Auroras have inspired myths and portents for millennia — but only now, with modern technology dependent on electricity, are we appreciating their true power. The same forces which cause auroras also cause currents that can damage infrastructure which conducts electricity, like pipelines. Now scientists writing in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences have demonstrated that the impact angle of interplanetary shocks is key to the currents’ strength, offering an opportunity to forecast dangerous shocks and shield critical infrastructure. “Auroras and geomagnetically induced currents are ...

Face attribute classification (FAC) is a high-profile problem in biometric verification and face retrieval. Although recent research has been devoted to extracting more delicate image attribute features and exploiting the inter-attribute correlations, significant challenges still remain.  To solve the problems, a research team led by Na LIU published their new research on 15 June 2024 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published by Higher Education Press and Springer Nature. The team proposed a scattering-based hybrid block, termed WS-SE, to incorporate frequency-domain (WST) and image-domain (CNN) features in a channel attention manner. Compared with CNN, WS-SE achieved ...

10 July 2024      Risky drinkers most at risk: Ads from sports broadcasts significantly increase alcohol urges    New Edith Cowan University (ECU) research shows exposure to alcohol advertisements during national sports broadcasts, particularly those that feature a preferred beverage, significantly increases cravings in people with risky drinking behaviours.    The ECU study, led by Dr Ross Hollett, analysed nationally televised finals matches from the Australian Football League (AFL) and the National Rugby League (NRL) ...

Quality is the core characteristic of cultivated land and is crucial for ensuring sustainable resource utilization and national food security. To meet the increasing demand for food driven by rapid population growth and the continual optimization of dietary structures, the intensity of cultivated land utilization has been steadily increasing. This trend has resulted in degradation issues such as deterioration of black soil, thinning of the cultivated land layer, reduction in organic matter content, soil salinization, acidification, and contamination by heavy metals, all of which threaten national food security. Currently, China has entered a critical period of agricultural ...

New research led by UCLA Health revealed that Black patients with Huntington's disease in the U.S. and Canada received their diagnoses, on average, one year later compared to White patients after symptoms first appear. Huntington’s disease is a rare, incurable genetic disease that causes a gradual death of nerve cells, resulting in a variety of symptoms affecting movement, emotions and cognition. About 41,000 Americans have the disease and 200,000 are at risk of inheriting it, according to the Huntington’s Disease Society of America. Children of a parent with ...

A trove of ancient plant remains excavated in Kenya helps explain the history of plant farming in equatorial eastern Africa, a region long thought to be important for early farming but where scant evidence from actual physical crops has been previously uncovered. In a new study published July 10 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, archaeologists from Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Pittsburgh and their colleagues report the largest and most extensively dated archaeobotanical record from interior east Africa. Up until now, scientists have ...

A longitudinal study by University of Queensland researchers has found high-intensity interval exercise improves brain function in older adults for up to 5 years. Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett and Dr Daniel Blackmore from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute led the study in which volunteers did physical exercise and had brain scans.  Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett and Dr Daniel Blackmore have shown high intensity exercise boosts cognition in healthy older adults and the improvement was retained for up to 5 years.  Emeritus Professor Bartlett said it is the first ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Even years after they have recovered, a person who once struggled with alcohol or opioid addiction can relapse—and that relapse is more likely to occur during particularly stressful times. Now, Scripps Research scientists have identified an area of the brain that plays a key role in stress-induced oxycodone relapse. Their findings explain why the drug suvorexant, which they previously found to reduce alcohol and oxycodone relapse when administered orally, works so well. “Having a better understanding of the region(s) in the brain responsible for this kind of relapse is incredibly important as we develop treatments for alcohol use disorder and opioid ...

Daily sugar intake fell by around 5 g in children and by around 11 g in adults in the 12 months following the introduction of the UK’s ‘sugar tax’, formally known as the Soft Drinks Industry Levy, finds an analysis of 11 years of survey data, published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.   The sugar from soft drinks alone made up over half this total, the estimates suggest. But overall daily energy intake from free sugars levels are still higher than the updated recommendation from the World Health Organisation (WHO) of 5%---equivalent to 30 g/day for adults, 24 g for 7–10 year olds, and 19 g for 4–6 year olds—point ...

Osteoarthritis—a condition in which the protective cartilage on the ends of bones breaks down—may more than double the risk of speedy progression to accumulating severe long term conditions (multimorbidity), finds a 20 year study published in the open access journal RMD Open. And there seem to be 4 different speeds of progression to multimorbidity, the findings indicate. Persistently low levels of physical activity, a high calorie diet, plus chronic low grade inflammation may help to explain the link between osteoarthritis and the risk of accumulating other long term conditions, suggest the researchers. Although the exact causes aren’t known, injury, age, family ...

Researchers from Konstanz have measured the heart rate of bats over several days in the wild, including complete flights—the first time this has been done for a bat species. To record the heart rate of male common noctule bats during flight, the scientists attached heart rate transmitters weighing less than one gram to the animals, which they then accompanied in an airplane while the bats flew, sometimes for more than an hour, in search of food. Their results, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, show how much energy bats consume over the course of a day and what energy-saving strategies they ...

