The humble butterfly could hold the key to unlocking new techniques to make solar energy cheaper and more efficient, pioneering new research has shown. A team of experts from the University of Exeter has examined new techniques for generating photovoltaic (PV) energy - or ways in which to convert light into power. They showed that by mimicking the v-shaped posture adopted by Cabbage White butterflies to heat up their flight muscles before take-off, the amount of power produced by solar panels can increase by almost 50 per cent. Crucially, by replicating this 'wing-like' ...

Main Finding(s): Women who participated in exercise as adolescents had a reduced risk of death from cancer and all causes in their middle and older ages. Journal in Which the Study was Published: Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research Author: Sarah J. Nechuta, MPH, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center and Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, Tennessee Background: Understanding the long-term impact of modifiable lifestyle factors such as exercise in adolescence ...

More time spent standing rather than sitting could improve your blood sugar, fats in the blood and cholesterol levels, according to a new study published today (Friday) in the European Heart Journal [1]. The study also shows that replacing time spent sitting with time walking could have additional benefits for your waistline and body mass index (BMI). Researchers in Australia gave activity monitors to 782 men and women, aged 36-80 years, who were taking part in the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study. The monitors were capable of determining, very accurately, ...

China needs to reduce its dependence on coal and improve the range of fuels it uses if it is to have long term energy security, according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA). The study, published in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change, looks at the future of electricity supply in China and the issues it faces in reducing its carbon emissions - nationally China's electricity sector accounts for more than half its total greenhouse gas emissions. The country's electricity sector is the largest in the world and energy security ...

If it takes more than three trips to the GP to be referred for cancer tests, patients are more likely to be dissatisfied with their overall care, eroding confidence in the doctors and nurses who go on to treat and monitor them. These worrying levels of dissatisfaction are based on further analysis of survey data from more than 70,000 cancer patients, by Cancer Research UK scientists at UCL (University College London) and the University of Cambridge, published today (Friday) in the European Journal of Cancer Care.* Of the nearly 60,000 survey respondents diagnosed through ...

On the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a three-part Series published in The Lancet looks at the enduring radiological and psychological impact of nuclear disasters, including the most recent accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan in 2011. The Series provides vital information for the public health planning of future disasters to protect the millions of people who live in areas surrounding the 437 nuclear power plants that are in operation worldwide. Although nuclear power plant accidents are uncommon, during the ...

Highlights Blood levels of TMAO, a byproduct generated from intestinal bacterial as they metabolize dietary nutrients, progressively increase with advancing severity of kidney disease. TMAO levels are dramatically reduced when kidney function is restored following kidney transplantation. High TMAO levels are linked with an increased risk of atherosclerosis and premature death in patients with chronic kidney disease. Washington, DC (July 30, 2015) -- In patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), atherosclerosis is exceedingly common and contributes to the ...

PHILADELPHIA -- Working with yeast and worms, researchers found that incorrect gene expression is a hallmark of aged cells and that reducing such "noise" extends lifespan in these organisms. The team published their findings this month in Genes & Development. The team was led by senior author Shelley Berger, PhD, a Daniel S. Och University Professor in the departments of Cell & Developmental Biology, Biology & Genetics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Weiwei Dang, PhD, a former Penn postdoctoral fellow who is now an assistant professor ...

(BOSTON) -- Gene drives are genetic elements - found naturally in the genomes of most of the world's organisms - that increase the chance of the gene they carry being passed on to all offspring, and thus, they can quickly spread through populations. Looking to these natural systems, researchers around the world, including some Wyss Institute scientists, are developing synthetic gene drives that could one day be leveraged by humans to purposefully alter the traits of wild populations of organisms to prevent disease transmission and eradicate invasive species. These synthetic ...

Numerous genes that regulate the activity of a neurotransmitter in the brain have been found to be abundant in brain tissue of depressed females. This could be an underlying cause of the higher incidence of suicide among women, according to research at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Studying postmortem tissue from brains of psychiatric patients, Monsheel Sodhi, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at UIC, noted that female patients with depression had abnormally high expression levels of many genes that regulate the glutamate system, which is widely distributed ...

