A scientific drilling ship has burrowed further into Earth’s mantle than ever before, obtaining new clues about the processes that feed oceanic volcanoes and the possible origins of life

After over a year of record-high global sea temperatures, the equatorial Atlantic is cooling off more quickly than ever recorded, which could impact weather around the world

An annual accounting of CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels and land use change finds no sign emissions will peak this year

Title: Record Heat Requires Exercise Precautions
Category: Health News
Created: 8/26/2010 10:10:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/27/2010 12:00:00 AM

Title: Record High COVID Cases and Deaths Reported in Florida
Category: Health News
Created: 8/26/2021 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/26/2021 12:00:00 AM

Two decades into the era of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), the promise of streamlining clinical care, reducing burden, and improving patient outcomes has yet to be realized. A cross-sectional family physician census conducted by the American Board of Family Medicine in 2022 and 2023 included self-reported physician EHR satisfaction. Of the nearly 10,000 responding family physicians, only one-in-four (26.2%) report being very satisfied and one-in-three (33.8%) were not satisfied. These low levels of satisfaction point to the need for greater transparency in the marketplace and pressure to increase user-centric EHR design.

Introduction:

High-quality primary care can reduce avoidable emergency department visits and emergency hospitalizations. The availability of electronic medical record (EMR) data and capacities for data storage and processing have created opportunities for predictive analytics. This systematic review examines studies which predict emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and mortality using EMR data from primary care.

BackgroundOrlistat is recommended as an adjunct to diet and exercise for weight loss in the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM).AimTo explore associations between patient characteristics and orlistat prescribing, and to determine associations of orlistat with weight loss in T2DM and prediabetes.Design and settingCohort study using anonymised health records from a UK database of general practice.MethodThe UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum database was searched to compile a cohort of patients aged ≥18 years, first diagnosed with T2DM or prediabetes in 2016 or 2017. Once the data had been collated, multivariable logistic regression models were used to determine associations with starting orlistat and stopping it early (<12 weeks of prescriptions) and orlistat’s associations with weight loss in those who had not been prescribed second-line antidiabetic medications.ResultsOut of 100 552 patients with incident T2DM or prediabetes, 655 (0.8%) patients with T2DM and 128 (0.7%) patients with prediabetes were prescribed orlistat. Younger people, females, those in areas of deprivation, current smokers, those coprescribed metformin, and those recorded as having hypertension were statistically significantly more likely to be prescribed orlistat; higher baseline glycated haemoglobin levels were associated with early stopping. In comparison with patients not on orlistat, those who continued using it for ≥12 weeks were more likely to lose ≥5% weight (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] 1.69, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.07 to 2.67) but those who stopped orlistat early were less likely to lose ≥5% weight (AOR 0.56, 95% CI = 0.29 to 1.09).ConclusionOrlistat was significantly associated with weight loss in patients with T2DM and prediabetes when taken for at least 12 weeks; however, it was infrequently prescribed and often taken for <12 weeks. Orlistat may be a useful adjunct to lifestyle modifications for patients with T2DM and prediabetes, but barriers to continued use means it may not be effective for everyone in managing weight loss.

What does 2023's Scottish Health Survey tell us about Scotland's population - from smoking rates to obesity, and alcohol consumption?

Steam's built-in game recording feature has been usable in beta since the summer, but it has now been properly launched for every user, following a client update to Steam yesterday. It's basically another method of capturing funny ragdoll glitches and posting them on the "lol-games-are-dumb" channel of your friend's Discord. Or for posting that flukey knife throw in Call Of Duty to Twitter, as if you really meant to kill the man from across the map all along. Or saving a clip for your personal records, like the footage of that time you yeeted an innocent citizen off the 50-foot wall of a castle town in Dragon's Dogma 2. We all do that, right? Right?

