Tech

New research has brought us closer to being able to understand the health benefits of coffee.

Monash researchers, in collaboration with Italian coffee roasting company Illycaffè, have conducted the most comprehensive study to date on how free radicals and antioxidants behave during every stage of the coffee brewing process, from intact bean to coffee brew.

Crowdsourced science helped predict the path of a deadly plant disease over a six-year period, demonstrating the contributions that trained citizen scientists can make in large-scale geographic tracking projects. That's the conclusion of a study of sudden oak death monitoring in California, published today in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

A research team led by geoscientists from Brown University and the Marine Biological Laboratory has provided some crucial ground-truth for a method of measuring plant photosynthesis on a global scale from low-Earth orbit.

The researchers have shown that chlorophyll fluorescence, a faint glow produced by plant leaves as a byproduct of photosynthesis, is a strong proxy for photosynthetic activity in the canopy of a deciduous forest. That glow can be detected by orbiting satellites and could be used to monitor global photosynthetic activity in real time.

By mounting cameras and spectral sensors over a forest canopy in central Massachusetts, scientists have developed an innovative system to measure plant photosynthesis over large areas, such as acres of crops or trees, using information on solar-induced fluorescence in the leaves. The system, which can monitor plant growth and several other ecosystem changes, was developed by a team led by Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) and Brown University scientists. It is described in a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters.

Current public health guidelines recommend that only gay men and people with HIV should be routinely screened for extragenital gonorrhea and chlamydia, given the high burden of these sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in this at-risk population.

The New England Journal of Medicine reports results of a multi-center phase I/II study of the investigational anti-cancer agent rociletinib (CO-1686) in patients with EGFR-mutant non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that had progressed after previous treatment with EGFR inhibitors. Responses were seen in 59 percent of evaluable patients with the T790M mutation (n=46). In this same population, median progression-free survival (PFS) at the time of analysis was 13.1 months; these data continue to mature.

Kaiba was just a newborn when he turned blue because his little lungs weren't getting the oxygen they needed. Garrett spent the first year of his life in hospital beds tethered to a ventilator, being fed through his veins because his body was too sick to absorb food. Baby Ian's heart stopped before he was even six months old.

Three babies all had the same life-threatening condition: a terminal form of tracheobronchomalacia, which causes the windpipe to periodically collapse and prevents normal breathing. There was no cure and life-expectancies were grim.

When a crystal lattice is excited by a laser pulse, waves of jostling atoms can travel through the material at close to one sixth the speed of light, or approximately 28,000 miles/second. Scientists now have a new tool to take movies of such superfast movement in a single shot.

The interim Senate report into the performance and management of electricity network companies has rightly identified over-investment as a key reason for the increase in electricity prices.

But in choosing to focus on the most difficult and complicated area for regulators and governments to grapple with - what the efficient level of investment for these businesses is - the inquiry has struggled to come up with solutions.

Automated organization, multi-RAT and multi-layer heterogeneous networks, those are what are being requested in mobile of 2020, what will be the 5G era - the first meaningful unified wideband mobile communication system.

A recent systematic overview discussed progress on 5G research and highlighted the network architecture and techniques which could be employed in the future 5G systems.

Blocked blood vessels can quickly become dangerous. It is often necessary to replace a blood vessel - either by another vessel taken from the body or even by artificial vascular prostheses. Together, Vienna University of Technology and Vienna Medical University have developed artificial blood vessels made from a special elastomer material, which has excellent mechanical properties. Over time, these artificial blood vessels are replaced by endogenous material. At the end of this restorative process, a natural, fully functional vessel is once again in place.

Emory scientists have adapted an antiviral enzyme from bacteria called Cas9 into an instrument for inhibiting hepatitis C virus in human cells.

The results were published Monday April 27, 2015 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cas9 is part of the CRISPR genetic defense system in bacteria, which scientists have been harnessing to edit DNA in animals, plants and even human cells. In this case, Emory researchers are using Cas9 to put a clamp on RNA, which hepatitis C virus uses for its genetic material, rather than change cells' DNA.

The autonomous locomotion for a macroscopic machine remains an intriguing issue for the researchers to explore. Recently, Professor LIU Jing and his group from Tsinghua University demonstrated that as a versatile material, the liquid metal could be self-actuated when fueled with aluminum (Al) flake, and the motion thus enabled would persist for more than an hour at a quite high velocity.

For the first time, industry and policymakers have a comprehensive report detailing the U.S. hydropower fleet's 2,198 plants that provide about 7 percent of the nation's electricity.

The 98-page report by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers Rocio Uria-Martinez, Patrick O'Connor and Megan Johnson is a resource that describes key features of the nation's hydro resources and systematically tracks trends that have influenced the industry in recent years.

Stroke is a frequent and dreaded complication of atrial fibrillation. But predicting which of the estimated six million Americans with a-fib are at highest risk has long challenged physicians weighing stroke risk against the serious side effects posed by lifelong therapy with warfarin and other blood thinners.