After decades of public safety campaigns focused on drinking and driving, it may be time to focus on the seventh leading cause of injury-related death, according to Bureau of Occupational Health and Injury Prevention at New York State Department of Health and Columbia University scholars looking at New York State.
Finding out whether you have been infected with dengue may soon be as easy as spitting into a rapid test kit. The Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) of A*STAR has developed a paper-based disposable device that will allow dengue-specific antibodies to be detected easily from saliva within 20 minutes. This device is currently undergoing further development for commercialization.
89 percent of young people in one region of Spain own their first mobile phone before they reach the age of 13 and a recent study has analyzed the use of information and communication technologies by using a sample of 5,538 students from the Vallès Occidental region of Catalonia. The study, based on surveys taken in the 2010/2011 academic year, finds links between school failure and an elevated use of computers at home. It also correlates an intensive use of video devices with the consumption of toxic substances.
NWA 7034 -
Black Beauty
- is a meteorite found a few years ago in the Moroccan desert. Now it has been shown to be a 4.4 billion-year-old chunk of the Martian crust, and according to a new analysis, rocks just like it may cover vast swaths of Mars.In a new paper, scientists report that spectroscopic measurements of the meteorite are a spot-on match with orbital measurements of the Martian dark plains, areas where the planet's coating of red dust is thin and the rocks beneath are exposed. The findings suggest that the meteorite, nicknamed Black Beauty, is representative of the "bulk background" of rocks on the Martian surface, says Kevin Cannon, a Brown University graduate student and lead author of the new paper.
Mitochondria produce ATP, the energy currency of the body. The driver for this process is an electrochemical membrane potential, which is created by a series of proton pumps. These complex, macromolecular machines are collectively known as the respiratory chain. The structure of the largest protein complex in the respiratory chain, that of mitochondrial complex I, has been elucidated by scientists from the Frankfurt "Macromolecular Complexes" cluster of excellence, working together with the University of Freiburg, by X-ray diffraction analysis.
The process of converting the sun's energy into liquid fuels requires a sophisticated, interrelated series of choices but a solar refinery is especially tricky to map out because the designs involve newly developed or experimental technologies. This makes it difficult to develop realistic plans that are economically viable and energy efficient.
In a paper recently published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical and biological engineering Professors Christos Maravelias and George Huber outlined a tool to help engineers better gauge the overall yield, efficiency and costs associated with scaling solar-fuel production processes up into large-scale refineries.
Five genetic variants that influence the size of structures within the human brain have been discovered by an international team that included a Georgia State University researcher.
In the study led by Drs. Sarah Medland, Margie Wright, Nick Martin and Paul Thompson of the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia, nearly 300 researchers analyzed genetic data and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from 30,717 individuals from around the world. They evaluated genetic data from seven subcortical brain regions (nucleus accumbens, caudate, putamen, pallidum, amygdala, hippocampus and thalamus) and intracranial volume from MRI scans.
A collaboration of researchers have experimentally produced Möbius strips from the polarization of light, confirming a theoretical prediction that it is possible for light's electromagnetic field to assume this peculiar shape. Möbius strips are easy to create, of course. Millions of school children do it in classrooms every year by taking a strip of paper, twisting it once and joining up the ends. That's it, you have created a Möbius strip: a three dimensional structure that has only one side. But finding Möbius strips occurring naturally is another issue.
Those video ads playing in the corner of your computer screen, in the midst of your multitasking, may have more impact than you realize. They may be as effective as the ads you're really watching, such as those during the Super Bowl, says a University of Illinois researcher.
It depends on how you perceive and process media content - whether your processing "style" is to focus more on one thing or to take it all in, according to Brittany Duff, a professor in Illinois' Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising.
Will extending telomeres lead to longer, healthier lives? Researchers have taken a step toward answering this question by developing a new treatment used in the laboratory that extends telomeres.
One of the key aspects of aging is the shortening of telomeres over time. Telomeres, which serve as protective "end caps" for chromosomes, help keep DNA healthy and functioning as it replicates. Unfortunately, these protective end caps become shorter with each DNA replication, and eventually are no longer able to protect DNA from sustaining damage and mutations. In other words, we get older.
The betting line created for this weekend's Super Bowl is done by very smart people. They are not trying to fool anyone, they want the betting to be as even as possible and they make their money on a 'commission' - the vigorish or 'vig' - from the winners. It's not like selling football jerseys, where more volume helps, they need losers to fund the winners so making the odds as even as possible is important.To do that, they try to take into account everything - which player has a cold, the type of field, the weather, the wind. According to a new study, they may take into account a biological clock.
In 2013, President Obama threatened to shut down the government if Congress did not do what he wanted. Congress replied in kind and so we got The Sequester, where government functions were halted unless they were specially exempted. NASA and the National Science Foundation were shuttered, the Smithsonian Panda Cam was turned off, science was doomed - but while scuttling science the president kept 436 personal White House staffers were kept on the payroll as "essential".
Modern humans date back only about 200,000 years. How did that turn into the population of the planet and the extinction of Neanderthals? We have to leave the world of science to speculate on that but physical evidence does provide some guideposts.Fossil records show that some anatomically modern human groups reached the Levantine corridor - the modern Middle East - as early as 100,000 years ago but genetic testing indicates that human populations inhabiting the globe today descended from a single group that migrated from Africa only 70,000 years ago. 30,000 years is a gigantic gap and there has been little evidence to bridge the contradictory hypotheses.
