Inspired by the eyes of mantis shrimp, researchers have developed a new kind of optical sensor that is small enough to fit on a smartphone but is capable of hyperspectral and polarimetric imaging. "Lots of artificial intelligence (AI) programs can make use of data-rich hyperspectral and polarimetric images, but the equipment necessary for capturing those images is currently somewhat bulky," says Michael Kudenov, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. "Our work here makes smaller, more user friendly devices possible. And that would allow us to better bring those AI capabilities to bear in fields from astronomy to biomedicine." In the context of this research, ...

Researchers have analyzed tracking data for 5,775 birds across 39 species of albatrosses and large petrels -- threatened seabirds whose ranges span many countries and the high seas -- to estimate how responsibility for their protection should be distributed among nations and international organizations. The authors note that albatrosses and large petrels from all breeding countries spend much of their time on the high seas, indicating that effectively managing these waters is of global interest. These estimates are critical to inform ongoing United Nations discussions to design a global treaty for conserving biodiversity in the high seas, beyond national jurisdictions, the authors write. Many species of albatrosses and ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - First-year college students are reporting symptoms of depression and anxiety significantly more often than they were before the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study, embargoed for release until March 3, 2021, at 2 p.m. EST, in the journal PLOS ONE, is based on surveys of 419 Carolina students, and reflects the challenge of colleges nationwide to support student well-being. The study is unique among the growing reports of COVID-19's toll on mental health: researchers followed the ...

The source of potentially hazardous solar particles, released from the Sun at high speed during storms in its outer atmosphere, has been located for the first time by researchers at UCL and George Mason University, Virginia, USA. These particles are highly charged and, if they reach Earth's atmosphere, can potentially disrupt satellites and electronic infrastructure, as well as pose a radiation risk to astronauts and people in airplanes. In 1859, during what's known as the Carrington Event, a large solar storm caused telegraphic systems across Europe and America to fail. With the modern world ...

A huge volume of digital data has been harvested, stored and shared in the last few years - from sources such as social media, geolocation systems and aerial images from drones and satellites - giving researchers many new ways to study information and decrypt our world. In Switzerland, the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) has taken an interest in the big data revolution and the possibilities it offers to generate predictive statistics for the benefit of society. Conventional methods such as censuses and surveys remain the benchmark for generating socio-economic indicators at the municipal, cantonal and national levels. But these methods can now be supplemented with secondary, mostly pre-existing data, from sources such as cell-phone ...

More than five years after receiving an experimental immunotherapy drug, half of a group of people at high risk of developing Type 1 diabetes remained disease-free compared with 22% of those who received a placebo, according to a new trial overseen by Yale School of Medicine researchers. And those who developed diabetes did so on average about five years after receiving the new drug, called teplizumab, compared with 27 months for those who received the placebo. The study, which was done in collaboration with researchers from Indiana University, was published March 3 in the journal Science Translational Medicine. "If approved for use, this will be the first drug to delay or prevent Type 1 diabetes," ...

A series of nanoparticle-based vaccines elicits protective antibodies against various strains of the influenza virus in nonhuman primates, according to work from Nicole Darricarrère and colleagues. Although more research is needed, the vaccines mark an important step toward a universal flu vaccine for humans, which has long been a major goal for infectious disease researchers. Current seasonal flu vaccines can prevent disease but often only work for a year, after which a new vaccine must be developed. This occurs because influenza viruses evolve extremely quickly, meaning that a year-old vaccine may not prepare the immune system to recognize a new ...

Endangered Southern Resident killer whales prey on a diversity of Chinook and other salmon. The stocks come from an enormous geographic range as far north as Alaska and as far south as California's Central Valley, a new analysis shows. The diverse salmon stocks each have their own migration patterns and timing. They combine to provide the whales with a "portfolio" of prey that supports them across the entire year. The catch is that many of the salmon stocks are at risk themselves. "If returns to the Fraser River are in trouble, and Columbia River returns are strong, then prey availability to the whales potentially balances out ...

