Desalination is the answer to long-term water security, but it's also expensive and energy-intensive. The good news is that scientists are developing viable solutions. For many years, the most common method of desalination has been reverse osmosis (RO). But RO desalination systems require connection to the electricity grid. Not only is this expensive, it is often inaccessible to isolated regions. This is why sustainable off-grid desalination systems powered by renewable energy are essential. With...
Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have identified mixtures of toxic air pollutants that appear to be linked to poor asthma outcomes later in a child's life. The study examined early exposure to dozens of pollutants potentially experienced by 151 children with mild to severe forms of the disease. The researchers used a novel machine learning algorithm to find that 18 individual chemicals may be linked to poor asthma outcomes...
New analysis of ancient writings suggests that sailors from the Italian hometown of Christopher Columbus knew of America 150 years before its renowned "discovery". Transcribing and detailing a, circa, 1345 document by Milanese friar Galvaneus Flamma, Medieval Latin literature expert Professor Paolo Chiesa has made an "astonishing" discovery of an "exceptional" passage referring to an area we know today as North America. According to Chiesa, the ancient essay – first discovered in 2013 –...
Hope for a future without fear of COVID-19 comes down to circulating antibodies and memory B cells, reports Medical Xpress. Unlike circulating antibodies, which peak soon after vaccination or infection only to fade a few months later, memory B cells can stick around to prevent severe disease for decades. And they evolve over time, learning to produce successively more potent "memory antibodies" that are better at neutralizing the virus and more capable of adapting...
(Reuters) - Sweden and Denmark said on Wednesday they are pausing the use of Moderna's (MRNA.O) COVID-19 vaccine for younger age groups after reports of possible rare cardiovascular side effects. The Swedish health agency said it would pause using the shot for people born in 1991 and later as data pointed to an increase of myocarditis and pericarditis among youths and young adults that had been vaccinated. Those conditions involve an inflammation of the heart or...
About 5,150 kilometres beneath Earth's surface lies the inner core, a ball-shaped mass of mostly iron that is responsible for Earth's magnetic field. In the 1950s, researchers suggested the inner core was solid, in contrast to the liquid metal region surrounding it. However, new research led by Rhett Butler, a geophysicist at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), suggests that Earth's "solid" inner core is,...
Dr. Josh Andersen, who heads Brigham Young University's Fritz B. Burns Cancer Research Laboratory, discovered the mechanism by which a gene, called TNK1, becomes an oncogenic driver in cancer. TNK1 is present in all cells, but when mutated, it becomes dangerous and able to convert normal cells into cancer cells. This puts TNK1 in a select category of cancer driver genes. "You can think of cancer drivers as the engine that makes cancer grow...
Researchers at MIT are exploring the use of artificial intelligence to automate the process of using X-rays and other images in combination with radiology reports to diagnose and treat patients. “We want to train machines that are capable of reproducing what radiologists do every day,” says Ruizhi Liao, a recent PhD graduate at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The vast body of radiology reports accompanying medical images are written by radiology...
It has been commonly believed that humans started to expand into the Americas from Siberia as the last ice age ended about 13,000 years ago, but new findings are igniting debate about this timeline. Thousands of human footprints dating back to 23,000 years ago were discovered in dried lake beds in White Sands National Park in New Mexico, according to a study published in Science. The prints were discovered in 2009, but it took more...
When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020, the R rate became well-known shorthand for the reproduction of the disease. Yet a new study suggests it's time for 'A Farewell to R' in favour of a different approach based on the growth rate of infection rather than contagiousness. The study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface and led by researchers from the University of Cambridge, is based on time series models developed using classical statistical methods....
