to recognize who is going ...

Physicists at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered how to locally add electrical charge to an atomically thin graphene device by layering flakes of another thin material, alpha-RuCl3, on top of it. A paper published in the journal Nano Letters describes the charge transfer process in detail. Gaining control of the flow of electrical current through atomically thin materials is important to potential future applications in photovoltaics or computing. "In my field, where we study van der Waals heterostructures made by custom-stacking atomically ...

ATLANTA--Compared to standard machine learning models, deep learning models are largely superior at discerning patterns and discriminative features in brain imaging, despite being more complex in their architecture, according to a new study in Nature Communications led by Georgia State University. Advanced biomedical technologies such as structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI and fMRI) or genomic sequencing have produced an enormous volume of data about the human body. By extracting patterns from this information, scientists can glean ...

Philadelphia, January 14, 2021--Based on preclinical studies of an investigational drug to treat peripheral nerve tumors, researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) as part of the Neurofibromatosis Clinical Trials Consortium have shown that the drug, cabozantinib, reduces tumor volume and pain in patients with the genetic disorder neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1). The results of the Phase 2 clinical trial, co-chaired by Michael J. Fisher, MD at CHOP, were published recently in Nature Medicine. "This is the second class of drugs to demonstrate ...

Many animal and insect species use Batesian mimicry - mimicking a poisonous species - as a defense against predators. The common palmfly, Elymnias hypermnestra (a species of satyrine butterfly), which is found throughout wide areas of tropical and subtropical Asia, adds a twist to this evolutionary strategy: the females evolved two distinct forms, either orange or dark brown, imitating two separate poisonous model species, Danaus or Euploea. The males are uniformly brown. A population group is either entirely brown (both males and females) or mixed (brown males and orange females). City College of New York entomologist David Lohman and his collaborators studied the genome of 45 samples representing 18 subspecies across Asia to determine ...

While new research from West Virginia University economists finds that presidential inaugurations have gained popularity as must-see tourist events in recent years, major security threats will keep visitors away for the inauguration of President-Elect Joe Biden. Published in "Tourism Economics," the study, by Joshua Hall, chair and professor of economics, and economic doctoral student Clay Collins, examined the impact of the inaugurations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump on hotel occupancy in the Washington, D.C.-area. Daily occupancy rates around the inaugurations were four-to-six times higher than the next largest event in the sample. The research team also concluded ...

To achieve full occupancy, hotels used to rely exclusively on experience, concentration and human abilities. Then came online booking, which made the reservation collection process faster, but did not solve the risk of turning down long stays because of rooms previously booked for short stays. To avoid overbooking (accepting more reservations than there is room for) in some cases online sales are blocked before hotels are completely booked. The solution that the University of Trento has just discovered could change the life of hotels by increasing the number of occupied rooms and, therefore, in the revenue of hotel owners. For an average Italian hotel (50 rooms), ...

More than half of all university students in the United States have experienced high levels of psychological impact from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Matthew Browning of Clemson University, US, and colleagues. University students are increasingly recognized as a psychologically vulnerable population, suffering from higher levels of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and disordered eating compared to the general population. Moreover, college students have been among the most strongly affected by COVID-19 because of uncertainty regarding academic success, future careers and social life during college, among other concerns. In the new study, researchers collected data on 2,534 students ...

Investors who bet on tropical forest conservation and reforestation to solve global warming by storing carbon in wood face huge uncertainties because the science behind predicting carbon stocks is still shaky. Even the best Earth Systems Models fail to predict how carbon stored by tropical forests varies from place to place. The New Phytologist invites scientists doing the "most-exciting, ground-breaking research" to review timely topics in a way that non-scientists can understand. Helene Muller-Landau, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) was chosen to write the authoritative Tansley Review ...

MIAMI--Scientists used a 600-year-old marine sponge to reconstruct a record of ocean temperature in the North Atlantic revealing past volcanic activity as well as the current global warming trend from the release of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gasses into Earth's atmosphere and absorbed by the oceans. The University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science-led research team used geochemical proxies to reconstruct a 600 year-long record of Atlantic Ocean temperatures from the skeleton of a sclerosponge (Ceratoporella nicholsoni). The basketball-sized sclerosponge was ...

These findings validate the significance of the previously described first threshold - the point when the damage to the acinar cells of the pancreas is sufficient to trigger the infamous inflammatory cascade (Barreto and Saccone, 2010) - while highlighting the importance of a second threshold, namely the point when a person develops clinical symptoms of the disease sufficient to warrant going to hospital. "This transcontinental collaboration of pancreatologists drew on their vast clinical and research experience spanning decades investigating the pathophysiology and treatments ...

