Increased sedentary time from childhood through young adulthood significantly increased cholesterol levels in a new follow-up study. However, the results also showed that light physical activity (LPA) may completely reverse the adverse process. Moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) may also reduce cholesterol levels, but its effect is diminished by body fat. The study was conducted in collaboration between the University of Bristol in the UK, the University of Exeter in the UK, and the University of Eastern ...

Similarly as for electronics, photonic circuits can be miniaturized onto a chip, leading to a so-called photonic integrated circuit (PIC). Although these developments are more recent than for electronics, this field is rapidly evolving. One of the main issues, however, is to turn such a PIC into a functional device. This requires optical packaging and coupling strategies to bring light into and to get light out of the PIC. For example, for optical communication a connection needs to be made with optical fibers, which then transport the light ...

People who abandon New Year’s resolutions or other commitments can maintain the respect of their peers by blaming external factors such as lack of money, new research suggests. Studies have found that people were more likely to be seen as having good self-control despite abandoning a commitment to live a healthier life if they claimed they did not have the money for a gym membership or expensive new cooking equipment. People who instead claimed they didn’t have the time to exercise or to replace a takeaway ...

The Third Pole, which spans the Tibetan Plateau and the surrounding Himalayas, Hindu Kush, and Tianshan Mountain ranges, is extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Warming temperatures and altered rainfall patterns have caused over 10,000 glaciers in the region to retreat over the past three decades, facilitating the formation of thousands of glacial lakes. Though they appear harmless, these water bodies have a tremendous destructive potential, particularly due to their ability to cause glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs). When triggered ...

Scientists at Klick Applied Sciences have created an artificial intelligence framework that can rapidly identify new use cases for existing therapeutics, according to findings presented Friday at the NeurIPS conference that could greatly improve the drug repurposing process and transform the pharmaceutical industry. The team debuted their algorithm, called LOVENet, a Large Optimized Vector Embeddings Network which integrates two cutting-edge AI technologies: large language model (LLM), and structured knowledge graph technology, which mathematically represents the relationships between drugs and diseases to offer a fresh ...

The efficient storage of clean energy is a critical component to achieving carbon neutrality.  Capacitors are devices that store energy by separating positive and negative electrical charge, and supercapacitors (SC) are capacitors that can store and release large amounts of energy.  A specialized supercapacitor, called a redox electrolyte-enhanced SC (RE-SC), places liquid redox electrolytes, a source of ions that can be electrically charged, next to a carbon-based electrical conductor, or electrode, to achieve high energy storage density and power output.  Despite this increase in performance, RE-SCs suffer from self-discharge of stored energy, limiting their practicality.  ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Snacks constitute almost a quarter of a day’s calories in U.S. adults and account for about one-third of daily added sugar, a new study suggests. Researchers analyzing data from surveys of over 20,000 people found that Americans averaged about 400 to 500 calories in snacks a day – often more than what they consumed at breakfast – that offered little nutritional value. Though dietitians are very aware of Americans’ propensity to snack, “the magnitude of the impact ...

Acting as the main interface between the internal and the external world, the skin is the largest and most important organ of the human body. It is frequently exposed to many types of physical injuries or wounds, including cuts, scrapes, scratches, infections, and ulcers. Unfortunately, as one ages, the skin becomes more frail and less capable of healing itself without help. With many countries experiencing a rapid rise in the aging population, the demand for treating such skin wounds has created a greater need for accessible and effective wound ...

Cerebral organoids are three-dimensional, in vitro cultured brains that mimic the activities of the human brain. They have emerged as invaluable tools to comprehend evolution, disease pathogenesis, and neurodevelopmental processes. However, the development of these organoids is still in nascent stages with several limitations that hinder their broad applications. A major obstacle is the absence of a functional vasculature that can restrict the size of organoids, trigger cell death, and prevent cell differentiation in the organoids. To address ...

NEWS RELEASE EMBARGOED UNTIL FRI, DEC. 15 – 5:00 A.M. Eastern   Contact Colleen McDonald - Sr. Consultant, Earned Media 414.801.3146 | cmcdonald@mcw.edu   Trip or Treat? Scientists at the Medical College of Wisconsin make strides in designing non-hallucinogenic psychedelic treatments that may accelerate research on mental health benefits; research findings published in Nature Communications. Milwaukee, Wis. – Dec. 15, 2023 – There is nothing magic about the recent increase ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA — During a chemical reaction, molecules gain energy until they reach what’s known as the transition state — a point of no return from which the reaction must proceed. This state is so fleeting that it’s nearly impossible to observe it experimentally. The structures of these transition states can be calculated using techniques based on quantum chemistry, but that process is extremely time-consuming. A team of MIT researchers has now developed an alternative approach, based on machine learning, that can calculate ...

Child psychologists have long known that play is essential for children’s cognitive development because it boosts their social, physical, and emotional skills. But beginning in the 21st century, specialists repeatedly sounded the alarm that ‘play is under siege’ for US children. Kids were playing less, and – it was feared – with a lesser quality. But are today’s parents sufficiently aware of the importance of letting their children play? Yes, found a team of researchers who tested this through a survey of the opinions of 1,172 US parents. Their results showed that today’s ...

