Lemurs can use their sense of smell to locate fruit hidden more than 50 feet away in the forest--but only when the wind blows the fruit's aroma toward them, according to a study published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. "This is the first time research has demonstrated that primates can track a distant smell carried by the wind," said anthropologist Elena Cunningham, a clinical associate professor of molecular pathobiology at NYU College of Dentistry and the study's lead author. Many animals use their sense of smell to locate food. However, less is known about whether primates can smell food that is far away, or if they instead rely on visual cues or memory to find their next meal. Because many primates--including ring-tailed lemurs, ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Oregon State University researchers analyzed more than 17,000 public comments focused on orca conservation in the state of Washington and found that the most common emotional sentiments were trust, anticipation and fear. The recently published findings have important implications because they provide conservation managers a way to convert a large volume of information to a manageable amount that can help them understand why people might support or reject management actions, the researchers said. "Emotions are intertwined in our decision-making, often playing a substantive role in public evaluations of conservation policies," said Kelly Biedenweg, an author ...

(Portland - March 15) Results of a clinical study conducted by researchers in Manaus, Brazil, show that the Gazelle® Malaria test outperformed Rapid Diagnostic Tests (RDTs) and was nearly as accurate as more expensive and time-consuming expert microscopy in detecting Plasmodium vivax (P. vivax) malaria. The data was published Friday, March 12 in the Malaria Journal. The double-blind study was based on 300 participants who sought care from Fundac?a?o de Medicina Tropical Doutor Heitor Vieira Dourado (FMT-HVD), located in Manaus, an area in the Western Brazilian Amazon, heavily endemic for P. vivax. "Because P. vivax is not adequately detected by current tests, the infection is frequently missed, and patients don't receive essential treatment," said ...

Copper nanomaterials with a cubic shape so perfect that they form neatly aligned stacks when brought together have been created by researchers at KAUST. The cuboid copper nanoclusters, developed by rational design, are a new member of an exotic nanomaterial family that has shown many promising properties but has remained very hard to make. "Copper nanomaterials are a class of materials that exhibit useful properties for the fields of photoluminescence and catalysis," says Ren-Wu Huang, a postdoc in Osman Bakr's lab, who led the research. There is great interest in synthesizing new copper nanomaterials to understand how their structure influences their function. Copper nanoclusters, which are of an atomically precise structure, are among the few copper nanomaterials that ...

An interdisciplinary, multinational research team presents a new class of chemical compounds that can be reversibly oxidized and reduced. The compounds known as 'pyrazinacenes' are simple, stable compounds that consist of a series of connected nitrogen-containing carbon rings. They are suitable for applications in electrochemistry or synthesis, as the researchers describe in the science journal Communications Chemistry. Redox reactions play an important role in our everyday life. In these reactions, one compound releases electrons and is oxidized, while another accepts ...

A discovery by University of Queensland pain researchers may allow some future cancer patients, including children with leukaemia, to avoid their chemotherapy's worst and most debilitating side effects. Professor Irina Vetter and Dr Hana Starobova thought "turning off" the inflammation that is one of the body's natural reactions to the chemotherapy drug vincristine might reduce its accompanying pain and unpleasant symptoms. "We found the anti-inflammatory drug anakinra substantially reduced the awful nerve symptoms for which vincristine chemotherapy is known," Professor ...

A study by a research team from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and China's first digital-only bank WeBank has found that security, service quality and system quality are the most important factors for customers who use mobile banking. Two in five respondents (40%) said that the security they felt while carrying out transactions on mobile applications was their most important consideration. This was followed by the level of service quality (25%), which referred to whether the banking applications could fulfil users' needs, such as carrying out transactions and easy access to credit card services. System quality, which considers the performance of the application, including ...

Researchers at UniSA have developed a cost-effective new technique to monitor soil moisture using a standard digital camera and machine learning technology. The United Nations predicts that by 2050 many areas of the planet may not have enough fresh water to meet the demands of agriculture if we continue our current patterns of use. One solution to this global dilemma is the development of more efficient irrigation, central to which is precision monitoring of soil moisture, allowing sensors to guide 'smart' irrigation systems to ensure water is applied at the optimum time and rate. Current methods for sensing soil moisture are problematic - buried sensors are susceptible to ...

