USA Archives

Clostridium difficile infection: Risk factors and potential vaccines

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Antibiotics treatment is one of the main factors of risk for developing Clostridium difficile (C. diff) infection, a condition responsible for nearly 500,000 infections and 30,000 deaths each year in the U.S. alone. Dr Joseph Shiloach, Dr Ashish Sharma and their collaborators at the Biotechnology Core Laboratory of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) optimised […]

Homelessness and the American dream: An inconvenient truth

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The widely accepted narrative around homelessness places the blame on poor life choices, conveniently absolving society of responsibility. However, at Eastern Washington University, Dr Matthew Anderson and Dr Stephen Tsikalas, with graduate students Elijah C. Hansen and Zachary Arms, are highlighting large-scale political, economic, and social drivers of the problem, which is inextricably linked to capitalism. In Portland, developers collaborate […]

Exploring mental benefits of the natural environment

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Treetops look like faces beneath a cloudy sky

Natural environments affect behavioural and neural processes, facilitating increased positive emotions and creativity, and reducing stress and impulsive decision-making. Kerry Jordan of Utah State University explores this domain, focusing on impulsive decision-making. With limited neurological literature on mental benefits of natural environments, she recently employed event-related potentials and attention restoration theory in an electrophysiological exploration of implicit decision-making when viewing […]

COVID-19: An individualized treatment framework

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Covid patient is fitted with a ventilator

The elderly are among those at greatest risk of serious infection and death from the coronavirus (COVID-19). By individualizing treatment for COVID-19 and its complications, a significant advance in medicine and improving care could be achieved. Dr Richard Aguilar and colleagues have developed the first known evidence-based recommendations for individualized treatment. These recommendations were derived from a preliminary review of […]

What media arts can teach us about technology and its use

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Professor Sha teaches a group of students

What if? That’s the question behind the Synthesis Center, a unique institutional experiment at Arizona State University in the United States. Created by Professor Sha Xin Wei, the transdisciplinary ‘atelier’ or workshop brings like minds together to explore the interface between media arts, the environment, engineering and technology. With the potential for global social impact, the results generate significant insights […]

An objective, holistic and fair tool for measuring productivity

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Every employer wants to be able to assess the productivity of their employees, and employees can benefit from having access to that data and understanding their performance. This is especially true in the construction industry, where delays can have knock-on effects causing creeping deadlines. How can employers identify and encourage productivity in their workforce? Elie AlChaer wondered the same thing […]

Electron emission patterning: A new path towards smaller devices?

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The demand for smaller and more powerful electronic devices is ever growing in many sectors of today’s society. Current technology limits how small devices can be. To develop smaller devices, new materials and manufacturing techniques are needed. Ali Aliev and Ray Baughman of the Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute have developed a non-contact dry patterning technique for carbon nanotubes. Their […]

Expansive learning within a teachers’ community of ongoing learners

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Good teachers are the critical element in improving education for children everywhere but especially for children in high poverty schools. However, urban schools serving children of poverty rarely attract and retain well-prepared teachers and they seldom provide their teachers with the kinds of support that would improve teaching and learning in their classrooms. To address this need, Professor Frances O’Connell […]

Bringing space closer with 3D printing

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To fulfil the promise of the “NewSpace” revolution and open the door to commercial space exploration that is accessible to everyone, low-cost space technologies are necessary. In order to lower the cost of spacecraft propulsion, Dulce Melo-Máximo from the Tecnológico de Monterrey in México and Luis Fernando Velásquez-García from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report on the first additively manufactured […]

COVID-19 and its variants:
How N95 (hi-fi) masks can protect us

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Devabhaktuni Srikrishna reviews how high quality masks would reduce the inter-household spread of COVID-19.

One of the defining issues of the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to prevent its spread is inter-household transmission. Among the many policies and guidelines implemented, masks have been one of the most important and are now required wearing in the public spaces of many countries. But what if the masks we currently wear aren’t good enough? Researcher Devabhaktuni Srikrishna models […]