An international research team has developed a fast and affordable quantum random number generator. The device created by scientists from NUST MISIS, Russian Quantum Center, University of Oxford, Goldsmiths, University of London and Freie Universität Berlin produces randomness at a rate of 8.05 gigabits per second, which makes it the fastest random number generator of its kind. The study published in Physical Review X is a promising starting point for the development of commercial random number generators for cryptography and complex systems modeling. INFORMATION: ...

ATHENS, Ohio (Jan. 20, 2021) - While the world awaits broad distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, researchers at Ohio University just published highly significant and timely results in the search for another way to stop the virus -- by disrupting its RNA and its ability to reproduce. Dr. Jennifer Hines, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, along with graduate and undergraduate students in her lab, published the first structural biology analysis of a section of the COVID-19 viral RNA called the stem-loop II motif. This is a non-coding section of the RNA, which means that it is not translated into a protein, but it is likely key to the ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (January 20, 2021) - More than 5.7 million Americans live with Alzheimer's disease and that number is projected to triple by 2050. Despite the growing number there is not a cure. Florin Despa a professor with the University of Kentucky's department of pharmacology and nutritional sciences says, "The mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases are largely unknown and effective therapies are lacking." That is why numerous studies and trials are ongoing around the world including at the University of Kentucky. One of those studies by University of Kentucky researchers was recently published in Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions. It is the ...

Older adults are managing the stress of the coronavirus pandemic better than younger adults, reporting less depression and anxiety despite also experiencing greater general concern about COVID-19, according to a study recently published by researchers at the UConn School of Nursing. Their somewhat paradoxical findings, published last month in the journal Aging and Mental Health, suggest that although greater psychological distress has been reported during the pandemic, older age may offer a buffer against negative feelings brought on by the virus's impact. "When you think about older adulthood, oftentimes, there are downsides. For example, with regard to physical well-being, we don't recover as well from injury or ...

Not long after the sun goes down, pairs of burying beetles, or Nicrophorus orbicollis, begin looking for corpses. For these beetles, this is not some macabre activity; it's house-hunting, and they are in search of the perfect corpse to start a family in. They can sense a good find from miles away, because carrion serves as a food source for countless members of nature's clean-up crew. But because these beetles want to live in these corpses, they don't want to share their discovery. As a result, burying beetles have clever ways of claiming their decaying prize all for themselves. In new research published in The American Naturalist, researchers from UConn and The University of Bayreuth have found these beetles recruit microbes to help throw rivals off the scent. Immediately following ...

The NFL playoffs are underway, and fans are finding ways to simulate tailgating during the COVID-19 pandemic. Football watch parties are synonymous with eating fatty foods and drinking alcohol. Have you ever wondered what all of that eating and drinking does to your body? Researchers from the University of Missouri School of Medicine simulated a tailgating situation with a small group of overweight but healthy men and examined the impact of the eating and drinking on their livers using blood tests and a liver scan. They discovered remarkably differing responses in the subjects. "Surprisingly, we found that in overweight men, after an afternoon of eating and drinking, how their bodies reacted to food and drink was not uniform," said Elizabeth Parks, PhD, professor of nutrition and ...

University of Arizona researchers read between the lines of tree rings to reconstruct exactly what happened in Alaska the year that the Laki Volcano erupted half a world away in Iceland. What they learned can help fine-tune future climate predictions. In June 1783, Laki spewed more sulfur into the atmosphere than any other Northern Hemisphere eruption in the last 1,000 years. The Inuit in North America tell stories about the year that summer never arrived. Benjamin Franklin, who was in France at the time, noted the "fog" that descended over much of Europe in the aftermath, and correctly reasoned that it led to an unusually cold winter on the continent. Previous analyses of annual tree rings have shown that the entire 1783 growing season for the spruce ...

A meteorite that fell in northern Germany in 2019 contains carbonates which are among the oldest in the solar system; it also evidences the earliest presence of liquid water on a minor planet. The high-resolution Ion Probe - a research instrument at the Institute of Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University - provided the measurements. The investigation by the Cosmochemistry Research Group led by Prof. Dr Mario Trieloff was part of a consortium study coordinated by the University of Münster with participating scientists from Europe, Australia and the USA. Carbonates are ubiquitous rocks on Earth. They can be found in the mountain ranges of the Dolomites, the chalk cliffs on the island of Rügen, and in the coral reefs of the ...

