Culture
A new study examining the relationships among personality, motivation, and internet gaming disorder (IGD) found that predictors of IGD include male gender, neurotic and introverted personality traits, and motivation related to achievement. The Journal of Addictions & Offender Counseling study included 1,881 adults from various countries.
Bad wells tend to get excluded from studies on groundwater levels, a problem that could skew results everywhere monitoring is used to decide government policies and spending.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo uncovered the problem while examining a discrepancy between scientific data and anecdotal evidence in southern India.
Reports on thousands of wells and satellite images taken between 1996 and 2016 suggested groundwater levels were rising, good news in an area where it is vitally important for agriculture.
Chinese and Rutgers scientists have discovered how aquatic plants cope with water pollution, a major ecological question that could help boost their use in wastewater treatment, biofuels, antibiotics and other applications.
The study is in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ordinary people see beauty in complex mathematical arguments in the same way they can appreciate a beautiful landscape painting or a piano sonata - and you don't need to be a mathematician to get it, a new study by Yale University and the University of Bath has revealed.
Plants constantly make trade-offs in their decisions: more light means more opportunity for photosynthesis, but then hot temperatures and dry air makes wilting more likely. Stomata - microscopic valves on the surface of a leaf's epidermis - are at the forefront of these trade-offs: stomata open to acquire fresh air (and the carbon dioxide in it) for photosynthesis, but water loss through stomatal pores causes plants to become dehydrated, and eventually to wilt.
A new mathematical model provides support for environmental taxation, such as carbon taxes, as an effective strategy to promote environmentally friendly practices without slowing economic growth. Xinghua Fan and colleagues at Jiangsu University, China, publish their model and findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 4, 2019.
In a remarkable evolutionary discovery, a team of scientists co-led by a Virginia Tech geoscientist has discovered what could be among the first trails made by animals on the surface of the Earth roughly a half-billion years ago.
Quasars are the Universe's brightest beacons; shining with magnitudes more luminosity than entire galaxies and the stars they contain. In the center of this light, at the heart of a quasar, researchers think, is an all-consuming black hole.
Researchers, for the first time, have observed the accelerated rate at which eight quasars consume interstellar fuel to feed their black holes.
They published their results on Sept 4th, Nature.
The death march of a segmented bilaterian animal unearthed from ~550-million-year-old rocks in China shows that the oldest mobile and segmented animals evolved by the Ediacaran Period (635-539 million years ago). The research was published in Nature on Sept. 4 by an international research team from China and the U.S.
Electoral gerrymandering, in which political districts are drawn to favor one party, has attracted renewed attention of late. The centuries-old practice operates to bias the outcome of elections.
Now researchers led by Penn biologist Joshua B. Plotkin and the University of Houston's Alexander J. Stewart have identified another impediment to democratic decision making, one that may be particularly relevant in online communities.
Many voters today seem to live in partisan bubbles, where they receive only partial information about how others feel regarding political issues. Now, an experiment developed in part by MIT researchers sheds light on how this phenomenon influences people when they vote.
Scientists have identified the missing part of a finger bone fragment from the Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, revealing that Denisovans--an early human population discovered when the original fragment was genetically sequenced in 2010--had fingers indistinguishable from modern humans despite being more closely related to Neanderthals. This finding uncovers an important piece of evidence to the puzzle surrounding Denisovan skeletal morphology and suggests that finger bone characteristics unique to Neanderthals evolved after their evolutionary split from Denisovans.
Scientists have visualised for the first time protein 'tangles' associated with dementia in the brains of patients who have suffered a single head injury.
This is the finding of a new study led by scientists from Imperial College London, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
In the early-stage study, researchers studied 21 patients who had suffered a moderate to severe head injury at least 18 years earlier (mostly from traffic accidents), as well as 11 healthy individuals who had not experienced a head injury.
There is safety in numbers. That's one of the key findings of a study published today in CMAJ Open that found a child's risk of death or injury in a residential fire was greatly reduced in neighbourhoods with larger than average households.
Led by researchers with the BC Injury Research and Prevention Unit (BCIRPU) at BC Children's Hospital and the University of British Columbia (UBC), the study is the first to broadly investigate the socioeconomic factors that affect fire incidence and fire-related injuries and death at the neighbourhood level in Canada.
The amount of antibiotics entering the River Thames would need to be cut by as much as 80 per cent to avoid the development and spread of antibiotic-resistant 'superbugs', a new study has shown.
Scientists from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) modelled the effects of antibiotic prescriptions on the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a river. It found that across three-quarters of the River Thames catchment, the antibiotics present, due to effluent discharge, were likely to be at levels high enough for antibiotic-resistant bacteria to develop.