Scientists share best practices for testing seed quality and breaking dormancy
Celebrated scientists and educators, including Nobel laureates and research pioneers, from across the life sciences will convene at the Experimental Biology (EB) 2022 meeting on April 2–5 in Philadelphia. EB brings together thousands of scientists to explore the latest findings and trends in anatomy, biochemistry, molecular biology, investigative pathology, pharmacology and physiology.
New research looks at why the diversity of soil microbes matter
To explore the inner workings of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a novel technique.
Beginning in February 2022, the American Society for Cell Biology launches the inaugural edition of the Emerging Researcher Talk Series. Speakers were selected from a review of the high-ranking abstracts that were submitted for the Cell Bio Virtual 2021 meeting.
Crops aren’t the only ones fighting to adapt to climate change. Weeds are too, and new research can help us identify their strengths and plan for them.
The MiikeMineStamps dataset of stamps provides a unique window into the workings of a large Japanese corporation, opening unprecedented possibilities for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. But some of the stamps in this archive only appear in a small number of instances. This makes for a “long tail” distribution that poses particular challenges for AI learning, including fields in which AI has experienced serious failures. A collaboration between scientists at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), PSC, DeepMap Inc. of California and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) took up this challenge, using PSC’s Bridges and Bridges-2 systems to build a new machine learning (ML) based tool for analyzing “long tail” distributions.
City living translates to an extra two to six hours of uncomfortable weather per day in the summer for people in much of the United States. The gap between rural and urban gets larger as the temperature rises.
The router in your home might be intercepting some of your Internet traffic and sending it to a different destination. Specifically, the router can intercept the Domain Name System traffic --the communications used to translate human-readable domain names (for example www.google.com) into the numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that the Internet relies on. That’s the finding from a team of computer scientists at the University of California San Diego, which they presented at the Internet Measurement Conference on Nov. 3, 2021.
The moon may be a mostly uniform expanse of gray, but if you look closely, you can still find a few nooks and crannies in its surface, from deep trenches to pits and maybe even caves.
New research shows that machine learning — computer algorithms that improve themselves without direct programming by humans — can be used to improve forecasts for lightning, one of the most destructive forces of nature.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists participating in the AGU Fall Meeting 2021, talking about making climate models smarter, are available for media interviews.
This exciting, virtual event will bring together university, industry, venture investment, non-profit and government experts to review, discuss, and advance innovations in the food and beverage ecosystem.
The shutdown of the Colonial gas pipeline in May 2021 had a disastrous impact on many sectors of the U.S. economy, particularly those dependent on the country’s transportation infrastructure. The incident was a warning that the failure of one critical infrastructure has a ripple effect on others, leading to sometimes serious human and economic consequences.
Climate change is fueling more floods, droughts, wildfires, and extreme storms across the United States. As a result, aging power grids are being pushed beyond their limits, sometimes with deadly impacts. (In 2020, a series of unusual winter storms knocked the power out in Texas for days -- leading to shortages of water and heat and more than 100 deaths.)
Throughout its unsteady course, the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the behavior of businesses and households. Those behavioral changes, intensified by government actions like mandatory closures, have had a reverberating impact on the U.S. economy.
Air trapped with ice below glacier surfaces becomes a compressed bubble-ice mixture that builds pressure during the long passage to the glacier terminus. The glacier ice holds ancient bubbles of air that can be up to 20 atmospheres of pressure and generate detectable sounds when they are released as the ice melts. Scientists can listen to the release of the air and potentially use the sounds to help them gauge the impact of climate change on the ice floes.
Killer whales will often travel to different areas to target varieties of prey. In a study including eight years of passive acoustic data, researchers monitored killer whale movements using acoustic tools, finding killer whales are spending more time than previously recorded in the Arctic Ocean, despite risks of ice entrapment there. Their readings indicate this change is directly following the decrease in sea ice in the area.
To demonstrate the power of focused vibrations, researchers use speaker shakers to generate vibrations in a plate. They place Lego minifigures on the plate, choose a target, and measure the impulse response between each shaker and the target location. Playing that very response from the shakers, but reversed in time, creates sound waves that constructively interfere at the target minifigure. The focused energy knocks over the single Lego minifig without disrupting the surrounding minifigs.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins APL team aim to create an ideal baby monitor that alerts parents when their baby needs attention but does not transmit or amplify sound from other sources. The project uses open-source audio processing hardware, originally intended for hearing aids, to filter out unwanted noises that may lead parents to turn down their baby monitor volume and potentially miss infant cries. They plan to keep babies' whole frequency range in mind as they explore signal processing options.
The Seattle Space Needle recently underwent a renovation to enhance the visitor experience, and acoustic designers were tasked with ensuring that the new design is a quiet one, incorporating designs targeted toward limiting unnecessary sound transmission and enhancing future visitor experience. They selected acoustic materials that complement the architectural concept for the spaces and provide effective reverberant sound control.
Ocean predators cannot survive on average concentrations of food found in the water. Instead, they survive by exploiting small patches of food-rich areas peppered throughout the world's waterways. Using active acoustics, researchers found the ocean is widely populated with narrow hotspots of activity. Traditionally, these hotspots are missed with conventional sampling tools, but locating them can provide dynamic layered maps of ocean life. The findings signify ocean food and biota as patchy, varying with depth and location, suggesting animals must find and exploit small-scale aggregations of resources.
Researchers observed a professional soprano singing with and without six types of masks and found masks effectively block aerosols, forcing the breath to exit at the sides. From there, the aerosols travel upward, rising with the upward flow of body heat from the singer. At low frequencies, masks reduced volume but did not have other effects on the singing. However, masks did reduce the power of higher frequencies, which made the enunciation of words less clear and altered the timbre. Masks had no effect on the pitch.