Women who have close family members with endocrine diseases, including type 2 diabetes, thyroid diseases and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), are at higher risk of pregnancy loss, a new study has found [1]. The research, presented today at the ESHRE 40th Annual Meeting in Amsterdam, examined the association between various endocrine diseases and the incidence of pregnancy loss. The study investigated 366,539 women in Denmark between 1973 and 2022. The study found that women with parents diagnosed with endocrine diseases faced a 6% higher risk of pregnancy loss ...

The Buck Institute for Research on Aging announces the appointment of Nathan Price, PhD, to Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Human Healthspan.  Price specializes in systems biology, artificial intelligence, and bioengineering. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and is co-author, with Buck Chief Innovation Officer and Distinguished Professor Lee Hood, of “The Age of Scientific Wellness.” Price has been named one of 10 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine by the National Academy of Medicine and is a member of the Board on Life Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Dr. Price is Chief Scientific Officer ...

There is a pressing need for countries and international organisations to understand better how existing international law can help them address serious concerns about the militarisation of outer space, a new study says.                                                                                           Space ...

A international team of astronomers led by Université de Montréal has made an exciting discovery about the temperate exoplanet LHS 1140 b: it could be a promising "super-Earth" covered in ice or water. When the exoplanet LHS 1140 b was first discovered, astronomers speculated that it might be a mini-Neptune: an essentially gaseous planet, but very small in size compared to Neptune. But after analyzing data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) collected in December 2023 - combined with previous data from other space telescopes such as Spitzer, Hubble and ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Genome editing has become a widely adopted technology to modify DNA in cells, allowing scientists to study diseases in the lab and develop therapies that repair disease-causing mutations. However, with current approaches, it’s only possible to edit cells in one location at a time. Now, a team of scientists at Gladstone Institutes has developed a new method that enables them to make precise edits in multiple locations within a cell—all at once. Using molecules called retrons, they created a tool that can efficiently modify DNA in bacteria, yeast, and human cells. “We wanted to push the boundaries of genomic technologies ...

Awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, quantum dots have a wide variety of applications ranging from displays and LED lights to chemical reaction catalysis and bioimaging. These semiconductor nanocrystals are so small—on the order of nanometers—that their properties, such as color, are size dependent, and they start to exhibit quantum properties. This technology has been really well developed, but only in the visible spectrum, leaving untapped opportunities for technologies in both the ultraviolet and infrared regions of the electromagnetic ...

Certain types of light have proven to be an effective, minimally invasive treatment for cancers located on or near the skin when combined with a light-activated drug. But deep-seated cancers, surrounded by tissue, blood and bone, have been beyond the reach of light’s therapeutic effects. To bring light’s benefits to these harder-to-access cancers, engineers and scientists at the University of Notre Dame have devised a wireless LED device that can be implanted. This device, when combined with a light-sensitive ...

While food insecurity has long been the focus of local and national policymakers and researchers, nutrition insecurity has largely been overlooked. A new study by the Institute for Food System Equity (IFSE) at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences aims to change that. This is the first study in Los Angeles County to identify the populations most affected by nutrition insecurity, distinct from food insecurity. Nutrition insecurity refers to a lack of access to healthy food that ...

AI can help humanitarians gain crucial insights to better monitor and anticipate risks, such as a conflict outbreak or escalation. But deploying systems in this context is not without risks for those affected, a new study warns. Humanitarian organisations have been increasingly using digital technologies and the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend. AI-supported disaster mapping was used in Mozambique to speed up emergency response, and AI systems were used to predict food crisis and rolled out by the World Bank across twenty-one countries. But the study warns some uses of AI may expose people to additional harms and present significant ...

The Speech Accessibility Project is partnering with several organizations who serve people with cerebral palsy as it recruits more participants for its speech recognition technology work. They include ADAPT Community Network, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation and CP Unlimited. The project is recruiting U.S. and Puerto Rican adults with cerebral palsy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Down syndrome, Parkinson’s and those who have had a stroke. Funded by Big ...

The Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation at The University of Texas at Arlington has awarded seven Interdisciplinary Research Program (IRP) grants totaling nearly $140,000 to foster collaboration between groups that do not typically work together. This represents an increase in funding of 40% over the grants awarded in 2023. “UT Arlington has increased its support of interdisciplinary research as we know that many of today’s great societal challenges ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA — A new tool makes it easier for database users to perform complicated statistical analyses of tabular data without the need to know what is going on behind the scenes. GenSQL, a generative AI system for databases, could help users make predictions, detect anomalies, guess missing values, fix errors, or generate synthetic data with just a few keystrokes. For instance, if the system were used to analyze medical data from a patient who has always had high blood pressure, it could catch a blood pressure reading that ...

Despite decades of research, there’s still much scholars don’t understand about life’s beginnings and early evolution. A UC Riverside paper has opened the door to understanding more and to framing future studies that could help predict climate change and search for life beyond Earth.   “This paper strives to inform the Earth sciences community where the research needs to go next,” said Christopher Tino, a UCR PhD candidate during the time of research and a first author. Many studies have explored signs ...

Quantum computers offer powerful ways to improve cybersecurity, communications, and data processing, among other fields. To realize these full benefits, however, multiple quantum computers need to be connected to build quantum networks or a quantum internet. Scientists have struggled to come up with practical methods of building such networks, which must transmit quantum information over long distances. Now, researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have proposed a new approach — building long quantum channels using vacuum sealed tubes ...