Osaka, Japan -- Ultra-intense lasers with ultra-short pulses and ultra-high energies are powerful tools for exploring unknowns in physics, cosmology, material science, etc. With the help of the famous technology "Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA)" (2018 Nobel Prize in Physics), the current record has reached 10 Petawatts (or 10^16 Watts). In a study recently published in Scientific Reports, researchers from Osaka University proposed a concept for next-generation ultra-intense lasers with a simulated peak power up to the Exawatt class (1 Exawatt equals 1000 Petawatts). The laser, which was invented by Dr. T. H. Maiman in 1960, has one important characteristic of high intensity (or high peak power for pulse lasers): historically, laser peak ...

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed insulin nanoparticles that may one day become the basis for an oral medicine, and an alternative to insulin injections for diabetic patients. In a pre-clinical study, the NTU Singapore team fed insulin-containing nanoparticles to rats and found that insulin increased in their blood minutes later. Insulin therapy is often an important part of treatment for diabetes, a metabolic disease that affects 422 million people globally . In Singapore, the number of diabetics is expected to grow to 1 million - almost a fifth of the population - in 2050 . Delivering insulin orally would be preferable over insulin jabs for patients because it causes less ...

Anthropogenic, or human-made, heat flux in the near-surface atmosphere has changed urban thermal environments. Much of this fluctuation has been noted with rapid development of the global economy and urbanization since the turn of the 21st century. Meanwhile, the number of extreme temperature events in the first decade of the 21st century grew faster than in the last 10 years of the 20th century. During this period, urban extreme heat events have become more frequent, breaking temperature records more often. "We found the relationships between anthropogenic heat flux and extreme temperature events..." said Prof. Zhenghui Xie, a scientist with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. "...including ...

DALLAS - Jan. 12, 2021 - A team of UT Southwestern researchers has identified a gene involved in the growth of breast cancer, a finding that could lead to potential new targets for treatment. "The gene ZMYND8 is increased in breast cancer conditions, and higher levels of the gene correlate with poor survival of breast cancer patients," says Yingfei Wang, Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology and neurology and corresponding author of the new study, published in Cancer Research. "It could be a promising target for antitumor immunotherapy." In the U.S., about 1 in 8 women will develop breast cancer at some point in their life. Worldwide, breast cancer is the most common cancer ...

In a paper published in Molecular Frontiers Journal, researchers from Cambridge, Massachusetts and Bangalore, India study the effectiveness of FEND product to significantly improve airway hygiene by reducing and suppressing respiratory droplets potentially containing airborne pathogens and other contaminants. The study's findings further highlight why the FEND product is an important new daily hygiene protocol that joins century-old hand washing, masking and distancing measures as a fourth protective layer of defense against aerosolized particles. The new study examined two nasal salines: ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - A resemblance to moss, lichens and fungi made for fantastic cover by a new genus and species of cylindrical bark beetle described by an Oregon State University College of Science researcher. "If you can't beat your enemies or run away, then hide, and that is what this Cretaceous beetle is doing," said OSU's George Poinar Jr. "He is hiding under a spectacular camouflage of his own making, allowing him to blend into a mossy background." Poinar, an international expert in using plant and animal life forms preserved in amber to learn more about the biology and ecology of the distant past, and collaborator Fernando ...

Research on cycad trees in Colombia, Guam, and the Philippines has illuminated how knowledge of their branching behavior may benefit conservation decisions for the endangered plants. In a study published in the December issue of the journal Horticulturae, scientists from the University of Guam and the Montgomery Botanical Center in Florida show that the number of times a cycad tree produces a branch can be used to infer the sex of the tree. The findings have practical applications for use of the sexual dimorphism that is described. Cycads are unique seed-producing plants. Conservation actions are being implemented for many species around the world as cycads are being threatened by human activity. The arborescent cycad stem is constructed using ...

Ten years of data from Australia, New Zealand and Canada reveals a drop in drowning deaths among people under 20 - but a large increase in drowning for adolescent females and First Nations peoples. Associate Professor Richard Franklin from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, said an international collaboration of researchers looked at drowning in the under 20s between 2005 and 2014. "Globally, drowning is a leading cause of unintentional death among children and young people, with the greatest toll among children under the age of five years. Many more children are impacted by non-fatal drowning, some experiencing long-term health impacts," said Dr Franklin. He said children aged 0-19 years account for an average ...

