news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

On August 6 (Tuesday), the main contents of the well-known foreign scientific website are as follows:

Nature website (www.nature.com)

Doctors take men's pain more seriously than women's

Research from Israel's Hebrew University shows differences in how doctors treat pain in men and women - women wait longer in hospitals and are less likely to receive medication than men.

The findings, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlight how our perception of other people's pain is influenced by unconscious biases.

"Women are often viewed as exaggerated or hysterical when they complain about pain, while men are viewed as stoic," said study co-author Alex Gileles-Hillel, a physician at the Hebrew University.

The researchers investigated this bias in emergency departments of hospitals in Israel and the U.S. They analyzed the records of more than 20,000 patients who were admitted for "nonspecific" pain, which is pain with no clear underlying cause, such as headaches.

The analysis showed that women were 10% less likely than men to have a pain score obtained when they first arrived at the hospital. After the initial assessment, women waited an average of 30 minutes longer than men to see a doctor and were less likely to receive pain medication. This trend was consistent regardless of the gender of the nurse or doctor.

The researchers also tested 100 medical staff on their perception of patient pain. In a simulated scenario of a patient with severe back pain, the participants were given the patient's historical clinical information, with all other information being the same except for gender. The results showed that pain scores for male patients were generally higher than those for female patients.

Science Daily website (www.sciencedaily.com)

1. New methods combine traditional Internet withquantumInternet integration

Researchers at the University of Hannover in Germany have developed a new transmitter-receiver concept for transmitting entanglement over optical fibers.Photon, this is the first time that entangled photons and laser pulses of the same color have been sent simultaneously in the same optical fiber.

This technological breakthrough could facilitate the development of the next generation of telecommunications technology - the quantum internet, which ensures the security of critical infrastructure by using eavesdropping-proof encryption methods that even future quantum computers cannot decrypt.

"To realize a quantum internet, we need to transmit entangled photons through a fiber-optic network while also continuing to use optical fibers for conventional data transmission," said the researchers. "This research is an important step toward combining the conventional internet with the quantum internet."

In experiments, the researchers showed that the entangled state of photons can remain intact even when they are sent together with a laser pulse, a capability that could potentially allow the integration of the traditional and quantum internets.

The research results have been published in the journal Science Advances.

2. New model proposedEarthA new theory of how continents formed

Billions of years ago, the formation of Earth's continents created the conditions for life to flourish, although scientists disagree on how continents formed.

A recent paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago offers new insights into the discussion, pointing out holes in the dominant theory of continental formation.

They used computer models to study the formation of magma, the molten material that cools to form rocks and minerals, which is seen as a key clue to the origin of continents.

They did this by looking for magmas that matched the compositional signatures of rare zircon deposits from the Archean eon, 2.5 billion to 4 billion years ago, when scientists think the continents formed.

Last year, scientists from China and Australia published a paper arguing that Archean zircons were formed through the subduction of tectonic plates, a process that still occurs today, causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that reshape continental coasts.

But researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have found that subduction is not necessary to form Archean zircons. They found that these minerals could have formed at high pressures and temperatures, conditions associated with the melting of Earth's primordial crust.

The discovery increases uncertainty about when plate tectonics began on Earth.

Scitech Daily website (https://scitechdaily.com)

1. The paradox of cognition: Why excessive thinking makes people miserable

If someone says that thinking causes pain, that statement is probably correct, as in many cases mental effort appears to be associated with unpleasant feelings, research from Radboud University in the Netherlands found.

The research was published in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

The researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 170 studies published between 2019 and 2020 to examine how people typically experience mental work. They aimed to examine whether mental work is associated with unpleasant feelings and whether this association depends on the task or population involved.

The studies involved a variety of participants from 29 countries and 358 different cognitive tasks. In all the studies analyzed, participants reported the amount of effort they exerted and the degree of unpleasant emotions they experienced.

Across all populations and tasks, the more mental effort participants exerted, the greater the level of unpleasantness they experienced. "Our results suggest that mental effort is perceived as unpleasant across a wide range of populations and tasks," the researchers said.

One interesting finding is that while the association between mental work and unpleasant emotions was still significant, it seemed less pronounced in studies conducted in Asian countries than in those conducted in Europe or North America. This supports the common view that the degree to which mental work is aversive may depend on people’s learning history. For example, high school students in Asian countries tend to spend more time on schoolwork than their counterparts in Europe or North America, and therefore may have learned to tolerate higher levels of mental work early in life.

2. Faster-than-light travel: new simulation explorationWarp SpeedEnginegravitationaleffect

Warp drive, a common device in science fiction, in principle could allow a spacecraft to travel faster than the speed of light. However, actually building such a drive faces many problems, such as requiring an exotic substance with negative energy. Other issues include the difficulty for people on board to actually control and deactivate the bubble.

A study conducted by Queen Mary University of the UK, the University of Potsdam in Germany, the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany and Cardiff University in the UK, while not claiming to have solved the problem of warp drive, explored the theoretical consequences of a "containment failure" in a warp drive through numerical simulations. The first author of the study said: "Although warp drives are purely theoretical, they have a clear description in Einstein's general relativity, so numerical simulations allow us to explore their effects on space-time in the form of gravitational waves."

The results show that a collapsing warp drive would produce a noticeable burst of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time that are typically picked up by gravitational wave detectors designed to detect mergers of black holes and neutron stars. Unlike the signal from merging objects, this signal is a short, high-frequency burst, so it cannot be picked up by current detectors. However, future high-frequency instruments might, and although no such instruments have been funded yet, the technology to build them exists. This raises the possibility that these signals could be used to search for evidence of warp drive technology, even if we can't build a warp drive ourselves.

Warp drives may still be a long way off, but this research has advanced our understanding of strange spacetime and gravitational waves. The researchers plan to study how the signal changes under different warp drive models.