A algunas personas les resulta especialmente desagradable una sonrisa falsa.
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La combinación de un tipo de colágeno y factores de crecimiento permite obtener folículos funcionales a partir de células madre cultivadas.
Combining machine learning technology with smartphone tracking data to create an app that accurately estimates the spread of flu.
In what suggests a new study published in the magazine Nature Communications, which describes how an application was developed for this purpose.
big data
To create their app, the researchers collected anonymous tracking data from Android phone users in New York City; Google stores the history of users who have chosen to allow such tracking to be recorded. They used that data to teach a machine learning system to recognize human movement on a city map.
The team then added data from models created to represent flu transmission rates based on patients' hospital visits and laboratory reports for the 2016 to 2017 flu season.
They used the application to predict the spread of the flu for the same season. They later compared the results to actual flu season records and found that they were as accurate as two of the three conventional systems based on passenger data and better than a third.
Finally, the researchers replicated their efforts to predict the 2016 flu season for all of Australia and They discovered that it could accurately predict the spread of the flu in that country.
The researchers note that using phone tracking data is significantly less expensive than using traveler data. They also noted that their system could also be used to track the spread of an outbreak as it crosses international lines, unlike systems based on passenger data.
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The news
Thanks to phone tracking data combined with machine learning, we can predict the spread of the flu
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
Antarctica was once at the equator. These are some of the findings that you can see in the following video: 1 billion years of continental drift in 40 seconds.
The video is the result of research published in the March 2021 issue of Earth-Science Reviews. For the first time it has been built a complete model of tectonics, including all limits.
Continental drift
The main author and creator of the video, Andrew Merdith He began working on the project while he was a PhD student with Dietmar Müller of the EarthByte geosciences group at the University of Sydney.
The model will help scientists understand how the climate has changed, how ocean currents were altered, and how nutrients flowed from deep within the Earth to stimulate biological evolution.
The Continental drift It is the displacement of continental masses with respect to each other. This theory It was developed in 1912 for the german Alfred Wegener based on various empirical-rational observations, but it was not until the 1960s, with the development of plate tectonics, when the movement of the continents could be adequately explained. Life, quite simply, on Earth would not exist without plate tectonics.
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The news
The uninterrupted movement of the Earth's tectonic plates during the last 1 billion years in 40 seconds
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
Las estrictas normas adoptadas para contener el coronavirus en la primavera de 2020 dejaron su huella en las temperaturas, pero no como quizá se esperaba. Sobre todo, en las zonas donde el aire está más contaminado.
Al parecer, no. La hidra, un animal primitivo sin cerebro, duerme. Este sorprendente hallazgo arroja luz sobre el origen del sueño.
There is no doubt that in these busy times in which multicasting abounds, an audiobook offers many advantages: We can consume it while driving, while running, while lying in bed with our eyes closed, or even while doing many other more cognitively important tasks.
However, There are some substantial differences between reading a book and listening to a book..
The commitment and presence of the narrator
Writing is less than 6,000 years old, insufficient time for the evolution of the specialized mental processes dedicated to reading. We use the mental mechanism that evolved to understand oral language to support the understanding of written language. In fact, the investigations show that adults get almost identical scores on a reading test if they listen to the passages instead of reading them.
However it is not always so. Audiobooks work when the texts are flat, simple, without complex metaphors, without cryptic images. Because there are denser texts that require reducing the reading speed, and even rereading a fragment, or even stopping at a word. Enjoy what it evokes in us as we delight in the taste of coffee.
Thus, A study compared how well students learned about a scientific topic in a 22-minute podcast versus a printed article. Although students spent equivalent time on each format, in a questionnaire written two days later, readers they obtained a result of 81 percent and the listeners, 59 percent.
In other words: reading is something that is done, that requires commitment, while listening is something that happens, that can happen even if we are not committed to the task. Audiobooks progress with or without our participation. We can tune in, pay attention to the book while our mind wanders to another topic at hand, and the book will still move forward.
That is to say, an average reader will be less involved in an audiobook. It will process it less intensely.
Furthermore, the audiobook lacks an internal narrator: the narrator is the one who has been hired to read the audiobook. There is an imposed prosody, that is, a tone and a tempo. Because, although writing lacks symbols for prosody, experienced readers infer it as they go. In A study, subjects listened to a recording of the voice of someone speaking quickly or slowly. Everyone then silently read the same text, supposedly written by the person whose voice they had just heard. Those who heard the speaker speak quickly read the text faster than those who heard the speaker speak slowly.
Also, not everything is based on tempo or learning more or less. Even reading fiction, which on the surface seems like just a hobby, can have fruitful results on many levels, as you can see in the following video:
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The news
Reading a book is not the same as listening to an audiobook: commitment, understanding and presence of the narrator
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) suggest that caffeine consumption during gestation can change important brain pathways of the fetus that could lead to future behavior problems.
To reach this conclusion, analyzed more than 9,000 brain scans of nine and ten year old children.
Small but relevant changes
Previous studies have found that caffeine can have a negative effect on pregnancy and neurodevelopment. It is also known that a fetus does not have the enzyme needed to break down caffeine when it crosses the placenta. This new study reveals that caffeine could also leave a lasting impact on neurodevelopment.
The changes are not drastic nor are the behavioral problems severe, but they are relevant, as explained John Foxe, lead author of the study. Basically, attention and hyperactivity difficulties were detected.
The researchers point out that they are also not clear if the impact of caffeine on the fetal brain varies from one trimester to the next, or when these structural changes occur during gestation. Furthermore, as they warn:
It is important to note that this is a retrospective study. We rely on mothers to remember how much caffeine they consumed during pregnancy.
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The news
Consuming caffeine during pregnancy could trigger behavioral problems in the future baby
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
The race for life, in which millions of sperm swim quickly towards the egg, is neither fair nor noble: rather a ruthless race in which even There are manipulative sperm that are careful to poison their competition..
In what points out a new study published in PLOS Genetics by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (MPIMG) in Berlin.
The research studied mouse sperm cells under a microscope to better understand the effects of a particular DNA sequence known as the t haplotype. The team knew from previous research that sperm that carry this sequence they tend to swim straighter (instead of going in circles) and faster on average than competing sperm without it.
He haplotype t is a series of linked genes that occupy chromosome 17 in house mice around the world. (Unlike humans, who have 23 pairs of chromosomes, mice only have 20.) What happens is that sperm with the t haplotype manage to disable sperm without it.
Specifically, the t haplotype 'poisons' all sperm during the early phases of sperm production, injecting each cell with certain genes that inhibit its ability to regulate movement. It is not until a later phase, when each cell divides in half, that the 'antidote' comes into play. After splitting, half of sperm inherit the genes of the t haplotype on chromosome 17.
For lucky sperm, the t haplotype provides new genetic variants that reverse the inhibitory effects of the 'poison' that all cells consumed during the previous phase of development. According to explains the co-author of the study, Bernhard Herrmann, director of MPIMG:
The trick is that the t haplotype 'poisons' all the sperm, but at the same time produces an antidote, which acts only on the t sperm (those with the t haplotype) and protects them. The result is a kind of marathon in which all participants receive poisoned drinking water, but only some of the runners have access to the antidote.
In their study, the researchers saw that many sperm without the antidote literally swam in circles until they died, while their t-haplotype competitors swam directly forward.
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The news
Some sperm literally poison their competition in the race to fertilize an egg
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
Varios trabajos basados en simulaciones y sistemas físicos análogos intentan estudiar la física del multiverso.