PHILADELPHIA--Patient-reported outcomes have become a critical part of improving surgical care because of their ability to capture patient experiences, such as quality of life and satisfaction, that can help inform treatment. However, for patients undergoing abdominal hernia repair -- a common procedure performed on about 400,000 patients a year in the United States -- a tool to effectively and practically measure those outcomes has not been widely accepted and implemented by clinics. Now, researchers from the division of Plastic Surgery in the department of Surgery in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, have successfully developed, tested, and implemented a first-of-its-kind, patient-informed ...

Osaka - Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays are now very popular features of many mainstream products including smartphones and televisions. OLEDs have the advantages of being low cost, light, flexible, and easy to modify, making them ideal display materials. However, current OLEDs that achieve commercially viable quantum efficiencies contain rare metal atoms such as iridium and platinum that increase costs and reduce sustainability. Now, an international team including researchers from Osaka University has reported the best performing heavy-atom-free OLED of its kind. Although OLEDs that do not contain heavy atoms--such as rare metals and halogens--are ...

SINGAPORE, 12 January 2021 - Researchers from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore and Columbia University in the US have solved how Wnt proteins, which play a fundamental role in cell proliferation and differentiation, hitch a ride to travel from their cellular factory to the cell surface. Drugs that interfere with Wnt transport, like the made-in-Singapore anti-cancer drug ETC-159, can be exploited to treat diseases with excess Wnt signalling, such as cancer and fibrosis. "Since excessive Wnt signalling can drive cancer, supress immunity and trigger fibrosis, ...

Conflict between divorced or separated parents increases the risk of children developing physical and mental health problems. A new study from the Arizona State University Research and Education Advancing Children's Health (REACH) Institute has found that children experience fear of being abandoned when their divorced or separated parents engage in conflict. Worrying about being abandoned predicted future mental health problems in children. The work will be published in Child Development on January 12. "Conflict is a salient stressor for kids, and the link between exposure to interparental conflict ...

WASHINGTON--The Endocrine Society is calling on policymakers to include government negotiation as part of an overall strategy to reduce insulin prices in its updated position statement published today in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. More than 34 million Americans have diabetes, and another 88 million are at risk for developing the disease. The cost of insulin has nearly tripled in the past 15 years, and a lack of transparency in the drug supply chain has made it challenging to identify and address the causes of soaring costs. Federal law currently prohibits Medicare, which accounts for a third of all drug spending, from negotiating directly with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices. Legislation empowering the ...

To properly monitor and help curb the spread of COVID-19, several millions of diagnostic tests are required daily in just the United States alone. There is still a widespread lack of COVID-19 testing in the U.S. and many of the clinical diagnostics protocols require extensive human labor and materials that could face supply shortages and present biosafety concerns. The current gold standard for COVID-19 diagnostic testing in the U.S., developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is quantitative PCR-based (qPCR) molecular tests that detect the presence of the viral ...

Toronto (Jan. 12, 2021) - More than half the clinicians surveyed at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre reported burnout and high levels of distress according to a series of studies published today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal Open (CMAJ-OPEN). In these studies carried out before the COVID-19 pandemic, 78% of nurses, 73% of allied health staff and 65% of physicians described experiencing burnout. "In my 35 years as a physician I have never seen a more serious issue for clinicians than burnout," says lead author Dr. Barry Rubin, Chair and Medical Director, the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, ...

A new structural arrangement of atoms shows promise for developing safer batteries made with solid materials. Scientists at Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) designed a new type of 'antiperovskite' that could help efforts to replace the flammable organic electrolytes currently used in lithium ion batteries. Their findings were described in the journal Nature Communications. Perovskite compounds are being tested and used in a wide range of technologies due to their excellent ability to conduct electricity, among other properties. They can be made from a large combination of atoms with the formula ABX3, where A and B are positively charged atoms and X is a negatively ...

Brain cells often cluster and grow together creating three-dimensional columns. While this pillar-like pattern of neurons is established, the exact mechanism behind its formation is still elusive. Makoto Sato's team at Kanazawa University has been closely studying this phenomenon. Their recent findings explain how molecules in the brain work in conjunction to create the architectural marvels that are the columns. The researchers base much of their work on the Drosophila (fruit fly) due to the organism's genetic similarities to humans. In this study they focused on the visual center of the fly's brain in a region known ...

