Earth
Virtual reality simulations of football (soccer) free kicks suggests placing a defensive wall can block a goalie's view and hamper their performance - and simulations might be useful in other sports too.
Over 40 years of monitoring, an endangered bunchgrass prairie became hotter, drier and more susceptible to fire annually--but dramatic seasonal changes (not annual climate trends) seem to be driving the biggest changes in plant production, composition, and summer senescence. Gary Belovsky and Jennifer Slade of The University of Notre Dame, Indiana, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on December 23.
The water levels of the Caspian Sea will be 9 to 18 meters lower than they are now, German and Dutch researchers calculate. In the Nature-journal Communications Earth & Environment they urge the world to act.
Coastal nations are rightly worried about a sea level rise, but in the countries around the Caspian Sea over a hundred million people are facing the opposite problem: an enormous drop in sea level. Technically, this sea is a land-locked lake, but it is the largest on the planet (371.000 km2), and quite salty.
What The Study Did: In this systematic review of current evidence on air contamination with SARS-CoV-2 in hospital settings, the air close to and distant from patients with COVID-19 was frequently contaminated with SARS-CoV-2 RNA; however, few of these samples contained viable viruses. High viral loads found in toilets and bathrooms, staff areas and public hallways suggest that these areas should be carefully considered.
Authors: Gabriel Birgand, Ph.D., of the Centre Hospitalo-Universitaire de Nantes in France, is the corresponding author.
Glioblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in adults. Roughly five in every 100,000 people develop this type of cancer each year. The diagnosis amounts to a death sentence: Even after surgical resection followed by radiation and chemotherapy, the glioblastoma will kill the patient in a few months. This is because the tumor invariably returns after treatment, and in a more aggressive form than before.
While global sea levels are rising due to the climate crisis and threatening near-coastal infrastructures, higher temperatures in other areas are having exactly the opposite effect. The water levels are falling and also causing massive problems. Although the consequences are equally serious, however, declining water levels are receiving less attention according to Matthias Prange, Thomas Wilke of the Justus Liebig University in Gießen, and Frank P. Wesselingh of the University of Utrecht and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center Leiden (the Netherlands).
MADISON -- The proliferation of face coverings to keep COVID-19 in check isn't keeping kids from understanding facial expressions, according to a new study by University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologists.
It's easiest to understand the emotions of the people around you by taking in all the hints they're dropping, on purpose or otherwise. Yet when people cover some of their facial expressions, they take some of those cues away.
How can conifers that are used for example as Christmas trees keep their green needles over the boreal winter when most trees shed their leaves? Science has not provided a good answer to this question but now an international team of scientists, including researchers from Umeå University, has deciphered that a short-cut in the photosynthetic machinery allows the needles of pine trees to stay green. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Anyone entering the world of quantum physics must prepare themself for quite a few things unknown in the everyday world: Noble gases form compounds, atoms behave like particles and waves at the same time and events that in the macroscopic world exclude each other occur simultaneously.
Serotonin is a neurochemical that plays a critical role in the way the brain controls our thoughts and feelings. For example, many antidepressants are designed to alter serotonin signals sent between neurons. In an article in Cell, National Institutes of Health-funded researchers described how they used advanced genetic engineering techniques to transform a bacterial protein into a new research tool that may help monitor serotonin transmission with greater fidelity than current methods.
December 23, 2020 - For patients receiving spinal cord stimulation (SCS) for chronic pain, integration with an immersive virtual reality (VR) system - allowing patients to see as well as feel the effects of electrical stimulation on a virtual image of their own body - can enhance the pain-relieving effectiveness of SCS, reports a study in
DECEMBER 23, 2020, NEW YORK - Researchers led by Ludwig San Diego Member Don Cleveland and Peter Campbell of the Sanger Center have solved the mystery of how free-floating circular DNA fragments, which are almost exclusively found in cancer cells, drive gene amplification to generate drug resistance in cancer.
Rapid, accurate communication worldwide is possible via fiber optic cables, but as good as they are, they are not perfect. Now, researchers from Penn State and AGC Inc. in Japan suggest that the silica glass used for these cables would have less signal loss if it were manufactured under high pressure.
Black children are removed from their families at much greater rates than any other race or ethnicity in this country. At the same time the sheer number of all child abuse investigations in the US is staggering: experts estimate that by age 18 one out of three children has been the subject of a child protective services investigation.
Prof. PAN Jianwei and his colleges from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have achieved the experimental verification of distribution quantum phase estimation for the first time. This work was published on Nature Photonics.
Distributed metrology is a key tool to measure several locations from remote simultaneously with high precision, one typical task of which is the monitoring of stress field and temperature field of bridge and airplane.