Scientists from the Skoltech Center for Design, Manufacturing and Materials (CDMM) and the Institute for Metals Superplasticity Problems (IMSP RAS) have studied the fatigue behavior of additive-manufactured high-entropy alloys (HEA). The research was published in the Journal of Alloys and Compounds. Conventional 20th century materials that are extensively used in industries and mechanical engineering have reached their performance limit. Nowadays, alloying is commonly used to improve the alloys' mechanical performance and increase their operating temperature. ...

Coastal communities at the forefront of climate change reveal valuable approaches to foster adaptability and resilience, according to a worldwide analysis of small-scale fisheries by Stanford University researchers. Globally important for both livelihood and nourishment, small-scale fisheries employ about 90 percent of the world's fishers and provide half the fish for human consumption. Large-scale shocks -- like natural disasters, weather fluctuations, oil spills and market collapse -- can spell disaster, depending on the fisheries' ability to adapt to change. In an assessment of 22 small-scale fisheries that experienced stressors, researchers revealed that diversity and flexibility are among the most important adaptive capacity factors ...

Humans were present in Florida by 14,000 years ago, and until recently, it was believed the Bahamas - located only a few miles away - were not colonized until about 1,000 years ago. But new findings from a team including a Texas A&M University at Galveston researcher prove that the area was colonized earlier, and the new settlers dramatically changed the landscape. Peter van Hengstum, associate professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Environment Science at Texas A&M-Galveston, and colleagues have had their findings published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Researchers generated a new ...

A detailed analysis of mental health treatment trends during the COVID-19 pandemic found a 7% increase in visits during the initial shelter-in-place period in 2020, compared with the same 3-month period in 2019. The study, published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry March 3, examined patient visits for psychiatric diagnoses among members of Kaiser Permanente in Northern California. The greatest increases in visits were for substance use (up 51%), adjustment disorder (up 15%), anxiety (up 12%), bipolar disorder (up 9%), and psychotic disorder (up 6%). Adjustment disorder is diagnosed when someone responds ...

Breakthrough greatly enhances the ultrafast resolution achievable with X-ray free-electron lasers. A large international team of scientists from various research organizations, including the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, has developed a method that dramatically improves the already ultrafast time resolution achievable with X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs). It could lead to breakthroughs on how to design new materials and more efficient chemical processes. An XFEL device is a powerful combination of particle accelerator and laser technology producing extremely brilliant and ultrashort pulses of X-rays for scientific research. "With this technology, scientists can now track processes that occur within millions of a billionth of ...

HOUSTON - (March 3, 2021) - In one of the first studies of its kind, an analysis of camera-trap data from 15 wildlife preserves in tropical rainforests has revealed a previously unknown relationship between the biodiversity of mammals and the forests in which they live. Tropical rainforests are home to half of the world's species, but with species going extinct at a rapid pace worldwide, it's difficult for conservationists to keep close tabs on the overall health of ecosystems, even in places where wildlife is protected. Researchers found that observational data from camera traps can help. "In general, rainforest ecosystems ...

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 2.0°C and, ideally, to 1.5°C, over preindustrial levels. However, even before that treaty was signed, scientists had already warned that those "best case" targets were unlikely to be achievable. Consequently, many fire weather studies are built with models that simulate much higher levels of climate warming. Recently, researchers from South Korea, Japan, and the United States have found that by projecting the fire weather conditions under two mildly varying warming levels -- one in which the global climate warms by 1.5°C and the other by 2°C -- even just a half-degree of warming could ...

"What scientists have achieved in a year since the discovery of a brand-new virus is truly remarkable," says Emma Hodcroft from the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) of the University of Bern, first author on the piece, "but the tools scientists are using to study how SARS-CoV-2 is transmitting and changing were never designed for the unique pressures - or volumes of data - of this pandemic." SARS-CoV-2 is now one of the most sequenced pathogens of all time, with over 600,000 full-genome sequences having been generated since the pandemic began, and over 5,000 new sequences coming in from around the world every day. ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Depression can be a common problem for teens and adolescents, and while many treatments exist, they don't always work for everyone. A new study found that feeling more informed about their health may help teens take better care of themselves, leading to less depressive symptoms. The researchers also found that trust played a factor in whether receiving health information improved depression. The more that adolescents trusted their parents or teacher as a credible source of health information, the more likely they were to ...

