Scientists are only just discovering the enormous impact of our gut health – and how it could hold the key to everything from tackling obesity to overcoming anxiety and boosting immunity by Rebecca Seal.
Category: health – Page 227
Safe and readily available water is important for public health, whether it is used for drinking, domestic use, food production, or recreational purposes. Despite the vast quantity of water on Earth, just 2.5% of it is freshwater, and an estimated 785 million people lack a clean source of drinking water. Desalination of seawater could be a vital technology to meet the world’s drinking water needs.
Now, Korean engineers have developed a new desalination technique that takes just minutes to make seawater drinkable. They used a new nanofiber membrane distillation process that could desalinate water with 99.99% efficiency. Engineers believe that commercializing such technology could help humankind cope with the shortage of fresh drinking water in the future.
Amongst the most challenging issues in membrane distillation is membrane wetting that causes the pollution of permeate, reduction in vapor production, and finally, reduction in the performance of the membrane. If a membrane exhibits wetting during membrane distillation operation, the membrane must be replaced.
A previous study led by Lee found losing just 16 minutes of sleep could impact job performance. Her previous findings also show that minor sleep loss can decrease daily mindfulness, which is a critical recourse for managing stress and maintaining healthy routines.
Summary: Three consecutive nights of sleep loss can have a negative impact on both mental and physical health. Sleep deprivation can lead to an increase in anger, frustration, and anxiety. Additionally, those who experienced sleep loss reported a change in physical wellbeing, including gastrointestinal and respiratory problems.
Source: USF
All it takes is three consecutive nights of sleep loss to cause your mental and physical well-being to greatly deteriorate.
A new study published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine looked at the consequences of sleeping fewer than six hours for eight consecutive nights – the minimum duration of sleep that experts say is necessary to support optimal health in average adults.
This mapping of aetiological sources of cross-disorder overlap can guide future research aiming to identify specific mechanisms contributing to risk of physical conditions in people with ADHD, which could ultimately inform preventive and lifestyle intervention efforts. Our findings highlight the importance of assessing the presence of physical conditions in patients with ADHD.
Swedish Research Council; Swedish Brain Foundation; Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life, and Welfare; Stockholm County Council; StratNeuro; EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme; National Institute of Mental Health.
Cyber incidents are an ongoing and substantial threat. Find out how The National Guard is working to deter, disrupt and defeat malicious cyber activity.
ARLINGTON, Va. – The National Guard plays a critical role in defending computer networks and mitigating cyber-attacks that occur almost daily, said Guard senior leaders during a roundtable discussion Tuesday.
“Cyber incidents are an ongoing and substantial threat,” said Army Gen. Daniel Hokanson, chief of the National Guard Bureau. “In 2021 alone, America’s power plants, food supply, water supply, health care, law enforcement, and defense sectors have all come under attack.”
That’s why upcoming exercises like Cyber Shield 2021 – which helps prepare “Guard cyber warriors to deter, disrupt and defeat malicious cyber activity” – are important, he said. Adding the Guard plays a key role in the Department of Defense’s cyber enterprise while partnering with outside agencies.
Nuclear Pore Complexes and Genome Integrity — Dr. Veronica Rodriguez-Bravo Ph.D., Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center — Jefferson Health, Thomas Jefferson University.
Dr. Veronica Rodriguez-Bravo, PhD, is Assistant Professor, Department of Cancer Biology, at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, Thomas Jefferson University, in Philadelphia, PA, USA. (https://sidneykimmelcancercenter.jeffersonhealth.org/)
Dr. Rodriguez-Bravo obtained her PhD in Pathology and Cell Biology (Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Barcelona in 2007, where she also received the Extraordinary Doctorate Award for her studies on the distinct DNA replication checkpoint mechanisms of tumor cells. During her postdoctoral training at the Experimental Oncology Department of the University Medical Center of Utrecht (UMC, The Netherlands) and at the Molecular and Cell Biology Programs of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC, New York), she specialized in the study of chromosome segregation during mitosis and the role of nuclear pores in genome integrity maintenance.
