Researchers from the UAB and the University of Nottingham, in an article published today in Physical Review Letters, have fixed the limits of thermometry, i.e., they have established the smallest possible fluctuation in temperature which can be measured. The researchers have studied the sensitivity of thermometers created with a handful of atoms, small enough to be capable of showing typical quantum-style behaviours. The researchers characterised these types of probes in detail, devices which could provide an estimation of the temperature with a never before seen precision. ...

June 5, 2015 - Young infants who can "resettle" themselves after waking up are more likely to sleep for prolonged periods at night, according to a video study in the June Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, the official journal of the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer. "Infants are capable of resettling themselves back to sleep by three months of age," according to the study by Ian St James-Roberts and colleagues of the University of London. They add, "Both autonomous resettling and prolonged ...

Nanofibers -- polymer filaments only a couple of hundred nanometers in diameter -- have a huge range of potential applications, from solar cells to water filtration to fuel cells. But so far, their high cost of manufacture has relegated them to just a few niche industries. In the latest issue of the journal Nanotechnology, MIT researchers describe a new technique for producing nanofibers that increases the rate of production fourfold while reducing energy consumption by more than 90 percent, holding out the prospect of cheap, efficient nanofiber production. "We have ...

One mystery of birds' flight is solved! The elegance of birds' flight, their seemingly effortless aerial turns and the softness of their landing, have been envied by many people. From countless observations, it has been known that the birds use a small group of feathers, called "the alula", a thumb-like structure that is present at the bend of the wing, in slow and steep flight such as landing. Why do they use it? How the tiny feathers can help them land softly? A recent article published in Scientific Reports says that the secret is a small vortex of air that is formed ...

Researchers from Uppsala University, together with colleagues at University College Dublin, have studied the dynamics of active swarms using computer simulations and experiments on unicellular algae. The team not only found full analogy of the active motion in a field to magnetic hysteresis but also managed to quantify the controllability of the swarm and identify the signatures of collective behavior of the active agents. Active motion of living organisms and artificial self-propelling particles has been an area of intense research at the interface of biology, chemistry ...

Dublin, June 4th 2015 - Biochemists from Trinity College Dublin have devised a new technique that will make the difficult but critical job of blueprinting certain proteins considerably faster, cheaper and easier. The breakthrough will make a big splash in the field of drug discovery and development, where precise protein structure blueprints can help researchers understand how individual proteins work. Critically, these blueprints can show weaknesses that allow drug developers to draw up specific battle plans in the fight against diseases and infections. Professor ...

Eye contact plays a crucial role when people initiate interaction with other people. If people look each other in the eye, they automatically send a signal that their attention is focused on the other person. If the other person happens to look back, the two will be in eye contact, and a channel for interaction is opened. Eye contact is thus a powerful social signal, which is known to increase our physiological arousal. Previous research has suggested that eye contact triggers patterns of brain activity associated with approach motivation, whereas seeing another person ...

Extremely poor vision can be caused by strabismus in early childhood or by a displaced optical axis. Amblyopia is caused not by organic damage to the eyes but by the brain incorrectly fitting together the images the eyes provide. As a result, the ability to see an object in sharp focus is severely limited. This occurs in more than one in 20 of the German population, as Heike M. Elflein et al. show in a recent original article in Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2015; 112(19): 338-44). The authors' study analyzed the visual acuity of over 3200 individuals ...

As a result of their work, teachers suffer psychosomatic disorders such as exhaustion, fatigue, and headaches more frequently than other occupational groups. This has been shown by Klaus Scheuch et al. in a recent review article in Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2015; 112(20): 347-56), in which they analyze the health of teachers and the frequency of their illnesses. In the study, teachers had healthier cardiovascular systems than the general population: they were more physically active (approximately 75% of teachers versus 66% of the general ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Alaitz Aizpurua, a lecturer at the UPV/EHU, maintains that "the highly widespread belief that memory deteriorates as one approaches old age is not completely true. Various pieces of neuro-psychological research and other studies show that cognitive loss starts at the age of 20 but that we hardly notice it because we have sufficient capacity to handle the needs of everyday life.This loss is more perceptible between 45 and 49 and, in general, after the age of 75, approximately." The deterioration does not tend to be either uniform ...

A new study published in the June 15th Oceanography journal finds that effective fisheries reform strategies are more than a pipe dream: they exist and they work. In fact, rights-based fisheries management can change the lives of small-scale fishermen and coastal communities around the world. "Solutions for recovering and sustaining the bounty of the ocean: combining fishery reforms, rights-based management and marine reserves," just published online in Oceanography shows that combining marine reserves with spatial rights-based fisheries management can provide synergistic ...

Powerful people respond quickly to unfair treatment when they are the victims, but they are less likely to notice injustice when they benefit or when others are victimized, according to new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. In four experiments, participants who were primed to think of powerful situations perceived unfair treatment more quickly when it affected them and were more likely to take action to avoid disadvantageous situations than powerless people. The study findings didn't differ for men or women. Most of the participants ...

