International Research Awards on New Science Inventions

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...

Simultaneous heatwaves and droughts are becoming increasingly common in western parts of the Unites States, according to a new study led by researchers from McGill University. Periods of dry and hot weather, which can make wildfires more likely, are becoming larger, more intense, and more frequent because of climate change. In a study published by  Science Advances , the researchers analyzed heat and drought events across the contiguous United States over the past 122 years. They found that combined dry and hot events have not only increased in frequency, but also in size geographically. Where such events were once confined to small parts of the United States, now they cover whole regions, such as the entire west coast and parts of the Northeast and Southeast. “Dry-hot events can cause large fires. Add wind and a source of ignition, and this results in ‘megafires’ like the 2020 fires across the west coast of the United States. Drought and record-breaking heatwaves, coupled with ...

Northwestern University researchers have developed the first quantitative model that captures how politicized environments affect U.S. political opinion formation and evolution. Using the model, the researchers seek to understand how populations change their opinions when exposed to political content, such as news media, campaign ads and ordinary personal exchanges. The math-based framework is flexible, allowing future data to be incorporated as it becomes available. “It’s really powerful to understand how people are influenced by the content that they see,” said David Sabin-Miller, a Northwestern graduate student who led the study. “It could help us understand how populations become polarized, which would be hugely beneficial.”   Daniel Abrams   “Quantitative models like this allow us to run computational experiments,” added Northwestern’s  Daniel Abrams , the study’s senior author. “We could simulate how various interventions might help fix extreme polarizatio...

In an article published in Nature Genetics, researchers confirm that about 14% of all cases of cerebral palsy, a disabling brain disorder for which there are no cures, may be linked to a patient’s genes and suggest that many of those genes control how brain circuits become wired during early development. This conclusion is based on the largest genetic study of cerebral palsy ever conducted. The results led to recommended changes in the treatment of at least three patients, highlighting the importance of understanding the role genes play in the disorder. The work was largely funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health. “Our results provide the strongest evidence to date that a significant portion of cerebral palsy cases can be linked to rare genetic mutations, and in doing so identified several key genetic pathways  involved,” said Michael Kruer, M.D., a neurogeneticist at Phoenix Children’s Hospital and ...