Read more

The Pokemon Company is teaming up with content creators to stage a 24-hour unboxing live stream for its new Scarlet & Violet - Surging Sparks card set as you Gotta Catch 'Em All

Apple has introduced a native call recording feature as part of Apple Intelligence with its release of iOS 18.1. It's easier than ever to document conversations.

Wall Street, crypto investors, and shareholders in Trump Media are all cheering the election results.

You know the drill by now: cloud money good, consumer PC sales not.

We all need to be fully aware who has access to our health data, when they can access it, what it’s being used for and the potential implications.

The post My Health Record: Remain in or opt out? appeared first on Star Observer.

Scientists warn that this year could end 1.5 C hotter than pre-industrial times, surpassing the current record of 1.48 C set just last year. Some experts now fear Donald Trump’s less-than-friendly stance on climate change could make the crisis even worse.

Earthquakes are among the most powerful natural forces on Earth, often causing widespread devastation, triggering tsunamis and altering the landscape of a region. But how strong was the strongest earthquake of all time?

Black Friday is right around the corner and the deals are already coming in hot. You can pick up a four-pack of Apple AirTags for just $70, as an early Black Friday promotion. This is a discount of 30 percent and represents a record low price.

Apple AirTags easily made our list of the best Bluetooth trackers, particularly for regular iPhone users. We love the vast finding network, which really helps when you misplace a tag. Just think of all of those AirTags, iPhones and other Apple devices out there helping to create this network.

Apple AirTags also offer the ability to tap into the ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless protocol. This creates a sort of game out of finding lost items, as long as the object is within 25 feet of the phone. The screen will display directional arrows and a distance meter so you can zero in on the lost item without having to ring the AirTag.

There are some caveats. These trackers only really work with iPhones, so Android users should buy something else. Also, the ringer only goes for seven seconds at a time, which isn’t always enough time to track something down. Finally, there’s no attachment point for connecting to a keychain or a related item. However, there are plenty of good AirTag accessories to solve that problem.

Check out all of the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals here.

Lahore, Pakistan (AFP) Nov 13, 2024
On the streets of Pakistan's second biggest city, smog stings eyes and burns throats. Inside homes, few people can afford air purifiers to limit the damage of toxic particles that seep through doors and windows. Lahore - a city of 14 million people stuffed with factories on the border with India - regularly ranks among the world's most polluted cities, but it has hit record levels this mon

Global temperatures through September point to 2024 besting 2023 as the hottest year on record. How many future years set records depends in part on the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election

The discovery of a new prime number highlights the rising price of mathematical gold

UPDATE 31 OCTOBER 2024: No. 1 no longer. The would-have-been groundbreaking study published in Nature Communications by Amit Goyal et al. claiming the world’s highest-performing high-temperature superconducting wires yet has been retracted by the authors.

The journal’s editorial statement that now accompanies the paper says that after publication, an error in the calculation of the reported performance was identified. All of the study’s authors agreed with the retraction.

The researchers were first alerted to the issue by Evgeny Talantsev at the Mikheev Institute of Metal Physics in Ekaterinburg, Russia, and Jeffery Tallon at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In a 2015 study, the two researchers had suggested upper limits for thin-film superconductors, and Tallon notes follow-up papers showed these limits held for more than 100 known superconductors. “The Goyal paper claimed current densities 2.5 times higher, so it was immediately obvious to us that there was a problem here,” he says.

Upon request, Goyal and his colleagues “very kindly agreed to release their raw data and did so quickly,” Tallon says. He and Talantsev discovered a mistake in the conversion of magnetization units.

“Most people who had been in the game for a long time would be fully conversant with the units conversion because the instruments all deliver magnetic data in [centimeter-gram-second] gaussian units, so they always have to be converted to [the International System of Units],” Tallon says. “It has always been a little tricky, but students are asked to take great care and check their numbers against other reports to see if they agree.”

