The Taj Mahal's iconic marble dome and soaring minarets require regular cleaning to maintain their dazzling appearance, and scientists now know why. Researchers from the United States and India are pointing the finger at airborne carbon particles and dust for giving the gleaming white landmark a brownish cast. Knowing the culprits in the discoloration is just the first step in cleaning up the Taj Mahal. Scientists now must determine where the particles are coming from to develop strategies for controlling them. "Our team was able to show that the pollutants discoloring ...

New York, NY, December 9, 2014 - Fourteen years after the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC), a case study in the current issue of Annals of Global Health identifies several elements that have had a critical impact on the evolution of the WTC response and, directly or indirectly, on the health of the WTC-exposed population. The case study also recounts and assesses post-disaster monitoring efforts, recent scientific findings from the World Trade Center Health Program (WTCHP), and explores the implications of these experiences for ongoing and future environmental disaster ...

The global spread of Ebola is due to the complex interactions between individuals, societies, and transportation and trade networks. Understanding and building appropriate statistical and mathematical models of these interactions is vital to responding to the challenges of living in a networked world. There are, of course, many other examples of complex networks -- from national power grids and airline networks to social networks, neuronal networks and protein-protein interactions. In a new study published in the Beijing-headquartered journal National Science Review, ...

This news release is available in Japanese. New research published in the Proceedings of The Royal Society A by members of the Mathematical Soft Matter Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University examines the energies at work in a closed flexible loop spanned by a soap film. While the underlying experiments are simple enough to be replicated in a kitchen sink, the research generates potentially important questions and changes how we think about different disciplines from material science to vertebrate morphogenesis. Aisa Biria and Professor ...

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS -Too many vehicles on the highway inevitably slow down traffic. On the Internet information highway, consumers value high-speed Internet service, but there is little reason to think broadband traffic congestion will improve if the Federal Communications Commission abandons net neutrality, according to economic research. In their paper, "The Economics of Network Neutrality," Ben Hermalin, Haas Economics Analysis and Policy Group, and Nicholas Economides, Berkeley-Haas visiting professor from NYU'S Stern School ...

Scientists at the University of Strathclyde and City University of New York have created methods that dramatically simplify the discovery of biological gels for food, cosmetics and biomedicine, as published in the journal Nature Chemistry. Strathclyde's Dr Tell Tuttle and Professor Rein Ulijn, the director of nanoscience at City University New York's new advanced research centre who also holds a position at Strathclyde, believe their team's breakthrough dramatically simplifies discovery of functional gels that can be used in a wide range of applications. Until now, ...

The drug daclatasvir (trade name Daklinza) has been available since August 2014 for the treatment of adults with chronic hepatitis C (CHC) infection. 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 therapy. The drug manufacturer presented data for patients without cirrhosis of the liver who are infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotype 1, and for patients with HCV genotype 4. However, these data are unsuitable in various aspects to ...

Pioneering new research by the University of Exeter could revolutionise global diagnostic procedures for one of the most common forms of epilepsy. Scientists from Exeter have investigated using mathematical modelling to assess susceptibility to idiopathic generalised epilepsy (IGE) by analysing electrical activity of the brain while the patient is in a resting state. Current diagnosis practices typically observe electrical activities associated with seizures in a clinical environment. The ground-breaking research has revealed differences in the way that distant regions ...

"A tree must be bent while it is young," as one saying about learning a foreign language goes. In other words, the earlier you start learning a foreign language systematically, the better the language level will be in the long run. The second widely held view is that you need to be solid in your first language (L1) in order to develop good literacy skills in the foreign language. Linguist Simone Pfenninger from the University of Zurich has been examining these two myths in her five-year study involving Swiss high-school children in order to identify the optimal starting ...

Reston, Va. (December 9, 2014) - Cancer therapy can be much more effective using a new way to customize nuclear medicine treatment, researchers say in the December 2014 issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. The process could also be useful for other diseases that could benefit from targeted radiation. Targeted therapy with radiopharmaceuticals--radioactive compounds used in nuclear medicine for diagnosis or treatment--has great potential for the treatment of cancer, especially for cancer cells that have migrated from primary tumors to lymph nodes and secondary organs ...

London, United Kingdom, December 9, 2014 - As the Ebola Virus Diseases (EVD) epidemic continues to rage in West Africa, infectious diseases experts call attention to the striking lack of treatment guidelines. With over 16,000 total cases and more than 500 new infections reported per week, and probable underreporting of both cases and fatalities, the medical community still does not have specific approved treatment in place for Ebola, according to an editorial published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. Not only are treatment guidelines lacking, but ...

Studying the social interaction of bears through the use of camera traps and visual observations requires that humans be able to tell individuals apart. A study done using volunteers to study the vulnerable Andean bear indicates that people can learn to identify individual bears, given a little practice. The research, done by San Diego Zoo conservationists with international collaborators using photos spanning many years, also indicates that young bears usually retain many of their unique markings as they grow older. "Knowing, scientifically, that people who have been ...

Researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg are proposing potential new active substances for treating the dengue virus. Just like Ebola, dengue fever is also caused by a virus for which there is currently no cure and no vaccine and can be fatal. In the quest for medication to treat the dengue virus, the scientific community is focusing on a particular enzyme of the pathogen, the protease known as NS2B/NS3. The reason for this is that inhibitors of similar proteases have been revealed to be very effective ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- A marker of immune function that predicts for better outcomes in patients treated with chemotherapy for triple negative breast cancer is also linked to improved prognosis in patients treated with chemotherapy for HER2-positive breast cancer. But that marker -- the quantity of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (S-TILs) in a biopsy -- appears irrelevant when trastuzumab is used. And since trastuzumab, and not chemotherapy alone, is the standard of care for the HER2-positive sub-class of breast cancer, there is no need to test for these lymphocytes in ...

In patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer--a disease with no approved targeted therapies--infusion of pembrolizumab produced durable responses in almost one out of five patients enrolled in a phase-Ib clinical trial, according to data presented Dec. 10, at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. The multi-center, non-randomized trial was designed to evaluate the safety, tolerability and antitumor activity of bi-weekly infusions of pembrolizumab (MK-3475, marketed as Keytruda®). The researchers enrolled 27 patients, aged 29 to 72 years, who had ...

Several past studies have suggested that the magnetic fields created by phones, high-voltage power lines and other electrical equipment are harmful for humans. Research first carried out in the 1970's and again subsequently, found an association between people living near overhead power lines and an increased risk of childhood leukaemia. Although some later studies have failed to find such a link, the International Agency for Research on Cancer has categorised low frequency magnetic fields as "possibly carcinogenic." But a mechanism for this association has never been ...

While many different combinations of genetic traits can cause autism, brains affected by autism share a pattern of ramped-up immune responses, an analysis of data from autopsied human brains reveals. The study, a collaborative effort between Johns Hopkins and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, included data from 72 autism and control brains. It will be published online Dec. 10 in the journal Nature Communications. "There are many different ways of getting autism, but we found that they all have the same downstream effect," says Dan Arking, Ph.D. , an associate professor ...

HOUSTON - (Dec. 10, 2014) - Researchers at Rice University have created flexible, patterned sheets of multilayer graphene from a cheap polymer by burning it with a computer-controlled laser. The process works in air at room temperature and eliminates the need for hot furnaces and controlled environments, and it makes graphene that may be suitable for electronics or energy storage. Under a microscope, what the researchers call laser-induced graphene (LIG) doesn't look like a perfect chicken wire-like grid of atoms. Instead, it's a jumble of interconnected graphene flakes ...

Phoenix, AZ (December 10th, 2014) - The brain responds differently to two kinds of sugar, according to a report today at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology annual meeting in Phoenix Arizona. The study suggests that fructose heightens the response of brain reward circuits to food cues, promoting feeding behavior. Currently, roughly two out of three U.S. adults are overweight and one out of three is obese. Changes in lifestyle and dietary intake during the past quarter century are thought to be the main culprits, with the increase in fructose consumption of ...

PISCATAWAY, NJ - Communities with fewer places to buy or drink alcohol also tend to have lower rates of intimate partner violence, new evidence suggests. The research, published in the January issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, suggests that laws limiting what is called "alcohol outlet density" could offer one way to address violence within intimate relationships. States and communities throughout the United States have enacted various laws to reduce excessive use of alcohol, including limiting outlet density, limiting hours and days of sale, and ...

The simple act of saving something, such as a file on a computer, may improve our memory for the information we encounter next, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research suggests that the act of saving helps to free up cognitive resources that can be used to remember new information. Our findings show that people are significantly better at learning and remembering new information when they save previous information," says psychological scientist and study author Benjamin Storm of ...

PITTSBURGH, Dec. 9, 2014 - A treatment pioneered at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research (CVR) is far more effective than traditional antibiotics at inhibiting the growth of drug-resistant bacteria, including so-called "superbugs" resistant to almost all existing antibiotics, which plague hospitals and nursing homes. The findings, announced online in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and funded by the National Institutes of Health, provide a needed boost to the field of antibiotic development, which has been limited in the last four ...

Berkeley -- A systematic overview of more than 100 studies comparing organic and conventional farming finds that the crop yields of organic agriculture are higher than previously thought. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, also found that certain practices could further shrink the productivity gap between organic crops and conventional farming. The study, to be published online Wednesday, Dec. 10, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, tackles the lingering perception that organic farming, while offering an environmentally ...

In an editorial published online today in the International Journal of Epidemiology, experts from the Departments of Psychiatry and Epidemiology at Columbia University, New York, are calling for survivors of the Ebola epidemic to be mobilised in a bid to hasten containment of the disease. We already know that the current Ebola outbreak is unique in its magnitude and for its dispersion in dense, mobile populations. Physicians and nurses face high mortality, and foreign aid in the form of medical supplies and staff continues to be unequal to the scope of the problem. With ...

In a world first study researchers have found a coral-eating fish that disguises its smell to hide from predators. "For many animals vision is less important than their sense of smell," says study lead author Dr Rohan Brooker from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University. "Because predators often rely on odors to find their prey, even visually camouflaged animals may stick out like a sore thumb if they smell strongly of 'food'." Dr Brooker says. The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, ...