International Conference on Science, Health and Engineering

The third day of the Digital Science Global Showcase 2020 tackled research culture, with three panel sessions, two product focuses, and one social. Want to catch up on what you missed? No problem! Download the DS Daily below, and don’t forget that you can still sign up for our Showcase here: REGISTER FOR THE DIGITAL SCIENCE GLOBAL SHOWCASE 2020 CATCH UP ON PREVIOUS DS DAILIES The post The DS Daily: Day 3 – Research Culture appeared first on Digital Science . from Digital Science https://ift.tt/34gWsRd

A strong, black coffee to wake you up after a bad night’s sleep could impair control of blood sugar levels, according to a new study. Research from the Centre for Nutrition, Exercise & Metabolism at the University of Bath (UK) looked at the effect of broken sleep and morning coffee across a range of different metabolic markers. Writing in the  British Journal of Nutrition  the scientists show that whilst one night of poor sleep has limited impact on our metabolism, drinking coffee as a way to perk you up from a slumber can have a negative effect on blood glucose (sugar) control. Given the importance of keeping our blood sugar levels within a safe range to reduce the risk of conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease, they say these results could have ‘far-reaching’ health implications especially considering the global popularity of coffee. For their study, the physiologists at the University of Bath asked 29 healthy men and women to undergo three different overnig...

A new study in mice identifies a gene that is critical for short-term memory but functions in a part of the brain not traditionally associated with memory. The study,  “A Thalamic Orphan Receptor Drives Variability in Short Term Memory,”  was published on Sept. 29 in the journal Cell. Classical studies of short-term memory have concentrated on the prefrontal cortex area of the brain. Recent studies, however, have suggested other brain regions may also play a role. To discover new genes and brain circuits that are important for short-term memory, the researchers turned to studying genetically diverse mice, rather than inbred mice commonly used in research. “We needed a population that is diverse enough to be able to answer the question of what genetic differences might account for variation in short-term memory,” said  Praveen Sethupathy ’03 , associate professor of biomedical sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine, director of the Cornell Center for Vertebr...

When we think about hackers, we might imagine someone stealing data and selling it on the dark web for financial gain. But new research from the University of Delaware’s John D’Arcy suggests that some hackers may have a different motivation: disappointment in a company’s attempts to fake social responsibility. “There is emerging evidence that the hacking community is not homogenous, and at least some hackers appear to be motivated by what they dislike, as opposed to solely financial gain,” said D’Arcy, who is a professor of  management information systems  (MIS) at UD’s  Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics . “Recent hacks against the World Health Organization, due to its actions (or supposed inactions) related to the COVID-19 pandemic, are a case in point.” D’Arcy and his coauthors, interested in exploring whether a firm’s corporate social performance (CSP) impacts their likelihood of being breached, studied a unique dataset that included information on ...

The potential acceleration of job automation spurred by COVID-19 will disproportionately affect Latinos in U.S. service sector jobs, according to  a new UCLA report , which also urges state and local officials to start planning now to implement programs to support and retrain these workers. The report, by the  UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative , looked at occupational data from the six states with the largest Latino populations and found an overrepresentation of Latinos in industries where jobs are more susceptible to automation, like construction, leisure and hospitality, agriculture, and wholesale or retail trade. More than 7.1 million Latinos, representing almost 40% of the Latino workforce in those six states — Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas — are at high risk of being displaced by automation, the report shows. “As Latinos take a disproportionate financial hit from the COVID-19 crisis, now is a good time to focus on increasing ...

Researchers at Berkeley Lab have transformed lignin, a waste product of the paper industry, into a precursor for a useful chemical with a wide range of potential applications. Lignin is a complex material found in plant cell walls that is notoriously difficult to break down and turn into something useful. Typically, lignin is burned for energy, but scientists are focusing on ways to repurpose it. In a recent study ,  researchers demonstrated their ability to convert lignin into a chemical compound that is a building block of bio-based ionic liquids. The research was a collaboration between the  Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit , the  Joint BioEnergy Institute  (both established by the Department of Energy and based at Berkeley Lab), and the Queens University of Charlotte. Ionic liquids are powerful solvents/catalysts used in many important industrial processes, including the production of sustainable biofuels and biopolymers. H...