In a statement, Goyal notes he and his colleagues “intend to continue to push the field forward” by continuing to explore ways to enhance wire performance using nanostructural modifications. —Charles Q. Choi

Original article from 17 August, 2024 follows:

Superconductors have for decades spurred dreams of extraordinary technological breakthroughs, but many practical applications for them have remained out of reach. Now a new study reveals what may be the world’s highest-performing high-temperature superconducting wires yet, ones that carry 50 percent as much current as the previous record-holder. Scientists add this advance was achieved without increased costs or complexity to how superconducting wires are currently made.

Superconductors conduct electricity with zero resistance. Classic superconductors work only at super-cold temperatures below 30 degrees Kelvin. In contrast, high-temperature superconductors can operate at temperatures above 77 K, which means they can be cooled to superconductivity using comparatively inexpensive and less burdensome cryogenics built around liquid nitrogen coolant.

Regular electrical conductors all resist electron flow to some degree, resulting in wasted energy. The fact that superconductors conduct electricity without dissipating energy has long lead to dreams of significantly more efficient power grids. In addition, the way in which rivers of electric currents course through them means superconductors can serve as powerful electromagnets, for applications such as maglev trains, better MRI scanners for medicine, doubling the amount of power generated from wind turbines, and nuclear fusion power plants.

“Today, companies around the world are fabricating kilometer-long, high-temperature superconductor wires,” says Amit Goyal, SUNY Distinguished Professor and SUNY Empire Innovation Professor at the University of Buffalo in New York.

However, many large-scale applications for superconductors may stay fantasies until researchers can find a way to fabricate high-temperature superconducting wires in a more cost-effective manner.

In the new research, scientists have created wires that have set new records for the amount of current they can carry at temperatures ranging from 5 K to 77 K. Moreover, fabrication of the new wires requires processes no more complex or costly than those currently used to make high-temperature superconducting wires.

“The performance we have reported in 0.2-micron-thick wires is similar to wires almost 10 times thicker,” Goyal says.

At 4.2 K, the new wires carried 190 million amps per square centimeter without any externally applied magnetic field. This is some 50 percent better than results reported in 2022 and a full 100 percent better than ones detailed in 2021, Goyal and his colleagues note. At 20 K and under an externally applied magnetic field of 20 tesla—the kind of conditions envisioned for fusion applications—the new wires may carry about 9.3 million amps per square centimeter, roughly 5 times greater than present-day commercial high-temperature superconductor wires, they add.

Another factor key to the success of commercial high-temperature superconductor wires is pinning force—the ability to keep magnetic vortices pinned in place within the superconductors that could otherwise interfere with electron flow. (So in that sense higher pinning force values are better here—more conducive to the range of applications expected for such high-capacity, high-temperature superconductors.) The new wires showed record-setting pinning forces of more than 6.4 trillion newtons at 4.3 K under a 7 tesla magnetic field. This is more than twice as much as results previously reported in 2022.

The new wires are based on rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO). The wires use nanometer-sized columns of insulating, non-superconducting barium zirconate at nanometer-scale spacings within the superconductor that can help pin down magnetic vortices, allowing for higher supercurrents.

The researchers made these gains after a few years spent optimizing deposition processes, Goyal says. “We feel that high-temperature superconductor wire performance can still be significantly improved,” he adds. “We have several paths to get to better performance and will continue to explore these routes.”

Based on these results, high-temperature superconductor wire manufacturers “will hopefully further optimize their deposition conditions to improve the performance of their wires,” Goyal says. “Some companies may be able to do this in a short time.”

The hope is that superconductor companies will be able to significantly improve performance without too many changes to present-day manufacturing processes. “If high-temperature superconductor wire manufacturers can even just double the performance of commercial high-temperature superconductor wires while keeping capital equipment costs the same, it could make a transformative impact to the large-scale applications of superconductors,” Goyal says.

The scientists detailed their findings on 7 August in the journal Nature Communications.

This story was updated on 19 August 2024 to correct Amit Goyal’s title and affiliation.

