Latest News Releases 8 April

A new study aimed at understanding perceptions of obesity management and the use of anti-obesity medicine by employers and employees in the U.S. is published in the peer-reviewed journal Population Health Management.

In a new study, researchers created an AI model of the mouse visual cortex that predicts neuronal responses to visual images.

Before humans can colonize the moon or Mars, scientists and engineers must first develop techniques for building permanent structures and pressurized habitats in harsh, thin-atmosphere and low-gravity environments.

Dr. Wei Li, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas, is developing a virtual lunar welding platform to troubleshoot assembling large structures in such conditions.

In 1962, when environmentalist and author Rachel Carson penned "Silent Spring," alerting the world to the dangers of the pesticide DDT, it was the reproductive threat to birds – the bald eagle in particular – that spurred people to action.

Six decades later, Rutgers University–New Brunswick researchers are taking the measure of another global environmental pollutant by drawing parallels to the crisis Carson identified. This time, the pollutant is mercury, and the sentinels are penguins living in the farthest reaches of the Antarctic Peninsula.

“With mercury, there’s an analogy to DDT,” said John Reinfelder, a professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, and co-author of a study published in Science of the Total Environment examining mercury levels in the flightless, aquatic birds.

In a massive scientific effort funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), hundreds of researchers have helped to map the connections between hundreds of thousands of neurons in the mouse brain and then overlayed their firing patterns in response to visual stimuli. This breakthrough is a critical piece of foundational science to build toward understanding how our brains process visual information to reconstruct the images we see every day.

An international team of researchers has created the first-ever detailed map of how genes are regulated in chickens — a breakthrough that could help scientists breed birds that are more resistant to diseases like avian influenza.

Recently, a team of researchers from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has consecutively removed the innermost atom and the outermost electron of a gold nanoparticle—without disturbing its overall structure. This precise manipulation allowed them to probe how the magnetic spin of the material influences its catalytic activity.

Scientists from Yale University report that in addition to participation in school-based extracurricular activities, U.S. adolescents who participate in faith-based or community-based extracurricular activities may be more likely to identify the risks of binge-drinking behavior, which could be an important consideration when developing preventions for excessive alcohol consumption.