News 2019

The number of e-cigarette users who began vaping at age 14 or younger has more than tripled in the last five years, say University of Michigan researchers. Last year, 28% of e-cigarette users said they started no later than age 14, compared to about 9% in 2014. The findings are scheduled to appear online Dec.

As climate change accelerates, the oceans are rapidly acidifying. An innovative new study by University of Chicago biologists shows that mussels raised in an acidic experimental environment grew smaller shells than those grown at normal levels, but the overall survival rate of mussels grown under both conditions was the same.

Mealworms are not only able to eat various forms of plastic, as previous research has shown, they can consume potentially toxic plastic additives in Styrofoam with no ill effects, a new study shows. The worms can then be used as a safe, protein-rich feed supplement. Tiny mealworms may hold part of the solution to our giant plastics problem.

Technique may help remotely image and assess health of infants, burn victims, and accident survivors in hard-to-reach places. For most people, getting an ultrasound is a relatively easy procedure: As a technician gently presses a probe against a patient's skin, sound waves generated by the probe travel through the skin, bouncing off muscle, fat, and other soft tissues before reflecting back to the probe, which detects and translates the waves into an image of what lies beneath.

Using limited data, this automated system predicts a company's quarterly sales. Knowing a company's true sales can help determine its value. Investors, for instance, often employ financial analysts to predict a company's upcoming earnings using various public data, computational tools, and their own intuition.

Method concentrates radionuclides in a small portion of a nuclear plant's wastewater, allowing the rest to be recycled. Nuclear power continues to expand globally, propelled, in part, by the fact that it produces few greenhouse gas emissions while providing steady power output. But along with that expansion comes an increased need for dealing with the large volumes of water used for cooling these plants, which becomes contaminated with radioactive isotopes that require special long-term disposal.

Researchers at EPFL have developed an ultra-light robotic insect that uses its soft artificial muscles to move at 3 cm per second across different types of terrain. It can be folded or crushed and yet continue to move. Imagine swarms of robotic insects moving around us as they perform various tasks.

A team of astronomers has produced a new image of an arc-shaped object in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The feature, which resembles a candy cane, is a magnetic structure that covers an enormous region of some 160 light-years. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year — almost 6 trillion miles.

People exposed to higher levels of air pollution are more likely to experience depression or die by suicide, finds a new analysis led by UCL. The first systematic review and meta-analysis of evidence connecting air pollution and a range of mental health problems, published in Environmental Health Perspectives , reviewed study data from 16 countries.

Researchers know that adversity-especially poverty-related adversity-increases the risk for anxiety and depression. Now, University of Michigan researchers have won a $6.7 million grant to study how poverty-related adversity might affect the development of threat and reward systems in the brain, and how that developmental process might increase the risk for people to develop anxiety and depression.

Professor Mark Emberton, Dean of the Faculty of Medical Sciences, writes about the new UCL-led trial, which is testing to see if MRI scans could be effective at screening men for prostate cancer, in a similar way to how mammograms are used to check women for breast cancer. Prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer in men with around 130 new cases diagnosed in the UK every day and more than 10,000 men a year dying as a result of the disease.

Quantum computers, just like classical computers, are only as good as the instructions that we give them. And although quantum computing is one of the hottest topics in science these days, the instructions, or algorithms, for quantum computers still have a long way to go to become useful. Garnet Chan , Caltech's Bren Professor of Chemistry, is tackling this problem.

New deep learning algorithm DeepMACT detects the smallest metastases Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the LMU Munich have developed a new algorithm that automatically detects metastases. The new technology uses artificial intelligence (AI) and even finds single disseminated cancer cells in the body of mice.

An ultrathin coating developed by University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers upends a ubiquitous physics phenomenon of materials related to thermal radiation: The hotter an object gets, the brighter it glows. The new coating - engineered from samarium nickel oxide, a unique tunable material - employs a bit of temperature trickery.

In this edition: We discover treatments for baby brain injuries, see what's new on Mars for 2020 and find out how to prevent pandemics. Play the complete podcast (above) You can catch the podcast on all your favourite platforms. Just click on any of the icons below. OR listen to individual chapters: News: Doctor burnout and Sun discoveries - We discuss a study showing a surprising number of doctors suffer from emotional exhaustion , and discover new insights into the Sun from a spacecraft that has flown closer to our star than ever before.

A fundamental problem for biology is explaining how life evolved. How did we get from simple chemical reactions in the prebiotic soup, to animals and plants? A key step in explaining life is that about 4 billion years ago, all we had was just the simplest molecules that could replicate themselves. These are called 'replicators' - the earliest form of life, so simple that that they are almost chemistry rather than biology.

An international team of geoscientists led by Caltech has used fiber optic communications cables stationed at the bottom of the North Sea as a giant seismic network, tracking both earthquakes and ocean waves. The project was, in part, a proof of concept. Oceans cover two-thirds of the earth's surface, but placing permanent seismometers under the sea is prohibitively expensive.

Teenage girls who experience clinical levels of anxiety could be at greater risk of eating disorders, according to researchers at UCL and University of Bristol. The study, published today in European Eating Disorders Review , looked at anxiety disorder pathology and engagement with severe levels of fasting (not eating for an entire day) in 2,406 teenage girls of Bristol's Children of the 90s study.

Two Carnegie Mellon University professors expect 2020 could bring new regulations and laws to protect consumers from data privacy risks and block pirate sites. In the coming year, Ari Lightman , professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy , predicts that lawmakers will tighten regulations on social media networks as part of a push for more transparency from digital giants.

A new multicentre study will investigate the link between brain inflammation and psychosis, and use artificial intelligence techniques to identify patients that might benefit most from novel treatments. The study, funded by UKRI Medical Research Council , is led by the Universities of Birmingham and Cambridge.