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An associate professor of marketing at The University of Texas at Arlington says digital avatars can replace a sales force and customer service employees at a fraction of the cost.

Researchers in the University of Arizona Health Sciences Comprehensive Pain and Addiction Center have found that terpenes mimic cannabinoids and produce similar pain-relieving effects, which are amplified when the two are used together.

Researchers from Kumamoto University, Japan have found that a component derived from turmeric essential oil, ar-turmerone, and its derivatives act directly on dopaminergic neurons to exert a neuroprotective effect on tissue cultures of a Parkinson's disease model. The effect appears to be due to the enhancement of cellular antioxidant potency through Nrf2 activation. The researchers believe that the ar-turmerone derivatives identified in this study can be utilized as new therapeutic agents for Parkinson's disease.

Researchers from the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Research Institute have found that physical load stimulates expression of the peptide osteocrin (OSTN) to make bone. They found that OSTN expression was high in bones such as the tibia, radius, and ulna, and was increased via stimulation by load and decreased when load was reduced. These results will be useful for promoting bone maintenance in patients restricted to long-term bed rest, and for treating frailty syndrome.

A team of scientists led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore has found a way to process tamarind shells which are rich in carbon, converting the waste material into carbon nanosheets, which are a key component of supercapacitors - energy storage devices that are used in automobiles, buses, electric vehicles, trains, and elevators.

Prof. DU Jiangfeng and his colleges from USTC set the most stringent laboratory constraint on the exotic spin- and velocity-dependent interaction at the micrometer scale. It's a graceful combination of experiment and theory, and it may contribute to the search for dark matter.

Prof. PAN Jianwei and Prof. ZHANG Jun from USTC set the new benchmark for real-time quantum random number generator in speed and size by highly integrated chip and optimized processing algorithm. This work makes it possible for the practical production and application of a quantum random number generator.

A new study by a team of scientists from Argonne National Laboratory and Chilean-based SQM shows the best ways to produce lithium more efficiently.

Scientists have devised a means of achieving improved information processing with a new technology for effective gate operation. This technology has applications in classical electronics as well as quantum computing, communications and sensing.

A team of geneticists and archaeologists from Ireland, France, Iran, Germany, and Austria has sequenced the DNA from a 1,600-year-old sheep mummy from an ancient Iranian salt mine, Chehrābād. This remarkable specimen has revealed sheep husbandry practices of the ancient Near East, as well as underlining how natural mummification can affect DNA degradation.

A new study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London, University of Oxford, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, and the Medical University of Graz, has found that lateral flow tests detect Covid-19 with similar accuracy to laboratory-based PCR tests, providing they are used at the onset of infection and soon after symptoms start.

Four percent of newly diagnosed cancer cases in 2020 may by associated with drinking alcohol, according to a global study published in The Lancet Oncology, leading its authors to call for greater public awareness of the link between alcohol and cancers and increased government interventions to reduce alcohol consumption in worst-affected regions.

Survival for a baby born with a birth defect - otherwise known as a congenital anomaly - is a "post-code lottery", according to scientists from 74 countries.

Climate change mitigation efforts have led to shifts from fossil-fuel dependence to large-scale renewable energy. However, renewable energy sources require significant land and could come at a cost to ecosystems. A new study led by Ryan McManamay, Ph.D., assistant professor of environmental science at Baylor University, evaluates potential conflicts between alternative energy strategies and biodiversity conservation.

A scientific team has shown that the release of neurotransmitters in the brain is impaired in patients with schizophrenia who have a rare, single-gene mutation known to predispose people to a range of neurodevelopmental disorders.

An international grassroots-funded multicenter clinical trial found that giving a full dose of heparin early to moderately ill hospitalized COVID-19 patients reduced the odds of all-cause death by 78 percent.

Solving structures of potential therapeutics using X-ray diffraction (XRD) is usually a pivotal step in drug development. But XRD generally requires large, well-ordered crystals. Advancements in automated data collection and processing have increased interest in electron diffraction as an XRD alternative. Electron diffraction uses a beam of electrons rather than X-rays to obtain structures. Here researchers present a new drug development pipeline using electron diffraction for use when XRD may not be an option.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix defines a mechanistic role for an understudied bacteria family in gynecologic disease.

Astronomers see many periodic emissions from space, typically caused by rotation of stars and often very regular. UC Berkeley astrophysicists noticed a unique periodicity in the soft gamma ray emissions from a magnetar located in our galaxy. The soft gamma repeater SGR1935+2154 appears to emit bursts only within regularly spaced windows, and is inactive in between. Based on their analysis, they predicted a resumption of bursts last month; so far, a dozen have been detected.

To understand how the University of Washington's transition to online-only classes affected college students' mental health in the spring of 2020, UW researchers surveyed 147 UW undergraduates over the 2020 spring quarter.