BOSTON, Aug. 17, 2015 --Native North Americans have long adorned themselves and their homes with fragrant sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata), a native plant used in traditional medicine, to repel biting insects, and mosquitoes in particular. Now, researchers report that they have identified the compounds in sweetgrass that keep these bugs at bay. The team will describe their approach in one of more than 9,000 presentations at the 250th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society, taking place here through Thursday. Mosquitoes ...

BOSTON, Aug. 17, 2015 -- Hand-written letters and printed photos seem quaint in today's digital age. But there's one thing that traditional media have over hard drives: longevity. To address this modern shortcoming, scientists are turning to DNA to save unprecedented amounts of digital data for posterity. One team has demonstrated that DNA they encapsulated can preserve information for at least 2,000 years, and they're now working on a filing system to make it easier to navigate. The researchers present their work today at the 250th National Meeting & Exposition of the ...

BOSTON, Aug. 17, 2015 -- A blood clot is a dangerous health situation with the potential to trigger heart attacks, strokes and other medical emergencies. To treat a blood clot, doctors need to find its exact location. But current clinical techniques can only look at one part of the body at a time, slowing treatment and increasing the risk for complications. Now, researchers are reporting a method, tested in rats, that may someday allow health care providers to quickly scan the entire body for a blood clot. The team will describe their approach in one of more than 9,000 ...

BOSTON, Aug.17, 2015 -- In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers have determined that natural sunlight triggers the release of smog-forming nitrogen oxide compounds from the grime that typically coats buildings, statues and other outdoor surfaces in urban areas. The finding confirms previous laboratory work using simulated sunlight and upends the long-held notion that nitrates in urban grime are "locked" in place. The scientists will present their findings based on field studies conducted in Leipzig, Germany, and Toronto, Canada, at the 250th National Meeting & Exposition ...

New Internet-based technology may aid criminal justice agencies through tools such as better criminal databases, remotely conducted criminal trials and electronic monitoring of parolees in the community, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Top criminal justice priorities for new Internet tools include developing a common criminal history record that can be shared across agencies, developing real-time language translation tools and improved video displays for law enforcement officers to adapt to changing needs, according to the analysis. "The criminal justice ...

During the deer's breeding season, or rut, the researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and ETH Zürich, played male fallow deer (bucks) in Petworth Park in West Sussex, a variety of different calls that had been digitally manipulated to change the pitch and length and analysed their responses. The bucks treated lower pitched and longer calls as more threatening, by looking towards source of the call sooner and for longer, than others. Fallow bucks attracted the attention of the researchers because of their intriguing calling behaviour. Males are silent ...

BOSTON, Aug. 16, 2015 -- Sunlight can be brutal. It wears down even the strongest structures, including rooftops and naval ships, and it heats up metal slides and bleachers until they're too hot to use. To fend off damage and heat from the sun's harsh rays, scientists have developed a new, environmentally friendly paint out of glass that bounces sunlight off metal surfaces -- keeping them cool and durable. The researchers present their work today at the 250th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS, the world's largest scientific ...

Findings from Nationwide Children's Hospital physicians demonstrate that headaches increase in fall in children, a trend that may be due to back-to-school changes in stress, routines and sleep. Although it may be difficult for parents to decipher a real headache from a child just wanting to hold onto summer a little longer and avoid going back to school, there is a variety of other common triggers including poor hydration and prolonged screen time that could contribute to a child's discomfort. "When we saw many of our families and patients in clinic, the families would ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Medicare Part D provides help to beneficiaries struggling with the cost of prescriptions drugs, but the plan's coverage gap hits some populations harder than others, particularly African-Americans age 65 and older. Reaching, or even approaching, the gap affects access to medication and influences whether those medications are taken as prescribed. "Don't assume that the existence of Part D means that people aren't having a difficult time affording their meds," says Louanne Bakk, an assistant professor in the University at Buffalo School of Social Work. "There ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Aug. 14, 2015 - Software may appear to operate without bias because it strictly uses computer code to reach conclusions. That's why many companies use algorithms to help weed out job applicants when hiring for a new position. But a team of computer scientists from the University of Utah, University of Arizona and Haverford College in Pennsylvania have discovered a way to find out if an algorithm used for hiring decisions, loan approvals and comparably weighty tasks could be biased like a human being. The researchers, led by Suresh Venkatasubramanian, ...

Discovered in 1982, Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is a disease-causing bacterium that survives in our stomachs despite the harsh acidic conditions. It is estimated that one in two people have got it, though most won't ever experience any problems. Even so, it is considered one of the most common bacterial infections worldwide and a leading cause of dyspepsia, peptic ulceration and gastric cancer. Through unique evolutionary adaptations, H. pylori is able to evade the antiseptic effect of our stomach acid by hiding within the thick acid-resistant layer of mucus that ...

Washington, DC - August 14, 2015 - Tungsten is exceptionally rare in biological systems. Thus, it came as a huge surprise to Michael Adams, PhD., and his collaborators when they discovered it in what appeared to be a novel enzyme in the hot spring-inhabiting bacterium, Caldicellulosiruptor bescii. The researchers hypothesized that this new tungstoenzyme plays a key role in C. bescii's primary metabolism, and its ability to convert plant biomass to simple fermentable sugars. This discovery could ultimately lead to commercially viable conversion of cellulosic (woody) biomass ...

