Tech
For a long time, geoscientists have assumed that the Alps were formed when the Adriatic plate from the south collided with the Eurasian plate in the north. According to the textbooks, the Adriatic plate behaved like a bulldozer, thrusting rock material up in front of it into piles that formed the mountains. Supposedly, their weight subsequently pushed the underlying continental plate downwards, resulting in the formation of a sedimentary basin in the north adjacent to the mountains - the Swiss Molasse Plateau.
Droughts impact millions of people and threaten the delicate ecosystems of the Amazon rainforest in South America. Now a study within the TiPES project by Catrin Ciemer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany, and colleagues in Environmental Research Letters has revealed how surface temperatures in two coupled areas of the tropical Atlantic Ocean can be used to accurately predict these severe climate events. Early warnings of upcoming droughts are imperative for mitigating the impact on millions of people depending on the rainforest ecosystem.
Metformin is the first-line drug that can lower blood sugar levels in type 2 diabetes patients. One third of patients do not respond to metformin treatment and 5 per cent experience serious side effects, which is the reason many choose to stop medicating. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have now identified biomarkers that can show in advance how the patient will respond to metformin treatment via a simple blood test.
Bottom Line: Proton pump inhibitor (PPI) use was associated with worse outcomes in patients with urothelial cancer treated with the immunotherapeutic atezolizumab (Tecentriq), compared with patients who did not use PPIs.
Journal in Which the Study was Published: Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research
Author: Ashley Hopkins, PhD, an early-career research fellow at Flinders University in Australia
A fruit used for centuries in countries around the world is getting the nutritional thumbs-up from a team of British Columbia researchers.
Breadfruit, which grows in abundance in tropical and South Pacific countries, has long been a staple in the diet of many people. The fruit can be eaten when ripe, or it can be dried and ground up into a flour and repurposed into many types of meals, explains UBC Okanagan researcher Susan Murch.
UPTON, NY--An international collaboration of theoretical physicists--including scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and the RIKEN-BNL Research Center (RBRC)--has published a new calculation relevant to the search for an explanation of the predominance of matter over antimatter in our universe.
TROY, N.Y. -- Let's say you want to purchase a camera, and you're comparing two different advertisements. In one, the font, colors, and layout make the information easy to read. The other has an obscure style that takes more time for you to understand. If you decide to purchase the second camera with the more confusing advertisement, new research out of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that, over time, you'll likely be happier with your choice.
NASA satellites provided a look at the rainfall potential in Hurricane Sally before and after it made landfall in southern Alabama. NASA's Aqua satellite and IMERG analysis were used to analyze the storm's flooding potential.
Sally came ashore on Wednesday, Sept. 16 around 5:45 a.m. EDT near Gulf Shores, Alabama. It was a Category 2 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind scale with sustained winds near 105 mph (169 kph). As a slow-moving storm, Sally generated a lot of rainfall, left behind flooded streets and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
AMHERST, Mass. - Artificial intelligence (AI) experts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Baylor College of Medicine report that they have successfully addressed what they call a "major, long-standing obstacle to increasing AI capabilities" by drawing inspiration from a human brain memory mechanism known as "replay."
NASA's Terra satellite found Vicky to be a shadow of its former self, devoid of precipitation around its low-level center. Any precipitation had been pushed far to the northeast from wind shear. Vicky looked like a wispy ring of clouds on visible satellite imagery and nearby Hurricane Teddy is not helping.
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new tool called the Phish Scale that could help organizations better train their employees to avoid a particularly dangerous form of cyberattack known as phishing.
By 2021, global cybercrime damages will cost $6 trillion annually, up from $3 trillion in 2015, according to estimates from the 2020 Official Annual Cybercrime Report by Cybersecurity Ventures.
Artificial light accounts for approximately 20% of the total electricity consumed globally. Considering the present environmental crisis, this makes the discovery of energy-efficient light-emitting materials particularly important, especially those that produce white light. Over the last decade, technological advances in solid-state lighting, the subfield of semiconductors research concerned with light-emitting compounds, has led to the widespread use of white LEDs.
Understanding the specific mutations that contribute to different forms of cancer is critical to improving diagnosis and treatment. But limitations in DNA sequencing technology make it difficult to detect some major mutations often linked to cancer, such as the loss or duplication of parts of chromosomes.
Now, methods developed by Princeton computer scientists will allow researchers to more accurately identify these mutations in cancerous tissue, yielding a clearer picture of the evolution and spread of tumors than was previously possible.
From loaning pandas to welcoming tourists to hike to sacred monuments, to regulating the sale of wild animals for meat, policies across the world seek to forge clear paths to sustainability.
New research by the University of Kent's Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) has demonstrated a clear fluctuation in the trade of wildmeat in and around the High Niger National Park in Guinea, West Africa.