ResearchPod

No longer just for gamers, VR is also becoming progressively more widespread, with uses in medicine to give an interactive visualisation of the human body, to provide employee training with reduced risk of accidents and even beginning to find its place in reimagining education.

A team from Singapore Management University has been researching how virtual reality, or VR, can be used in teaching undergraduate university students’ key concepts in computing. 

Read the original article:  https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7586/

Psychological science has been trying to understand what exactly causes mental illness, such as depression, anxiety, or eating disorders. Different theories assume that symptoms arise from past experiences in interaction with biological risk factors, and use this as guidance for treatment.

A new trend says that we should move away from finding the underlying cause and rather explain disorders by its interacting symptoms. But is this indeed the way to go?

This is the question that Inga Marie Freund, Arnoud Arntz, Renée Visser, and Merel Kindt at the Amsterdam Emotional Memory Lab located at the University of Amsterdam, have been puzzling about. Together they are critically assessing the role of emotional memory in mental health conditions.

Read their original article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2022.104154

In Richard Feynman's words, turbulence is ‘the most important unsolved problem of classical physics’ with  seemingly too many mathematical descriptions – each valid, more or less, under a series of restrictive conditions.

The research of Professor Fabio Gori and Dr Andrea Boghi from the University of Rome Tor Vergata  into turbulence in solutions is revealing new insights about molecular diffusion rates and correlation rules, with impacts ranging from plastic production to solar power – and even our understanding of the movement of energy from the core of the earth itself.

Read their original research at: https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4002743

Quantum computing is coming close to reality, and its applications seem almost boundless. However, the bounds of those applications and of the very atoms involved are real, with research bridging quantum energy, uncertainty, and newly discovered limits of just how fast a quantum computer can get.

Dr Gal Ness discusses his research into quantum speed limits opens up new understandings of the cutting edge of physics.

Read the original research: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abj9119

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Proteins are important biomolecules, fulfilling tasks in every cell of your body and with a central role in health and disease.

Dr. Harald Weinstabl and Dr. Will Farnaby lead collaboration at Boehringer Ingelheim and the University of Dundee  working on PROTACs, a new class of molecules with the potential to  selectively target and destroy disease-causing proteins.

Drs. Weinstabl and Farnaby's interdisciplinary research team has achieved significant tumor growth inhibition in mice, and this molecule is freely available to other researchers. 

Read their original research: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-33430-6

Voice-based marketing is becoming increasingly popular on social media and video sites - Even in this very podcast, your player may drop an advert in for you to listen too.

How successful are voice-overs at increasing sales, though? And for a product or charity still raising funds, is it possible to increase their appeal through narration alone?

Researchers from Singapore Management University, Cornell University and INSEAD  have been investigating how narrator voices can influence customers watching crowdfunder videos and better persuade them to invest. Using real-world datasets and controlled experiments they have demonstrated that it is possible to significantly improve the effectiveness of video campaigns by employing certain techniques.

Read their original research :  https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/6980

Technology has become increasingly responsive to human behaviour, with AI tools and machine learning in high demand in modern society. The unpredictability and vagueness of human perception, however, is incredibly hard to capture, and there remains a certain gap in communication between biological and technological systems.

Moreno Colombo and colleagues at the Human-IST Institute in Fribourg, Switzerland, in conjunction with the FMsquare Foundation, have investigated the concept of 'computing with words' by way of handling imprecision in the interaction between humans and machines, a branch of 'fuzzy logic' that has wide and varied applications. 

Read the original research: https://www.springer.com/series/11223 

Finding out why some collaborations are more successful than others is complex, and includes factors of culture, gender, and attitudes to conflict and creativity.

Associate Professor Roy Chua of Singapore Management University and Assistant Professor Mengzi Jin of Peking University have been investigating the way that men and women interact with people from other cultures when they face creative challenges.

Read the original research: https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2016.1319

Sudden unexpected death in infancy, or SUDI, is the leading category of death after the first month of life, and it usually happens when babies are sleeping. Modification of unsafe sleep environments therefore provides a focus for possible intervention.

One such intervention in Australia and New Zealand, the Pēpi-Pod® Program, is literally saving lives. Professor Jeanine Young of the School at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. Young is a registered nurse, midwife, and neonatal nurse who has provided nursing and midwifery care for parents who have lost their children.

Read more about their work in Research Features

Read the original research : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wombi.2019.06.022

Treatment for an enlarged prostate depends on the severity of  symptoms, with various treatments available. In rare cases, however, surgery is needed to reduce the size of an enlarged prostate by cutting away sections of the gland, known as a ‘Transurethral Resection of the Prostate’.

A team of researchers at the Cedar Healthcare Technology Research Centre in Wales, UK, present updates on a treatment known as the PLASMA system, an innovative approach which differs to traditional forms of treatment and reduces hospital stay for patients, thereby effectively cutting treatment time and costs. 

Read the original article: NICE.org