Plants can produce a wide range of molecules, many of which help them fight off harmful pests and pathogens. Biologists have harnessed this ability to produce many molecules important for human health — aspirin and the antimalarial drug artemisinin, for example, are derived from plants. Now, scientists at the  Joint BioEnergy Institute  (JBEI) are using synthetic biology to give plants the ability to create molecules never seen before in nature.  New research  led by Patrick Shih, director of Plant Biosystems Design at JBEI, and Beth Sattely of Stanford University describes success in swapping enzymes between plants to engineer new synthetic metabolic pathways. These pathways gave plants the ability to create new classes of chemical compounds, some of which have enhanced properties. “This is a demonstration of how we can begin to start rewiring and redesigning plant metabolism to make molecules of interest for a range of applications,” Shih said. Engineering...

A study of more than a half-million people in India who were exposed to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 suggests that the virus’ continued spread is driven by only a small percentage of those who become infected. Furthermore, children and young adults were found to be potentially much more important to transmitting the virus — especially within households — than previous studies have identified, according to a paper by researchers from the United States and India  published Sept. 30 in the journal Science . Researchers from the  Princeton Environmental Institute  (PEI), Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, worked with public health officials in the southeast Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to track the infection pathways and mortality rate of 575,071 individuals who were exposed to 84,965 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. It is the largest contact tracing study — which is the pr...

Two and a half years ago, MIT entered into a research agreement with startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant. Now, after many months of intensive research and engineering work, the researchers charged with defining and refining the physics behind the ambitious tokamak design have published a series of papers summarizing the progress they have made and outlining the key research questions SPARC will enable. Overall, says Martin Greenwald, deputy director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and one of the project’s lead scientists, the work is progressing smoothly and on track. This series of papers provides a high level of confidence in the plasma physics and the performance predictions for SPARC, he says. No unexpected impediments or surprises have shown up, and the remaining challenges appear to be manageable. This sets a solid basis for the d...

A new study from researchers at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and Stanford University School of Medicine has determined that higher severe maternal morbidity rates for Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, and mixed-race women may be reduced if they had delivered in the same hospitals as non-Hispanic White women. Researchers specifically targeted severe maternal morbidity (SMM), an umbrella term for a set of 21 adverse health complications including eclampsia and heart failure that can occur during childbirth. SMM has emerged as a growing public health crisis. The CDC reports that “the overall rate of SMM increased almost 200%” between 1993 and 2014, with Black women experiencing these outcomes at 2-3 times the rate of White women. The factors explaining the sharp increase in SMM nationally, as well as the persistent disparities by race and ethnicity, are inadequately understood, leaving few options to prevent short- and long-term health consequences for ...

As the United States prepares for November’s general election, almost every step of the voting process is being revamped and reevaluated to ensure that COVID-19 will not spread in local communities when millions of Americans cast their ballot in the fall. While some states are expanding their  vote-by-mail programs , many precincts are still expecting a high turnout for in-person voting. Helping election administrators and poll workers prepare for safe in-person voting is a team at  the Stanford Hasso Plattner Institute of Design , also known as the d.school. In May 2020, they partnered with the  Healthy Elections Project , a joint effort between Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to develop and promote best practices for a safe and secure election this November. “The United States is making the most fundamental transformation to its election infrastructure in the shortest period of time in recent memory,” said  Nathaniel Persily , the Jam...

In the September issue of the journal  Nature ,  scientists from Texas A&M University, Hewlett Packard Labs and Stanford University have described a new nanodevice that acts almost identically to a brain cell. They have shown that these synthetic brain cells can be joined together to form intricate networks that can then solve problems in a brain-like manner. “This is the first study where we have been able to emulate a neuron with just a single nanoscale device, which would otherwise need hundreds of transistors,” said R. Stanley Williams, senior author on the study and professor in the  Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering . “We have also been able to successfully use networks of our artificial neurons to solve toy versions of a real-world problem that is computationally intense even for the most sophisticated digital technologies.” In particular, the researchers have demonstrated proof of concept that their brain-inspired system can identify possib...