To an everyday consumer, the best gadgets on the market have the highest speed, the largest memory, and the longest battery life. Chasing this demand, the forefront of research often only considers these tangible performance metrics when innovating and designing next-generation electronics. In the wake of this technological stampede, the long-term environmental impacts lie obscured and neglected under the dust.   Researchers at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) hope to be the catalyst for sustainability-driven science. Assistant Professor Ang Yee Sin from the Science, Mathematics ...

Transformer architectures have facilitated the development of large-scale and general-purpose sequence models for prediction tasks in natural language processing and computer vision, e.g., GPT-3 and Swin Transformer. Although originally designed for prediction problems, it is natural to inquire about their suitability in another important field, sequential decision-making and reinforcement learning problems, which are typically beset by long-standing issues involving sample efficiency, credit assignment, and partial observability, etc. In recent years, sequence models, especially the Transformer, have attracted increasing interest in the RL communities, spawning ...

Not all discoveries turn out to be actual new discoveries. This was the case for the extremely red objects (EROs) found in James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data. Analysis shows that they are very similar to blue-excess dust obscured galaxies (BluDOGs) already reported in Subaru Telescope data. Quasars, some of the brightest objects in the Universe, are driven by a supermassive black hole with a mass that can reach more than a billion times that of the Sun. These objects are the focus of much research, but how ...

A research team at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has outlined the high-resolution structure of a little-known virus, improving our understanding of viral infection, which could pave the way for more accurate predictions of climate change. With the help of an advanced technique involving cryo-electron microscopy, they managed to capture images of the virus – the cyanophage P-SCSP1u – at near-atomic resolution in its native form and examined it to see how its different parts fit together. This helped show how different proteins work in the virus and how they interact to make the virus ...

In a new study published on 13 November 2023, in the journal Satellite Navigation, researchers from Chang’an University have developed a novel approach using the Precise Point Positioning (PPP) technique combined with a cumulative sum control chart (CUSUM) method. This method enables the analysis of reference station stability and compensates for deformation at monitoring stations. In the study conducted at the Tengqing landslide in Liupanshui, Guizhou Province, Southwest China, an innovative method was applied, showcasing a significant leap in landslide monitoring using GNSS PPP technology. ...

The risk of death from COVID-19 decreases significantly after vaccination but this protection diminishes after six months, providing evidence for continued booster doses, a new study has found.   Researchers from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) analysed more than 10 million cases of COVID-19 in adults between May 2020 and February 2022. Their findings are published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM).   The Case Fatality Risk (CFR) - the proportion of cases that resulted in death - was cross-referenced with vaccination ...

In a significant advancement in optical technology, researchers from Tohoku University and Toyohashi University of Technology have developed a new method for creating transparent magnetic materials using laser heating. This breakthrough, recently published in the journal Optical Materials, presents a novel approach to integrating magneto-optical materials with optical devices, a long-standing challenge in the field. "The key to this achievement lies in creating 'Cerium-substituted Yttrium Iron Garnet (Ce:YIG)', ...

When it comes to the Colorado River, history often repeats itself—but it doesn’t have to. That’s the take-home message from CU Boulder hydrologist Shemin Ge, who will present a little-known piece of history from the river this Thursday at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco.   The story of hydrologist Eugene Clyde La Rue, Ge said, may help to explain the current water crisis facing many states in the American West. Ge’s presentation centers around a decision ...

Researchers at the Center for Homelessness, Housing, and Health Equity Research at the University of Southern California released an interim report on the first six months of a randomized controlled trial to study the impact of a basic income and social support intervention for 103 individuals experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area. Two key findings so far are that participants in the Miracle Money study who received $750 per month were less likely to remain unsheltered and closer ...

UCL researchers have developed a new gene therapy to cure a devastating form of childhood epilepsy, which a new study shows can significantly reduce seizures in mice. The study, published in Brain, sought to find an alternative to surgery for children with focal cortical dysplasia. Focal cortical dysplasia is caused by areas of the brain that have developed abnormally and is among the most common causes of drug-resistant epilepsy in children. It frequently occurs in the frontal lobes, which are important for planning and decision-making. Epilepsy in focal cortical dysplasia is associated with comorbidities, including learning disabilities. Although surgery to remove the affected brain malformation ...

The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has received more than $1.3 million from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the  National Institutes of Health (NIH) to expand the New York City Virus Hunters program. The program engages high school students from communities historically underrepresented in science in the first large-scale citizen science effort to catalog and map circulating avian influenza and avian paramyxoviruses in New York City’s wild birds. The goal is to track emerging viruses and to prevent future outbreaks. Wild birds can disseminate infectious ...

In an effort to better optimize the triage of patients during mass casualty events, University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers are receiving up to $7.3 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) for vital new research. The funding will be used to support a study that will collect data over the next 3.5 years on trauma patients with the aim of identifying and implementing lifesaving advancements in medical triage for large-scale mass casualty incidents. “The importance of early interventions in trauma is described as the concept of the ‘golden ...

Freight transportation is a backbone of the US economy — and a significant contributor to US greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, freight accounts for nearly 10% of annual U.S. emissions,ISE Dan Doulet Faculty Fellow and Professor Xueping Li points out. Li and an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional team have been awarded funding from the US Department of Energy to launch a first-of-its-kind, national-scale undertaking to address freight’s impact on climate change — and climate change’s impact on this vital sector. Funding from DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) is highly competitive. “Any ...