Story Tips from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, May 2015
2015-05-04
(Press-News.org) BIOMETRICS - 3-D face analysis ...
Law enforcement and national security agencies could benefit from an Oak Ridge National Laboratory technology able to determine a person's age, race and gender with high fidelity. "Normally, computers estimate age by looking for wrinkles or estimate gender by looking at specific two-dimensional distances or 2-D texture," said Ryan Tokola of ORNL's Imaging, Signals and Machine Learning Group. ORNL's system allows users to employ the same set of features to estimate age with an error of less than five years, gender with 89 percent accuracy and race with 99 percent accuracy. This is the first work to accomplish this based solely on the 3-D geometry of a face. Tokola will present this work at the International Conference on Biometrics in Thailand May 19-22. [Contact: Ron Walli, (865) 576-0226; wallira@ornl.gov]
HYDRO - Power and peril ...
Fish and the dams that provide about 7 percent of the nation's electricity may have a more symbiotic relationship because of work being performed by a team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Mark Bevelhimer and Brenda Pracheil. While researchers have performed several studies over the last few decades, this one focused on pulling together disparate data to gain a better understanding of turbine-associated fish injuries and mortality. "We found that while most of our understanding of fish passage through turbines comes from young salmon, they actually represent a small fraction of the fish that move through turbines on a national scale," Pracheil said. The study also provides insight into why a prized walleye may have a mortality rate as high as 40 percent for some turbine types while a lunker largemouth may face just a 14 percent chance of meeting an untimely demise. [Contact: Ron Walli, (865) 576-0226; wallira@ornl.gov]
MATERIALS - Imaging atoms for better batteries ...
Lithium-manganese-rich cathodes are twice as energy dense as other commercially available cathodes but degrade quickly during use. Using electron microscopy and theoretical modeling, Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers identified substitution patterns in the material's atomic arrangement. These location-dependent changes rely on nickel swapping with lithium, and can raise or lower energy barriers for lithium-ion diffusion. The findings (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/nn505740v) provide a basis for altering this cost-effective cathode material to optimize battery technology. "It is all about understanding the movement of atoms in the material," said ORNL researcher Hemant Dixit. "The combination of theory and imaging techniques provides unique tools so that we can understand this behavior and develop the next generation of robust and reliable battery materials." - written by Ashanti Washington [Contact: Dawn Levy, (865) 576-6448; levyd@ornl.gov]
INFORMATION:
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2015-05-04
(New York -- May 4, 2015) -- Patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) have a four-fold increase in their risk of developing intermediate-stage age-related macular degeneration (AMD) compared to people of the same age who are not infected with HIV, according to results from the Longitudinal Study of the Ocular Complications of AIDS (LSOCA) presented today at the 2015 ARVO Annual Meeting in Denver, CO. The results of the study, led by the National Eye Institute-funded Studies of the Ocular Complications of AIDS Research Group, were also published online in ...
2015-05-04
Scientists, conservationists and governments could have a new weapon in their struggle to gauge -- and halt -- the devastation of the wildlife trade on populations of prized animals: the very markets where the animals are bought and sold.
Species that are disappearing as a result of the pet trade can be identified by changes in their market prices and trade volumes, a study led by researchers at Princeton University found. The researchers studied open-air pet markets on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and found that bird species that increased in price but decreased ...
2015-05-04
Bad news, fans of rational political discourse: A study by an MIT researcher shows that attempts to debunk political rumors may only reinforce their strength.
"Rumors are sticky," says Adam Berinsky, a professor of political science at MIT, and author of a paper detailing the study. "Corrections are difficult, and in some cases can even make the problem worse."
More specifically, Berinsky found in an experiment concerning the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that rebuttals of political rumors about the supposed existence of "death panels" sometimes increased belief in the ...
2015-05-04
ANN ARBOR--The main job of pollen is to help seed the next generation of trees and plants, but a new study from the University of Michigan and Texas A&M shows that the grains might also seed clouds.
The unexpected findings demonstrate that these wind-carried capsules of genetic material might have an effect on the planet's climate. And they highlight a new link between plants and the atmosphere.
Pollen has been largely ignored by atmospheric scientists who study aerosols--particles suspended in the air that scatter light and heat and play a role in cloud formation.
"The ...
2015-05-04
Since 2014 dulaglutide has been approved alone or in combination with other drugs for the treatment of adults with type 2 diabetes. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether this new drug offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapies.
IQWiG found a hint of minor added benefit for the combination with short-acting insulin with or without metformin. In contrast, an added benefit of dulaglutide versus the respective appropriate comparator therapy is not proven for the combination with ...
2015-05-04
Studies have long associated low-income areas with poor oral health. But dental researchers at Case Western Reserve University and University of Washington sensed that other factors related to income may be at work -- in particular, education level.
So they recently investigated how a parent or other caregiver's education level and dental habits affect children's dental health.
With data from 423 low-income African-American kindergarteners and their caregivers from a CWRU dental school study in 2007, researchers tested the hypothesis that a caregiver's education ...
2015-05-04
MAYWOOD, IL - Patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can, in rare cases, experience bleeding on the brain that causes a type of stroke called intracerebral hemorrhage.
A Loyola University Medical Center case study demonstrates that a virus called varicella-zoster can cause inflammation of blood vessels in the brain. This inflammation, known as cerebral vasculitis, can cause both hemorrhagic and non-hemorrhagic strokes.
The study by Daniel Vela Duarte MD, David Pasquale, MD, and senior author Murray Flaster, MD, PhD, was presented during a meeting of ...
2015-05-04
Madrid, Spain - 3 May 2015: A new test has been developed to predict sudden cardiac death in hemodialysis patients in whom such forecasts were previously impossible. The novel method was presented at ICNC 12 by Dr Akiyoshi Hashimoto, a cardiologist at Sapporo Medical University in Japan. The test uses a combination of nuclear medicine, C-reactive protein and electrocardiogram (ECG).
ICNC is organised by the Nuclear Cardiology and Cardiac CT section of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI), a registered branch of the European Society of Cardiology ...
2015-05-04
HIV-1 replication requires the coordinated movement of the virus's components toward the plasma membrane of an immune cell, where the virions are assembled and ultimately released. A study in The Journal of Cell Biology reveals how a Rab protein that controls intracellular trafficking supports HIV-1 assembly by promoting high levels of an important membrane lipid.
New HIV-1 particles assemble at specialized sites in the plasma membrane that are enriched in PIP2, a phospholipid component of the membrane that recruits a viral protein called Pr55Gag (Gag) that directs HIV-1 ...
2015-05-04
What do you think is the biggest cause of death for firefighters on duty? Well if your first thought was burns or smoke inhalation you'd be wrong! According to research published in the June edition of Vascular Medicine "since 1977, sudden cardiac death has accounted for the largest share of on-duty deaths among firefighters - surpassing burns, trauma, asphyxiation and smoke inhalation."
Although the number of deaths amongst firefighters is declining, cardiac death still counts for 42% of deaths in on-duty firefighters over the past 5 years. This is an astonishingly ...
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[Press-News.org] Story Tips from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, May 2015