Technology has revolutionized the way people live their lives. Individuals can use smartphones to access their bank account, shop from almost any store, and connect with friends and family around the globe. In fact, these personal devices have tethered communities together during the coronavirus pandemic, allowing many people to maintain much of their lives remotely.

BAKU — Global carbon dioxide emissions, including those from burning fossil fuels, are set to hit a record high this year, pulling the world further off course from averting more destructive climate extremes, scientists said on Wednesday (Nov 13). The Global Carbon Budget report, published during the UN's COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, said global CO2 emissions are set to total 41.6 billion metric tons in 2024, up from 40.6 billion tons last year. The bulk of these emissions are from burning coal, oil and gas. Those emissions would total 37.4 billion tons in 2024, up by 0.8 per cent in 2023, the report said. The rest are from land use, a category that includes deforestation and forest fires. The report by more than 80 institutions was led by the University of Exeter in UK. "We don't see a sign of fossil fuel emissions peaking in 2024," said lead author Pierre Friedlingstein, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter. Without immediate and steep emissions cuts worldwide, "we will just go straight into the 1.5C target, we'll just pass it and continue," he said.

Apr 12, 2024

The share of Russians who would like to leave Russia for permanent residence in another country has reached a record low, according to the results of a national poll conducted by Russia’s Levada Center on March 21-27, 2024.  Of the countries Russians were eager to relocate to, the U.S. topped the list (11%), followed by Germany (8%) and Italy and Turkey (6% each). China ranked 10-11 along with Canada.That seven out of the top 11 countries Russians would like to relocate to are members of the collective West, with 46% interested in moving to these countries, also shows the limits of the Kremlin’s efforts to instill anti-Western sentiments in the Russian public.

Thin line between success and failure

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An annual accounting of CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels and land use change finds no sign emissions will peak this year

On the campaign trail the president-elect pledged to make America "the crypto capital of the planet".

BBC coverage of the US election, which my colleague Jon Williams trailed here a couple of days ago, brought the highest traffic to BBC News Online so far this year, and set a new record for us on mobile.

On 7 November, there were 16.4m unique browsers across the website and mobile, 8.1m of which came from the UK. That makes it the highest traffic day of 2012 so far and rivals our two biggest previous days during the August riots and the March Tsunami, in 2011. During the England riots, on 9 August 2011 there were there were 18.2m unique browsers, 10.9m of which came from the UK.

The peak traffic point yesterday was 07:00-08:00 GMT, which saw higher usage than lunchtime, maybe as people checked the results as soon as they woke up. UK usage figures yesterday were 50% higher than the average for 2012, and ex-UK usage was 75% higher than average.

We spent a lot of time working out how to provide the best possible service on mobile, so it's encouraging to see that nearly 5m mobile devices visited BBC News Online yesterday, a record figure for us on mobile, accounting for about 30% of all users yesterday (on an average weekday, we'd expect mobiles to account for about 24% of users).

Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC News website.

Ellie Simmonds becomes the first person to break a world record at London's Aquatics Centre in the 200m individual medley.

Joanna Rowsell, Dani King and Laura Trott follow their male counterparts in defeating Australia for world team pursuit gold.

Karnataka Health Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao revealed that Bengaluru has recorded 4,427 medlinkdengue/medlink cases this year. He also announced the launch of a monitoring app for these cases.

IWMI and CIMMYT warn of changing climate patterns in South Africa.

The post Farmers urged to prepare for El Niño to trigger record-high temperatures first appeared on International Water Management Institute (IWMI).

In Europe in 2022, around 1,300 locally acquired human cases of medlinkWest Nile virus/medlink infection have been recorded (!--ref1--). They

The Ministry of Agriculture in Japan confirmed a highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak at a poultry farm in the eastern prefecture of Ibaraki. This

Alibaba Group, the e-commerce giant behind the 24-hour Singles' Day shopping blitz, has raked up a record $17. 6 billion in the Singles Day online sales, creating a new record in global retail sales for any single day.