Dr Daniel Montesinos is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Tropical Herbarium, at James Cook University in Cairns. He is studying weeds to better understand (among other things) how they might respond to climate change. He said most invasive plants are characterised by their rapid pace when it comes to taking up nutrients, growing, and reproducing - and they're even faster in the regions they invade. "New experiments comparing populations from distant regions show a clear trend for already-fast invasive plants to rapidly adapt even faster traits in their non-native regions," Dr Montesinos said. This is further pronounced in the tropics and sub-tropics. "Even though invasives' growth rates are already among the highest for plants, when they invade new territory ...

A new concept of on-demand drug delivery system has emerged in which the drugs are automatically released from in vivo medical devices simply by shining light on the skin. A research team led by Professor Sei Kwang Hahn of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor Kilwon Cho of the Department of Chemical Engineering at POSTECH have together developed an on-demand drug delivery system (DDS) using an organic photovoltaic cell coated with upconversion nanoparticles. This newly developed DDS allows nanoparticles to convert skin-penetrating near-infrared (NIR) light into visible light so that drug release can be controlled in medical ...

An international team of researchers, affiliated with UNIST has unveiled a novel technology that could improve the learning ability of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Professor Hongsik Jeong and his research team in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UNIST, in collaboration with researchers from Tsinghua University in China, proposed a new learning method to improve the learning ability of ANN chips by challenging its instability. Artificial neural network chips are capable of mimicking the structural, functional and biological features of human neural networks, and thus have been considered the technology of the future. In this study, the research team demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed learning method ...

A chromatin-regulating enzyme has been shown by in-depth interdisciplinary investigations to be a key driver of a common type of lung cancer. Drugs that target the enzyme could improve treatment and survival rates for this particular cancer. "Squamous cell carcinoma represents nearly one third of all lung cancers in humans," says KAUST structural biologist Lukasz Jaremko, who led the research along with colleagues at Stanford University and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, U.S. "Our joint structural and dynamics investigations, including enzymatic activity studies, genetic analyses, and mouse model and human cell results, ...

Basic, acidic, basic again: for pathogenic bacteria such as Salmonella, the human digestive tract is a sea change. So how do the bacteria manage to react to these changes? A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg led by Andreas Diepold has now provided a possible explanation: pathogenic bacteria can change components of their injection apparatus on the fly - like changing the tires on a moving car - to enable a rapid response. Some of the best-known human pathogens - from the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis to the diarrhea pathogen Salmonella - use a tiny hypodermic needle to inject disease-causing ...

Despite pandemic-driven restrictions on movement, there were over 12,000 accidents in Madrid in 2020, leading to 31 fatalities. In Barcelona, there were more than 5,700 collisions, causing 14 deaths. Pedestrian and vehicle safety is a priority, which is why a research project at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) is harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to make decisions that will make cities safer. The researchers have looked into the correlation between the complexity of certain urban areas and the likelihood of an accident occurring there. According to the researchers, the data they have gathered can be used to train neural networks to detect probable ...

Last December, the Parliament of Catalonia unanimously approved the incorporation into its legislation of second-order violence against those who give their support to victims of violence against women. A recent study compiles testimonies of victims, and analyses this form of intimidation To tackle violence against women, it is essential for victims to have the support of those surrounding them and to prevent them from being isolated. But what happens if the people around them are not protected? The work of Jose Ramón Flecha García, founder of the Community of Research on Excellence for All (CREA), and various academic teams, has led to the approval in the Catalan parliament of the first legislation on the Second Order of Sexual Harassment (SOSH). The following point ...

Robotics researchers are developing exoskeletons and prosthetic legs capable of thinking and moving on their own using sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The system combines computer vision and deep-learning AI to mimic how able-bodied people walk by seeing their surroundings and adjusting their movements. "We're giving robotic legs vision so they can control themselves," said Brokoslaw Laschowski, a PhD candidate in systems design engineering who leads a University of Waterloo research project called ExoNet. Exoskeletons and prosthetic devices operated by motors already exist, but users must manually ...

In 2016, a collaborative group of research and education specialists received funding from the National Science Foundation for the project 'Building a Comprehensive Evolutionary History of Flagellate Plants' -- also known as 'Genealogy of Flagellate Plants' (GoFlag). Members of the team have the ambitious goal of reconstructing the 470-million-year history of one of the most diverse groups of land plants on the planet. The first of several forthcoming publications from the project was published in a recent issue of Applications in Plant Sciences. In their inaugural article, the researchers report on the successful development of 451 nuclear target enrichment probes, which correspond to short, variable loci. By creating a standard ...

