When two scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) brought black lights and glow powder into the Maryland State Police crime lab, they weren’t setting up a laser tag studio or nightclub. Instead, their aim was to study the way drug particles get spread around crime labs when analysts test suspected drug...
Scientists have created a new database to help track the impacts of climate change on fish living in rivers, lakes and other inland waters throughout the world. The Fish and Climate Change Database — or FiCli (pronounced “fick-lee”) — is a searchable directory of peer-reviewed journal publications that describe projected or documented effects of climate change on...
Ethicists from Carnegie Mellon and McGill universities are calling on the global research community to resist treating the urgency of the current COVID-19 outbreak as grounds for making exceptions to rigorous research standards in pursuit of treatments and vaccines. With hundreds of clinical studies registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, Alex John London, Professor of Ethics and Philosophy and...
An international team of evolutionary biologists and paleontologists have reconstructed the evolution of the avian brain using a massive dataset of brain volumes from dinosaurs, extinct birds like Archaeopteryx and the Great Auk, and modern birds. The study, published online today in the journal Current Biology, reveals that prior to the mass extinction at the...
The origin of machine and deep learning algorithms, which increasingly affect almost all aspects of our life, is the learning mechanism of synaptic (weight) strengths connecting neurons in our brain. Attempting to imitate these brain functions, researchers bridged between neuroscience and artificial intelligence over half a century ago. However, since then experimental neuroscience has not...
Biophysicists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have visualized a nearly complete transport cycle of the mammalian glutamate transporter homologue from archaea. They confirmed that the transport mechanism resembles that of an elevator: A “door” opens, ions and substrate molecules come in, the door closes,...
When an earthquake or other natural disaster strikes, government relief agencies, insurers and other responders converge to take stock of fatalities and injuries, and to assess the extent and cost of damage to public infrastructure and personal property. But until now, such post-disaster assessment procedures have focused on the dollar value of damages to property...
Historic research based on group movements of humans and animals suggest three simple rules: move away from those that are too close. move toward those that are far away. match the direction of the movement of their neighbors. This research is especially used for air travel where there is an increased risk for contagious infection...
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are combining artificial intelligence/machine learning, bioinformatics and supercomputing to help discover candidates for new antibodies and pharmaceutical drugs to combat COVID-19. Backed by five high performance computing (HPC) clusters and years of expertise in vaccine and countermeasure development, a COVID-19 response team of LLNL researchers from various...
Amidst the flurry of social media updates about the COVID-19 pandemic, a chart illustrating the importance of flattening the curve has gone viral. The idea is that taking measures to slow the spread of COVID-19 lowers the chances of overwhelming hospitals and increases the chances that all of those who become ill will have access...
