Culture
Though we may not always realize it, photodetectors contribute greatly to the convenience of modern life. Also known as photosensors, photodetectors convert light energy into electrical signals to complete tasks such as opening automatic sliding doors and automatically adjusting a cell phone's screen brightness in different lighting conditions.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Fake news detectors, which have been deployed by social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to add warnings to misleading posts, have traditionally flagged online articles as false based on the story's headline or content. However, recent approaches have considered other signals, such as network features and user engagements, in addition to the story's content to boost their accuracies.
Scientists worldwide have been working flat out on research into infectious diseases in the wake of the global outbreak of the COVID-19 disease, caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. This concerns not only virologists, but also physicists, who are developing mathematical models to describe the spread of epidemics. Such models are important for testing the effects of various measures designed to contain the disease - such as face masks, closing public buildings and businesses, and the familiar one of social distancing.
In March 2020, New York City, an icon of America, was unfortunately named an early epicenter of the novel coronavirus. Now seven months later, America faces a new surge in coronavirus cases and researchers at Texas A&M University hope to provide information and context to help with the battle ahead.
Rich Whittle, a doctoral student at Texas A&M, cites in a recent study that by April 2020, New York City accounted for more than a third of the nation's confirmed cases, with a transmission rate five times higher than the rest of the country.
The majority of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 appear to actively shed infectious virus for about 8 days, but there is a wide range of variability from person to person. Understanding how long people can remain actively infected is important, because it provides new details about a disease and a virus that are still not well understood and informs public health decisions.
Microbes and other microscopic organisms could serve as sustainable "factories" to create many types of industrial materials because they naturally convert nutrients such as sugars into byproducts. However, creating industrial amounts of organic acids from renewable resources poses a challenge, because not many organisms can grow in highly acidic environments. With the help of gene editing and computational modeling tools, a team of researchers explored one type of yeast that could survive in the harsh environment created by acidic products.
An earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or larger will almost always cause strong shaking, but a new study suggests that smaller earthquakes--those around magnitude 5.5 or so--are the cause of most occurrences of strong shaking at a 60-kilometer (37-mile) distance.
Small earthquakes are expected to produce relatively weak shaking, and for the most part that's true, said Sarah Minson of the U.S. Geological Survey. However, ground motion is highly variable, and there are always outlier earthquakes at every size that generate more shaking than expected.
On April 28, a supermagnetized stellar remnant known as a magnetar blasted out a simultaneous mix of X-ray and radio signals never observed before. The flare-up included the first fast radio burst (FRB) ever seen from within our Milky Way galaxy and shows that magnetars can produce these mysterious and powerful radio blasts previously only seen in other galaxies.
It is an experience we all share, as miraculous as it is mysterious. Birth.
Today, roughly one in three births in the United States occurs via cesarean section or C-section. In some other countries across the globe, like Brazil and Turkey, this percentage is even higher.
Yet little is known about how delivery by C-section affects an individual's long-term development.
Support staff and Black and Latinx hospital employees with and without patient care responsibilities are at highest risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection in health care settings, a Rutgers study found.
The very heart of inpatient care for psychiatric patients is socialization, group therapy, shared meals, and a standard two people per room. Then COVID-19 hit with the accompanying public health warnings to isolate, socially distance, and wear masks.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (Nov. 4, 2020) -- For the first time, scientists have visualized a new class of molecular gates that maintain pH balance within brain cells, a critical function that keeps cells alive and helps prevent stroke and other brain injuries.
These gates, called proton-activated chloride channels (PAC), nest within cell membranes and regulate the passage of small molecules called chloride ions into and out of cells. This allows cells to sense and respond to their environment.
A new University of Colorado Boulder-led study sheds light on a protein key to controlling how cells grow, proliferate and function and long implicated in tumor development.
The findings, published this week in the journal Genes and Development, could lead not only to new therapies for hard-to-treat cancers, but also inform novel treatments for neurological diseases and rare developmental disorders, the authors say.
"These findings could have broad biomedical application," said lead author Dylan Taatjes, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry.
Despite extensive support for relationships between the gut microbiome and the brain (the "microbiota-gut-brain axis") in humans and rodents, little is known about these relationships in other animals, leaving questions about this system's generality.
The ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect cells depends on interactions between the viral spike protein and the human cell surface protein ACE2. To enable the virus to hook onto the cell surface, the spike protein binds ACE2 using three finger-like protrusions, called the receptor binding domains (RBDs). Blocking the RBDs therefore has the potential to stop the virus from entering human cells. This can be done using antibodies.