WASHINGTON, D.C., September 23, 2014 -- For millions of people in the United States living with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, measuring the daily rise and fall of blood glucose (sugar) is a way of life. Our body's energy is primarily governed by glucose in the blood, and blood sugar itself is exquisitely controlled by a complicated set of network interactions involving cells, tissues, organs and hormones that have evolved to keep the glucose on a relatively even keel, pumping it up when it falls too low or knocking it down when it goes too high. This natural dynamical balance ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., September 23, 2014—Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and Northwestern University have demonstrated a new method to improve the reliability and performance of transistors and circuits based on carbon nanotubes (CNT), a semiconductor material that has long been considered by scientists as one of the most promising successors to silicon for smaller, faster and cheaper electronic devices. The result appears in a new paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing. In the paper, researchers examined the effect ...

A new Swedish study shows that adolescents who suffer from sleep disturbance or habitual short sleep duration are less likely to succeed academically compared to those who enjoy a good night's sleep. The results have recently been published in the journal Sleep Medicine. In a new study involving more than 20,000 adolescents aged between 12 and 19 from Uppsala County, researchers from Uppsala University demonstrate that reports of sleep disturbance and habitual short sleep duration (less than 7 hours per day) increased the risk of failure in school. The study was led ...

This news release is available in French. Montreal, September 23, 2014 — It's rare to see a Wal-Mart downtown. Big box stores usually set up shop in the suburbs, where rent is cheap and the consumer base is growing. So should smaller stores follow suit? Not so fast, says Concordia University professor Tieshan Li. His recent study, published in the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, shows that higher profits are had by retailers located furthest from where the market is expanding. "Those results may seem counterintuitive but the decreased profits are ...

Nanocomposite oxide ceramics have potential uses as ferroelectrics, fast ion conductors, and nuclear fuels and for storing nuclear waste, generating a great deal of scientific interest on the structure, properties, and applications of these blended materials. "The interfaces separating the different crystalline regions determine the transport, electrical, and radiation properties of the material as a whole," said Pratik Dholabhai, principal Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher on the project. "It is in the chemical makeup of these interfaces where we can improve ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — They are common suggestions to remedy stress: You just need a breath of fresh air. Walk it off. Get out and see people. Turns out all those things combined may in fact make you feel better – a lot better – a new large scale study suggests. Group nature walks are linked with significantly lower depression, less perceived stress and enhanced mental health and well-being, according to the study conducted by the University of Michigan, with partners from De Montfort University, James Hutton Institute, and Edge Hill University in the United Kingdom. The ...

Thermal energy storage is a common strategy in energy production systems in which the period of production does not coincide with that of consumption. This happens with the production of hot water by means of solar thermal panels, for example; here, hot water is produced during sunlight hours when demand is lower. It is also the case in residential cogeneration, where heat and electrical power are simultaneously generated but not so demand. In both cases, storing the heat allows production to be decoupled from demand, thus making the integration of these technologies into ...

Investigators at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center have published the first study to extensively characterize eosinophilic gastritis (EG). The study, published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, found that EG is a systemic disorder that has high levels of eosinophils in the blood and gastrointestinal tract, involves a series of allergy-associated-immune mechanisms and has a gene expression pattern (transcriptome) that is distinct from that of a related disorder, eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE). Eosinophilic gastrointestinal disorders are chronic ...

An international team of scientists has identified a gene mutation that causes aplastic anemia, a serious blood disorder in which the bone marrow fails to produce normal amounts of blood cells. Studying a family in which three generations had blood disorders, the researchers discovered a defect in a gene that regulates telomeres, chromosomal structures with crucial roles in normal cell function. "Identifying this causal defect may help suggest future molecular-based treatments that bypass the gene defect and restore blood cell production," said study co-leader Hakon Hakonarson, ...

Tropical Depression Fung-Wong skirted the coast of mainland China and is moving through the East China Sea. NASA's Aqua satellite captured cloud top temperature data that showed strongest thunderstorms were stretched out as the storm continues to look more frontal in nature. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Fung-Wong on Sept. 22 at 1:23 p.m. EDT, the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument read cloud top temperatures. AIRS detected strongest, highest storms, those with the coldest cloud tops stretched out from northwest to southeast giving the depression ...

Scheduled for surgery? New research suggests that you may want to get screened and treated for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) before going under the knife. According to a first-of-its-kind study in the October issue of Anesthesiology, the official medical journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists® (ASA®), patients with OSA who are diagnosed and treated for the condition prior to surgery are less likely to develop serious cardiovascular complications such as cardiac arrest or shock. "OSA is a common disorder that affects millions and is associated with an increased ...

VIDEO: Researchers at the CRG try to understand how networks of genes work together to create specific patterns like stripes. They have gone beyond studying individual networks and have created computational and... Click here for more information. Pattern formation is essential in the development of animals and plants. The central problem in pattern formation is how can genetic information be translated in a reliable manner to give specific spatial patterns of cellular differentiation. ...

The majority of drugs used to treat asthma today are the same ones that were used 50 years ago. New drugs are urgently needed to treat this chronic respiratory disease, which causes nearly 25 million people in the United States alone to wheeze, cough, and find it difficult at best to take a deep breath. But finding new treatments is tough: asthma is a patient-specific disease, so what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another, and the animal models traditionally used to test new drug candidates often fail to mimic human responses – costing tremendous ...

