Today, ACS is launching its first open access multidisciplinary research journal. Aspiring to communicate the most novel and impactful science developments, ACS Central Science will feature peer-reviewed articles reporting on timely original research across chemistry and its allied sciences. Free to readers and authors alike, original research content will be accompanied by additional editorial features. These additional editorial features include news stories contributed by the Society's award-winning science journalists, invited topical reviews (called Outlooks) from ...

Young children who received the 4CMenB vaccine as infants to protect against serogroup B meningococcal disease had waning immunity by age 5, even after receiving a booster at age 3 ½, according to new research in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) Serogroup B meningococcal disease is the leading cause of meningitis and blood infections in developed countries. Infants and young children under the age of 5 years are especially at risk, and there is a second peak of cases in the late teenage years. The multicomponent serogroup B meningococcal (4CMenB) ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio--Researchers at The Ohio State University have discovered how to control heat with a magnetic field. In the March 23 issue of the journal Nature Materials, they describe how a magnetic field roughly the size of a medical MRI reduced the amount of heat flowing through a semiconductor by 12 percent. The study is the first ever to prove that acoustic phonons--the elemental particles that transmit both heat and sound--have magnetic properties. "This adds a new dimension to our understanding of acoustic waves," said Joseph Heremans, Ohio Eminent Scholar ...

New observations made with APEX and other telescopes reveal that the star that European astronomers saw appear in the sky in 1670 was not a nova, but a much rarer, violent breed of stellar collision. It was spectacular enough to be easily seen with the naked eye during its first outburst, but the traces it left were so faint that very careful analysis using submillimetre telescopes was needed before the mystery could finally be unravelled more than 340 years later. The results appear online in the journal Nature on 23 March 2015. Some of seventeenth century's greatest ...

New Haven, Conn. -- A Yale-led team has identified a promising new combination immunotherapy to enhance the body's ability to fight chronic viral infections and possibly cancer. Their study was published March 23 in Nature Medicine. Viruses that cause chronic infection, such as HIV and Hepatitis B and C, are able to persist in the body despite attack from T cells, the body's main line of defense against pathogens. They persist because, over time, our T cells weaken to the point of "T-cell exhaustion." To circumvent this process, the research team -- led by Susan Kaech, ...

Society should set a high carbon tax now to try and prevent climate change reaching a point of no return according to a new study. The research, carried out by the Universities of Exeter, Zurich, Stanford and Chicago and published today in the journal Nature Climate Change shows that the prospect of an uncertain future tipping point should greatly increase the amount we are willing to pay now to limit climate change. Depending on the economic impacts of an abrupt change in climate and how quickly this is felt, the cost of carbon emitted now increases by 50 - 200%. Setting ...

The gradual but accelerating melting of the Greenland ice-sheet, caused by man-made global warming, is a possible major contributor to the slowdown. Further weakening could impact marine ecosystems and sea level as well as weather systems in the US and Europe. "It is conspicuous that one specific area in the North Atlantic has been cooling in the past hundred years while the rest of the world heats up," says Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, lead author of the study to be published in Nature Climate Change. Previous research had already ...

Scientists have for the first time used DNA sequencing to trace the fatal spread of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis between patients in the UK. Genetic analysis of the TB bacteria revealed how a 44-year-old man who died of the disease in 2012 caught the drug-resistant infection from a healthcare worker who had worked in South Africa, when both were admitted on the same medical ward four years earlier. TB is spread by inhaling tiny airborne droplets from an infected person. The bacteria can survive in the lungs for long periods without causing symptoms - known as latent ...

A frog in Ecuador's western Andean cloud forest changes skin texture in minutes, appearing to mimic the texture it sits on. Originally discovered by a Case Western Reserve University PhD student and her husband, a projects manager at Cleveland Metroparks' Natural Resources Division, the amphibian is believed to be the first known to have this shape-shifting capability. But the new species, called Pristimantis mutabilis, or mutable rainfrog, has company. Colleagues working with the couple recently found that a known relative of the frog shares the same texture-changing ...

Verbal abuse, aggressive behaviour, criminal damage to objects--such incidents are to be expected within certain professions. Hardly anyone had included doctors in this thinking, however, although they too are exposed to such problems. Florian Vorderwülbecke and colleagues in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2015; 112: 159-65) investigate, for the first time, how often acts of violence and aggression against primary care physicians are committed in Germany. They surveyed 1500 doctors, asking which assaults they had been ...

ATHENS, GA -- More efficient irrigation management has become a primary focus in sustainable container plant production as growers look for ways to improve resource use and mitigate negative environmental impacts of fertilizers and pesticides that are often found in nursery runoff. Among the new technologies for increasing irrigation efficiency is the use of soil moisture sensors for automated irrigation. The practice allows nursery personnel to schedule plant irrigation when substrate volumetric water content drops below a certain threshold, thus improving irrigation efficiency ...

Boston, MA - Schools collaborating with a professionally trained chef to improve the taste of healthy meals significantly increased students' fruit and vegetable consumption, according to a new study led by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The study also found that using "choice architecture" (environmental nudges to promote healthy choices) in school cafeterias improved students' selection of fruits and vegetables, but did not increase consumption over the long-term. The study is the first to examine the long-term impact of choice architecture ...

