A research team led by group leader Yung-Eun Sung has announced that they have developed cost-effective technology to synthesize sulfur-doped and nitrogen-doped graphenes which can be applied as high performance electrodes for secondary batteries and fuel cells. Yung-Eun Sung is both a group leader at the Center for Nanoparticle Research at Institute for Basic Science* (IBS) and a professor at the Seoul National University. This achievement has great significance with regards to the development of relative simplicity, scalablity, and cost effectiveness processes that ...

Mitochondria play an important role in neuronal apoptosis caused by cerebral ischemia. Researchers at the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University, China discovered transient ischemia led to cell apoptosis in the hippocampus and changes in memory and cognition of aged rats. Differential proteomics analysis suggested that this phenomenon may be mediated by mitochondrial proteins associated with energy metabolism and apoptosis in aged rats. This study reported in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 11, 2014) provides potential drug targets for the treatment of ...

Researchers at Central Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan, led by Prof. Liu, Dr. Shen and Mrs. Yang have developed a biodegradable nerve conduit containing genipin-cross-linked gelatin was annexed using beta-tricalcium phosphate (TCP) ceramic particles (Genipin-Gelatin-TCP, GGT) to bridge the transection of a 15 mm sciatic nerve in rats. The effects of LLL therapy on peripheral nerve restoration and regeneration have systematically investigated throughout the study period. Very few studies have employed tubulation in combination with diode laser therapy ...

The cellular process autophagy appears to not work properly, contributing to the destruction of insulin-producing beta cells People with Type 2 diabetes have an excess of a protein called islet amyloid polypeptide, or IAPP, and the accumulation of this protein is linked to the loss of insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells. What causes this accumulation of IAPP in pancreatic beta cells of people with diabetes has remained a mystery. But a team of researchers from the Larry L. Hillblom Islet Research Center led by Dr. Peter Butler, professor of medicine at UCLA, may ...

TORONTO, ON (23 JULY 2014) – A team of astronomers has made the most precise measurements yet of water vapour in the atmospheres of Jupiter-like planets beyond our Solar System and found them to be much drier worlds than expected. The team, including Dr. Nicolas Crouzet of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto, has found that the abundance of atmospheric water vapour is between ten and a thousand times less than what models predict. "The low water vapour levels are surprising," says Crouzet. "Our models predict a much higher abundance ...

Researchers have uncovered a way the malaria parasite becomes resistant to an investigational drug. The discovery, at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, also is relevant for other infectious diseases including bacterial infections and tuberculosis. The study appears July 24 in Nature Communications. Many organisms, including the parasite that causes malaria, make a class of molecules called isoprenoids, which play multiple roles in keeping organisms healthy, whether plants, animals or bacteria. In malaria, the investigational drug fosmidomycin blocks ...

Traditional methods of characterising and detecting bacteria are often slow and time-consuming. Therefore, development of new methods of characterising and detecting illness-causing microorganisms is very important for improving food safety. Trine Hansen, PhD student at the National Food Institute, has studied new methods of characterising Salmonella in pork meat processing and detecting unknown bacteria in water, feed and food samples. The research project has given a better understanding of which factors in pork meat processing may contribute to the development of ...

It is seldom sufficient to read the declaration of contents if you need to know precisely what substances a product contains. In fact, to do this you need to be a highly skilled chemist or to have genuine X-ray vision so that you can look directly into the molecular structure of the various substances. Christian Grundahl Frankær, a Postdoc at DTU Chemical Engineering, is almost both, as he has developed a method that allows him to use X-rays to look deep into biological samples. The 'Fingerprints' of a Substance The technique is called 'powder diffraction' and involves ...

Quantum computers have yet to materialise. Yet, scientists are making progress in devising suitable means of making such computers faster. One such approach relies on quantum dots—a kind of artificial atom, easily controlled by applying an electric field. A new study demonstrates that changing the coupling of three coherently coupled quantum dots (TQDs) with electrical impulses can help better control them. This has implications, for example, should TQDs be used as quantum information units, which would produce faster quantum computers due to the fact that they would be ...

Sufficient financial inducements are one way of encouraging people to move to regional Australia for jobs, but other factors also play a part, according to a new report. Moving workers from a region with high unemployment to a region with many job vacancies is an important aspect of labour markets. The Commission of Audit recently advised the government to "force" long-term unemployed people who are single and between the ages of 22 and 30 to move to areas of higher employment if they have been on the dole for 12 months. Researchers from Monash and Deakin Universities ...

Philadelphia – Students graduating from U.S. medical schools in 2012 feel they've received a better education in health policy issues than graduates surveyed in 2008, according to a multi-center study led by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and published online this month in Academic Medicine. The study applied a new framework for teaching and evaluating perceptions of training in health policy, first proposed by the authors in a 2011 perspective published in the New England Journal of Medicine. "Our prior work found that for nearly a ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers have discovered a previously unknown mechanism for wear in metals: a swirling, fluid-like microscopic behavior in a solid piece of metal sliding over another. The findings could be used to improve the durability of metal parts in numerous applications. "Wear is a major cause of failure in engineering applications," said Srinivasan Chandrasekar, a Purdue University professor of industrial engineering and materials engineering. "However, our findings have implications beyond wear itself, extending to manufacturing and materials processing." The ...