Fruit and vegetable consumption could be as good for your mental as your physical health, new research suggests. The research, conducted by the University of Warwick's Medical School using data from the Health Survey for England, and published by BMJ Open focused on mental wellbeing and found that high and low mental wellbeing were consistently associated with an individual's fruit and vegetable consumption. 33.5% of respondents with high mental wellbeing ate five or more portions of fruit and vegetables a day, compared with only 6.8% who ate less than one portion. ...

A team of researchers from the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) has developed a new way to fabricate a potential challenger to graphene. Graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms in a honeycomb lattice, is increasingly being used in new electronic and mechanical applications, such as transistors, switches and light sources, thanks to the unprecedented properties it offers: very low electrical resistance, high thermal conductivity and mechanically stretchable yet harder than diamond. Now, ORC researchers have developed molybdenum di-sulphide ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Scientists have scoured cow rumens and termite guts for microbes that can efficiently break down plant cell walls for the production of next-generation biofuels, but some of the best microbial candidates actually may reside in the human lower intestine, researchers report. Their study, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to use biochemical approaches to confirm the hypothesis that microbes in the human gut can digest fiber, breaking it down into simple sugars in order to ferment them into nutrients that nourish ...

A special issue of the European Journal of Cancer presents detailed reports on the wide range of research presented during the 1st EORTC Cancer Survivorship Summit held this past January in Brussels, Belgium. Early diagnosis, targeted therapeutics, and more personalized multimodal treatments has boosted survival rates of patients with cancer and led to a large and rapidly increasing number of cancer survivors. Despite this good news, cancer survivors are often confronted with a broad spectrum of late adverse treatment effects and some must also deal with societal discrimination ...

Carbon nanotubes serve as bridges that allow electrical signals to pass unhindered through new pediatric heart-defect patches invented at Rice University and Texas Children's Hospital. A team led by bioengineer Jeffrey Jacot and chemical engineer and chemist Matteo Pasquali created the patches infused with conductive single-walled carbon nanotubes. The patches are made of a sponge-like bioscaffold that contains microscopic pores and mimics the body's extracellular matrix. The nanotubes overcome a limitation of current patches in which pore walls hinder the transfer ...

Inflammation has been shown to be a driving force behind many chronic diseases, especially liver cancer, which often develops due to chronic inflammation caused by conditions such as viral hepatitis or alcoholism and has relatively few effective treatment options. Now, scientists at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center have demonstrated for the first time in preclinical studies that blocking the expression of a gene known as astrocyte elevated gene-1 (AEG-1) halts the development and progression of liver cancer by regulating inflammation. This research ...

Athens, Ga. – Bed sharing, a practice where mother and infant sleep on the same surface, remains popular all over the world despite potential health risks for the infant. According to a new University of Georgia study, bed sharing can likely be decreased if public health officials tailor messaging to their unique population. Trina Salm Ward, assistant professor in the UGA School of Social Work and assistant professor of health promotion and behavior in the College of Public Health, reviewed literature on bed sharing in "Reasons for Mother-Infant Bed-Sharing: A Systematic ...

WASHINGTON (Sept. 23, 2014) — A patient survives life-threatening trauma, is intubated in the intensive care unit (ICU) to support his or her affected vital functions, starts to recover, and then develops pneumonia. It's a scenario well-known to physicians, who understand that the development of ventilator-associated pneumonia in critically ill patients often results in significant morbidity, mortality, and additional health care costs. An interdisciplinary team of George Washington University (GW) researchers are investigating more accurate and rapid methods of identification ...

The Affordable Care Act — "Obamacare" — was signed into law in 2010 and promised the largest overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system since the 1960s. Designed to provide medical care to uninsured Americans, it has been widely decried as an unwarranted intrusion into the affairs of private businesses and individuals. However, an independent comparative study of healthcare systems in six Western countries, published last month in Social Science and Medicine, supports a move away from privatized medicine toward state-sponsored healthcare systems. In her research, Dina Maskileyson ...

Alexandria, Va. — "Virtual water" was coined in 1993 to help explain why long-predicted water wars driven by water and food security had not occurred among the arid nations of the Middle East and North Africa. The virtual water notion refers basically to the total amount of freshwater, either from rainfall or irrigation, used in the production of food commodities, including crops and fodder-fed livestock, or other goods and services — agricultural, industrial or otherwise. Taking root in the late 1990s across a range of disciplines, the concept has since expanded and evolved. Today, ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Racially and economically mixed cities are more likely to stay integrated if the density of households stays low, finds a new analysis of a now-famous model of segregation. By simulating the movement of families between neighborhoods in a virtual "city," Duke University mathematician Rick Durrett and graduate student Yuan Zhang find that cities are more likely to become segregated along racial, ethnic or other lines when the proportion of occupied sites rises above a certain critical threshold -- as low as 25 percent, regardless of the identity of the ...

WASHINGTON, DC -- Gender-based violence affects the physical and mental health of girls and boys, men and women worldwide. A recent study by researchers from the Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University addresses the challenge of developing effective strategies to change inequitable and harmful social norms that result in gender-based violence. Inequitable gender norms are not only related to domestic violence, but also to other behaviors such as multiple sexual partners, smoking and alcohol abuse which lead to poor health outcomes. The findings ...