When rain began falling in northern Georgia on Sept. 15, 2009, little did Atlantans know that they would bear witness to epic flooding throughout the city. Neighborhoods, like Peachtree Hills, were submerged; Georgia's busiest expressway was underwater, as were roads and bridges; untreated sewage mingled with rising flood waters; cars and people were swept away. Then-Georgia-governor, Sonny Perdue, declared a state of emergency. Moisture from the Gulf of Mexico fueled the flood of 2009. A decade later, Arizona State University researchers are asking whether a ...

The habitats of freshwater fish species are threatened by global warming, mainly due to rising water temperatures. A 3.2-degree Celsius increase in global mean temperature would threaten more than half of the habitat for one third of all freshwater fish species. The number of species at risk is ten times smaller if warming is limited to 1.5 degrees. This is the conclusion of a study led by Radboud University, in collaboration with Utrecht University, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Leiden University and others, and published in Nature Communications ...

DALLAS, March 15, 2021 -- Beta-blockers treat various cardiovascular diseases and were not more likely to cause depression compared to other similar treatments, according to new research published today in Hypertension, an American Heart Association journal. While depression may occur during beta-blocker therapy, the research suggests beta-blockers are not the likely cause. Beta-blockers are a class of medications that reduce the heart rate, the heart's workload and the heart's output of blood, which, together, lower blood pressure. They are a common treatment for cardiovascular diseases, including heart failure, arrhythmias, chest pains and high blood pressure. Researchers have suspected ...

DALLAS, March 15, 2021 — Primary care clinics can play an important role in preserving patients’ brain health using the American Heart Association’s Life’s Simple 7 as a guide, as well as addressing 6 other factors associated with cognitive decline, according to a new American Stroke Association/American Heart Association Scientific Statement. “A Primary Care Agenda for Brain Health,” published today in the Associations’ journal Stroke. Preserving brain health in an aging population is a growing concern in the U.S. An estimated one in five Americans 65 years and older has mild cognitive impairment, and one in seven has dementia. By 2050, the number of Americans with dementia is expected to triple, ...

HOUSTON ? A high rate of genetic mutations within a tumor, known as high tumor mutation burden (TMB), was only useful for predicting clinical responses to immune checkpoint inhibitors in a subset of cancer types, according to a new study led by researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The findings, published today in Annals of Oncology, suggest that TMB status may not be reliably used as a universal biomarker for predicting immunotherapy response. While TMB status was capable of successfully predicting response to checkpoint blockade in certain cancers, such as melanoma, lung and bladder cancer, there was no association with improved outcomes in others, including breast, prostate and brain ...

A large study of people in 28 countries found men aged 50 and over had a 60% greater risk of death than women, partly explained by heavier rates of smoking and heart disease in men, although the gap varied across countries, according to new research in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) . "Many studies have examined the potential impact of social, behavioural and biological factors on sex differences in mortality, but few have been able to investigate potential variation across countries," writes Dr. Yu-Tzu Wu, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, and Population Health Sciences Institute, Newcastle University, United Kingdom, with coauthors. "Different cultural traditions, historical contexts, ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - For teens, pandemic restrictions may have meant months of virtual school, less time with friends and canceling activities like sports, band concerts and prom. And for young people who rely heavily on social connections for emotional support, these adjustments may have taken a heavy toll on mental health, a new national poll suggests. Forty-six percent of parents say their teen has shown signs of a new or worsening mental health condition since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, according to the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health at Michigan Medicine. Parents of teen girls were more likely to say their child had a ...

PULLMAN, Wash. - People who talk with their doctors are more likely to get vaccinated during a pandemic, according to a study of evidence collected during the "swine flu," the last pandemic to hit the U.S. before COVID-19. Researchers from Washington State University and University of Wisconsin-Madison surveyed patients about the vaccine for the H1N1 virus, also known as the swine flu, which was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in 2009. They found that doctor-patient communication helped build trust in physicians, which led to more positive attitudes toward the H1N1 vaccine--and it was more than just talk; it correlated to people actually getting vaccinated. ...