There are 12 essential attributes that explain why commercial carbon capture and sequestration projects succeed or fail in the U.S., University of California San Diego researchers say in a recent study published in Environmental Research Letters. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) has become increasingly important in addressing climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies greatly on the technology to reach zero carbon at low cost. Additionally, it is among the few low-carbon technologies in President Joseph R. Biden's proposed $400 billion clean energy plan that earns bipartisan support. In the last two decades, private industry and government have ...

Amsterdam, NL, March 22, 2021 - The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on our world, with disequilibrium, uncertainty, and human suffering making it difficult to envision a human, societal and individual future. Milan Zeleny, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Management Systems, Fordham University, New York, NY, USA, and world-recognized authority on decision making, productivity, knowledge management, and more recently the corporation as a living organism, says that "COVID-19 is rapidly changing from a cause to one of the symptoms of an increasingly unhinged world." Writing in the journal Human Systems Management, published ...

A University of New Mexico research team conducted a data analysis that has found that as a larger portion of the population gets vaccinated against COVID-19, it becomes economically advantageous to start relaxing social distancing measures and open businesses. Francesco Sorrentino, associate professor of mechanical engineering, is lead author of "Data-driven Optimized Control of the COVID-19 Epidemics," published March 22 in Scientific Reports. Co-authors of the study are Afroza Shirin of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Yen Ting Lin, a staff scientist of the Information Science Group in the Computer, Computational ...

Despite the fact that viruses are among the simplest biological entities--consisting only of DNA or RNA encapsulated in a protein shell--they can have devastating consequences, with viruses such as influenza, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and Ebola having dramatically affected the course of human history. Because they generally lack the cellular machinery necessary to reproduce, they propagate by hijacking host cells, often to the host's detriment. While their status as a "living" organism may be in question, there is no doubt that viruses are shaped by evolutionary forces that influence their genomes, as well as their replication, host range, virulence, and other features. With the emergence of ...

The same process that drains the battery of your cell phone even when it's turned off is even more of a problem for lithium-metal batteries, which are being developed for the next generation of smaller, lighter electronic devices, far-ranging electric vehicles and other uses. Now scientists at Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have taken the first atomic-scale look at how this process, called "calendar aging," attacks lithium-metal anodes, or negative electrodes. They discovered that the nature of the battery electrolyte, which carries charge between the electrodes, has a big impact on aging - a factor that needs to be taken into account ...

The first documented record of salt as an ancient Maya commodity at a marketplace is depicted in a mural painted more than 2,500 years ago at Calakmul, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. In the mural that portrays daily life, a salt vendor shows what appears to be a salt cake wrapped in leaves to another person, who holds a large spoon over a basket, presumably of loose, granular salt. This is the earliest known record of salt being sold at a marketplace in the Maya region. Salt is a basic biological necessity and is also useful for preserving food. Salt also was valued ...

Two new environmental policy briefings, aimed at decision makers working on rapidly expanding urban areas in southern Africa, emphasise that local community voices must be included in the early planning stages to minimise ecological impacts. Urban populations across the African continent and in particular the surrounding areas of urban sprawl, are forecasted to triple by 2050, resulting in higher rates of land conversion that have implications for managing significant environmental changes that lie ahead. This expansion is happening faster than infrastructure changes can keep-pace, meaning that residents do not have access to important services to reduce the impact of climate-related events such as flooding, droughts, and heat-stress. A new policy briefing, led by ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- A University of California, Riverside, study analyzing fourth-generation electronic cigarette, or EC, pod atomizer design features has found the pod atomizers are similar to those of previous generations and contain elements that may adversely affect health and accumulate in the environment. EC atomizers are chambers that hold nicotine-containing fluid and upon heating generate an aerosol. The pod-style e-cigarettes have become very popular, especially with young people. The elements/metals in atomizers are important because chronic exposure could adversely affect human health. Further, EC pod products, which eventually enter the environment, could ...