A team of researchers in the United States and Japan reports that spinal cord stimulation (SCS) measurably decreased pain and reduced motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, both as a singular therapy and as a “salvage therapy” after deep brain stimulation (DBS) therapies were ineffective. Writing in the September 28, 2020 issue of  Bioelectronic Medicine , first author Krishnan Chakravarthy, MD, PhD, assistant professor of anesthesiology at University of California San Diego School of Medicine,  and colleagues recruited 15 patients with Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that is commonly characterized by physical symptoms, such as tremors and progressive difficulty walking and talking, and non-motor symptoms, such as pain and mental or behavioral changes. The mean age of the patients was 74, with an average disease duration of 17 years. All of the patients were experiencing pain not alleviated by previous treatments. Eight had undergone earlier DBS, a non-inv...

Temperatures at Earth’s highest latitudes were nearly as warm after Antarctica’s polar ice sheets developed as they were prior to glaciation, according to a new study led by Yale University. The finding upends most scientists’ basic understanding of how ice and climate develop over long stretches of time. The study, based on a reconstruction of global surface temperatures, gives researchers a better understanding of a key moment in Earth’s climate history — when it transitioned from a “greenhouse” state to an “icehouse” state. The study appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Sept. 28. “ This work fills in an important, largely unwritten chapter in Earth’s surface temperature history,” said  Pincelli Hull , assistant professor of earth and planetary studies at Yale, and senior author of the study. Charlotte O’Brien, a former Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies (YIBS) Donnelley Postdoctoral Fellow who is now a postdoctoral research as...

A new Duke University-led analysis shows that during the early months of the COVID pandemic, the average number of new infections caused by an infected individual (i.e. the basic reproduction number, R0) was 4.5, or more than twice as many as the initial 2.2 rate estimated by the World Health Organization at the time. At that higher rate of infectious spread, governments had just 20 days from the first reported cases to implement non-pharmaceutical interventions stringent enough to reduce the transmission rate to below 1.1 and prevent widespread infections and deaths, the analysis shows. If delays in implementing these interventions allowed the reproduction rate to remain above 2.7 for at least 44 days – as was the case in many of the 57 countries studied – any subsequent interventions were unlikely to be effective. “These numbers confirm that we only had a small window of time to act, and unfortunately that’s not what happened in most countries,” said the Gabriel Katul, Theodore S...

Dementia is a growing problem for people as they age, but it often goes undiagnosed. Now investigators at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have discovered and validated a marker of dementia that may help clinicians identify patients who have the condition or are at risk of developing it. The findings are published in JAMA Network   Open. The team recently created the Brain Age Index (BAI), a model that relies on artificial intelligence and a large set of sleep data to estimate the difference between a person’s chronological age and the biological age of their brain when computed through electrical measurements (with an electroencephalogram, or EEG) during sleep. A higher BAI signifies deviation from normal brain aging, which could reflect the presence and severity of dementia. “The model computes the difference between a person’s chronological age and how old their brain activity during sleep ‘looks,’ to provid...

As the globe warms, the atmosphere is becoming more unstable, but the oceans are becoming more stable, according to an international team of climate scientists, who say that the increase in stability is greater than predicted and a stable ocean will absorb less carbon and be less productive. Stable conditions in the atmosphere favor fair weather. However, when the ocean is stable, the layers of the ocean do not mix. Cooler, oxygenated water from beneath does not rise up and deliver oxygen and nutrients to waters near the surface, and warm surface water does not absorb carbon dioxide and bury it at depth. “The same process, global warming, is both making the atmosphere less stable and the oceans more stable,” said Michael Mann, distinguished professor of  atmospheric sciences  and director of the  Earth System Science Center  at Penn State. “Water near the ocean’s surface is warming faster than the water below. That makes the oceans become more stable.” Just as ho...

It saved lives in past epidemics of lung-damaging viruses. Now, the life-support option known as ECMO appears to be doing the same for many of the critically ill COVID-19 patients who receive it, according to an international study led by a University of Michigan researcher. The 1,035 patients in the study faced a staggeringly high risk of death, as ventilators and other care failed to support their lungs. But after they were placed on ECMO—extracorporeal membrane oxygenation—their actual death rate was less than 40%. That’s similar to the rate for patients treated with ECMO in past outbreaks of lung-damaging viruses and other severe forms of viral pneumonia. The new study published in The Lancet provides strong support for the use of ECMO in appropriate patients as the pandemic rages worldwide. It may help more hospitals that have ECMO capability understand which of their COVID-19 patients might benefit from the technique, which channels blood out of the body and into a circuit of ...