Curated News: Scientific Reports

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Scientists have found that while eye-to-eye contact is rare, it plays a vital role in conveying important social messages and predicting subsequent social behavior.

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Glaucoma remains one of the most common causes of vision loss and blindness in the U.S. and much of the world, disproportionately affecting older people, African Americans, and Hispanics and Latinos.

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With Amazon aiming to make 10,000 deliveries with drones in Europe this year and Walmart planning to expand its drone delivery services to an additional 60,000 homes this year in the states, companies are investing more research and development funding into drone delivery, But are consumers ready to accept this change as the new normal?

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Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a land change model that simulates interactions between urban growth, increased flooding and how humans adapt in response. The new model could offer a more realistic assessment of risk for urban planners, natural resource managers and other local government stakeholders.

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A CT scan of an often-overlooked, plant-eating dinosaur’s skull reveals that while it may not have been all that “brainy,” it had a unique combination of traits associated with living animals that spend at least part of their time underground, including a super sense of smell and outstanding balance. The work is the first to link a specific sensory fingerprint with this behavior in extinct dinosaurs.

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Measuring blood pressure while patients are standing rather than sitting may improve the accuracy of readings, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers report. Their findings, published in Scientific Reports, could lead to significant improvements in early detection of high blood pressure in healthy adults.

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he main transmission routes identified initially for the novel coronavirus infection were droplet and contact transmission. Airborne transmission by aerosol particles was eventually identified as one of the most likely transmission routes.

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As urbanization advances around the globe, the quality of the urban physical environment will become increasingly critical to human well-being and to sustainable development initiatives. However, measuring and tracking the quality of an urban environment, its evolution and its spatial disparities is difficult due to the amount of on-the-ground data needed to capture these patterns. To address this issue, Yong Suk Lee, assistant professor of technology, economy and global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, and Andrea Vallebueno from Stanford University used machine learning to develop a scalable method to measure urban decay.

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This smartphone attachment could enable people to screen for a variety of neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury, at low cost—and do so accurately regardless of their skin tone.

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New research shows that both MDMA and methamphetamine deepened personal connections after guided conversations, suggesting different mechanisms for how these drugs produce feelings of closeness.

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Showers in bathrooms bring us comfort; showers from space bring astrophysicists joy. Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have observed, with their novel method, cosmic-ray extensive air showers with unprecedented precision, opening the door to new insights into the Universe’s most energetic particles.

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University of Delaware researchers found inequality in access to high quality parks. Focusing on Philadelphia, they discovered that the majority of parks with strong ratings were found in affluent areas, while green spaces in marginalized communities had fewer amenities and more safety concerns.

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Intrusive thoughts, involuntary repetition of undesirable gestures and behaviors combined with high anxiety... Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a disabling condition, affects around 2% of the population, regardless of age.

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For the first time, scientists have direct evidence of an exotic state of ice that may form inside Uranus, Neptune, and other water-rich gas giants due to extreme temperatures and pressures.

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To bridge the knowledge gap between volcanologists and atmospheric scientists working on climate change and observing global systems, Cornell researchers have characterized volcanic ash samples from many explosive eruptions of a broad compositional range.

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Cal State Fullerton antibiotic-resistance researcher María Soledad Ramírez and her students have discovered a promising new therapeutic to treat Acinetobacter baumannii, a superbug commonly found in hospitals and resistant to many antibiotics.

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Cornell University scientists have characterized the genome of a metal-loving bacteria with an affinity for rare earth elements. The research paves the way towards replacing the harsh chemical processing of these elements with a benign practice called biosorption.

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Elk treponeme-associated hoof disease, previously thought to be limited to deformations in elks’ hooves, appears to create molecular changes throughout the animal’s system, according to epigenetic research from Washington State University.

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New research led by the George Washington University finds that current mitigation efforts to combat distrust online may not be effective because organizations and governments tackling distrust are only targeting one topic and only one geographical scale.

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Studying prehistoric production processes of birch bark tar using computational modelling reveals what kinds of cognition were required for the materials produced by Neanderthal and early modern humans.

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Ongoing work by Florida State University College of Medicine researchers into how aspartame affects the brain has linked the artificial sweetener with learning and memory deficits in mice.

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Scientists from Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University and Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of RAS have described in detail disturbances in rhythm of brain that are observed among patients with Rett syndrome – severe genetical disorder, that leads to decline of mental abilities, memory and ability to control movements.

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Koalas are endangered in much of Australia now but in in the past there were multiple species living across the continent.

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Russian neurobiologists have created computer software that can automatically analyze and classify the shape of dendritic spines. The program is based on machine learning techniques.

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Like climbing a mountain via the shortest possible path, improving classification tasks can be achieved by choosing the most influential path to the output, and not just by learning with deeper networks.

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A groundbreaking study published in *Scientific Reports, a Nature portfolio scientific journal, has shed light on the intricate relationship between the sense of presence in virtual reality (VR) environments and cognitive abilities.

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Loss of habitat and human activities such as fishing and shipping pose a grave threat to wildlife but diseases driven by the smallest organisms in the ocean are a less understood side of marine conservation.

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For the first time, a group of researchers have successfully extracted ancient DNA from a 2,900-year-old clay brick.

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A new study led by Archaeologist Michelle Bebber, Ph.D., an assistant professor in Kent State University’s Department of Anthropology, has demonstrated that the atlatl (i.e. spear thrower) functions as an “equalizer”, a finding which supports women’s potential active role as prehistoric hunters.

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An analysis of the hierarchy of tipping points suggests that during the last 66 million years two events set the scene for further climate tipping and for the evolution of the climate system in particular.

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In January 2017, Reddit users read about an alleged case of terrorism in a Spanish supermarket. What they didn’t know was that nearly every detail of the stories, taken from several tabloid publications and amplified by Reddit’s popularity algorithms, was false. Now, Cornell University research has shown that urging individuals to actively participate in the news they consume can reduce the spread of these kinds of falsehoods.

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Cancer patients saw a significant fall in Covid-related hospitalisations and mortality following the rollout of vaccines in the first panoramic study of its kind.

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An exquisitely preserved fossil forest from Japan provides missing links and helps reconstruct a whole Eurasia plant from the late Miocene epoch.

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CABI joined an international team of researchers from 57 institutions around the world to share its expertise in a ground-breaking study which highlights the urgent need to protect the world’s forests from non-native pests amid climate change.

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In a new landmark chemistry study, researchers describe how they have achieved the highest level of energy storage — also known as capacitance — in a supercapacitor ever recorded.

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Putting truth to the test in the “post-truth era”, Boston College psychologists conducted experiments that show when Americans decide whether a claim of fact should qualify as true or false, they consider the intentions of the information source.