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    New Apps designed to Reduce Depression and Anxiety as easily as checking your phone

    January 8, 2017, Categories  Biology/Biotechnology, Technology/Electronics, Health/Medical

    Health care apps

    Speedy mini-apps are designed to address depression and anxiety

    A novel suite of 13 speedy mini-apps called IntelliCare resulted in participants reporting significantly less depression and anxiety by using the apps on their smartphones up to 4 times a day, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. The apps offer exercises to de-stress, reduce self-criticism and worrying, methods to help your life feel more meaningful, mantras to highlight your strengths, strategies for a good night’s sleep and more. Most apps designed for mental health typically offer a single strategy to feel better or provide too many features that make them difficult to navigate.

    But participants robustly used the IntelliCare interactive apps an average of 195 times for 8 weeks of the study...

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    Bio-Inspired Suction Cups withstand more than Splashes

    January 8, 2017, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics, Biology/Biotechnology

    1. The northern clingfish (Gobiesox maeandricus) lives in Pacific Northwest waters, where it seeks out prey in the crashing waves of the intertidal Credit: Petra Ditsche 2. Credit: Christina Linkem

    1. The northern clingfish (Gobiesox maeandricus) lives in Pacific Northwest waters, where it seeks out prey in the crashing waves of the intertidal Credit: Petra Ditsche 2. Credit: Christina Linkem

    To create prototype suction cups that are capable of glomming onto rough, wet surfaces and staying there, Ditsche has found inspiration in clingfish. On the rocky shores of Washington State, clingfish maneuver over rocks to prey on limpets – dime-sized, snail-like invertebrates. A limpet is covered by a shell shield that hides soft organs, which are fair game if the predatory clingfish can pop it off the rock. Yet the clingfish faces its own foe: heavy forces from incoming waves that threaten to slosh it off the rocks as it searches for food...

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    Hubble Provides Interstellar Road Map for Voyagers’ Galactic Trek

    January 8, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Voyager's view of solar system (artist's concept). In this illustration, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has a bird's-eye view of the solar system. The circles represent the orbits of the major outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 visited the planets Jupiter and Saturn. The spacecraft is now 13 billion miles from Earth, making it the farthest and fastest-moving human-made object ever built. In fact, Voyager 1 is now zooming through interstellar space, the region between the stars that is filled with gas, dust, and material recycled from dying stars. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is observing the material along Voyager's path through space. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

    Voyager’s view of solar system (artist’s concept). In this illustration, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has a bird’s-eye view of the solar system. The circles represent the orbits of the major outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 visited the planets Jupiter and Saturn. The spacecraft is now 13 billion miles from Earth, making it the farthest and fastest-moving human-made object ever built. In fact, Voyager 1 is now zooming through interstellar space, the region between the stars that is filled with gas, dust, and material recycled from dying stars. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is observing the material along Voyager’s path through space. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

    NASA’s 2 Voyager spacecraft are hurtling through unexplored territory on...

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    Hubble Captures ‘Shadow Play’ caused by possible Planet

    January 8, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    These images, taken a year apart by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, reveal a shadow moving counterclockwise around a gas-and-dust disk encircling the young star TW Hydrae. The two images at the top, taken by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, show an uneven brightness across the disk. Through enhanced image processing (images at bottom), the darkening becomes even more apparent. These enhanced images allowed astronomers to determine the reason for the changes in brightness. The dimmer areas of the disk, at top left, are caused by a shadow spreading across the outer disk. The dotted lines approximate the shadow's coverage. The long arrows show how far the shadow has moved in a year (from 2015-2016), which is roughly 20 degrees. Based on Hubble archival data, astronomers determined that the shadow completes a rotation around the central star every 16 years. They know the feature is a shadow because dust and gas in the disk do not orbit the star nearly that quickly. So, the feature must not be part of the physical disk. The shadow may be caused by the gravitational effect of an unseen planet orbiting close to the star. The planet pulls up material from the main disk, creating a warped inner disk. The twisted disk blocks light from the star and casts a shadow onto the disk's outer region. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Debes (STScI)

    These images, taken a year apart by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, reveal a shadow moving counterclockwise around a gas-and-dust disk encircling the young star TW Hydrae. The two images at the top, taken by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, show an uneven brightness across the disk. Through enhanced image processing (images at bottom), the darkening becomes even more apparent. These enhanced images allowed astronomers to determine the reason for the changes in brightness. The dimmer areas of the disk, at top left, are caused by a shadow spreading across the outer disk. The dotted lines approximate the shadow’s coverage. The long arrows show how far the shadow has moved in a year (from 2015-2016), which is roughly 20 degrees...

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