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive method of brain stimulation, in which electrodes are applied over certain places on the scalp, creating a weak electric field. It is currently used for a variety of purposes: from treating depression and pain syndromes to better acquisition of new words and even sports techniques. During stimulation, the active electrode can transmit a positive or negative electrical charge. In the former case, this stimulation is called 'anodal'; in the latter one, it is called 'cathodal'. Researchers believe that anodal tDCS generally leads to depolarisation of neurons, which increases the likelihood of their excitation when new information arrives. Cathodal ...

As the United States struggles to control record-breaking increases in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, the roll-out of two approved vaccines offers tremendous hope for saving lives and curbing the pandemic. To achieve success, however, experts estimate that at least 70 to 90 percent of the population must be inoculated to achieve herd immunity, but how can we ensure folks will voluntarily receive a vaccine? Both vaccines require two injections. Pfizer-BioNTech's second dose must be given 21 days after the first and Moderna's second dose must be administered 28 days after the first. While public health and infectious disease experts have discussed strategies to enhance adherence, including the potential use of financial incentives, ...

One more piece of the puzzle has fallen into place behind a new drug whose anti-cancer potential was developed at the University of Alberta and is set to begin human trials this year, thanks to newly published research. "The results provide more justification and rationale for starting the clinical trial in May," said first author John Mackey, professor and director of oncology clinical trials in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry. "It's another exciting stepping stone to finding out if this is going to be a new cancer treatment." The drug PCLX-001 is designed to selectively kill cancer cells by targeting enzymes ...

Better grades thanks to your fellow students? A study conducted by the University of Zurich's Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics has revealed that not only the grade point average, gender and nationality peers can influence your own academic achievement, but so can their personalities. Intensive contact and interaction with persistent fellow students improve your own performance, and this effect even endures in subsequent semesters. Personality traits influence many significant outcomes in life, such as one's educational attainment, income, career achievements or health. Assistant Professor Ulf Zölitz of the University of Zurich's Department of Economics and Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development has investigated how one's own personality affects fellow students. The ...

Robots are widely used to build cars, paint airplanes and sew clothing in factories, but the assembly of microscopic components, such as those for biomedical applications, has not yet been automated. Lasers could be the solution. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have used lasers to create miniature robots from bubbles that lift, drop and manipulate small pieces into interconnected structures. Watch a video of the bubble microrobots in action here. As manufacturing has miniaturized, objects are now being constructed that are only a few hundred micrometers long, or about the thickness of a sheet of paper. But it is hard to position ...

HOUSTON - (Jan. 20, 2021) - Once upon a time, seasons in Gale Crater probably felt something like those in Iceland. But nobody was there to bundle up more than 3 billion years ago. The ancient Martian crater is the focus of a study by Rice University scientists comparing data from the Curiosity rover to places on Earth where similar geologic formations have experienced weathering in different climates. Iceland's basaltic terrain and cool weather, with temperatures typically less than 38 degrees Fahrenheit, turned out to be the closest analog to ancient Mars. The study determined that temperature had the biggest impact on how rocks formed from sediment ...

Since SARS-CoV-2 was identified in December 2019, researchers have worked feverishly to study the novel coronavirus. Although much knowledge has been gained, scientists still have a lot to learn about how SARS-CoV-2 interacts with the human body, and how the immune system fights it. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science have developed a mathematical model of SARS-CoV-2 infection that reveals a key role for the innate immune system in controlling viral load. The COVID-19 pandemic has created tremendous socioeconomic problems and caused the death of almost 2 million people worldwide. Although vaccines ...

Scientists at the University of Bonn have built hair-thin optical fibre filters in a very simple way. They are not only extremely compact and stable, but also colour-tunable. This means they can be used in quantum technology and as sensors for temperature or for detecting atmospheric gases. The results have been published in the journal Optics Express. Optical fibers not much thicker than a human hair today not only constitute the backbone of our world-wide information exchange. They are also the basis for building extremely compact and robust sensors with very high sensitivity for temperature, chemical analysis and much more. Optical resonators or filters are important components cutting out very narrow spectral lines from white light sources. In the simplest case such filters ...

Tityus serrulatus, the Yellow scorpion, causes more deaths than any other venomous animal in Brazil. Its sting can induce heart attack and pulmonary edema, especially in children and the elderly. According to the Brazilian Health Ministry, more than 156,000 cases of scorpion envenomation, 169 fatal, were reported in the country in 2019. Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) have demonstrated for the first time that in severe cases of scorpion envenomation a systemic neuroimmune reaction produces inflammatory mediators leading to the release of neurotransmitters. A paper reporting the results of their study is published in Nature Communications. It suggests the inflammatory process can be inhibited by administration of a corticosteroid almost immediately after the ...

