Articles Archives

Health & Medicine

When complex systems fail: The mammalian dive response and sudden unexpected death

The mammalian dive response (MDR) conserves oxygen when a person is swimming or diving. Usually the MDR serves as a built-in safety feature of the body. Sometimes, though, the MDR interacts with other factors to cause sudden unexpected death. In particular, risk of death increases when the MDR is combined with a heart condition called long QT syndrome. In a […]

Physical Sciences

This polymer hardens as it heats up

Dr Takayuki Nonoyama, Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Advanced Life Science at Hokkaido University, has made a polymer material with a rather strange property: at room temperature, it is rubbery, and at higher temperatures it solidifies. Cool it back down, and it becomes rubbery again. To create a material which exhibits this counter-intuitive behaviour, Nonoyama took inspiration from the proteins in […]

Biology

Revisiting the medicinal plants of the Bible and the Holy Land

Many previously described medicinal plants of the Bible do not match the flora of the Holy Land. Using modern interpretations of ancient Hebrew, Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources, the authors have reduced these potential medicinal plants to 45 species of which 20 were not previously included. Amots Dafni (Institute of Evolution, Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology, University of Haifa, Israel) […]

Health & Medicine

How does age change sport performance? Master athletes have the answer

We all grow older, but the ageing process affects us differently. Many master, or veteran, athletes are examples of “successful ageing”. Their physical fitness is often recorded in sport performance records over a long period of time, making them ideal for studying the effects of ageing. Professor Emeritus Michael Stones, of Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada, used a statistical method called […]

Engineering & Technology

Cooperation with autonomous machines through culture and emotion

People tend to be less cooperative with machines than with humans. Dr Celso de Melo, a computer scientist with the US Army Research Laboratory, and Dr Kazunori Terada, an Associate Professor at Gifu University, Japan, demonstrate how incorporating simple cultural and emotional cues, such as virtual faces showing positive or negative emotion, can help mitigate unfavourable bias toward machines and […]

Earth & Environment

Archaeology from space: Using Earth Observation data to unearth our past

Archaeologists have discovered many relics of our ancestors across the Earth’s surface, but much more remains buried beneath the soil. Archaeological prospection plays an important role in both the identification of these special sites and their protection. Dr Athos Agapiou of the Cyprus University of Technology, at the Department of Civil Engineering and Geomatics and the Eratosthenes Research Centre, develops […]

Physical Sciences

Deconstructing spookiness:
Emergent Quantum Mechanics explains the quantum world

From tunnelling to entanglement, the world of quantum mechanics describes a diverse array of seemingly bizarre behaviours which only emerge on the very smallest of scales. Yet Professor Theo van Holten at the Delft University of Technology believes that the physics required to describe quantum systems may not need to be nearly as exotic as many physicists currently believe. Through […]

Biology

Climate change is driving the expansion of zoonotic diseases

Climate change is expanding the range of many infectious diseases. In particular, vector-borne diseases, such as dengue or malaria, are advancing. Predictions of risk for zoonotic diseases need to take into account both biological and abiotic factors. Dr Jeanne M. Fair and her colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA, are pioneering a multidisciplinary approach to the problem. […]

Physical Sciences

Uncovering the underlying geometrical structure for an extension of the theory of electroweak interaction and the Dark Matter problem

Describing the behaviour of all fundamental particles and forces as we know them, the Standard Model has held up to every experiment physicists have undertaken to date. Frustratingly, however, the theory remains far from complete. Dr Joachim Herrmann at the Max Born Institute in Berlin suggests the tangent bundle as the underlying geometrical structure for an extension of the Standard […]

Health & Medicine

Serious illness decision-making:
How do you plan for uncertainty?

The death toll from the current COVID-19 pandemic rises every day. Symptoms can range from a cough to severe pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Thinking about future medical care is now more relevant than ever before. However, planning for death under conditions of certainty is not the same as planning for a serious illness, where the outcome is more […]