By contrast, Google’s search engine earned an “A” and ATMs a “B” in similar but separate studies. Like EHRs, the spreadsheet software Excel got an “F.” “A Google search is easy,” said lead author Edward R. Melnick, assistant professor of emergency medicine and director of the Clinical Informatics Fellowship at Yale. “There’s not a lot of learning or memorization; it’s not very error-prone. Excel, on the other hand, is a super-powerful platform, but you really have to study how to use it....

A calculator to help people understand their risk factors for COVID-19 infection and vaccination has been launched by the Immunisation Coalition in collaboration with Australian researchers. The tool’s three co-lead researchers are University of Queensland virologist Dr. Kirsty Short, CoRiCal instigator from Flinders University Associate Professor John Litt, and GP Dr. Andrew Baird. Dr. Kirsty Short said the Immunisation Coalition COVID-19 Risk Calculator (CoRiCal) was an online tool to support GPs and community members in their discussions about the benefits and risks of COVID-19 vaccines....

“This ‘backflow’ phenomenon is quite delicate and requires exquisite control over the state of a particle, so its demonstration was hindered for half a century,” explains Dr. Alon Bahabad of the Department of Physical Electronics at TAU’s School of Electrical Engineering, who led the research for the study. “This phenomenon reveals an unintuitive behavior of a system comprised of waves, whether it’s a particle in quantum mechanics or a beam of light....

The fossil, called Candelarhynchus padillai, is approximately 90 million years old, and has no modern relatives, explained Oksana Vernygora, Ph.D. student in the Department of Biological Sciences and lead author on the study. The discovery was made with the unlikely assistance of a young tourist, visiting the Monastery of La Candelaria, near the town of Ráquira Boyacá, Colombia. “A kid was walking into the monastery during a tour when he noticed the shape of a fish in flagstones on the ground,” explained Javier Luque, Ph....

Lockdowns, job losses, and social isolation have been the hallmarks of 2020 as COVID-19 tightens its grip on the world, not only infecting millions and leaving a mounting death toll, but also denying humans the most basic sense – touch. In the absence of human-to-human contact, in millions of households worldwide, animals have stepped into the breach for many people, providing much-needed comfort via cuddles, pats, and a constant physical presence....

The underlying goal of the research on magnonic logic is creating alternative circuit elements compatible with the existing electronics. This means developing completely new elements, including faster signal processors with low power consumption, that could be incorporated into present-day electronics. In designing new devices, various components are integrated with each other. However, magnonic circuits rely on magnetic waveguides rather than wires for this. Researchers previously conjectured that waveguides could have an adverse effect on signal intensity in transmission from one component to another....

The collaborative project demonstrated that silicon’s ability to harvest energy from heat can be greatly increased while remaining mass-producible. Dr. Mark Lee, professor and head of the Department of Physics in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University Of Texas at Dallas, is the corresponding author of a study published July 15 in Nature Electronics that describes the results. The findings could greatly influence how circuits are cooled in electronics, as well as provide a method of powering the sensors used in the growing “internet of things....

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Turku and Turku University Hospital in Finland has emphasized the crucial role that a mother’s health and lifestyle play in regulating the neurodevelopment of her child. The study specifically investigated the impact of maternal gestational diabetes, obesity, and diet during pregnancy on the neurodevelopment of 2-year-old children. The research project examined the development of children’s cognitive, language, and motor skills. Maternal adiposity was determined by air displacement plethysmography and gestational diabetes with an oral glucose tolerance test....

Rather than leveling inequality, as the Great Depression did, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities around the world allowing some wealthy investors to benefit from the crisis and make a fortune on the misfortune of others. During March to December last year, U.S. billionaires increased their wealth by over one-third, to one trillion dollars, while millions of Americans faced deep financial hardship. New research from Copenhagen Business School has examined how American “shadow banks”– which are less regulated and include private credit intermediaries such as private equity, venture capital, and hedge fund firms – have invested in ways that extract profit from the misfortunes of frontline workers, struggling companies, and distressed sectors....