Suppose you drop your morning coffee and it splatters everywhere. Later a colleague drops by to say hello. Do you grumble a testy acknowledgment, or cheerfully greet her? In a new study on brain activity led by University of Miami psychologists, researchers found that how a person's brain evaluates fleeting negative stimuli--such as that dropped cup--may influence their long-term psychological well-being. "One way to think about it is the longer your brain holds on to a negative event, or stimuli, the unhappier you report being," said Nikki Puccetti, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology ...

East Hanover, NJ. March 22, 2021. Kessler Foundation researchers demonstrated that spinal cord transcutaneous stimulation (scTS) combined with hand training improves upper extremity and hand function in individuals with motor and sensory compete spinal cord injury (SCI). The study results showed immediate and long-lasting gains in strength, sensibility, and voluntary motor function. The article, "Cervical Spinal Cord Transcutaneous Stimulation Improves Upper Extremity and Hand Function in People with Complete Tetraplegia: A Case Study" (doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2020.3048592), was published January 28, 2021, in IEEE Transactions On Neural Systems And Rehabilitation Engineering. It is available open access at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9311628. The authors are Fan Zhang, ...

What is happening in your brain as you are scrolling through this page? In other words, which areas of your brain are active, which neurons are talking to which others, and what signals are they sending to your muscles? Mapping neural activity to corresponding behaviors is a major goal for neuroscientists developing brain-machine interfaces (BMIs): devices that read and interpret brain activity and transmit instructions to a computer or machine. Though this may seem like science fiction, existing BMIs can, for example, connect a paralyzed person with a robotic ...

The pandemic has exposed weaknesses in nursing homes, causing many families to rethink whether to keep an aging parent at home instead. Now a new study by UC San Francisco has found that many elderly Americans lack the basic self-care equipment that could enable them to live at home longer, postponing the need to move into residential care facilities. In the study, researchers focused on three inexpensive, low-tech assistive devices: grab bars around the toilet and in the shower or tub area; a shower or tub seat; and a raised toilet or toilet seat. They identified approximately 2,600 seniors who were representative of Medicare recipients nationwide and were drawn from the National Health and Aging ...

Social deficits attract so much attention in the study of autism spectrum disorder, it's easy to forget there are motor learning deficits during early childhood as well. For autistic kids hoping to throw a ball around the schoolyard and connect with classmates, these physical skill differences can isolate a child further. In a new study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers from the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Medicine have closed in on the neurological underpinnings of the motor learning delay. Dr. Simon Chen's lab in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine used a mouse model of autism to demonstrate a shortage ...

Though 40 million concussions are recorded annually, no effective treatment exists for them or for many other brain-related illnesses. In collaboration with Dragan Maric of the National Institutes of Health, Badri Roysam, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor and Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and his team are working to speed up drug development to treat brain diseases and injuries like concussion by developing new tools. "We are interested in mapping and profiling unhealthy and drug-treated brain tissue in unprecedented detail to reveal multiple biological processes at once - in context," said Roysam about his latest paper published ...

NEW YORK, NY (March 22, 2021)--The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic has taken the lives of millions of people around the world but has also left hundreds with lingering symptoms or completely new symptoms weeks after recovery. Much is unknown about what causes these symptoms and how long they last. But with nearly 740,000 cases of COVID reported in New York City since last March--and 28 million in the United States--physicians are increasingly seeing these "long-haulers" in their practices. "Over the course of the summer, we started getting a sense of what issues these people were having," ...

Organoids are tiny three-dimensional cellular assemblies that are grown in a laboratory from tissue-specific cells. They are particularly interesting to biologists because of their ability to mimic the characteristics of the original tissues. If scientists extract cells from a tumor, then they can grow cancer organoids that mimic the characteristics of the source tumor. This possibility for individual-level studies of tumor properties makes cancer organoids an exciting tool from the perspective of an emerging field called precision cancer medicine. Daniel Gil of the University of Wisconsin ...

CLEVELAND--A new technique for sampling and testing cells from Barrett's esophagus (BE) patients could result in earlier and easier identification of patients whose disease has progressed toward cancer or whose disease is at high risk of progressing toward cancer, according to a collaborative study by investigators at Case Western Reserve University and Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center (JHKCC). Published in the journal Gastroenterology, the findings show the combination of esophageal "brushing" with a massively parallel sequencing method can provide an accurate assessment of the ...

