A research team led by DGIST Professor Jong-Sung Yu’s team at the Department of Energy Science and Engineering has successfully developed a new catalyst synthesis method that can efficiently decompose water into oxygen and hydrogen using solar light. It is expected that this method will facilitate hydrogen mass production due to higher efficiency than the existing photocatalyst method.

Regular physical activity is associated with better lung function among current smokers in European cities, regardless of air pollution levels. This is the main conclusion of a new study comprising over 4,500 people from nine European countries, led by the Barcelona Institute of Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by ”la Caixa” Foundation, and conducted as part of  the "Ageing Lungs in European Cohorts" (ALEC) project*, coordinated by Imperial College London.

A Washington State University researcher has completed the most thorough analysis yet of The Great Drought — the most devastating known drought of the past 800 years — and how it led to the Global Famine, an unprecedented disaster that took 50 million lives.

Nice people may be at greater risk of bankruptcy and other financial hardships compared with their less agreeable peers, not because they are more cooperative, but because they don’t value money as much, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

Modern meteorological data collection gives us an unprecedented view into the real-time growth, track, and death of tropical cyclones. Recently, we watched as Hurricane Florence started as a tropical wave off the west coast of Africa, grew into a storm with Category 4 winds, and then made landfall on September 14 near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. At that point, with sustained winds down to 90 miles-per-hour, Florence was classified as merely a Category 1 storm. But after moving rapidly across the Atlantic, Hurricane Florence had slowed to a crawl before hitting the Carolina coast, turning the storm into a rain bomb that dropped more precipitation — 36 inches in one town — than all previous U.S. tropical cyclones save one, last year’s Hurricane Harvey. Fears of coastal flooding were rapidly replaced by the reality of prolonged, inland flooding.

Researchers from the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine of the University of Zurich and the Adelaide Medical School have analyzed data from 178 countries and found a link between family size and cancer risk. Worldwide the incidence of various types of cancer increases with smaller family size. “And this relationship is independent of income, levels of urbanization and age,” explains Professor Maciej Henneberg, academic guest at UZH and senior author of the study.  

The study, by Dr Indrani Roy at the University of Exeter, suggests that the natural phenomena such as solar eleven-year cycles and strong volcanic explosions play important roles in recent climate change which has been ‘underestimated’.

Nearly 15 percent of all chewing gum varieties sold promise to provide health-enhancing supplements to users, so Penn State researchers studied whether two vitamin-supplemented products were effective at delivering vitamins to the body. Their results validate the concept of gum as an effective delivery system for at least some vitamins.

Why share food with non-family members when there is no immediate gain? An international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, conducted observations of natural food sharing behavior of the chimpanzees of the Taï National Park, Ivory Coast. They found that chimpanzees who possess large, desirable food items, like meat, honey or large fruit share food with their friends, and that neither high dominance status nor harassment by beggars influenced possessors’ decisions to share.

Just like humans, young songbirds are thought to learn their vocalizations by listening to adults — a process that has been studied in the laboratory but never experimentally in the wild, until now.