What hap­pens when a drought in Florida estu­aries causes a rise in the salt levels in water? Fewer wild oys­ters appear on restau­rant menus, for starters. New research from North­eastern Uni­ver­sity marine and envi­ron­mental sci­ences pro­fessor David Kimbro and grad­uate stu­dent Hanna Gar­land, pub­lished in PLOS ONE, links the dete­ri­o­ra­tion of oyster reefs in Florida's Matanzas River Estuary (MRE) to a pop­u­la­tion out­break of car­niv­o­rous conchs and ...

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Aug. 14, 2015 - Another barrier to commercially viable biofuels from sources other than corn has fallen with the engineering of a microbe that improves isobutanol yields by a factor of 10. The finding of the Department of Energy's BioEnergy Science Center, published in the journal Metabolic Engineering, builds on results from 2011 in which researchers reported on the first genetically engineered microbe to produce isobutanol directly from cellulose. Isobutanol is attractive because its energy density and octane values are much closer to gasoline and ...

Americans favor diplomatic and economic strategies over military involvement in foreign policy, according to a new national survey conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Americans also question whether or not the United States should be the world's chief problem solver, even as a myriad of issues across the globe are identified as important for the next president to address. The nationwide poll of 1,167 adults collected data from June 25 to July 7 using AmeriSpeak, the probability-based panel of NORC at the University of Chicago. Interviews ...

Early-stage Non-small-cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) is asymptomatic and difficult to detect since no blood test for NSCLC is currently available. In a new study, Chen-Yu Zhang and Chunni Zhang's group at Nanjing Advanced Institute for Life Sciences, Nanjing University identified a panel of five serum microRNAs (miRNAs) as the potential biomarker for NSCLC diagnosis. The study is published this week in the journal EBioMedicine. MiRNAs are a family of small, single-stranded non-coding RNAs that are critical regulators of numerous diseases, and their expression patterns have ...

Researchers at Columbia University's National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) and the University of Washington have published a new study focused on the public health implications of climate change. The article explores climate change impacts on human health in the U.S. Gulf Coast and has implications for this and other coastal regions that are particularly vulnerable to climate change. The study appears in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (August 11, 2015). The Open Access article is available here: http://bit.ly/1gAVqVe This ...

Rockville, Md. -- A new study may have unlocked understanding of a mysterious part of the brain -- with implications for neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's. The results, published in Translational Vision Science & Technology (TVST), open up new areas of research in the pursuit of neuroprotective therapies. Glaucoma is a neurodegenerative disease where patients lose seemingly random patches of vision in each eye. This random pattern of vision loss is in stark contrast to loss from a brain tumor or stroke, which causes both eyes to develop blind spots in the ...

The liver is unique among organs in its ability to regenerate after being damaged. Exactly how it repairs itself remained a mystery until recently, when researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health discovered a type of cell in mice essential to the process. The researchers also found similar cells in humans. When healthy liver cells are depleted by long-term exposure to toxic chemicals, the newly discovered cells, known as hybrid hepatocytes, generate new tissue more efficiently than normal liver cells. Importantly, they divide and grow without causing cancer, ...

Physicists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich studied the interaction of light with tiny glass particles. A team of physicists and chemists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU) and the Laboratory of Attosecond Physics (LAP) at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ), from the Institute of Physics of the University of Rostock, and from the Freie Universität Berlin studied the interaction between strong laser pulses and glass nanoparticles, which consist of multiple millions of atoms. Depending on how many atoms were ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Using a specially designed computational tool as a lure, scientists have netted the genomic sequences of almost 12,500 previously uncharacterized viruses from public databases. The finding doubles the number of recognized virus genera - a biological classification one step up from species - and increases the number of sequenced virus genomes available for study almost tenfold. The research group studies viruses that infect microbes, and specifically bacteria and archaea, single-cell microorganisms similar to bacteria in size, but with a different evolutionary ...

The once hurricane Hilda weakened to a remnant low pressure area early on Friday, August 14, 2015. Images generated from NOAA's GOES-West satellite were made into an animation that showed the "last Hoorah" of Hilda as it weakened into a low pressure area on August 14, south of the Big Island of Hawaii. NOAA's GOES-West satellite sits in a fixed position over the eastern Pacific Ocean and monitors weather in the western U.S. and the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Visible and infrared imagery from August 9 through August 14 were compiled and made into an animation at ...

August 14, 2015- Medicare patients in rural areas have lower rates of follow-up care after leaving the hospital--which may place them at higher risk of emergency department (ED) visits and repeat hospitalizations, according to a study in the September issue of Medical Care. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer. "This study provides evidence of lower rates of post-discharge follow-up care, and higher ED use for Medicare beneficiaries in rural settings," comments lead author Matthew Toth, PhD, MSW. The research was conducted while Dr. Toth was at University of North ...

Wieze/Belgium, Zurich/Switzerland - March 12, 2015 - The Barry Callebaut Group, VIB (Flanders Institute for Biotechnology) and KU Leuven (University of Leuven), with the support of IWT (Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology-Flanders), managed to improve the process of cocoa fermentation. Building on techniques inspired by Belgian brewers, the researchers developed a special yeast that unlocks the flavor and aroma precursors in cocoa beans and enriches the chocolate's full flavor development. With the new yeast Barry Callebaut will now be able to customize the ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Vaccination rates for a critical booster shot tripled after clinics began using electronic prompts alerting them of patients needing the Tdap vaccine that protects against tetanus, diptheria, and whooping cough, according to a new study from the University of Michigan Health System. The electronic prompt-and-reminder system resulted in 76 percent of 31,195 patients ages 19-64 and 85 percent of 3,278 patients aged 11 to 18 being up-to-date on their immunization. That compares to 59 percent of similarly aged adults up-to date on the vaccine during the ...