International Research Awards on New Science Inventions

From “Star Wars” to “Happy Feet,” many beloved films contain scenes that were made possible by motion capture technology, which records movement of objects or people through video. Further, applications for this tracking, which involve complicated interactions between physics, geometry, and perception, extend beyond Hollywood to the military, sports training, medical fields, and computer vision and robotics, allowing engineers to understand and simulate action happening within real-world environments. As this can be a complex and costly process — often requiring markers placed on objects or people and recording the action sequence — researchers are working to shift the burden to neural networks, which could acquire this data from a simple video and reproduce it in a model. Work in physics simulations and rendering shows promise to make this more widely used, since it can characterize realistic, continuous, dynamic motion from images and transform back and forth between a 2D render...

(The below Apr. 21, 2022 press release is from the American Lung Association). A news report from the American Lung Association reveals that nearly 9 million more people were impacted by particle pollution, which can be deadly, than in last year’s report. The Lung Association’s 23rd annual “State of the Air” report, released today, also shows more days with “very unhealthy” and “hazardous” air quality than ever before in the two-decade history of this report. The Lung Association’s annual air quality “report card” tracks and grades Americans’ exposure to unhealthy levels of short-term spikes in particle pollution (also known as soot), annual particle pollution and ground-level ozone air pollution (also known as smog) over a three-year period. This year’s report covers 2018-2020. “‘State of the Air 2022’ shows that an unacceptable number of Americans are still living in areas with poor air quality that could impact their health,” said Harold Wimmer, National President and CEO of the ...

Creeping coils of rust seep across the sea – bands of coloured crud buoyed by build-ups of our chemical excess. Irritation, choking, prying, aggregation, soaking, dying. Drowning in the flow that bleeds beyond the edges of our broken shore. An aerial photo demonstrating the aesthetics and reach of the algal blooms off the Florida Coast (Image Credit: FRLA). This poem is inspired by recent research , which has found links between red tides and dead zones off the west coast of Florida. Almost all bodies of water have some algae, but in a red tide, the water changes colour because the population of algae living in the water becomes so dense. Red tides have been around since long before humans. However, certain human activities are making them more frequent. Chemicals from farming, factories, sewage treatment plants and other sources can become dissolved in water on the land, flowing into the ocean, where it can cause the algae to grow faster, leading to red tides. The...

Studying mice, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a neural circuit and a neuropeptide — a chemical messenger that carries signals between nerve cells — that transmit the sensation known as pleasant touch from the skin to the brain. Such touch — delivered by hugs, holding hands or caressing, for example — triggers a psychological boost known to be important to emotional well-being and healthy development. Identifying the neuropeptide and circuit that direct the sensation of pleasant touch eventually may help scientists better understand and treat disorders characterized by touch avoidance and impaired social development, including autism spectrum disorder. The study is published April 28 in the journal  Science . “Pleasant touch sensation is very important in all mammals,” said principal investigator  Zhou-Feng Chen, PhD , director of the  Center for the Study of Itch & Sensory Disorders  at Washington Universi...

Now, after the United Nations’ historic decision to adopt a global treaty to end plastic pollution earlier this year, governmental negotiations on the agreement are set to begin on May 30th. These will foster intense debates on what kind of measures will be needed to end the pollution of the air, soils, rivers and oceans with plastic debris and microplastics. In a letter to the journal Science, an international group of scientists and experts now argue for tackling the issue right at the source, by regulating, capping, and in the long term phasing out the production of new plastics. “Even if we recycled better and tried to manage the waste as much as we can, we would still release more than 17 million tons of plastic per year into nature,” says Melanie Bergmann of the German Alfred-Wegener-Institute, the initiator of the letter. “If production just keeps growing and growing, we will be faced with a truly Sisyphean task,” she adds. Research published in  Science  in 2020 s...

As greenhouse gas emissions continue to warm the world’s oceans, marine biodiversity could be on track to plummet within the next few centuries to levels not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs, according to a recent study in the journal  Science  by Princeton University researchers. The paper’s authors modeled future marine biodiversity under different projected climate scenarios. They found that if emissions are not curbed, species losses from warming and oxygen depletion alone could come to mirror the substantial impact humans already have on marine biodiversity by around 2100. Tropical waters would experience the greatest loss of biodiversity, while polar species are at the highest risk of extinction, the authors reported. “Aggressive and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are critical for avoiding a major mass extinction of ocean species,” said senior author Curtis Deutsch, professor of geosciences and the  High Meadows Environmental In...

Stanford University scientists have found that when recreational runners are left to their own devices and outfitted with a wearable fitness tracker, they prefer to run at the same calorie-saving pace, regardless of the distance ran – contrary to the explicit goals of competitive racing. Previously, scientists theorized that runners burn the same amount of calories for a given distance no matter how fast they run because the energetic cost depends mostly on the weight of the runner and time ran. But a new study, published April 28 in  Current Biology , helps upend this thinking in favor of a more economical one. With data from more than 4,600 runners totaling more than 28,000 hours of running, researchers compared energy-saving running speeds measured in a lab setting to the preferred, real-world speeds measured by wearable trackers and found the two to be indistinguishable. “When you go out for a run, you run to have your best fuel economy,” said  Scott Delp , the Ja...

