Only 16% of all counties in the U.S. offered pregnant people the opportunity to attempt labor after a previous cesarean section between 2016 and 2021, according to University of Massachusetts Amherst research that provides the most recent national look at this trend.

 

When a research team from Eurac Research entered the warehouses of the National Archaeological Museum in La Paz a couple of years ago, they were stunned to find more than 50 mummified individuals and over 500 pre-Columbian skulls, preserved with good intentions but in conditions that put them at risk of contamination by fungi and bacteria. This is a situation that often occurs in countries that cannot devote large sums of money to the conservation of cultural heritage, but also in countries such as Italy, where the heritage is so vast that it is difficult to take care of everything. The problem of protecting organic cultural heritage also arises when it needs to be transported or studied. Environmental conditions can have a significant impact on the most sensitive items, such as mummified human remains, textiles, paper, and wood. A research team coordinated by Eurac Research has been experimenting with conservation techniques and materials for years and has now developed an innovative, versatile, and inexpensive system called the Conservation Soft Box. It was recently presented in an article in the Journal of Cultural Heritage and at the 11th World Congress of Mummy Studies in Cuzco, Peru.

Different countries have different cultures, and social scientists have developed theories about which values are most important in differentiating the world’s cultures. Abhishek Sheetal and colleagues used the power of machine learning to identify the crucial distinguishing characteristics of the world’s national cultures in a theory-blind manner, extracting the top 60 most predictive survey questions

A new review study by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development shows that nearly one in three people choose to avoid medical information about serious health conditions if they fear they may be affected. One of the main reasons driving this behavior is a lack of trust in the medical system. The study has been published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine. 

In a major step toward realizing memory systems that works as flexibly as the random-access memory (RAM) in today’s classical computers, researchers at ICFO have developed an array of ten individually controllable quantum memories that can store multiple qubits simultaneously and recall them when needed.

This solid-state system, reported in Physical Review X, is based on a previous configuration that held 250 available “slots” to potentially store a photon —the current world record for a solid‑state device with on-demand retrieval. The system brings us closer to the quantum equivalent of a RAM, and could serve as a building block for generating large-scale entangled states —a key resource for quantum computing— or dramatically boost the efficiency of entanglement distribution across long distances —a foundational task for future quantum communication networks.