Deep in the Brazilian Amazon River basin, scientists led by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History fish research associate C. David de Santana discovered a small, river-fed lake filled with more than 100 adult electric eels, many of which were upwards of 4 feet long. On its own, this was an intriguing discovery, electric eels--a type of knifefish rather than true eels--were thought to be solitary creatures. But in this lake along the banks of the Iriri River in Brazil's state of Pará, the researchers witnessed the eels working together to herd small fish called tetras into tightly packed balls. Then groups of up to ...

Underwater seagrass meadows may trap, extract and carry marine plastic debris to shore, thereby helping to remove plastic litter from the sea, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. Previous research suggested that most plastics end up in the seafloor and that some are washed back to shore; however, how this occurs was unclear. Seagrass meadows are widespread in shallow coastal waters and are involved in trapping and binding sediment particles that form the seabed. To assess the role that seagrass may have in trapping and removing marine plastic, Anna Sanchez-Vidal and colleagues measured the amount of plastic debris collected from seagrass litter ...

Advancements in energy technologies, healthcare, semiconductors and food production all have one thing in common: they rely on developing new materials--new combinations of atoms--that have specific properties enabling them to perform a needed function. In the not-too-distant past, the only way to know what properties a material had was by performing experimental measurements or using very expensive computations. More recently, scientists have been using machine learning algorithms to rapidly predict the properties that certain arrangements of atoms would have. The challenge with this approach is it requires a lot of highly accurate data to train the model, which often does not exist. By combining large ...

Retinal cells derived from adult human eye stem cells survived when transplanted into the eyes of monkeys, an important early step in the validation of this approach for treating blindness, according to a study by Liu, et al recently published in Stem Cell Reports. The retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a layer of pigmented cells in the retina, is essential for sustaining normal vision. Blindness due to RPE dysfunction, such as macular degeneration, affects about 200 million people worldwide. To restore this population of cells, researchers extracted retinal stem cells from donated cadaver adult eyes, grew them into RPE cells and transplanted them into the eyes of monkeys. ...

Retinal cells derived from a cadaver human eye survived when transplanted into the eyes of primate models, an important advance in the development of cell therapy to treat blindness, according to a study published on January 14 in Stem Cell Reports. The retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a layer of pigmented cells in the retina, functions as a barrier and regulator in the eye to maintain normal vision. RPE dysfunction can lead to eye disorders including macular degeneration and can cause blindness, which affects about 200 million people worldwide. To restore this population of cells, ...

A major roadblock to computational design of high-entropy alloys has been removed, according to scientists at Iowa State University and Lehigh University. Engineers from the Ames Lab and Lehigh University's Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics have developed a process that reduces search time used for predictive design 13,000-fold. According to Ganesh Balasubramanian, an associate professor at Lehigh, the goal of the team's research was to accelerate the computational modeling of complex alloys. The tools available for creating random distribution of atoms in materials simulation models, he says, have been used for many, many years now and are limited in ...

What The Study Did: The number of patients undergoing cancer screening tests and of subsequent cancer diagnoses during the COVID-19 pandemic in the largest health care system in the northeastern United States was assessed in this study. Authors: Toni K. Choueiri, M.D., of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Quoc-Dien Trinh, M.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, are the corresponding authors. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2020.7600) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict ...

What The Study Did: Which demographic and socioeconomic factors were associated with patient participation in telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic surge was examined in this observational study. Authors: Ilaaf Darrat, M.D., M.B.A., of the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, 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/jamaoto.2020.5161) 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 investigated the association of home confinement during the COVID-19 outbreak with myopia (nearsightedness) development in school-age children in China. Authors: Xuehan Qian, M.D., Ph.D., of Tianjin Medical University Eye Hospital in Tianjin, China, is the corresponding author. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY License. © 2021 Wang J et al. JAMA Ophthalmology.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2020.6239) Editor's Note: The ...

Cardiac rehabilitation is a therapy that combines guided exercise along with heart-healthy lifestyle education that can be life-saving for the majority of people who have had a major cardiac event, such as a heart attack. However, it is underutilized in the United States, with many hospitals referring just 20 percent or fewer of their eligible patients, largely because the referral process can be cumbersome. But new research shows that implementing a simple, easy to use "opt-out" pathway in the electronic health record drastically increased the rate of referrals, which could lead to fewer rehospitalizations and even lowered mortality. Led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine ...

What The Study Did: Researchers in this randomized clinical trial compared injection-site pain and other reactions among adults age 65 and older who received flu vaccines. Author: Kenneth E. Schmader, M.D., of the Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, 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.2020.31266) 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 disclosures, and funding and ...