In everyday life, materials that conduct electricity well, like metals, also tend to conduct heat. For instance, a metal spoon left in a hot cup of tea will get hot, while the ceramic mug remains cool. This is because good electrical conductors are usually good heat conductors too. However, researchers at Drexel University and Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium have discovered that MXenes, a type of material known for its excellent electrical conductivity, actually have very low ...

(CAMBRIDGE, MASS.) December 05, 2024 – Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, with various subtypes affecting millions of people each year. Among these, ALK-positive lung cancer frequently strikes younger people who have never smoked, including those aged between 20 and 50. Upon diagnosis, 80% of individuals already have stage 4 metastatic cancer, spread beyond the lungs to other parts of the body. Despite initially effective ALK inhibitor treatments, the cancer recurs in most patients, and there are about 70,000 people living with ALK+ lung cancer in the ...

Extreme weather and pollution have increased the salt content in some soil, making growing conditions harsh for salt-sensitive crops like rice. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano detail a possible solution that doesn’t require genetic modification to make rice plants thrive in these conditions. In lab experiments, they determined that coating rice seedlings with magnesium-doped carbon dots — derived from durian peels — increased the seedlings’ antioxidant activity and photosynthesis, reducing the stress caused by salty soil.   To increase stress resistance in plants, the current ...

Despite the massive hype surrounding Power-to-X (PtX), most of the world's announced green hydrogen projects lack financing. The market is deemed far too risky by stakeholders. And, there are many potential pitfalls. According to the authors of a study from the University of Copenhagen, actors must be ‘compelled’ to invest in a genuinely green manner. Green hydrogen has long been touted as the climate-friendly energy solution of the future. Indeed, there has been no shortage of hype surrounding Power-to-X – which converts green electricity into hydrogen and other molecules. In Denmark, politicians have referred to PtX as a cornerstone of ...

In the split second that is needed to view a stop sign and react to it, our brain navigates a complex process that transitions seamlessly from perception to action control. This ability to halt or inhibit actions, known as response inhibition, is fundamental to human cognition. It plays a key role in decision-making and self-control, enabling us to suppress impulsive or inappropriate behaviors. Understanding the mechanisms underlying this process is essential for grasping how we manage our thoughts and actions and for treating impulse control disorders like attention deficit hyperactivity ...

From the 1960s to the 1980s, the use of lead in fuel, paints, and pipes caused widespread contamination. It is estimated that 170 million Americans alive today were exposed to high lead levels as children, which caused significant harm, including a measurable drop in IQ scores. While we now understand the dangers of these chemicals, large sections of the population are still exposed to them. UNICEF reports that about 800 million children globally, nearly half of whom live in South Asia, are still exposed to unsafe levels of lead resulting from the hazardous ...

Control systems are ubiquitous in modern day technology. In industrial contexts, these systems ensure that relevant variables remain within a desirable range to keep processes running safely and efficiently. A vast array of control strategies exists, and it is not uncommon to combine different types of controllers to improve performance. For instance, high-level controllers based on mathematical modeling of a given process are routinely combined with low-level controllers, such as the widely used ...

The Horner–Wadsworth–Emmons (HWE) reaction is a fundamental reaction in organic chemistry, widely used to create conjugated carbonyl compounds. Conjugated carbonyl compounds are used in many industries for synthesizing perfumes, plastics, and pharmaceuticals and are also involved in biological processes. Consequently, methods for improving HWE reactions are an active area of research. One potential application of HWE reactions is to develop (E)-isomers of conjugated carbonyl compounds that are useful for synthesizing chemicals called hynapene analogues with promising anti-cancer ...

Patients and families affected by food allergy worry when they fly and often make travel decisions with food allergy management top-of-mind Airlines don’t always honor buffer zones, allergen-free food or cabin announcements that were promised to travelers during the booking process  Simple steps to help ensure the safety of travelers with food allergy can go a long way CHICAGO ---The skies aren’t always so friendly for patients and families affected by food allergies, who may often experience worry and anxiety regarding airline travel, according to a new study from the Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research at Northwestern University ...

More images and video available- see link in the Notes section. A new study suggests that the fundamental abilities underlying human language and technological culture may have evolved before humans and apes diverged millions of years ago. The findings will be published 5th December 2024 in the journal PeerJ. Many human behaviours are more complex than those of other animals, involving the production of elaborate sequences (such as spoken language, or tool manufacturing). These sequences include the ability to organise behaviours by hierarchical chunks, and to understand relationships between distantly separated elements. For example, even relatively simple human behaviours like making ...

PULLMAN, Wash. – Analysis of cheek swabs taken from pregnant women revealed a potential epigenetic biomarker for preeclampsia, a potentially life-threatening condition that often leads to preterm births. While a clinical trial is needed to confirm the results, a study published in the journal Environmental Epigenetics offers hope that a simple test can be developed to identify preeclampsia earlier in pregnancy. Currently preeclampsia is usually identified by symptoms, such as abnormally high blood pressure, which only appear in the second trimester of pregnancy. Sometimes the condition can go undetected ...

CHICAGO – More than a third of women across 10 health care practices chose to enroll in a self-pay, artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced breast cancer screening program, and the women who enrolled were 21% more likely to have cancer detected, according to research being presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). AI has shown great promise in mammography as a “second set of eyes” for radiologists providing decision support, risk prediction and other benefits. Despite its promise, AI is not yet reimbursed by insurance, which likely is slowing its adoption ...

We all need to eat, but the impact of the climate crisis on our crops is throwing the world’s food supply into question. Modern crops, domesticated for high food yields and ease of harvesting, lack the genetic resources to respond to the climate crisis. Significant environmental stresses are reducing the amount of food produced, driving supplies down and prices up. We can’t sustainably take over more land for agriculture, so we need to change our crops—this time to adapt them to the world we have altered. “Agriculture is highly vulnerable to climate change, and the intensity and frequency of extreme events is only going to increase,” said Prof Sergey ...