Seven hours is the ideal amount of sleep for people in their middle age and upwards, with too little or too much little sleep associated with poorer cognitive performance and mental health, say researchers from the University of Cambridge and Fudan University. Sleep plays an important role in enabling cognitive function and maintaining good psychological health. It also helps keep the brain healthy by removing waste products. As we get older, we often see alterations in our sleep patterns, including difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep, and decreased quantity and quality of sleep. It is thought that these sleep disturbances may contribute to cognitive decline and psychiatric disorders in the aging population. In research published today in Nature Aging, scientists from the UK and China examined data from nearly 500,000 adults aged 38-73 years from the UK Biobank. Participants were asked about their sleeping patterns, mental health and wellbeing, and took part in a ser...

Waves break once they swell to a critical height, before cresting and crashing into a spray of droplets and bubbles. These waves can be as large as a surfer’s point break and as small as a gentle ripple rolling to shore. For decades, the dynamics of how and when a wave breaks have been too complex to predict. Now, MIT engineers have found a new way to model how waves break. The team used machine learning along with data from wave-tank experiments to tweak equations that have traditionally been used to predict wave behavior. Engineers typically rely on such equations to help them design resilient offshore platforms and structures. But until now, the equations have not been able to capture the complexity of breaking waves. The updated model made more accurate predictions of how and when waves break, the researchers found. For instance, the model estimated a wave’s steepness just before breaking, and its energy and frequency after breaking, more accurately than the conventional wave...

Religious shoppers are less likely to buy such items when they feel unconditionally loved by God Whether it is marketing a tea to sharpen thinking, or sheets that promote sounder sleep, the  $10 billion self-help industry  has always attracted consumers with products that promise to improve aspects of their bodies and their lives. However, certain consumers may be less likely to take these items home. Research from Duke University’s  Fuqua School of Business  published in the  Journal of Consumer Research  suggests people who are spiritual or religious are less likely to purchase such self-improvement products when they are thinking about God. More specifically, when people who believe in God or a higher power are primed to think about the unconditional love and acceptance God offers, their intent to purchase self-improvement products decreases, said Fuqua marketing professor  Keisha Cutright , a co-author of the research, which found the results ...

A plant virus that infects legumes, called cowpea mosaic virus, has a special power that you may not have known about: when injected into a tumor, it triggers the immune system to treat the cancer—even metastatic cancer—and prevents it from recurring. For the past seven years, researchers at the University of California San Diego and Dartmouth College have been studying and testing cowpea mosaic virus—in the form of nanoparticles—as a cancer immunotherapy and have reported promising results in lab mice and companion dog patients. Its performance has been unmatched by other cancer-fighting strategies the team has tested. But the exact reasons for its success have remained a mystery. In a new  study  published in the journal  Molecular Pharmaceutics , the researchers uncover details that explain why cowpea mosaic virus in particular is exceptionally effective against cancer. The work was led by Nicole Steinmetz, a professor of nanoengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs...

GDP: This brief acronym is believed to represent the sum total of a country’s wealth. Gross Domestic Product has been used by economists since the end of the last world war to track the runners and riders in the global race for prosperity. While we may glimpse GDP figures amid TV news graphics and shrug, for politicians and central banks its fluctuations are the stuff of obsession. “GDP tots up the value of stuff and services produced by a given country to provide a single number used to rank national economies,” says Prof Diane Coyle, Co-Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. “And it has proved to be a hugely powerful incentive to get things done.” GDP’s reign over macroeconomics has seen millions lifted out of poverty and major reductions to child mortality since the measurement was created by two Cambridge graduates working deep in the UK’s War Cabinet in the 1940s. However, this fixation has also taken a devastating ecological toll. Vast tracts of the natural w...

Words influence the way we see the world. In 2015,  we warned  that the language used by the west to describe Russia’s armed intervention in Ukraine was a jumble of euphemism and understatement that failed to serve the public interest. The problem hasn’t gone away. Today there may be a reckoning in the west with how political and business interests have long accommodated the barbarism of Vladimir Putin’s regime for profit and short-term gain. But there is one form of appeasement that we have yet to confront. This appeasement comes in the form of our words. Check the headlines about Ukraine. How many of them bend over backwards to avoid even mentioning Russia? Instead, they speak of the “ Ukraine war ” or “ Ukraine conflict ”. We read about “ Ukraine at war ” or “ the situation in Ukraine ”. Even public gestures are curiously neutral – such as the moment of silence and statement of solidarity for the people of Ukraine observed at the  2022 Academy Awards , which faile...