Bats use their acoustical abilities to create discrete echo snapshots and build representations of their environments, producing sounds for echolocation through contracting the larynx or clicking their tongues before analyzing the returning echoes. This acoustic information facilitates navigation and foraging, often in total darkness. Echo snapshots provide interrupted sensory information about target insect trajectory to build prediction models of prey location, and by amalgamating representations of prey echoes, bats can determine prey distance, size, shape, and density.
Converting newly emptied office spaces into podcast studios poses noise challenges not previously realized before hybrid offices began. Offices are less busy and less noisy, meaning recording spaces can be used more often, and newly empty private offices can become podcast studios. But existing spaces present multiple acoustic challenges -- single-glazed windows, nearby noise sources, and limited available surface area, to name a few. Experts recommend considering location, nearby noise sources, and ways to absorb sound to make a studio effective.
Electric vehicles are so quiet they can create a safety concern. To address this, many governments have mandated artificial sounds be added. In the U.S., regulations require vehicle sounds to be detectable at certain distances for various speeds, and researchers have tested how well people detect electric vehicle sounds in terms of these requirements. Participants in the study were seated adjacent to a lane of the test facility and pressed a button upon hearing an approaching electric vehicle. This allowed the researchers to measure the probability of detection versus distance from the vehicle.
Filtering and removing the microplastics from water is a difficult task, but acoustic waves may provide a solution. Researchers have developed a filtration prototype that uses two speakers to create acoustic waves. The force produced by the waves separates the microplastics from the water by creating pressure on a tube of inflowing water. As the tube splits into three channels, the microplastic particles are pressed toward the center as the clean water flows toward the two outer channels.
Press conferences at the 181st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America will be held Wednesday, Dec. 1, in room 505 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle. The media availabilities will focus on wide range of newsworthy sessions at the upcoming meeting from killer whales spending more time in the Arctic Ocean to knocking over Lego minifigures with time reversal focused vibration. For more information, contact AIP Media.
A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used the nation’s fastest supercomputer to streamline the search for potential treatments for COVID-19.
A team led by Rommie Amaro of the University of California San Diego has used ORNL’s Summit supercomputer to model an aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 viral particle for the first time. The 1.05-billion-atom system is among the largest biochemical system ever simulated at the atomic level.
Princeton researchers have solved a 54-year-old puzzle about why certain fluids strangely slow down under pressure when flowing through porous materials, such as soils and sedimentary rocks.
Computer scientists recently examined the performance of dialog systems, such as personal assistants and chatbots designed to interact with humans. The team found that when these systems are confronted with dialog that includes idioms or similes, their performance drops to between 10 and 20 percent. The research team also developed a partial remedy.
A new measurement of the neutron skin in calcium reveals that heavier types of calcium nuclei are relatively thin-skinned. The new measurement, made by the 48Ca Radius EXperiment (CREX) collaboration at DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, was presented at the 2021 Fall Meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society. It is the first highly robust electroweak measurement of the neutron skin in a medium-weight nucleus, and it features a precision of about 0.025 millionths of a nanometer.
Since the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February, the rover and its team of scientists back on Earth have been hard at work exploring the floor of the crater that once held an ancient lake.
Black women are more likely than white women to experience a severe, unexpected complication during labor or delivery, particularly due to systemic inflammation, according to research being presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2021 annual meeting.
Study may have implications for other vaccinations, including COVID-19 vaccine.
Research shows pre-existing severe diabetes and high blood pressure play a role.
Physician anesthesiologist-led rapid response teams led to a significant decrease in cardiac arrest and death, after a transition from nurse-only rapid response teams at the Anesthesiology Institute, Department of Intensive Care and Resuscitation, Cleveland Clinic, Ohio, according to a study presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2021 annual meeting.
Smokers, those with bipolar disorder, depression, pulmonary hypertension at higher risk for persistent opioid use, study finds.
Providing children oral instead of intravenous (IV) acetaminophen to help manage tonsillectomy pain improves care at lower costs, according to research being presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2021 annual meeting.
Patients who experience low blood pressure during surgery are at increased risk for postoperative delirium, according to a large study being presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2021 annual meeting.
Patients with breast, pancreatic and certain other types of cancer may survive longer if given an anti-nausea drug during surgery, according to a large study being presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2021 annual meeting.
Minority children die after surgery at higher rates than white children regardless of socioeconomic status (SES), according to a first-of-its-kind study being presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2021 annual meeting.
Their newborns requiring oxygen support and NICU admission more than asymptomatic pregnant women.
Two NAU astronomers presented groundbreaking research this week at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences, a branch of the American Academy of Sciences.
The results of three new studies indicate there could be new treatments for Alzheimer’s and stroke.
At the 2021 AACC Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo, September 26-30, AACC was proud to welcome thousands of laboratory medicine professionals, all of whom have been on the frontlines of COVID-19 testing. The meeting gave the laboratory medicine community a much-needed opportunity to come together safely and in-person to share lessons learned from the pandemic to date, and to discover what’s on the horizon for COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment.
Georgia Tech researchers have recently discovered a new side channel attack that is effective on a wide range of low-end phones. All that's needed for the attack to work is to place a sensor close to the phone, for example, under the coffee table where the phone is sitting. If the sensor bears witness to a single secure transaction, like a bank login, then the attacker can immediately break the user's encryption and forge their digital signature.
At the 2021 AACC Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Expo, laboratory medicine experts will present the cutting-edge research and technology that is revolutionizing clinical testing and patient care.
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