Friday 31 May 2019

Occupational hazards account for more than one in ten people with range of lung diseases

More than 1 in 10 people with a range of non-cancerous lung diseases may be sick as a result of inhaling vapors, gas, dust or fumes at work, according to a joint American Thoracic Society and the European Respiratory Society statement published in the ATS's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

* This article was originally published here

New algorithm may help people store more pictures, share videos faster

The world produces about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Storing and transferring all of this enormous—and constantly growing—number of images, videos, Tweets, and other forms of data is becoming a significant challenge, one that threatens to undermine the growth of the internet and thwart the introduction of new technologies, such as the Internet of Things.

* This article was originally published here

Video: What are the northern lights?

Every winter, thousands of tourists head north hoping to catch a glimpse of the luminous auroras dancing in the sky.

* This article was originally published here

Smoke from Canadian wildfires drifts into 5 US states

Smoke from large wildfires in Canada's Alberta province has drifted into five U.S. states and is causing haze and air quality issues.

* This article was originally published here

Quick liquid packaging: Encasing water silhouettes in 3-D polymer membranes for lab-in-a-drop experiments

The ability to confine water in an enclosed compartment without directly manipulating it or using rigid containers is an attractive possibility. In a recent study, Sara Coppola and an interdisciplinary research team in the departments of Biomaterials, Intelligent systems, Industrial Production Engineering and Advanced Biomaterials for Healthcare in Italy, proposed a water-based, bottom-up approach to encase facile, short-lived water silhouettes in a custom-made adaptive suit.

* This article was originally published here

U.S. Postal Service mail, packages are headed to Dallas by self-driving truck

Before letters end up in your mailbox and packages land on your doorstep, many travel hundreds or thousands of miles in the back of a truck. Now, the United States Postal Service is testing what it would take to shuttle that cargo without a driver in the front seat.

* This article was originally published here

Shared control allows a robot to use two hands working together to complete tasks

A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the Naval Research Laboratory has designed and built a robotic system that allows for bimanual robot manipulation through shared control. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group explains the ideas behind their work and how well they worked in practice.

* This article was originally published here

REPLAB: A low-cost benchmark platform for robotic learning

Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a reproducible, low-cost and compact benchmark platform to evaluate robotic learning approaches, which they called REPLAB. Their recent study, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, was supported by Berkeley DeepDrive, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Google, NVIDIA and Amazon.

* This article was originally published here

Hydrogen-power electric flying vehicle: Long road to liftoff

A transportation company is betting its sleek new hydrogen-powered electric flying vehicles will someday serve as taxis, cargo carriers and ambulances of the sky, but experts say they will have to clear a number of regulatory hurdles before being approved for takeoff years in the future.

* This article was originally published here

Pediatric nurse practitioner shortage looming

(HealthDay)—There is a looming critical shortage of pediatric nurse practitioners (PNPs), according to a white paper published in the May-June issue of the Journal of Pediatric Health Care.

* This article was originally published here

Desalinating water in a greener and more economical way

We know that excessive consumption, industrial activity and growth in the global population are some of the factors threatening access to drinking water for an increasing proportion of people around the world. According to UNESCO figures from 2012, almost 700 million people suffer from limited access to water—and that number could rise to 1.8 billion by 2025. Desalination and the treatment of industrial wastewater can produce large amounts of drinking water, and these methods are already used in many countries and regions such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, China, Europe and the U.S.. However, existing systems are costly and use a lot of energy. Jeff Ong, from EPFL's Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Catalysis, has developed a water treatment machine that combines the benefits of all of the main technologies currently being used while offering improved performance. For example, the prototype removes more than 99.9 percent of the salt from seawater with the same throughput but using less energy. The system will be tested in real-world conditions this year.

* This article was originally published here

Guidelines updated for radiotherapy after prostatectomy

(HealthDay)—Clinical guidelines on adjuvant and salvage radiotherapy after radical prostatectomy have been updated, according to the American Society for Radiation Oncology and the American Urological Association.

* This article was originally published here

Radio-wave therapy proves effective against liver cancer cells

A new targeted therapy using non-thermal radio waves has been shown to block the growth of liver cancer cells anywhere in the body without damaging healthy cells, according to a study conducted by scientists at Wake Forest School of Medicine, part of Wake Forest Baptist Health.

* This article was originally published here

Novel approach to test the adverse impacts of man-made chemical mixtures

Concerns over our seemingly constant exposure to chemical mixtures of all kinds have been growing in the past two decades. This is because endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) found in various materials such as pesticides, metals, additives in food and personal care products are believed to be associated with various health risks. These include altered reproductive function in males and females, increased incidence of breast cancer, abnormal growth patterns and neurodevelopmental delays in children.

* This article was originally published here

Sensor-packed glove learns signatures of the human grasp

Wearing a sensor-packed glove while handling a variety of objects, MIT researchers have compiled a massive dataset that enables an AI system to recognize objects through touch alone. The information could be leveraged to help robots identify and manipulate objects, and may aid in prosthetics design.

* This article was originally published here

Oncologists see benefit of medical marijuana, but not comfortable prescribing

A University of Colorado Cancer Center study presented at the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting 2019 shows that while 73 percent of surveyed oncology providers believe that medical marijuana provides benefits for cancer patients, only 46 percent are comfortable recommending it. Major concerns included uncertain dosing, limited knowledge of available products and where to get them, and possible interactions with other medications.

* This article was originally published here

Transgender no longer classified as mental health disorder by WHO

(HealthDay)—Transgender people will no longer be classified as having a mental disorder by the World Health Organization.

* This article was originally published here

Child deaths in Brazil fall following comprehensive smoking ban

Child deaths have fallen in Brazil following complete smoking bans in public places, according to a new study.

* This article was originally published here

A new mechanism for accessing damaged DNA

UV light damages the DNA of skin cells, which can lead to skin cancer. But this process is counteracted by DNA repair machinery, acting as a molecular sunscreen. It has been unclear, however, how repair proteins work on DNA tightly packed in chromatin, where access to DNA damage is restricted by protein packaging. Using cryo electron microscopy, researchers from the Thomä group at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) have identified a new mechanism whereby repair proteins detect and bind to damaged DNA that is densely packed in nucleosomes.

* This article was originally published here