Scientists at Japan's Nagoya University and the National Institute for Materials Science have found that a simple one-drop approach is cheaper and faster for tiling functional nanosheets together in a single layer. If the process, described in the journal ACS Nano, can be scaled up, it could advance development of next-generation oxide electronics. "Drop casting is one of the most versatile and cost-effective methods for depositing nanomaterials on a solid surface," says Nagoya University materials scientist Minoru Osada, the study's corresponding author. "But it has serious drawbacks, one being the so-called coffee-ring effect: a pattern left by particles once the liquid they are in evaporates. We found, to our great surprise, that ...

Silicon carbide (SiC), a versatile and resistant material that exists in multiple crystalline forms, has attracted much attention thanks to its unique electronic properties. From its use in the first LED devices, to its applications in high-voltage devices with low power losses, SiC displays exceptional semiconductor behavior. So far, the operating voltages for unipolar SiC devices are below 3.3 kV. Though useful for the electronic systems of cars, trains, and home appliances, unipolar SiC-based devices cannot be used in power generation and distribution systems, which operate at voltages above 10 kV. Some researchers believe that the solution to this conundrum lies in bipolar SiC devices, which offer low on-resistance (and hence lower losses) ...

Overview: Associate Professor Hiroto Sekiguchi and Ph.D. candidate Hiroki Yasunaga in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology have developed a MicroLED neural probe for neuroscience. This MicroLED tool can optogenetically control and observe neural activity in the brain. Neural activity was successfully recorded using the neural probe, and sufficient light output was obtained from the MicroLED to activate neural activity. The developed MicroLED tool will contribute to the development of neuroscience research-purposed ...

For other measures, however, the behaviour of the generations differs: "Of those under 40 years of age, 18 percent say they have food delivered more frequently", says BfR-President Professor Dr. Dr. Andreas Hensel. "In the age group 60 years and older, on the other hand, only seven percent make use of such offers." https://www.bfr.bund.de/cm/349/210105-bfr-corona-monitor-en.pdf In addition to more frequent ventilation, the respondents try to protect themselves from an infection mainly by wearing masks, keeping distance to other people and washing their hands more frequently. The mandatory use of masks was approved by 93 percent of the respondents, the distance regulation by 96 percent. ...

In patients with anorexia, it could remain at the same level as before the start of the illness. The researchers led by Professor Martin Diers recommend a combination of cognitive behavioural therapy and the use of virtual reality to correct the distorted body schema. The study is published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders on 20 December 2020. Understanding the unconscious The distorted perception of one's own body is a characteristic symptom of anorexia nervosa. It has long been known that patients overestimate the dimensions of their body. "This ...

Severe thunderstorms often produce lightning, heavy precipitation, hails, and wind gusts, and cause significant economic losses and casualties in the region they passed through. So, their prediction is one of the primary concerns of not only weather forecasters but also local government and public. However, the accurate forecasting on severe thunderstorm is still a great challenge because of its complicated mechanism of formation and enhancement. Beijing metropolitan region is one of the most developed areas in China and is also influenced greatly by severe thunderstorms. ...

Groundwater flow and seepage can form large gullies along coastal cliffs in the matter of days, it has been discovered, as per a recently-published paper. An international team of scientists from Malta, Germany, Romania, New Zealand and USA has used drones and satellite imagery to monitor a stretch of coastline near Ashburton (South Island, New Zealand). They found that gullies up to 30m in length can develop in less than a week. Field observations and numerical models have shown that groundwater plays a key role in forming these gullies, by either eroding tunnels or triggering landslides. Gullies are an important coastal hazard. There ...

To resolve the energy crisis and environmental issues, research to move away from fossil fuels and convert to eco-friendly and sustainable hydrogen energy is well underway around the world. Recently, a team of researchers at POSTECH has proposed a way to efficiently produce hydrogen fuel via water-electrolysis using inexpensive and readily available nickel as an electrocatalyst, greenlighting the era of hydrogen economy. A POSTECH research team led by Professor Jong Kyu Kim and Ph.D. candidate Jaerim Kim of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and a team led by Professor Jeong Woo Han and Ph.D. candidate Hyeonjung Jung of the Department of Chemical Engineering have jointly developed a highly efficient nickel-based catalyst system doped with oxophilic transition metal atoms ...