265 articles from THURSDAY 22.8.2019

Psychiatric illnesses are common in adults and children with kidney failure

Between 1996 and 2013, approximately 27% of adults, 21% of elderly adults, and 16% of children with kidney failure in the United States were hospitalized with a psychiatric diagnosis in the first year of kidney failure. The prevalence of hospitalizations with psychiatric diagnoses increased over time across age groups, mostly due to secondary diagnoses.

Global worry over Amazon fires escalates; Bolsonaro defiant

Amid global concern about raging Amazon fires, Brazil on Thursday said it was the target of a smear campaign by critics who contend President Jair Bolsonaro is not doing enough to curb widespread deforestation. The growing threat to what some call "the lungs of the planet" has ignited a bitter dispute about who is to blame during the tenure of a leader who described Brazil's rainforest...

Scurrying roaches help researchers steady staggering robots

To walk or run with finesse, roaches and robots coordinate leg movements via signals sent through centralized systems. Though their moving parts are utterly divergent, researchers have devised handy principles and equations to assess how both beasts and bots locomote and to improve robotic gait.

The Paleozoic diet: Why animals eat what they eat

In what likely is the first study on the evolution of dietary preferences across the animal kingdom, researchers report several unexpected discoveries, including that the first animal likely was a carnivore and that humans, along with other omnivores, belong to a rare breed.

What's killing sea otters? Parasite strain from cats

Many wild southern sea otters in California are infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, yet the infection is fatal for only a fraction of sea otters, which has long puzzled the scientific community. A new study identifies the parasite's specific strains that are killing southern sea otters, tracing them back to a bobcat and feral domestic cats from nearby watersheds.

Helping NASA spacecraft travel faster and farther with math

By combining cutting-edge machine learning with 19th-century mathematics, a mathematician is working to make NASA spacecraft lighter and more damage tolerant by developing methods to detect imperfections in carbon nanomaterials used to make composite rocket fuel tanks and other spacecraft structures.

In a quantum future, which starship destroys the other?

Quantum mechanics boasts all sorts of strange features, one being quantum superposition -- the peculiar circumstance in which particles seem to be in two or more places or states at once. Now, an international group of physicists flip that description on its head, showing that particles are not the only objects that can exist in a state of superposition -- so can time itself.

Cracking a decades-old test, researchers bolster case for quantum mechanics

Researchers have developed creative tactics to get rid of loopholes that have long confounded tests of quantum mechanics. With their innovative method, the researchers were able to demonstrate quantum interactions between two particles spaced more than 180 meters (590 feet) apart while eliminating the possibility that shared events during the past 11 years affected their interaction.

UN, France raise concern over Amazon wildfires 'crisis'

France and the United Nations called Thursday for the protection of the fire-plagued Amazon rainforest as Brazil's right-wing president blamed NGOs for promoting an "environmental psychosis" to damage the country's interests. UN chief Antonio Guterres said he was "deeply concerned" by the fires in the Amazon. "In the midst of the global climate crisis, we cannot afford more damage to a major...

New images from asteroid probe yield clues on planet formation

Photographs snapped by a shoebox-sized probe that explored the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu offer new clues about its composition, insights that are expected to help scientists understand the formation of our solar system. The German-French Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) was dropped off by Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft on October 3, 2018, free-falling from a height of 41 meters (135 feet) for...

Spacewatch: India’s moon mission arrives in lunar orbit

If Chandrayaan-2 is successful, it will make India the fourth country to reach the moon’s surfaceIndia’s moon mission, Chandrayaan-2, has arrived in lunar orbit. The spacecraft is engaged in a series of manoeuvres that will place it in its final operating orbit, a circular path looping over the moon’s poles at an altitude of 100km (62 miles).Chandrayaan-2 entered lunar orbit at about 0500...

Jay Inslee’s failed presidential run shows that it’s tough to make voters care about climate change

Jay Inslee may be out of the presidential race, but he's not out of the minds of climate policy campaigners. The two-term Washington state governor won high praise from his Democratic rivals as well as experts on global climate change after he acknowledged on Wednesday night that he would not be "carrying the ball" in the presidential campaign, largely due to his failure to attract...

Return of the king: Salmon rebounds after California drought

Trolling off the California coast, Sarah Bates leans over the side of her boat and pulls out a long, silvery fish prized by anglers and seafood lovers: wild king salmon. Reeling in a fish "feels good every time," but this year has been surprisingly good, said Bates, a commercial troller based in San Francisco. It's a sharp reversal for chinook salmon, also known as king salmon, an iconic species...

What do criminal justice risk assessments actually assess?

Exposure to the criminal justice system increases some of the risk factors used to predict recidivism and re-arrest, according to new research out of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. For every arrest or conviction an adolescent experienced, their levels of antisocial attitudes, behaviors, and number of peers became subsequently higher. Findings provide new empirical evidence...