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have discovered that bats living in a city are less likely to move from tree to tree in brightly lit areas, according to research published online today (5th June 2015) in the journal Global Change Biology. To maintain high biodiversity in cities, wildlife must be able to move between patches of habitat, which are often separated by paved surfaces, buildings and roads. The bats studied in this experiment emerge in the evening from their roosts, often within residential housing areas, to feed on small insects in gardens, streams ...

A major new Commission on women and health has found that women are contributing around $3 trillion to global health care, but nearly half of this (2.35% of global GDP) is unpaid and unrecognised. Published in The Lancet, the Commission offers one of the most exhaustive analyses to date of the evidence surrounding the complex relationships between women and health, and demonstrates that women's distinctive contribution to society is under-recognised and undervalued--economically, socially, politically, and culturally. The report underlines that women are important ...

Crystalline materials have atoms that are neatly lined up in a repeating pattern. When they break, that failure tends to start at a defect, or a place where the pattern is disrupted. But how do defect-free materials break? Until recently, the question was purely theoretical; making a defect-free material was impossible. Now that nanotechnological advances have made such materials a reality, however, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Germany's Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems have shown how these defects first form on the road to failure. In ...

In 1913 in Southern California, two 241-mile-long electric lines began carrying power from hydroelectric dams in the Sierra Nevada to customers in Los Angeles--a massive feat of infrastructure. In 1923, power company Southern California Edison upgraded the line to carry 220,000 volts, among the highest voltage lines in the world at the time. Then the problems started. Power interruptions caused by short circuits cropped up every few days, inconveniencing consumers and threatening to damage expensive equipment. In a new paper in the journal Environmental Humanities, ...

At its annual assembly in Geneva last week, the World Health Organization approved a radical and far-reaching plan to slow the rapid, extensive spread of antibiotic resistance around the world. The plan hopes to curb the rise caused by an unchecked use of antibiotics and lack of new antibiotics on the market. New Tel Aviv University research published in PNAS introduces a promising new tool: a two-pronged system to combat this dangerous situation. It nukes antibiotic resistance in selected bacteria, and renders other bacteria more sensitive to antibiotics. The research, ...

La Jolla, Calif., June 4 -- In a scientific discovery that has significant implications for preventing HIV infections, researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) have identified a protein that could improve the body's immune response to HIV vaccines and prevent transmission of the virus. The study shows how a protein called polyglutamine-binding protein 1 (PQBP1) acts as a front-line sensor and is critical to initiating an immune response to HIV. When the PQBP1 encounters the virus, it starts a program that triggers an overall protective ...

ANN ARBOR--African-American women are equally, if not more, likely to experience infertility than their white counterparts, but they often cope with this traumatic issue in silence and isolation, according to a new University of Michigan study. African-American women also more often feel that infertility hinders their sense of self and gender identity. The U-M study may be among the first known to focus exclusively on African-American women and infertility. Most research has been conducted on affluent white couples seeking advanced medical interventions. "Infertile ...

ATLANTA--The ability to delay gratification in chimpanzees is linked to how specific structures of the brain are connected and communicate with each other, according to researchers at Georgia State University and Kennesaw State University. Their findings were published June 3 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. This study provides the first evidence in primates, including humans, of an association between delay of gratification performance and white matter connectivity between the caudate and the dorsal prefrontal cortex in the right hemisphere, ...

A tougher federal standard for ozone pollution, under consideration to improve public health, would ramp up the importance of scientific measurements and models, according to a new commentary published in the June 5 edition of Science by researchers at NOAA and its cooperative institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. The commentary, led by Owen Cooper of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory, looks at how a new, stricter ozone standard would pose challenges for air quality managers at state ...

Modern mountain climbers typically carry tanks of oxygen to help them reach the summit. It's the combination of physical exertion and lack of oxygen at high altitudes that creates one of the biggest challenges for mountaineers. University of Washington researchers and collaborators have found that the same principle will apply to marine species under global warming. The warmer water temperatures will speed up the animals' metabolic need for oxygen, as also happens during exercise, but the warmer water will hold less of the oxygen needed to fuel their bodies, similar to ...

If you want to live, you need to breathe and muster enough energy to move, find nourishment and reproduce. This basic tenet is just as valid for us human beings as it is for the animals inhabiting our oceans. Unfortunately, most marine animals will find it harder to satisfy these criteria, which are vital to their survival, in the future. That was the key message of a new study recently published in the journal Science, in which American and German biologists defined the first universal principle on the combined effects of ocean warming and oxygen loss on the productivity ...

From a single drop of blood, researchers can now simultaneously test for more than 1,000 different strains of viruses that currently or have previously infected a person. Using a new method known as VirScan, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School tested for evidence of past viral infections, detecting on average 10 viral species per person. The new work sheds light on the interplay between a person's immunity and the human virome -- the vast array of viruses that can infect humans - with implications both for the clinic and for the ...

PHILADELPHIA - Around-the-clock rhythms guide nearly all physiological processes in animals and plants. Each cell in the body contains special proteins that act on one another in interlocking feedback loops to generate near-24 hour oscillations called circadian rhythms. These dictate behaviors controlled by the brain, such as sleeping and eating, as well as metabolic, hormonal, and other rhythms that are intrinsic to the organs of the body. For example, when you eat may have affects on rhythms controlling fat or sugar metabolism, illustrating how circadian and metabolic ...