Olafur Palsson, PsyD, professor of medicine in the UNC School of Medicine, led a study investigating the emotional and mental impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. The findings of a nationwide survey assessing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the emotional wellbeing of the U.S. adult population have been released online. The survey was a collaboration between UNC School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School, and was quickly organized to gain an understanding of how individuals are responding to the stressors of isolation and quarantine, record unemployment levels, and the virus’ threat to their health....

Although further research is required to determine if these genetic markers can lead to targeted treatments, the study’s findings provide a deeper understanding of how inherited risk factors contribute to the development of suicidal thoughts and actions. “It’s important to note that these genes do not predestine anyone to problems, but it’s also important to understand that there could be heightened risks, particularly when combined with life events,” said Nathan Kimbrel, Ph....

A new analysis of global datasets shows low-income countries are significantly more likely to be impacted by both toxic pollution and climate change–and provides a list of at-risk countries most (and least) able to immediately begin direct efforts toward pollution risk reduction, according to a study published July 7, 2021, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Richard Marcantonio from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA, and colleagues. In this age of the Anthropocene, it’s clear that human activities are destabilizing our planet across multiple systems....

Lead author, Dr. Kai Kornhuber from the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics and Colombia University’s Earth Institute, said: ‘Co-occurring heatwaves will become more severe in the coming decades if greenhouse gases are not mitigated. In an interconnected world, this can lead to food price spikes and have impacts on food availability even in remote regions not directly affected by heatwaves. ‘We found a 20-fold increase in the risk of simultaneous heatwaves in major crop-producing regions when these global-scale wind patterns are in place....

Researchers have identified a total of four cases of newborn babies with COVID-19 infection in China. In all cases, the babies experienced only mild symptoms with none requiring intensive care or mechanical ventilation according to research published in the European Respiratory Journal today (April 9, 2020). The study was carried out by Dr. Zhi-Jiang Zhang and colleagues at Wuhan University in China. The team report that all four babies were born to mothers with COVID-19 and all were delivered by cesarean section....

It’s a bit like learning the secrets of the family that lived in your house in the 1800s by examining dust particles they left behind in cracks in the floorboards. By looking at specks of dust carried to earth in meteorites, scientists are able to study stars that winked out of existence long before our solar system formed. This technique for studying the stars – sometimes called astronomy in the lab — gives scientists information that cannot be obtained by the traditional techniques of astronomy, such as telescope observations or computer modeling....

NASA scientists are using satellite data to help federal and local agencies identify areas with potential damage. Earthquakes cause permanent changes to the ground surface. By comparing interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data acquired on January 9, 2020, with data acquired on December 28, 2019, from the Copernicus Sentinel-1A satellite, the scientists were able to map where, how much and in what direction those changes occurred. Managed by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Copernicus Sentinel-1A satellite was able to see the eastern two-thirds of the island during the January 9 flyover....

H. moorei was powerful enough to attack and prey on giant flightless birds, the moa, weighing 10 to 15 times their own body weight. Comparatively to its body size, the Haast’s Eagle’s wingspan was short, at about 9 feet. It’s believed that the raptor would swoop down at speeds of nearly 50 mph to attack the moa. It used its talons to kill them on the ground and didn’t carry off its prey....

The research by lead author Cédric Aria, a recent graduate of the Ph.D. program in the department of ecology & evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T, and co-author Jean-Bernard Caron, senior curator of invertebrate paleontology at the ROM and an associate professor in the departments of ecology & evolutionary biology and Earth sciences at U of T, is published today in BMC Evolutionary Biology....

For the first time, researchers have fabricated high-performance mid-infrared laser diodes directly on microelectronics-compatible silicon substrates. The new lasers could enable the widespread development of low-cost sensors for real-time, accurate environmental sensing for applications such as air pollution monitoring, food safety analysis, and detecting leaks in pipes. “Most optical chemical sensors are based on the interaction between the molecule of interest and mid-infrared light,” said research team leader Eric Tournié from the University of Montpellier in France....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Functional Ecology. Hummingbirds are native to the Americas, and are one of the only types of birds that can hover while flying. This expends a lot of energy, and as such, they have one of the fastest metabolisms of any animal. While they eat small insects, hummingbirds typically drink the sugar-rich nectar from flowers to gain calories. Many hummingbird species have co-evolved with certain plant species, but it has remained a mystery why they visit flowers that hang upside-down....

