news 2020

The threshold for dangerous global warming will likely be crossed between 2027 and 2042 - a much narrower window than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's estimate of between now and 2052. In a study published in Climate Dynamics , researchers from McGill University introduce a new and more precise way to project the Earth's temperature.

The spread of the Internet is shaping migration in profound ways. A McGill-led study of over 150 countries links Internet penetration with migration intentions and behaviours, suggesting that digital connectivity plays a key role in migration decisions and actively supports the migration process. Countries with higher proportions of Internet users tend to have more people who are willing to emigrate.

Diverting urine away from municipal wastewater treatment plants and recycling the nutrient-rich liquid to make crop fertilizer would result in multiple environmental benefits when used at city scale, according to a new University of Michigan-led study. The study, published online Dec. 15 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, modeled large-scale, centralized urine-diversion and fertilizer-processing systems-none of which currently exist-and compared their expected environmental impacts to conventional wastewater treatment and fertilizer production methods.

Thanks to the pandemic, we know just how quickly food can disappear from supermarket shelves. But it is hard to gauge the vulnerability of our food production system as a whole to abrupt changes, such as those that could be caused by extreme events such as a nuclear war or massive volcanic eruptions.

New parents often expect their baby to start sleeping through the night around the time they reach six months of age. But according to a new study led by Professor Marie-Hélène Pennestri, parents should view sleep consolidation as a process, instead of a milestone to be achieved at a specific age. Tracking 44 infants over a period of two weeks, she found that sleeping patterns vary greatly - not only for different babies, but also night to night for the same baby.

The second edition of UGent'ers will arrive in your mailbox this week. Sneak-preview: Claudia and Wuxia compare Ghent to their hometown, Napels and Guizhou.

In a story of lost and stolen books and scrupulous detective work across continents, a Caltech historian and his former student have unearthed previously uncounted copies of Isaac Newton's groundbreaking science book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica , known more colloquially as the Principia .

Significant gaps in how walking capacity and performance is assessed for people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) could be harming therapy and treatment development according to McGill University researchers. The study, published in the International Journal of MS Care , examined the differential between measurement tools for clinical walking capacity and real-world performance.

Stanford researchers are connecting the dots between attention and memory to explain why we remember certain things and forget others, why some people remember better than others and how media multitasking affects how well we recall. The eyes may be the windows to the soul, but they can also provide insightful glimpses into memory.

Higher education institutions frequently offer mentored research experiences to increase undergraduate student interest, motivation and preparedness for research careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematic and Medicine (STEMM) fields. However, for participating students from historically underrepresented groups, unaddressed cultural factors may hinder engagement and result in a less effective mentoring relationship.

After eating a bag of salty potato chips, you probably feel thirsty. And after a long period of exercise, you also probably feel thirsty. However, these two types of thirst are not the same. In the first example, you would likely reach for water. This is because after eating chips, the concentration of salts and minerals in your blood becomes elevated, which induces a state called osmotic thirst.

When attempting to solve a problem, people often fall back on prior experiences that worked, sometimes without considering other solutions. In other words, they stay in their comfort zone, which psychologists call "fixation. Researchers at the University of Michigan, University of Limerick and Iowa State University investigated what happens when new engineers attempt to design a solution on their own with no examples: They tend to stick to their original idea and not try other options.

In an increasingly polarized political system, Democratic control has a meaningful impact on narrowing the gender gap New research from the University of California San Diego reveals that Democratic control of state houses leads to substantial improvement in women's incomes, wages and unemployment relative to men.

The Higgs boson reached overnight fame in 2012 when it was finally discovered in a jumble of other particles generated at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The discovery was monumental because the Higgs boson, which had only been theorized about previously, has the special property of endowing other elementary particles with mass.

A recent study by researchers at McGill University has identified polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) as an independent risk factor for gestational diabetes and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. The condition, known to lead to multiple reproductive complications, including infertility, affects 1 in 10 women of childbearing age.

Unfair, unequal treatment of poor and minority customers of financial institutions is nothing new. Nor are efforts to protect vulnerable populations through changes to the law. New research by University of Michigan finance professor Amiyatosh Purnanandam finds federal regulations aimed at ensuring equal access to credit has an unintended consequence: The quantity of financial products and services has increased but the quality of the offerings are much lower for the lower-income, minority borrowers.

Using e-cigarettes triples the chance of a non-smoker taking up cigarettes and there is "insufficient" evidence that they help smokers quit, according to a new report submitted to the Government. Research led by The Australian National University (ANU) reviewed the worldwide evidence on e-cigarettes and smoking behaviour, relevant to the Australian context.    "We found clear evidence that non-smokers who use e-cigarettes are around three times as likely to take up conventional smoking as their peers who don't use e-cigarettes," lead researcher Professor Emily Banks from ANU said.

New research suggests that the impact of natural and vaccine-induced immunity will be key factors in shaping the future trajectory of the global coronavirus pandemic, known as COVID-19. In particular, a vaccine capable of eliciting a strong immune response could substantially reduce the future burden of infection, according to a study recently published in the journal Science .

Surprisingly, university students without pre-existing mental health concerns seem to be suffering greater psychological distress during the pandemic than their peers with pre-existing mental health problems according to a study of close to 800 university students in Toronto carried out by researchers from McGill and University of Toronto.

Engineers at Stanford have used X-ray CT scans, more common in hospital labs, to study how wood catches fire. They've now turned that knowledge into a computer simulation to predict where fires will strike and spread. As wildfires rage across much of the American West, researchers at Stanford have used CAT scanners, the same instruments used in medicine to peer inside the human body, to understand the process of smoldering - the state of burning without flame that often leads to fire.