In a clinical trial that explored the effectiveness of exercise training and vitamin D supplementation for reducing falls in older women, neither intervention affected the overall rate of falls, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. Falls are the leading cause of unintentional injuries and fractures in older adults. However, reviews of clinical trials on the role of vitamin D in reducing falls and fractures in community-dwelling older adults and in improving physical functioning have been inconclusive, according to the study background. Kirsti ...

Patients with Parkinson disease who experienced pain before undergoing subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN DBS) had that pain improved or eliminated at eight years after surgery, although the majority of patients developed new pain, mostly musculoskeletal, according to an article published online by JAMA Neurology. Pain is a common nonmotor symptom in patients with Parkinson disease and it negatively impacts quality of life. Beom S. Jeon, M.D., Ph.D., of the Seoul National University Hospital, Korea, and coauthors evaluated the long-term effect of STN DBS ...

Fruit and vegetable selections in school meals increased after students had extended exposure to school food made more tasty with the help of a professional chef and after modifications were made to school cafeterias, including signage and more prominent placement of fruits and vegetables, but it was only chef-enhanced meals that also increased consumption, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics. More than 30 million students get school meals daily and many of them rely on school foods for up to half of their daily calories. Therefore, school-based ...

ROCHESTER, Minn - A Mayo Clinic study has identified a familial association in spontaneous coronary artery dissection, a type of heart attack that most commonly affects younger women, suggesting a genetic predisposition to the condition, researchers say. The results are published in the March 23 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. Researchers used the Mayo Clinic SCAD Registry of 412 enrollees to identify five familial cases of SCAD, comprised of three pairs of first-degree relatives (mother-daughter, identical twin sisters, sisters) and two pairs of second-degree relatives ...

AURORA, Colo. (March 23, 2015) - Discontinuing statin use in patients with late-stage cancer and other terminal illnesses may help improve patients' quality of life without causing other adverse health effects, according to a new study by led by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and Duke University and funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR). The finding, to be published in JAMA Internal Medicine on March 23, indicates that care for patients with advanced illness can be improved by discontinuing some therapies that are ...

DETROIT - Innovative angles of attack in research that focus on how the human brain protects and repairs itself will help develop treatments for one of the most common, costly, deadly and scientifically frustrating medical conditions worldwide: traumatic brain injury. In an extensive opinion piece recently published online on Expert Opinion on Investigational Drugs, Henry Ford Hospital researcher Ye Xiong, M.D., Ph.D., makes the case for pioneering work underway in Detroit and elsewhere seeking to understand and repair brain function at the molecular level. "To date, ...

A blood thinning agent is helping researchers at the University of East Anglia understand more about the body's natural barriers to HIV. New research published today reveals how the protein langerin, which is present in genital mucous and acts as a natural HIV barrier during the first stages of contamination, interacts with the drug heparin. The research team has been able to identify two different mechanisms for that interaction - involving different sites or 'faces' at the surface of the langerin protein. Lead researcher Dr Jesus Angulo from UEA's school of Pharmacy ...

Lexington, MA (March 23, 2015) - Research results published in the Journal of Neurotrauma and conducted by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) as part of a collaboration with Concert Pharmaceuticals, Inc. showed that a novel deuterium-containing sigma-1 agonist invented at Concert, called C-10068, demonstrated anti-seizure and anti-inflammatory effects in a preclinical model of traumatic brain injury (TBI). C-10068, a novel metabolically-stabilized morphinan derivative, is based on a compound first identified at WRAIR in the 1990s as possessing anticonvulsant ...

Many smartphone users know that free apps sometimes share private information with third parties, but few, if any, are aware of how frequently this occurs. An experiment at Carnegie Mellon University shows that when people learn exactly how many times these apps share that information they rapidly act to limit further sharing. In one phase of a study that evaluated the benefits of app permission managers - software that gives people control over what sensitive information their apps can access - 23 smartphone users received a daily message, or "privacy nudge," telling ...

March 23, 2015 - Patients with carpal tunnel syndrome are more than twice as likely to have migraine headaches, reports a study in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery--Global Open®, the official open-access medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). The association also runs in the other direction, with migraine patients having higher odds of carpal tunnel syndrome, according to research by Dr. Huay-Zong Law and colleagues of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. The findings add a new piece of evidence in the ongoing debate ...

This news release is available in French. Raising the age of eligibility for the Old Age Security pension and the Guaranteed Income Supplement will increase inequalities between older people. "This change will force retired people into greater dependence on their private savings to support them as they get older. Research shows that greater privatisation of the retirement income system results in growing inequalities among the older population. When you raise the pension eligibility age, you are also opening the door to rising disparities" according to demographer Yves ...

Implementing a well-established business approach allowed physicians to shave hours off pediatric patient discharges without affecting readmission rates, according to researchers at Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital. This approach could help hospitals around the country open up existing beds to more patients, and reduce emergency department crowding and lost referrals without investing significant capital. Most hospitals have a fixed number of staffed beds available for patients. When hospitals are at or exceed capacity, admitted patients may be kept in the ED ...

An extensive study of global habitat fragmentation - the division of habitats into smaller and more isolated patches - points to major trouble for a number of the world's ecosystems and the plants and animals living in them. The study shows that 70 percent of existing forest lands are within a half-mile of the forest edge, where encroaching urban, suburban or agricultural influences can cause any number of harmful effects - like the losses of plants and animals. The study also tracks seven major experiments on five continents that examine habitat fragmentation ...