Tech
DALLAS, Nov. 9, 2020 -- The more secondhand tobacco smoke children breathe at home while growing up, the higher chance they have of developing markers of decreased heart function as adults, according to preliminary research to be presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2020. The meeting will be held virtually, Friday, November 13 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020, and is a premier global exchange of the latest scientific advancements, research and evidence-based clinical practice updates in cardiovascular science for health care worldwide.
Durham, NC - A new study released today in STEM CELLS might just have solved the mystery behind why mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) continue to suppress inflammation in the body long after the MSCs are cleared from the system. The findings, by researchers at Duke University (Durham, N.C.), could help overcome a critical barrier to MSCs being considered a reliable option when developing treatments for inflammatory diseases ranging from COVID-19 and cancer, to allergies, arthritis and more.
The capacity of the Amazon forest to store carbon in a changing climate will ultimately be determined by how fast trees die - and what kills them. Now, a huge new study has unravelled what factors control tree mortality rates in Amazon forests and helps to explain why tree mortality is increasing across the Amazon basin.
Cigarette smoking remains a leading preventable cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States. And while adolescent cigarette smoking has declined over the past several decades, e-cigarette use presents a new risk for nicotine use disorder. a new study, published Nov. 9 in the journal Pediatrics, finds that e-cigarette use is associated with a higher risk of cigarette smoking among adolescents who had no prior intention of taking up conventional smoking.
Researchers from the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) have shown that nanoparticles could be used to deliver drugs to the brain to treat neurodegenerative diseases.
WINSTON-SALEM, NC, NOVEMBER, 2020 -- Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine scientists (WFIRM) have developed a method to bioprint a type of cartilage that could someday help restore knee function damaged by arthritis or injury.
Scientists at Linköping University, Sweden, working with the perovskite family of materials have taken a step forwards and developed an optoelectronic magnetic double perovskite. The discovery opens the possibility to couple spintronics with optoelectronics for rapid and energy-efficient information storage.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are developing a wearable electronic device that's "really wearable"--a stretchy and fully-recyclable circuit board that's inspired by, and sticks onto, human skin.
The team, led by Jianliang Xiao and Wei Zhang, describes its new "electronic skin" in a paper published today in the journal Science Advances. The device can heal itself, much like real skin. It also reliably performs a range of sensory tasks, from measuring the body temperature of users to tracking their daily step counts.
In 1973, physicist and later Nobel laureate Philip W. Anderson proposed a bizarre state of matter: the quantum spin liquid (QSL). Unlike the everyday liquids we know, the QSL actually has to do with magnetism - and magnetism has to do with spin.
Disordered electron spin produces QSLs
What makes a magnet? It was a long-lasting mystery, but today we finally know that magnetism arises from a peculiar property of sub-atomic particles, like electrons. That property is called "spin", and the best - yet grossly insufficient - way to think of it is like a child's spinning-top toy.
First the background: Microbiologists traditionally determine which organisms they are dealing with using the small subunit ribosomal RNA or in short SSU rRNA gene. This marker gene allows to identify almost any living creature, be it a bacterium or an animal, and thus assign it to its place in the tree of life. Once the position in the tree of life is known, specific DNA probes can be designed to make the organisms visible in an approach called FISH (fluorescence in situ hybridization).
Astrophysicists consider that around 40% of the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and galaxies remains undetected, concealed in the form of a hot gas in the complexe cosmic web. Today, scientists at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay) may have detected, for the first time, this hidden matter through an innovative statistical analysis of 20-year-old data. Their findings are published on November 6, 2020 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Researchers have found a way to produce nylon fibres that are smart enough to produce electricity from simple body movement, paving the way for smart clothes that will monitor our health through miniaturised sensors and charge our devices without any external power source.
Germanium telluride (GeTe) is known as a ferrolectric Rashba semiconductor with a number of interesting properties. The crystals consist of nanodomains, whose ferrolectric polarization can be switched by external electric fields. Because of the so-called Rashba effect, this ferroelectricity can also be used to switch electron spins within each domain. Germanium telluride is therefore an interesting material for spintronic devices, which allow data processing with significantly less energy input.
Scientists at the National Center for Tumor Diseases Dresden (NCT/UCC) and Dresden University Medicine, together with an international team of researchers, were able to demonstrate that certain white blood cells, so-called neutrophil granulocytes, can potentially - after completing a special training programme - be utilised for the treatment of tumours. In order to stimulate the training of this part of the innate immune system, the scientists used beta-glucan, a long-chain sugar molecule that occurs as a natural fibre mainly in the cell walls of fungi, oats or barley.
Optical activity in chiral molecules has become a hot topic in physics and optics, representing the ability to manipulate the polarized state of light. Understanding how molecules rotate the plane of plane-polarized light has widespread applications, from analytic chemistry to biology and medicine--where it can, for example, be used to detect the amount of sugar in a substance.