Following Healthy Lifestyle may Reduce Risk of Long COVID

Woman running in a park

Women who followed most aspects of a healthy lifestyle, including healthy body weight, not smoking, regular exercise, adequate sleep, high quality diet, and moderate alcohol consumption, had about half the risk of long COVID compared with women without any healthy lifestyle factors, according to a study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“With ongoing waves of COVID-19, long COVID has created a serious public health burden. Our findings raise the possibility that adopting more healthy behaviors may reduce the risk of developing long COVID,” said Andrea Roberts, senior research scientist in the Department of Environmental Health and senior author of the study.

The study appears online February 6, 2023, in JAMA Internal Medicine.

It’s estimated that 8-23 million ...

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Deep Learning for Quantum Sensing

Scheme of the implemented deep learning protocol.
Scheme of the implemented deep learning protocol. A limited number of quantum probe states are fed into the sensor treated as a black box. A grid of measurement results is collected to train a neural network, which learns the posterior probability distribution associated with the single-measurement Bayesian update. Such distribution is used to define the reward of the RL agent that sets the control phases on the black-box device. Image credit: Cimini et al., doi 10.1117/1.AP.5.1.016005

Quantum sensing represents one of the most promising applications of quantum technologies, with the aim of using quantum resources to improve measurement sensitivity...

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A Star is Born: Study reveals Complex Chemistry inside ‘Stellar Nurseries’

Graphic showing how hexagonally-shaped ortho-benzyne molecules can combine with methyl radicals to form a series of larger organic molecules, each containing a ring of five carbon atoms. (Credit: Henry Cardwell)

An international team of researchers has uncovered what might be a critical step in the chemical evolution of molecules in cosmic “stellar nurseries.” In these vast clouds of cold gas and dust in space, trillions of molecules swirl together over millions of years. The collapse of these interstellar clouds eventually gives rise to young stars and planets.

Like human bodies, stellar nurseries contain a lot of organic molecules, which are made up mostly of carbon and hydrogen atoms. The group’s results, published Feb...

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Nanoscale Ferroelectric Semiconductor could Power AI and Post-Moore’s Law Computing on a Phone

Nanoscale ferroelectric semiconductor could power AI and post-Moore's Law computing on a phone
a) Cross-sectional HAADF-STEM image of the 5 nm thick ScAlN grown on Mo template. (b) and (c) Nano-beam electron diffraction patterns captured from the Mo (b) and ScAlN (c) regions labeled in (a). (d) Magnified HAADF-STEM image showing the thickness of the ScAlN layer. (e) Schematic of the epitaxial relationship between wz-ScAlN and bcc-Mo. (f) EDS element maps for the ITO/ScAlN/Mo capacitor. Credit: Applied Physics Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1063/5.0136265

Ferroelectric semiconductors are contenders for bridging mainstream computing with next generation architectures, and now a team at the University of Michigan has made them just five nanometers thick—a span of just 50 or so atoms.

This paves the way for integrating ferroelectric technologies with conventional components used in ...

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