163 articles from WEDNESDAY 28.7.2021

National parochialism widespread, worldwide

In our globalized world, cooperation between citizens of different countries should actually be a matter of course. But around the world, people prefer to cooperate with their own fellow citizens rather than with foreigners. This was the result of a study by an international team of researchers led by Angelo Romano and Matthias Sutter from the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.

Hybrid cars are twice as vulnerable to supply chain issues as gas-powered models

The global computer chip shortage has hit car manufacturers especially hard, indicating the importance of supply chain resilience. Yet, for hybrid electric vehicles, it isn't clear how their production could be impacted by fluctuating supplies and high prices. To get a grasp of these vulnerabilities compared to those for gas-powered models, researchers conducted a thorough analysis, finding that...

Magnetic fields implicated in the mysterious midlife crisis of stars

Middle-aged stars can experience their own kind of midlife crisis, experiencing dramatic breaks in their activity and rotation rates at about the same age as our Sun, according to new research. The study provides a new theoretical underpinning for the unexplained breakdown of established techniques for measuring ages of stars past their middle age, and the transition of solar-like stars to a...

Postmenopausal women can dance their way to better health

Women often struggle with managing their weight and other health risk factors, such as high cholesterol, once they transition through menopause. A new study suggests that dancing may effectively lower cholesterol levels, improve fitness and body composition and in the process, improve self-esteem.

Giant friction experiment at Kilauea volcano

A new analysis of the 2018 collapse of Kilauea volcano's caldera helps to confirm the reigning scientific paradigm for how friction works on earthquake faults. The model quantifies the conditions necessary to initiate the kind of caldera collapse that sustains big, damaging eruptions of basaltic volcanoes like Kilauea and could help to inform forecasting and mitigation.

Exercise may boost kids’ vocabulary growth

Swimming a few laps likely won't turn your child into the next Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps, but it just might help them become the next J.K. Rowling or Stephen King. A recent study suggests aerobic exercise, such as swimming, can boost kids' vocabulary growth.

A reversible male contraceptive, targeted to the testes with magnets

Women have several choices for long-lasting, reversible contraceptives, but most options for men are either single-use, such as condoms, or difficult to reverse, like vasectomies. Now, in a step toward a safe, long-lasting and reversible male contraceptive, researchers have developed magnetic, biodegradable nanomaterials that reduced the likelihood of mice fathering pups for at least 30 days.

Covid vaccine map: how are countries around the world doing?

More than 2bn Covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered worldwide. Find out which countries are vaccinating the mostCoronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverageSince the first Pfizer vaccine against Covid-19 was injected into the arm of a British woman in December 2020, hundreds of millions of vaccine doses have been administered worldwide.Dozens of countries now have...

From chemical graphs to structures

3D configurations of atoms dictate all materials properties. Quantitative predictions of accurate equilibrium structures, 3D coordinates of all atoms, from a chemical graph, a representation of the structural formula, is a challenging and computationally expensive task which is at the beginning of practically every computational chemistry workflow. Researchers at the University of Vienna have now...

COVID-19-related xenophobia

A lot of entirely unwarranted anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. and elsewhere has emerged on social media since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had its original source in Wuhan, China, but is a global problem we all must face. Researchers from China and the U.S. have investigated how this xenophobia can be classified on one particularly prominent social media platform, Twitter, with a...