A team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have gone looking for water vapour in the atmospheres of three planets orbiting stars similar to the Sun – and have come up nearly dry. The three planets, HD 189733b, HD 209458b, and WASP-12b, are between 60 and 900 light-years away, and are all gas giants known as 'hot Jupiters.' These worlds are so hot, with temperatures between 900 to 2200 degrees Celsius, that they are ideal candidates for detecting water vapour in their atmospheres. However, the three planets have only one-tenth to one-thousandth the ...

WASHINGTON, DC -- For decades, couples in which a wife had more education than her husband faced a higher risk of divorce than those in which a husband had more education, but a new study finds this is no longer the case. "We also found that couples in which both individuals have equal levels of education are now less likely to divorce than those in which husbands have more education than their wives," said Christine R. Schwartz, lead author of the study and an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "These trends are consistent with ...

New research has found that birthday-related drinking is associated with upsurges in hospital admissions among young people. This study of drinking behaviour in Ontario, Canada is published online today in the scientific journal Addiction. Researchers, led by University of Northern British Columbia Associate Professor of Psychiatry Dr. Russ Callaghan, analysed records from all hospital admissions in Ontario over a five-year period (2002-07) involving people aged 12 to 30 years. They discovered that during the week in which Ontarians turned 19 – the legal drinking age ...

The immune system has evolved to recognize and respond to threats to health, and to provide life-long memory that prevents recurrent disease. A detailed understanding of the mechanism underlying immunologic memory, however, has remained elusive. Since 2001, various lines of research have converged to support the hypothesis that the persistence of immune memory arises from a reservoir of immune cells with stem-cell-like potential. Until now, there was no conclusive evidence, largely because experiments could only be carried out on populations of cells. This first strict ...

Odds are, there’s a virus living inside your gut that has gone undetected by scientists for decades. A new study led by researchers at San Diego State University has found that more than half the world’s population is host to a newly described virus, named crAssphage, which infects one of the most common types of gut bacteria, Bacteroidetes. This phylum of bacteria is thought to be connected with obesity, diabetes and other gut-related diseases. The research appears today in Nature Communications. Robert A. Edwards, a bioinformatics professor at SDSU, and his colleagues ...

Washington, DC (July 21, 2014) – It seems common practice. After a long day at work, sometimes you just want to turn on the TV or play a video game to relax, decompress. This is supposed to make you feel better. But, a recent study published in the Journal of Communication, by researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, and VU University Amsterdam, found that people who had high stress levels after work and engaged in television viewing or video game play didn't feel relaxed or recovered, but had high levels of guilt and feelings of failure. Leonard ...

A new study of identical twins has found that early reading skill might positively affect later intellectual abilities. The study, in the journal Child Development, was conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and King's College London. "Since reading is an ability that can be improved, our findings have implications for reading instruction," according to Stuart J. Ritchie, research fellow in psychology at the University of Edinburgh, who led the study. "Early remediation of reading problems might aid not only the growth of literacy, but also more general ...

Adolescents in some countries and U.S. states are required to perform community service, and many national and nongovernmental agencies promote such service. A new study has found that while community service has broad benefits for adolescents, it is particularly effective when the activities are accompanied by reflection and discussion. The study, by researchers at Utrecht University and Rutgers University, appears in the journal Child Development. Researchers used meta-analysis to assess findings from 49 studies from around the world that were conducted from 1980 ...

Children who have been abused or neglected early in life are at risk for developing both emotional and physical health problems. In a new study, scientists have found that maltreatment affects the way genes are activated, which has implications for children's long-term development. Previous studies focused on how a particular child's individual characteristics and genetics interacted with that child's experiences in an effort to understand how health problems emerge. In the new study, researchers were able to measure the degree to which genes were turned "on" or "off" through ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a genetic disorder that causes obsessive-compulsive and repetitive behaviors, and other behaviors on the autistic spectrum, as well as cognitive deficits. It is the most common inherited cause of mental impairment and the most common cause of autism. Now biomedical scientists at the University of California, Riverside have published a study that sheds light on the cause of autistic behaviors in FXS. Appearing online today (July 23) in the Journal of Neuroscience, and highlighted also on the cover in this week's print issue ...

(NEW YORK, NY, July 24, 2014) – If past experience is anything to go by, nurse practitioners in New York State are about to get a lot more recognition for their contributions to primary care. In Massachusetts, laws already on the books allowing NPs to provide primary care offer nurses more recognition of their contributions to patient care and better relationships with physicians and administrators, compared with colleagues in New York, according to a study from Columbia University School of Nursing, published in Health Care Management Review. "This suggests that the ...

In Aesop's fable about the crow and the pitcher, a thirsty bird happens upon a vessel of water, but when he tries to drink from it, he finds the water level out of his reach. Not strong enough to knock over the pitcher, the bird drops pebbles into it — one at a time — until the water level rises enough for him to drink his fill. Highlighting the value of ingenuity, the fable demonstrates that cognitive ability can often be more effective than brute force. It also characterizes crows as pretty resourceful problem solvers. New research conducted by UC Santa Barbara's Corina ...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. – Honey bees, especially the young, are highly sensitive to temperature and to protect developing bees, adults work together to maintain temperatures within a narrow range. Recently published research led by Philip T. Starks, a biologist at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences, is the first to show that worker bees dissipate excess heat within a hive in process similar to how humans and other mammals cool themselves through their blood vessels and skin. "This study shows how workers effectively dissipate the heat absorbed via heat-shielding, ...