News Articles

In 1994, the term “atmospheric river” appeared in a paper to describe narrow amounts of atmospheric water vapor across the mid-latitudes but now a week doesn't go by without a weather forecaster on the local news claiming it is hitting their viewers.The catchy name was new but the phenomenon was well-known prior to that. Scientists had long known that how moisture is transported through the atmosphere makes a difference in snowpacks and floods. The "Pineapple Express" is a well-known current from Hawaii to California and early analyses of climate changed were criticized for not controlling during those or events like El Nino.

An epidemiological look at 1,981 women who reported a positive SARS-CoV-2 test found that those with pre-infection healthy lifestyle had a substantially lower "risk" of the post–COVID-19 condition known as 'long COVID.' It is just correlation but it brings to light concerns about how much of an impact co-morbidities and lifestyle had on the effects of SARS-CoV-2 and lingering effects. And how much benefit health care workers would have derived from healthier lifestyles prior to the pandemic.

As technology continues to advance, it will one day be possible to grow organs and even faces from a patient's own stem cells. Until then there are transplants from donors.Such donors are often anonymous but in the case of Belgium's first facial transplant, that isn't really possible. A recent "interpretive phenomenological analysis" of the experience of family members of the deceased tissue donor may provide insight for what to expect in the future and how to prepare. 

Most people go into relationships intending to be monogamous, or at least convincing themselves they can remain faithful, but with cheap travel and dating apps, any small problem can become a permanent schism.A new paper sought to understand if virtual reality can be used to examine the circumstances that will help people in a monogamous relationship resist the temptations of infidelity.

It is easy to believe ants disperse and walk randomly until they find something they want, but a new paper says they may have a more methodical approach.At least one species of rock ant, Temnothorax rugatulus, doesn’t walk randomly at all. Instead, their search combines systematic meandering with random walks interspersed. They alternate left and right turns on a relatively regular length scale of roughly three body lengths.

SIR, shorthand for Susceptible people, Infected people, and Recovered people, modeling is, along with R0, a rule of thumb for disease epidemiology but it failed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with three coronavirus pandemics since 2003 they are the new normal, so the race is on to make better predictive analytics and restore public confidence.A new model used COVID-19 data for calibration and integrated SIR compartment modeling in time and a point process modeling approach in space–time, while also taking into account age-specific contact patterns. To do this, they used a two-step framework that allowed them to model data on infectious locations over time for different age groups.

If you fish you know that catching a muskie (muskellunge), the “fish of 10,000 casts”, is like hitting a hole-in-one in golf. You will talk about it a lot. But it doesn't need 10,000 casts because that would mean having one strike is random. Instead, it helps to learn how they behave. A recent experiment evaluated behavioral traits – activity, aggression, boldness, and exploration – for 68 young muskies in laboratory tanks before transferring the fish to an outdoor pond. Then they fished the pond every day for 35 days.

Government lockdowns may have been terrible for diagnosing disease and the mental health of kids but it reduced terrorism, according to a new paper. If no one can travel, government agents helping fifth columnists do their damage are useless. When the pandemic struck, terrorists vowed to increase their attacks and create a tipping point but that did not happen.Instead, government-imposed curfews and travel bans instituted to protect public health in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt were significantly associated with a reduction in ISIS attacks, especially in urban areas and locations near their bases of operations. It likely meant fewer attacks by al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram also.

Superionic materials, needed for solid-state electrolytes that could replace the liquid organic electrolytes in current electric car batteries and make them safe for mass usage, face challenges in going from conception to production.Lithium ions are very mobile at ambient temperatures in solid-state ionic conductors, and that means atoms do not simply vibrate around their equilibrium positions. Disorder is bad in production systems. 

Until Alfred the Great managed to isolate and contain invaders from Scandinavia, Lyminge, a monastery in Kent, was on the front line of long-running Viking hostility. Lyminge endured repeated attacks for almost a century through effective defensive strategies, University of Reading archaeologists now say. Despite being in a region of Kent which bore the full brunt of Viking raids in the later 8th and early 9th centuries, they survived. rebuilt, and recovered more completely than historians previously thought. The excavation at Lyminge, Kent. Credit: Dr. Gabor Thomas

Stimuli-responsive polymers will bring next-generation small-scale, wirelessly controlled soft-bodied robots. Even now, these materials have made robots that can walk, swim and jump. Now, a FAIRY can even fly. FAIRY is the nickname of the Flying Aero-robots based on Light Responsive Materials Assembly program at Tampere University. It flies by wind and is controlled by light, using a soft actuator. "The actuator is made of light-responsive liquid crystalline elastomer, which induces opening or closing actions of the bristles upon visible light excitation,” explains Hao Zeng, group leader of the project.

Since the 1960s, antioxidant supplements have been promoted as a miracle cure and that has never been true - preventing oxidation too much would be as bad as not preventing enough - but luckily few supplements make coenzyme Q bioavailable at all. Evolution created a way for the energy factories of our cells, mitochondria, to be thrown out of balance by pills.Yet they can be thrown out of balance by nature. Coenzyme Q is entirely natural, and a lack of it leads to mitochondrial diseases like Leigh syndrome. But short of experimentally replacing mitochondrial DNA, it is hard to modify. For anything to change it must pass through the watery cell interior called cytoplasm to the surface of the cells in order to neutralize oxidized lipid species.