— By Michael Matz The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and several collaborating institutions have successfully demonstrated a machine-learning technique to accelerate discovery of materials for film capacitors — crucial components in electrification and renewable energy technologies. The technique was used to screen a library of nearly 50,000 chemical structures to identify a compound with record-breaking performance. The other collaborators from University of Wisconsin–Madison, Scripps Research Institute, University of California, ...

Researchers from Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience have discovered a new pathway to forming long-term memories in the brain. Their work suggests that long-term memory can form independently of short-term memory, a finding that opens exciting possibilities for understanding memory-related conditions. A New Perspective on Memory Formation Our brain works diligently to record our experiences into memories, creating representations of our daily events that stay with us for short time periods. Current scientific theories of memory formation suggest that short-term memories are stored in what we can imagine as a temporary art exhibition in our ...

• A research team led by the UAB has made exceptional discoveries on prehistoric archery from the early Neolithic period, 7,000 years ago. • The well organic preservation of the remains of the Cave of Los Murciélagos in Albuñol, Granada, made it possible for scientists to identify the oldest bowstrings in Europe, which were made from the tendons of three animal species. • The use of olive and reed wood and birch bark pitch in the making of arrows reveals an unprecedented degree of precision and technical mastery, as highlighted in the study, published in Scientific Reports. ...

EMBARGOED: NOT FOR RELEASE UNTIL 00.01 UK TIME ON THURSDAY 5 DECEMBER 2024 Tyrannosaur teeth discovered in Bexhill-on-Sea with help of retired quarryman Spinosaur and Velociraptor-like predators also roamed East Sussex 135 million years ago Research led by the University of Southampton has revealed that several groups of meat-eating dinosaur stalked the Bexhill-on-Sea region of coastal East Sussex 135 million years ago. The study, published today [5 December 2024] in Papers in Palaeontology, has discovered a whole community of predators belonging to different ...

TORONTO - New research published by a team of researchers from the University of Toronto in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Alberta has found that women who have had both ovaries surgically removed before the age of 50 and carry a variant of the apolipoprotein gene, the APOE4 allele, are at high risk of late-life Alzheimer disease (AD).  Use of hormone therapy mitigates this risk. Why does this matter? By 2050, Alzheimer’s disease is projected to affect 12.7 million individuals 65 and older with women comprising two-thirds of that number. It is still unclear why Alzheimer’s disease is more prevalent in women than in men, but it may have to do with ...

BALTIMORE, Dec. 5, 2024:  Obesity affects a staggering 40 percent of adults and 20 percent of children in the United States. While some new popular therapies are helping to tackle the epidemic of obesity, there is still so much that researchers do not understand about the brain-body connection that regulates appetite. Now, researchers have discovered a previously unknown population of neurons in the hypothalamus that regulate food intake and could be a promising new target for obesity drugs. In a study published in the Dec. 5 issue of Nature, a team of researchers from the Laboratory ...

When a forest is lost to development, some effects are obvious. Stumps and mud puddles across the landscape, a plowed field or houses a year after that. But deforestation isn’t just a loss of trees; it’s a loss of the countless benefits that forests provide—one of which is control of disease. Now, a startling new global study shows that a widespread malaria-fighting strategy—bed nets—becomes less effective as deforestation rises. The research underscores how important a healthy environment can be for human health. Insecticide-treated ...

Polarization photodetectors (pol-PDs) have widespread applications in geological remote sensing, machine vision, and biological medicine. However, commercial pol-PDs usually require bulky and complicated optical components and are difficult to miniaturize and integrate. Chinese researchers have recently made important progress in this area by developing an on-chip integrated polarization photodetector. This study, published in Science Advances on Dec. 4, was conducted by Prof. Li Mingzhu’s group from the Technical ...

Researchers from Singapore and China have used a superconducting quantum processor to study the phenomenon of quantum transport in unprecedented detail. A better understanding of quantum transport, which can refer to the flow of particles, magnetisation, energy or information through a quantum channel, could propel advances in technologies such as nanoelectronics and thermal management. “We’re quite excited because this is, practically, a new paradigm of doing quantum transport experiments,” says Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) Fellow Dario Poletti, whose co-corresponding authors for the new work published in Nature ...

An international team of researchers including The University of Tokyo Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU, WPI) has found evidence showing that old elliptical galaxies in the universe can form from intense star formation within early galaxy cores. This discovery will deepen our understanding of how galaxies evolved from the early Universe, reports a new study in Nature. Galaxies in today’s Universe are diverse in morphologies and can be roughly divided into two categories: younger, disk-like spiral galaxies, ...

Bamboo invasion has been widely observed across Asia (e.g., China, Japan, and India), North America, South America (e.g., Brazil and Peru) and Africa. Moso bamboo (Phyllostachys edulis), a large-running bamboo species native to subtropical China, is known for its invasive nature and ability to encroach upon adjacent communities, particularly derived forests. While some plot-based studies exist, our understanding of how forest structural dynamics and diameter–height allometric relationships respond to bamboo invasion has remained limited. In a study published in the KeAi journal Forest Ecosystems, researchers from China ...

Developing reliable methods to replace dead or damaged tissue is one of the primary goals of regenerative medicine. With steady advances in tissue engineering and biomedicine, we are almost at a point where growing cell sheets in the lab and transplanting them onto damaged or diseased organs is becoming a reality rather than fiction. Notably, myoblast cell sheets have already been used to successfully treat severe heart failure, demonstrating the potential of this technology. However, there are still a few unsolved challenges ...