Culture
Light and foraging ants seem totally unrelated, but they have one thing in common: they travel along time-reducing paths. According to Fermat's principle about the refraction of a ray of light, the light bends when it meets a matter with different refractive indices and travels through time-minimizing paths. Recently, similar behavior was reported in foraging ants in a lab setting: ants 'bend' their travel paths when they enter a substrate that slows them down.
Consumers often struggle to achieve self-set life improvement goals, but what if deliberately emulating the successful strategies used by their friends could help them?
Threats to self-esteem and negative feedback are pervasive in today's society. Social media researchers, for example, have shown a link between frequent usage of social media websites and upward social comparison and negative affect.
How does this influence consumer behavior? A new paper published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research examines how single and repeated exposure to negative feedback in one domain influences goal-directed consumer behaviors.
Renewable technologies are a promising solution for addressing global energy needs in a sustainable way.
However, widespread adoption of renewable energy resources from solar, wind, biomass and more have lagged, in part because they are difficult to store and transport.
As the search for materials to efficiently address these storage and transport needs continues, University of Delaware researchers from the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI) report new techniques for characterizing complex materials with the potential to overcome these challenges.
One of the most commonly used diagnostic tools, particularly during this pandemic, is the reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction test (RT-PCR), which uses a person's respiratory sample to detect viral particles and determine if the person may have been exposed to a virus. Laboratory professionals across the U.S. and the globe have used RT-PCR to find out if a person has been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These tests have played a critical role in our nation's response to the pandemic.
More than 1.7 million Americans develop sepsis each year, and more than 270,000 die from it. The condition--which happens when the body has an extreme response to a bacterial or viral infection, causing a chain reaction that can lead to organ failure and death--has few strategies for treatment.
May 26, 2020 - Early in the pandemic, American Indian Reservations have experienced a disproportionately high incidence of COVID-19 infections: four times higher than in the US population, reports a study in the July/August issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice.
CHAPEL HILL, NC - May 26, 2020 - How hepatitis A virus (HAV) manages to enter liver cells called hepatocytes and initiate infection had remained a mystery for fifty years until now. University of North Carolina School of Medicine researchers designed experiments using gene-editing tools to discover how molecules called gangliosides serve as de facto gatekeepers to allow the virus entry into liver cells.
The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the social, educational and health care disparities already plaguing the nearly 40 million Americans the U.S. Census Bureau estimates are living in poverty.
Coordination Compounds Lab of Kazan Federal University started researching prebiotic peptide synthesis in 2013 with the use of the ASIA-330 flow chemistry system. Many lab projects are devoted to the problem of selectivity and specificity of processes in living nature.
When a new virus emerges, biologists rush to reconstruct its genome - a prerequisite for future diagnostic and vaccine development. The challenge with viral sequencing during an outbreak is that a sample from a patient, like saliva from a COVID-19 patient that was used for the very first SARS-COV-2 coronavirus sequencing effort, contains genomes of many other, often harmless, viruses. Not to mention hundreds of much larger bacterial genomes that live in our mouth and make it difficult to find the viral sequences among them.
The hypothesis that blood clotting disorders may explain some of the worst symptoms of COVID-19, including respiratory failure and pulmonary fibrosis, was suggested in mid-April by researchers in Brazil affiliated with the University of São Paulo’s Medical School (FM-USP) via an article accepted for publication by the Journal of Thrombosis.
The Milky Way, the whiteish strip of light which is prominent in both the summer and the winter skies, is the densest part of the disc of the Galaxy which we are inside. However, over very long periods it has not always looked the same, and its evolution is a challenge to current astrophysics.
To study this evolution, ESA's Gaia mission is measuring the luminosities, positions, motions, and the chemical composition of a large number of individual stars in our Galaxy.
Stem cell researchers at Lund University in Sweden have developed a new research model of the early embryonic brain. The aim of the model is to study the very earliest stages of brain to understand how different regions in the brain are formed during embryonic development. With this new insight, researchers hope to be able to produce different types of neural cells for the treatment of neurological diseases more efficiently. The study is published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Below please find a summary and link(s) of new coronavirus-related content published today in Annals of Internal Medicine. The summary below is not intended to substitute for the full article as a source of information. A collection of coronavirus-related content is free to the public at http://go.annals.org/coronavirus.
1. Loss of Smell and Taste in 2013 European Patients With Mild to Moderate COVID-19