Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that defects on an atomically thin semiconductor can produce light-emitting quantum dots. The quantum dots serve as a source of single photons and could be useful for the integration of quantum photonics with solid-state electronics - a combination known as integrated photonics. Scientists have become interested in integrated solid-state devices for quantum information processing uses. Quantum dots in atomically thin semiconductors could not only provide a framework to explore the fundamental physics of how they interact, ...

Using brain tumor samples collected from children in the United States and Europe, an international team of scientists found that the drug panobinostat and similar gene regulating drugs may be effective at treating diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas (DIPG), an aggressive and lethal form of pediatric cancer. The study, published in Nature Medicine, was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and more than 25 nonprofit foundations devoted to finding cures for childhood brain cancer. "Our results provide a glimmer of hope for treating ...

Huntington's disease is caused by a mutation in the Huntington's disease gene, but it has long been a mystery why some people with the exact same mutation get the disease more severely and earlier than others. A closer look at the DNA around the Huntington's disease (HD) gene offers researchers a new understanding of how the gene is controlled and how this affects the disease. These findings set the stage for new treatments to delay or prevent the onset of this devastating brain disease. Huntington's disease is a genetic disorder that gets passed down in families, but ...

Malmö, Sweden, May 4, 2015 -- A team of researchers from Sweden and the United States have examined the potential role of the family environment and neighborhood factors on mental health outcomes in a new study published in Journal of Psychiatric Research. The study includes highly detailed data on over 500,000 children in Sweden and covers a timespan of more than a decade. A total of 542,195 children were tracked for 11 years for incident internalizing (anxiety and mood) and externalizing (ADHD and conduct) disorders. During the course of the study, 4.8 percent ...

Considering geological time scales, the occurrence of biogenic shale gas in Sweden´s crust is relatively young. An international team of geoscientists (led by Hans-Martin Schulz, German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ) found that biogenic methane in the Alum Shale in South Sweden formed due to deglaciation around 12.000 years ago. Moreover, the formation processes were due to complex interactions between neotectonic activity and the occurrence of a deep biosphere. Applying a new hydrogeochemical modelling approach, the specific methane generation process was unravelled ...

Hyalella azteca are invertebrates that are widely used for sediment and water toxicity studies. Investigators have found that H. azteca collected from sites influenced by agricultural/urban runoff are as much as 2-times less sensitive to pyrethroid insecticides than lab-grown H. azteca. In contrast, the insecticide sensitivities of H. azteca collected from undeveloped sites beyond the influences of agricultural/urban runoff were similar to those of lab-grown populations. The results suggest that standard compliance testing of ambient waters, stormwater, and agricultural ...

In a 4-year study of 178 pre- and 329 postmenopausal women, investigators found that women's sexual functioning was moderately stable over time. The main predictors of changes in sexual functioning and satisfaction were desire and arousal, highlighting their role as the main "players" in women's sexual health. The study also found that despite the potentially impairing effects of menopause and menopausal transition, sexual satisfaction and functioning in postmenopausal women can be improved and sexual problems can show spontaneous remission. "From a clinical standpoint, ...

In contrast to the general population, low body mass index has been associated with premature death in patients with rheumatoid arthritis -- a situation known as the "obesity paradox." A new Arthritis & Rheumatology study shows that weight loss, as opposed to low body mass index per se, is a strong predictor of mortality in these patients. The study also found that the greater the rate of weight loss, the higher the risk of early death. The findings suggest that there isn't a biologically protective role of obesity, and they indicate that patients with rheumatoid arthritis ...

Unique person-specific cues--such as the presence of a specific friend or hearing a specific song--appear to have a robust effect on craving addictive substances, a recent study shows. The study also found that person-specific cues may have a longer effect on craving than more general substance-specific cues, such as the presence of bottles, syringes, or lighters. The study included 132 outpatients beginning treatment for alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, or opiate addiction. Using mobile technologies, participants were questioned 4 times per day relative to craving, substance ...

Young people are just as likely to try electronic cigarettes as smoking, according to a new report from the Propel Centre for Population Health Impact at the University of Waterloo. The findings, published today in Tobacco Use in Canada: Patterns and Trends, reveal that approximately 20 per cent of youth between the ages of 15 and 19 experiment with vaping, the same number who try cigarettes. "E-cigarettes have become increasingly popular among Canadians," said David Hammond, lead author on the report and a professor in the School of Public Health and Health Systems ...

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 ...

(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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Even non-professionals may someday be able to create high-quality video panoramas using multiple cameras with the help of an algorithm developed by a team of Disney researchers. Their method smooths out the blurring, ghosting and other distortions that routinely occur when video feeds from unstructured camera arrays are combined to create a single panoramic video. The algorithm corrects for the apparent difference in position of an object caused by different camera angles - known as parallax - and image warping that occurs because of slight timing differences between ...

Madrid, Spain - 4 May 2015: Patients with rheumatoid arthritis are at increased risk of a surprise heart attack, according to new research presented today at ICNC 12 by Dr Adriana Puente, a cardiologist in the National Medical Centre "20 de Noviembre" ISSSTE in Mexico City, Mexico. Risk was increased even when patients had no symptoms and was independent of traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as smoking and diabetes. Dr Puente said: "Our study suggests that one quarter of patients with rheumatoid arthritis and no symptoms of heart disease could have a heart attack ...

New research from the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) study shows that exposure to outdoor air pollution during the first year of life increases the risk of developing allergies to food, mould, pets and pests. The study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, showed that the sensitivity to allergens was associated with exposure to traffic-related air pollution during infancy. "With the increasing rates of allergies amongst children in Canada and elsewhere, we were interested in determining if air pollution from traffic might ...

Two ocean hot spots have been found to be the potential drivers of the hottest summers on record for the Central US in 1934 and 1936. The research may also help modern forecasters predict particularly hot summers over the central United States many months out. The unusually hot summers of 1934/36 broke heat records that still stand today. They were part of the devastating dust bowl decade in the US when massive dust storms travelled as far as New York, Boston and Atlanta and silt covered the decks of ships 450km off the east coast. Research by Dr Markus Donat from the ...