Based on a design ten years in the making, the processor has built-in scalability that allows the number of quantum components – made out of light – to scale to extreme numbers. The research was published in Science today, October 18, 2019. Quantum computers promise fast solutions to hard problems, but to do this they require a large number of quantum components and must be relatively error free. Current quantum processors are still small and prone to errors....

When it rains, plants are not only showered with water, but also microbes. These rain-borne microbes have the opportunity to become part of a plant’s aboveground microbial community – known as the phyllosphere. Phyllosphere microbes can protect plants from disease and other stressors and understanding where they come from may help us improve plant health. While plant microbiome research has historically focused on soil and seeds as sources of plant-associated microbes, new findings by scientists at Virginia Tech University suggest that rain may also be an important reservoir....

While the general mechanics of magnetic reconnection are well understood, researchers have struggled for over a half-century to explain the precise physics behind the rapid energy release that occurs. A new Dartmouth research study published yesterday (April 28, 2022) in the journal Communications Physics provides the first theoretical description of how a phenomenon known as the “Hall effect” determines the efficiency of magnetic reconnection. “The rate at which magnetic field lines reconnect is of extreme importance for processes in space that can impact Earth,” said Yi-Hsin Liu, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth....

Spinosaurids, or spinosauridae (meaning “spined lizards”) is a family of carnivorous theropod dinosaurs that originated in the Jurassic period and came to prominence during the Cretaceous period. Paleontologists have found spinosaurid fossils in many locations around the world, including Asia, Europe, South America, Africa, and Australia. New research has identified the remains of one of Europe’s largest ever land hunters. The research was led by paleontologists at the University of Southampton and will be published today (June 9, 2022) in the journal PeerJ Life & Environment....

Airborne and potentially deadly, the virus that causes COVID-19 can only be studied safely under high-level biosafety conditions. Scientists handling the infectious virus must wear full-body biohazard suits with pressurized respirators, and work inside laboratories with multiple containment levels and specialized ventilation systems. While necessary to protect laboratory workers, these safety precautions slow down efforts to find drugs and vaccines for COVID-19 since many scientists lack access to the required biosafety facilities....

In the wake of the sobering news that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, an important advance in the race to develop carbon-neutral renewable energy sources has been achieved. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have reported the first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis. While “artificial leaf” is the popular term for such a system, the key to this success was an “artificial forest....

Researchers at Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE), in partnership with colleagues in the United States, United Kingdom, and South Africa, have recorded for the first time the formation and branching of luminous structures by lightning strikes. Analyzing images captured by a super slow motion camera, they discovered why lightning strikes bifurcate and sometimes then form luminous structures interpreted by the human eye as flickers. The study was supported by FAPESP....

“We need to know what turns on the inflammatory response to bacterial infection to be able to modulate the process,” said Subhrangsu Mandal, the UTA associate professor of chemistry who led the research. “If we can do so, we can control inflammatory diseases of the central nervous system that have been hard to treat up to now, such as sepsis and meningitis, as well as cancer and muscular dystrophy, which can also be seen as a kind of inflammation,” he added....

“Hotspots” of Coronavirus Infections in Human Bodies An infection with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) can affect multiple organs. With this in mind, researchers of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and Cornell University in the US have investigated cellular factors that could be significant for an infection. To this end, they analyzed the activity of 28 specific genes in a wide range of human tissues. Their findings, which provide a map of potentially disease-relevant factors across the human body, are published in the journal Cell Reports....

Plant disease surveillance, detection can preserve food security. Plant diseases don’t stop at a nation’s borders and miles of oceans don’t prevent their spread, either. That’s why plant disease surveillance, improved plant disease detection systems and predictive plant disease modeling — integrated at the global scale — are necessary to mitigate future plant disease outbreaks and protect the global food supply, according to a team of researchers in a new commentary published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

Scientists have found that the psychedelic drug psilocybin, in development as an anti-depressive treatment, changes the emotional state of people listening to music. Psilocybin is the active psychedelic ingredient in ‘magic mushrooms.’ Clinical trials of psilocybin generally use selected music playlists to support the drug-induced psychedelic experience, and this work shows that enhanced emotional processing may be a positive outcome of combining psilocybin with music, suggesting that music should be an active component of psilocybin therapy....