Skoltech researchers and their collaborators from France, the US, Switzerland, and Australia were able to create and describe a mixed oxide Na(Li1/3Mn2/3)O2 that holds promise as a cathode material for sodium-ion batteries, which can take one day complement or even replace lithium-ion batteries. The paper was published in the journal Nature Materials. Lithium-ion batteries are powering the modern world of consumer devices and driving a revolution in electric transportation. But since lithium is rather rare and challenging to extract from an environmental standpoint, researchers and engineers have been looking for more sustainable and cost-effective alternatives for quite some time now. One option is sodium-ion technology, as sodium is much more abundant than ...

Researchers Yulia Chilipenok, Olga Gaponova, Nadezhda Gaponova and Lyubov Danilova of HSE - Nizhny Novgorod looked at how the lockdown has impacted Russian women during the COVID-19 pandemic. They studied the following questions: how women divided their time; how they worked from home; how they got on with their partners and children; and how they dropped old habits and started new ones in relation to nutrition, health, beauty, and self-development. In cases in which the whole family had to stay home together for a long time, it was largely women on whom the family's adaptation to the new reality depended. The paper was published in the Woman in Russian Society Journal. It is difficult to find a strictly academic definition for today's 'self-isolation'. According to the ...

A new study from researchers at the Allen Institute collected and analyzed the largest single dataset of neurons' electrical activity to glean principles of how we perceive the visual world around us. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, captures the hundreds of split-second electrical signals that fire when an animal is interpreting what it sees. Your brain processes the world around you nearly instantaneously, but there are numerous lightning-fast steps between light hitting your retinas and the point at which you become aware of what's in front of you. Humans have three dozen different brain areas responsible for understanding the visual world, and scientists still don't ...

Various software packages can be used to evaluate products and predict failure; however, these packages are extremely computationally intensive and take a significant amount of time to produce a solution. Quicker solutions mean less accurate results. To combat this issue, a team of Penn State researchers studied the use of machine learning and image colorization algorithms to ease computational load, maintain accuracy, reduce time and predict strain fields for porous materials. They published their work in the Journal of Computational Materials Science with accompanying presentations and proceedings in Procedia Engineering. "There is always a human side to design," said Chris McComb, assistant professor of engineering design in the School of Engineering Design, ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - When humans first domesticated maize some 9,000 years ago, those early breeding efforts led to an increase in harmful mutations to the crop's genome compared to their wild relatives, which more recent modern breeding has helped to correct. A new comparative study investigates whether the same patterns found in maize occurred in sorghum, a gluten-free grain grown for both livestock and human consumption. The researchers were surprised to find the opposite is true: Harmful mutations in sorghum landraces (early domesticated crops) actually decreased compared to their wild relatives. The ...

Harbor porpoises have rebounded in a big way off California. Their populations have recovered dramatically since the end of state set-gillnet fisheries that years ago entangled and killed them in the nearshore waters they frequent. These coastal set-gillnet fisheries are distinct from federally-managed offshore drift-gillnet fisheries. They have been prohibited in inshore state waters for more than a decade. The new research indicates that the coastal set gillnets had taken a greater toll on harbor porpoise than previously realized. The return of harbor porpoises reflects the first documented example of the species rebounding. It's a bright spot for marine wildlife, the scientists write in a new assessment published in Marine Mammal Science. "This is ...

A new study shows that humans express a powerful hormone during exercise and that treating mice with the hormone improves physical performance, capacity and fitness. Researchers say the findings present new possibilities for addressing age-related physical decline. The research, published on Wednesday in Nature Communications, reveals a detailed look at how the mitochondrial genome encodes instructions for regulating physical capacity, performance and metabolism during aging and may be able to increase healthy lifespan. "Mitochondria are known as the cell's energy source, but they are also hubs that coordinate and fine-tune metabolism by actively communicating to the rest of the body," said Changhan David Lee, assistant professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology ...

BOSTON - Opioid addiction is persistently stigmatized, delaying and preventing treatment for many - an urgent problem with overdose deaths continuing to rise. To help alleviate this, various medical ways of describing opioid-related impairment, such as "a chronically relapsing brain disease," "illness," or "disorder," have been promoted in diagnostic systems and among national health agencies. "While intensely debated, there were no rigorous scientific studies out there to inform practice and policy about which terms may be most helpful in reducing stigma," says John F. Kelly, PhD, lead investigator ...