Video Transcript: It’s estimated that candy sales this Halloween will reach upwards to $2.5 billion dollars in the US. [Ed. – For 2022 it is estimated to be $3.1 billion.] In keeping within the bounds of this season’s spookiness – today we’re looking at how many pieces of Halloween candy, when eaten in one sitting, can kill the average person. It isn’t called candy if it isn’t absolutely loaded with sugar....

Galaxy clusters such as this one contain thousands of galaxies of all ages, shapes, and sizes, together totaling a mass thousands of times greater than that of the Milky Way. These groupings of galaxies are colossal — they are the largest structures in the Universe to be held together by their own gravity. Clusters are useful in probing mysterious cosmic phenomena like dark matter and dark energy, the latter of which is thought to define the geometry of the entire Universe....

NGC 6744 is similar to our home galaxy in more ways than one. Like the Milky Way, NGC 6744 has a prominent central region packed with old yellow stars. Moving away from the galactic core, one can see parts of the dusty spiral arms painted in shades of pink and blue; while the blue sites are full of young star clusters, the pink ones are regions of active star formation, indicating that the galaxy is still very lively....

The Universe is rarely static, although the timescales involved can be very long. Since modern astronomical observations began we have been observing the birthplaces of new stars and planets, searching for and studying the subtle changes that help us to figure out what is happening within. The bright spot located at the edge of the bluish fan-shaped structure in this Hubble image is a young star called V* PV Cephei, or PV Cep....

New research by scientists at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine may have pinpointed an underlying cause of the seizures that affect 90 percent of people with Angelman syndrome (AS), a neurodevelopmental disorder. Published online Wednesday, June 6, 2012, in the journal Neuron, researchers led by Benjamin D. Philpot, PhD, professor of cell and molecular physiology at UNC, describe how seizures in individuals with AS could be linked to an imbalance in the activity of specific types of brain cells....

This warning comes from 70 experts from 19 nations in a timely paper published in the journal Ecological Monographs. However, they also provide management techniques and approaches to help insects in a warming world. Yes, we’ve heard about insect decline before. But no, we haven’t made much progress in stopping it globally. Climate change is still currently at the top of the world’s to-do list. Gradual change plus extremes “Climate change aggravates other human-mediated environmental problems,” says Jeffrey Harvey from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam....

In a new paper published in Light Science & Application, scientists from the State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, Department of Electronics, Peking University, China, the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, Southeast University, China, and co-workers developed an AI-driven smart metasurface for jointly controlling the EM waves on the physical level and the EM data flux on the digital pipeline. Based on the metasurface, they designed an inexpensive intelligent EM “camera,” which has robust performance in realizing instantaneous in-situ imaging of full scene and adaptive recognition of the hand signs and vital signs of multiple non-cooperative people....

Eyewitnesses can identify perpetrators more accurately when they are able to manipulate 3D images of suspects, according to a new study. A team of researchers in the University of Birmingham’s School of Psychology developed and tested new interactive lineup software which enables witnesses to rotate and view lineup faces from different angles. When the eyewitnesses were able to rotate the image to match the alignment of the face in their memory, they were more likely to accurately pick out the criminal from the lineup....

Students are taught that quantum uncertainty is always in the eye of the beholder, but that principle might have been proven false by a new experiment that measured a quantum system which doesn’t necessarily introduce uncertainty. It overthrows a common classroom explanation of quantum mechanics, but the fundamental limit of what is knowable at the smallest scales remains unchanged. Scientists published their findings in the journal Physical Review Letters. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that there is a fundamental limit to what is knowable about a quantum system....