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Blog – Page 269

When unable to smell prey, female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes turn to—and upregulate—heat sensors in their legs, new Science Advances research finds.

Fig. 2. Orco mutant mosquitoes display enhanced heat-seeking behavior.

(A) Schematic of female body parts that express Orco. (B) Heatmaps showing mean mosquito occupancy for the indicated genotypes on the Peltier (dotted lines) and surrounding area at indicated Peltier temperature during seconds 90 to 180 of each stimulus period. © Mean ± SEM percentage of mosquitoes of indicated genotypes on Peltier (top) during the 36°C trial (bottom). A 20-s pulse of CO2 was applied at the beginning of each stimulus period. (D) Percent of mosquitoes of indicated genotypes on Peltier during seconds 90 to 180 of stimuli of indicated temperature (mean ± SEM, n = 9 trials per genotype; data points marked with indicate that the mutant differs significantly from all other tested genotypes within each tested temperature at P < 0.05; one-way ANOVA with Tukey’s HSD post hoc test). (E to G) Mean dwell time (E), landing frequency (F), and take-off frequency (G) of indicated genotypes on the Peltier surface during the 36°C trial (n = 9 trials per genotype).

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A new study from Vanderbilt University Medical Center shows that clinical alerts driven by artificial intelligence (AI) can help doctors identify patients at risk for suicide, potentially improving prevention efforts in routine medical settings.

A team led by Colin Walsh, MD, MA, associate professor of Biomedical Informatics, Medicine and Psychiatry, tested whether their AI system, called the Vanderbilt Suicide Attempt and Ideation Likelihood model (VSAIL), could effectively prompt doctors in three neurology clinics at VUMC to screen patients for suicide risk during regular clinic visits.

The study, reported in JAMA Network Open, compared two approaches—automatic pop-up alerts that interrupted the doctor’s workflow versus a more passive system that simply displayed risk information in the patient’s electronic chart.

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DGIST’s triple-layer solid polymer electrolyte battery improves safety, efficiency, and durability, addressing dendrite issues while retaining 87.9% performance after 1,000 cycles. It holds promise for diverse applications, including electric vehicles and energy storage systems.

A research team from DGIST’s Division of Energy & Environmental Technology, led by Principal Researcher Kim Jae-hyun, has developed a lithium metal battery using a “triple-layer solid polymer electrolyte.” This innovation significantly improves fire safety while extending the battery’s lifespan, making it a promising solution for applications in electric vehicles and large-scale energy storage systems.

Conventional solid polymer electrolyte batteries face challenges due to structural limitations that impede optimal contact between electrodes. These limitations fail to address the issue of “dendrites”—tree-like lithium formations that occur during repeated charging and discharging cycles. Dendrites pose a critical safety risk, as their irregular growth can damage battery connections and lead to fires or explosions.

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Advances in inertial confinement fusion and innovative modeling have brought nuclear fusion closer to reality, offering insights into high-energy-density physics and the early universe.

The pursuit of controlled nuclear fusion as a source of clean, abundant energy is moving closer to realization, thanks to advancements in inertial confinement fusion (ICF). This method involves igniting deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel by subjecting it to extreme temperatures and pressures during a precisely engineered implosion process.

In DT fusion, most of the released energy is carried by neutrons, which can be harnessed for electricity generation. Simultaneously, alpha particles remain trapped within the fuel, where they drive further fusion reactions. When the energy deposited by these alpha particles surpasses the energy input from the implosion, the plasma enters a self-sustaining “burning” phase. This significantly boosts energy output and density.

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