Dr. Rodriguez-Bravo’s post-doctoral work allowed her to apply genome-editing techniques crucial to dissect the function of mitotic and nuclear pore proteins in chromosomal stability and resulted in the recognition with the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Postdoctoral Research Award.
Dr. Rodriguez-Bravo’s research focuses on the study of genome integrity maintenance mechanisms and the relationship of defects in cell division to cancer pathogenesis with special emphasis in the pathways contributing to cancer cells’ more aggressive phenotypes.
As smart watches are increasingly able to monitor the vital signs of health, including what’s going on when we sleep, a problem has emerged: Those wearable, wireless devices are often disconnected from our body overnight, being charged at the bedside.
“Quality of sleep and its patterns contain a lot of important information about patients’ health conditions,” says Sunghoon Ivan Lee, assistant professor in the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences and director of the Advanced Human Health Analytics Laboratory.
But that information can’t be tracked on smartwatches if the wearable devices are being charged as users sleep, which prior research has shown is frequently the case. Lee adds, “The main reason users discontinue the long-term use of wearable devices is because they have to frequently charge the on–device battery.”
Objectives This study sought to assess the association between long working hours, psychosocial safety climate (PSC), work engagement (WE) and new major depression symptoms emerging over the next 12 months. PSC is the work climate supporting workplace psychological health.
Setting Australian prospective cohort population data from the states of New South Wales, Western Australia and South Australia.
Participants At Time 1, there were 3921 respondents in the sample. Self-employed, casual temporary, unclassified, those with working hours 35 (37% of 2850) and participants with major depression symptoms at Time 1 (6.7% of 1782) were removed. The final sample was a population-based cohort of 1084 full-time Australian employees.
“I realized that in the middle-dose group, which is the one that mattered for the no-effects level, they had conveniently left out one of the two baseline measurement days,” said Sheppard. “The outrageous thing was that the group they declared as NOEL was only that because they left out data from their analysis.” In a peer-reviewed paper published in October 2020, Sheppard and her colleagues concluded that “the omission of valid data without justification was a form of data falsification.”
In any case, bifenthrin was not the only pesticide that dodged testing to see if it presented dangers. The EPA’s pesticide office granted 972 industry requests to waive toxicity tests between December 2011 and May 2018, 89 percent of all requests made. Among the tests on pesticides that were never performed were 90 percent of tests looking for developmental neurotoxicity, 92 percent of chronic cancer studies, and 97 percent of studies looking at how pesticides harm the immune system.
By law, the companies that submit their products for review pay for these tests, and in a presentation about the waivers last year, Anna Lowit, a senior science adviser in the office, emphasized the savings to these companies: more than $300 million. Lowit also noted that animal lives were saved — a goal that the Trump administration and the chemical industry prioritized within the agency. The EPA developed the guidelines for waiving the tests along with BASF, Corteva, and Syngenta, pesticide manufacturers that all stand to benefit significantly from having their products bypass toxicity testing.
There is no replacement for these waived experiments, according to pediatrician and epidemiologist Philip Landrigan. “There is no other way to know if a chemical is toxic but to test it,” said Landrigan, who co-authored a landmark report on children’s particular vulnerability to pesticides. “If they allow chemicals to come onto the market and to be used widely in the environment and put on food crops without testing them for toxicity, then EPA is clearly not fulfilling its mandate to protect human health.”
Meet Amazon’s robots
Posted in health, media & arts, robotics/AI
According to recent Occupational Safety and Health Administration data, workers at Amazon fulfillment centers were seriously injured about twice as often as employees in other warehouses. To improve workplace safety, Amazon has been increasing its investment in robotic helpers to reduce injuries among its employees. With access granted for the first time ever, “Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue visited the company’s secret technology facility near Seattle to observe some of the most advanced warehouse robots yet developed, and to experience how high-tech tools are being used to aid human workers.
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