For something we spend one-third of our lives doing, we still understand remarkably little about how sleep works -- for example, why can some people sleep deeply through any disturbance, while others regularly toss and turn for hours each night? And why do we all seem to need a different amount of sleep to feel rested? For decades, scientists have looked to the behavior of the brain's neurons to understand the nature of slumber. Now, though, researchers at UC San Francisco have confirmed that a different type of brain cell that has received far less study -- astrocytes, named for their star-like shape -- can influence how long and how deeply animals sleep. The findings could open new avenues for exploring sleep disorder therapies and help scientists better understand brain diseases linked ...

A large study of brain MRI scans from 11,679 nine- and ten-year-old children reviewed by UC San Francisco neuroradiologists identified potentially life-threatening conditions in 1 in 500 children, and more minor but possibly clinically significant brain abnormalities in 1 out of 25 children. The results provide the best estimates to date of the true incidence of various structural abnormalities in the developing brain, and raise the question of whether all MRI brain imaging obtained during research studies should be reviewed by board-certified radiologists, as was done in this study, in the hopes of saving lives and alerting participants to incidental findings that ought to be medically evaluated. One ...

How the amygdala responds to viewing negative and subsequent neutral stimuli may impact our daily mood, according to new research published in JNeurosci. The amygdala evaluates the environment to find potential threats. If a threat does appear, the amygdala can stay active and respond to new stimuli like they are threatening too. This is helpful when you are in a dangerous situation, but less so when spilling your coffee in the morning keeps you on edge for the rest of the day. In a recent study, Puccetti et al. examined data collected from the "Midlife ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (03/22/2021) -- New research from the University of Minnesota Medical School suggests that disease-driving B cells, a white blood cell, play a role in the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) - the most common chronic liver condition in the U.S. Their findings could lead to targeted therapies for NAFLD, which currently affects a quarter of the nation and has no FDA-approved treatments. After noticing that patients with the disease showed a large number of inflammatory B cells in their livers, Xavier Revelo, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology and senior author, began studying B cells in NAFLD. "This disease is increasing in prevalence ...

Although Tuberculosis, or TB, killed nearly as many people as COVID-19 (approx. 1.8 million) in 2020, it did not receive as much media and public attention. The pandemic has proven that transmissible infection is indeed a global issue. TB remains a serious public health concern in Ireland, particularly with the presence of multi-drug resistant types and the numbers of complex cases here continuing to rise, with cases numbering over 300 annually. Science tells us that iron is crucial for daily human function, but it is also an essential element for the survival of ...

Batteries charge and recharge--apparently all thanks to a perfect interplay of electrode material and electrolyte. However, for ideal battery function, the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) plays a crucial role. Materials scientists have now studied nucleation and growth of this layer in atomic detail. According to the study published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the properties of anions and solvent molecules need to be well balanced. In lithium-ion batteries, the SEI forms at the beginning of the first charging process, when a potential is applied. Elements from the electrolyte deposit on the graphite electrode and form a coating that soon ...

Antibiotics have revolutionized the field of medicine by making it possible to treat most known microbial diseases today. However, their uncontrolled usage has led to the major global problem of antibiotic resistance. As we continue to exploit antibiotics, sometimes at doses much higher than needed, disease-causing bacteria are rapidly evolving defense strategies to evade them. These drug-resistant bacteria, also known as "superbugs," cause severe infections that are difficult to treat and can eventually be fatal. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a particularly vicious group of superbugs that have developed resistance to the antibiotic methicillin, is a major cause of hospital-acquired infections. Accurate and timely diagnosis ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: Beneath the cold, dark depths of the Arctic ocean sit vast reserves of methane. These stores rest in a delicate balance, stable as a solid called methane hydrates, at very specific pressures and temperatures. If that balance gets tipped, the methane can get released into the water above and eventually make its way to the atmosphere. In its gaseous form, methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, warming the Earth about 30 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide. Understanding possible sources of atmospheric methane is critical for accurately predicting future climate change. In the Arctic Ocean today, ice sheets exert pressure on the ground below them. That pressure diffuses ...