Here are today’s top science and technology stories from “ScienceBlog.com.”
Views expressed in this science and technology post are those of the reporters and correspondents.
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Accessed on 15 June 2020, 1520 UTC.
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ScienceBlog.com: 10 Stories to Start Your Day |
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- By recreating phobias and panic attacks, neuroscientists aim to improve anxiety therapies
- Dedicated high-speed rail dollars kept in the Valley will simply go farther
- Spontaneous Formation of Nanoscale Hollow Structures Could Boost Battery Storage
- Artificial Intelligence Makes Blurry Faces Look More Than 60 Times Sharper
- NASA’s IBEX charts 11 years of change at the boundary to interstellar space
- COVID-19 threatens the entire nervous system
- The Rise of the ‘Liberaltarian’
- Stiffer roadways could improve truck fuel efficiency
- Recovery of Sea Otter Populations Yields More Benefits than Costs
- Putting ‘Super’ in Natural Killer Cells
| By recreating phobias and panic attacks, neuroscientists aim to improve anxiety therapies
Posted: 15 Jun 2020 04:01 AM PDT  by Fintan Burke Tracking the brain’s reaction to virtual-reality-simulated threats such as falling rocks and an under-researched fear reduction strategy may provide better ways of treating anxiety disorders and preventing relapses. Hippocrates described them as ‘masses of terrors,’ while French physicians in the 18th century labelled them as ‘vapours’ and ‘melancholia.’ Nowadays we know that panic […] |
| Dedicated high-speed rail dollars kept in the Valley will simply go farther
Posted: 14 Jun 2020 06:01 PM PDT  This June 16th marks five years since construction on California’s statewide high-speed rail program first began. There are now 4,000 laborers doing bullet-train-related building work in the Golden State’s Central Valley at over three dozen sites. That level of commitment notwithstanding, there are those who think that they know what’s best regarding where yet-unspent dedicated […] |
| Spontaneous Formation of Nanoscale Hollow Structures Could Boost Battery Storage
Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:32 AM PDT  An unexpected property of nanometer-scale antimony crystals — the spontaneous formation of hollow structures — could help give the next generation of lithium ion batteries higher energy density without reducing battery lifetime. The reversibly hollowing structures could allow lithium ion batteries to hold more energy and therefore provide more power between charges. Flow of lithium […] |
| Artificial Intelligence Makes Blurry Faces Look More Than 60 Times Sharper
Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:31 AM PDT  Duke University researchers have developed an AI tool that can turn blurry, unrecognizable pictures of people’s faces into eerily convincing computer-generated portraits, in finer detail than ever before. Previous methods can scale an image of a face up to eight times its original resolution. But the Duke team has come up with a way to […] |
| NASA’s IBEX charts 11 years of change at the boundary to interstellar space
Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:29 AM PDT  Far beyond the orbits of the planets are the hazy outlines of the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble in space that we call home. This flexible cosmic bubble stretches and shrinks in response to the sun’s gasps and sighs. Now, for the first time, a team of scientists led by Princeton’s David McComas have gathered an entire solar […] |
| COVID-19 threatens the entire nervous system
Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:27 AM PDT  A new review of neurological symptoms of COVID-19 patients in current scientific literature reveals the disease poses a global threat to the entire nervous system, reports a Northwestern Medicine study published this week in Annals of Neurology. About half of hospitalized patients have neurological manifestations of COVID-19, which include headache, dizziness, decreased alertness, difficulty concentrating, disorders […] |
| The Rise of the ‘Liberaltarian’
Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:27 AM PDT  Tech industry millionaires are moving the Democratic Party to the left on almost every issue except government regulation. Unions beware. Political economists Neil Malhotra and David Broockman have documented a new species of political animal: the liberaltarian. Malhotra, the Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Broockman, a former Stanford […] |
| Stiffer roadways could improve truck fuel efficiency
Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:25 AM PDT  Every time you hear a deep rumble and feel your house shake when a big truck roars by, that’s partly because the weight of heavy vehicles causes a slight deflection in the road surface under them. It’s enough of a dip to make a difference to the trucks’ overall fuel efficiency. Now, a theoretical study […] |
| Recovery of Sea Otter Populations Yields More Benefits than Costs
Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:24 AM PDT  Since their reintroduction to the Pacific coast in the 1970s, the sea otters’ rapid recovery and voracious appetite for tasty shellfish such as sea urchins, clams and crabs has brought them into conflict with coastal communities and fishers, who rely on the same valuable fisheries for food and income. But the long-term benefits of sea […] |
| Putting ‘Super’ in Natural Killer Cells
Posted: 14 Jun 2020 07:23 AM PDT  Using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and deleting a key gene, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have created natural killer cells — a type of immune cell — with measurably stronger activity against a form of leukemia, both in vivo and in vitro. The findings are published in the June 11, 2020 online […] |
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Until next time,
Russ Roberts