Bands and artists on independent record labels get less than their fair share of access to the most popular playlists on streaming platforms such as Spotify - argues a new paper from the University of East Anglia. The paper, published today, looks at whether streaming platforms offer a level playing field for artists and record labels. It finds that major labels have an unfair advantage when it comes to playlist access - and that they take the lion's share of subscription revenue as a result. As a possible remedy, the research team suggests changing the payment system, so that royalties generated by individual listener subscriptions go direct to the labels, bands and artists they are listening to. They also ...

As researchers around the world work to identify and address risk factors for severe COVID-19, there is additional evidence that certain blood types could be associated with greater risk of contracting the disease. A new Blood Advances study details one of the first laboratory studies to suggest that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is particularly attracted to the blood group A antigen found on respiratory cells. In the study, researchers assessed a protein on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus called the receptor binding domain, or RBD. The RBD is the part of the virus that attaches to the host cells, so it is an important research target for ...

Adolescents who vape cannabis are at greater risk for respiratory symptoms indicative of lung injury than teens who smoke cigarettes or marijuana, or vape nicotine, a new University of Michigan study suggests. The result challenges conventional wisdom about vaping nicotine, says the study's principal investigator, Carol Boyd, the Deborah J. Oakley Collegiate Professor Emerita at the U-M School of Nursing. "I thought that e-cigarettes (vaping nicotine) would be the nicotine product most strongly associated with worrisome respiratory symptoms," she said. "Our data challenges the assumption that smoking cigarettes ...

A healthy system of gut bacteria, or microbiota, is crucial to health: Gut bacteria not only aid with digestion, but also play an important role in the body's immune response. Infants, however, are not born with full-fledged gut microbiota, which makes it difficult for them to fight off intestinal infections. Although little is known about how the immune system develops during infancy, new research from the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine's Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology sheds significant new light on the subject. A research team from principal investigator ...

DURHAM, N.H.-- In business, as in life, it is important to make a good first impression and according to research at the University of New Hampshire a positive initial trust interaction can be helpful in building a lasting trust relationship. Researchers found that trusting a person early on can have benefits over the life of the relationship, even after a violation of that trust. "It's not just an old adage, first impressions really do matter especially when it comes to trust," said Rachel Campagna, assistant professor of management. "During an initial interaction, one of the most important and immediate factors people consider about another person is trustworthiness. It can impact their willingness to accept risk and vulnerability ...

Although the use of pesticides in agriculture is increasing, some farms have transitioned to organic practices and avoid applying them. But it's uncertain whether chemicals applied to land decades ago can continue to influence the soil's health after switching to organic management. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have identified pesticide residues at 100 Swiss farms, including all the organic fields studied, with beneficial soil microbes' abundance negatively impacted by their occurrence. Fungicides, herbicides and insecticides protect crops by repelling or destroying organisms that harm the plants. In contrast, organic agriculture management strategies avoid adding ...

In earlier days of the COVID-19 pandemic, before diagnostic testing was widely available, it was difficult for public health officials to keep track of the infection's spread, or predict where outbreaks were likely to occur. Attempts to get ahead of the virus are still complicated by the fact that people can be infected and spread the virus even without experiencing any symptoms themselves. When studies emerged showing that a person testing positive for COVID-19 -- whether or not they were symptomatic -- shed the virus in their stool, "the sewer seemed like the 'happening' place to look for it," said Smruthi Karthikeyan, PhD, an environmental engineer and postdoctoral researcher at University of California ...

Healthy human bodies are good at regulating: Our temperatures remain around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, no matter how hot or cold the temperature around us. The sugar levels in our blood remain fairly constant, even when we down a glass of juice. We keep the right amount of calcium in our bones and out of the rest of our bodies. We couldn't survive without that regulation, called homeostasis. And when the systems break down, the results can cause illness or, sometimes, death. In presentations at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting, researchers argued that mathematics can help explain and predict those breakdowns, potentially offering new ways of treating the systems to prevent or fix them when things go wrong. The meeting ...