Browse Articles

Redesigning an Experiment to Determine the Coefficient of Friction

Hu et al. | Jun 27, 2016

Redesigning an Experiment to Determine the Coefficient of Friction

In a common high school experiment to measure friction coefficients, a weighted mass attached to a spring scale is dragged across a surface at a constant velocity. While the constant velocity is necessary for an accurate measurement, it can be difficult to maintain and this can lead to large errors. Here, the authors designed a new experiment to measure friction coefficients in the classroom using only static force and show that their method has a lower standard deviation than the traditional experiment.

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Mining social media posts: An alternative approach to understanding home health care workers’ experiences

Tang et al. | Jun 15, 2026

Mining social media posts: An alternative approach to understanding home health care workers’ experiences
Image credit: Markus Winkler

This study developed an effective method for extracting valuable information from social media data and employed computer-assisted human coding alongside the AI-powered tool to analyze social media posts. The findings provide a deep understanding of the major challenges that home health care workers are experiencing and offer important implications regarding how to improve home healthcare workers' well-being, and provide suggestions on optimizing the home health care service experience.

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Effect of hypervitaminosis A in regenerating planaria: A potential model for teratogenicity testing

Bennet et al. | Dec 12, 2022

Effect of hypervitaminosis A in regenerating planaria: A potential model for teratogenicity testing

This unique research study evaluated the potential use of the flatworm, brown planaria (Dugesia tigrine), as an alternative model for teratogenicity testing. In this study, we exposed amputated planaria to varying concentrations of a known teratogen, vitamin A (retinol), for approximately 2 weeks, and evaluated multiple parameters including the formation of blastema and eyes. The results from this study demonstrated that high concentrations of retinol caused defects in head and eye formation in regenerating planaria, with similarities to vitamin A related teratogenicity findings in mammals. Based on these results, regenerating brown planaria are a promising alternative model for teratogenicity testing, which can potentially be paradigm shifting as it can reduce cost, time, and pregnant animal use in research.

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Developing a Method to Remove Inorganic Arsenic from Rice with Natural Substances

Mukai et al. | Oct 27, 2020

Developing a Method to Remove Inorganic Arsenic from Rice with Natural Substances

In this study, the authors tested different approaches for removing arsenic from rice. Due to higher arsenic levels in water, some areas grow rice with higher levels as well. This is a health hazard and so developing methods to remove arsenic from the rice will be helpful to many. Using a rapid arsenic kit, the authors found that activated charcoal was the most effective at removing arsenic from rice.

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Implications of various pure tones on Phaseolus vulgaris and Gaultheria shallon

Judit et al. | Jul 13, 2026

Implications of various pure tones on <i>Phaseolus vulgaris</i> and <i>Gaultheria shallon<i>

This study investigated how different sound frequencies (0, 1,000, 5,000, and 15,000 Hz) affect the growth of Phaseolus vulgaris and the transpiration rates of Gaultheria shallon. Although some differences in plant growth were observed, the authors found no consistent evidence that sound frequency enhanced overall growth or transpiration, highlighting the need for further research.

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Evaluating need for adversarial training data given algorithmic defense methods against adversarial attacks

Yian et al. | Jul 05, 2026

Evaluating need for adversarial training data given algorithmic defense methods against adversarial attacks

The purpose of this study was to determine the necessity of previous non-algorithmic attacks (Adversarial Training) in light of algorithmic defense methods (Gradient Masking and Defensive Distillation) against FGSM attacks. We found a significant increase in image classification accuracy from defense methods with the non-algorithmic defense method compared to ones without. By analyzing the significance with a McNemar test, we determined that the inclusion of non-algorithmic defense methods is still necessary in light of new algorithmic defense methods.

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