Washington, DC - July 30, 2015 - In research that could lead to protective probiotics to fight the "chytrid" fungus that has been decimating amphibian populations worldwide, Jenifer Walke, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, and her collaborators have grown bacterial species from the skin microbiome of four species of amphibians. The research appears July 10 in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. In the study, the investigators swabbed the four species, all of which inhabit Virginia. ...

PHILADELPHIA -- The importance of a diet rich in fish oils - now a billion dollar food-supplement industry -- has been debated for over half a century. A few large clinical trials have supported the idea that fish oils confer therapeutic benefits to patients with cardiovascular disease. Researchers think that hearts and blood vessels may benefit in part from their anti-inflammatory properties. Synthetic versions of marine fish lipid-derived molecules called specialized pro-resolving mediators (SPMs) show anti-inflammatory properties in cell cultures and live animal models. ...

Not every mom and dad agree on how their offspring should behave. But in genetics as in life, parenting is about knowing when your voice needs to be heard, and the best ways of doing so. Typically, compromise reigns, and one copy of each gene is inherited from each parent so that the two contribute equally to the traits who make us who we are. Occasionally, a mechanism called genomic imprinting, first described 30 years ago, allows just one parent to be heard by completely silencing the other. Now, researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine report on a ...

If the technical features of a new camera delight the tech experts but leave consumers scratching their heads, how should a retailer's website present those views and what sales results could it expect? A paper to be published in the September issue of the Journal of Retailing provides insights on the relatively new phenomenon of online user reviews. In "User Reviews Variance, Critic Reviews Variance, and Product Sales: An Exploration of Customer Breadth and Depth Effects," Feng Wang of Hunan University, Xuefeng Liu of Loyola University Maryland, and Eric Fang of ...

A national coalition of experts that includes two University of Washington researchers has a bold plan to reduce behavioral health problems such as violence and depression among young people across the country by 20 percent in a decade. And their proposal rests on one simple principle: prevention. The group's paper, recently published on the National Academy of Medicine website, recommends implementing evidence-based prevention programs on a national scale to reduce a host of problems ranging from drinking to delinquent behavior, anxiety and risky driving. It notes ...

Many physicians are pushing back against or debating new requirements for maintaining medical board certifications, which affect more than 250,000 physicians nationwide. Now, a new study by UC San Francisco and Stanford University researchers concludes that the cost of implementing the most recent requirements will be an estimated $5.7 billion over the next 10 years. In their study, published online on July 27, 2015, in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the researchers found that most costs of the latest maintenance-of-certification (MOC) requirements implemented for ...

Athens, Ga. - An international team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Georgia has discovered how parasitic plants, which steal their nutrients from another living plant, evolved the ability to detect and attack their hosts. Their findings, published recently in the journal Science, could lead to new techniques to control the thieving weeds. There are thousands of parasitic plant species, but the most burdensome for humans are those that infiltrate farmland and destroy crops. Parasite infestations reduce crop yields by billions of dollars each year, ...

In cells with latent HIV infection, the virus is dormant, and such cells are therefore not attacked by the immune system or by standard antiretroviral therapy. To eradicate the virus from the human body and truly cure a patient, reservoirs of latently infected cells need to be activated and eliminated "the so-called "kick-and-kill" approach. Two studies published on July 30th in PLOS Pathogens report encouraging results on the use of a combination of several drugs to efficiently reactivate HIV in cells with latent infection. Please contact plospathogens@plos.org if you ...

A deadly fungus identified in 2013 could devastate native salamander populations in North America unless U.S. officials make an immediate effort to halt salamander importation, according to an urgent new report published today in the journal Science. San Francisco State University biologist Vance Vredenburg, his graduate student Tiffany Yap and their colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles say the southeastern United States (particularly the southern extent of the Appalachian Mountain range and its southern neighboring ...

Scientists at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the School of Public Health of Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong have shown for the first time that it is possible to predict the timing and intensity of influenza outbreaks in subtropical climates like Hong Kong where flu seasons can occur at different times and more than once during a year. Results appear online in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. Since the 2013-2014 season, the Mailman School scientists have published weekly regional flu forecasts for over 100 ...

Worldwide, influenza kills an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 people each year. A new study publishing in PLOS Computational Biology has shown that for the first time it is possible to predict the timing and intensity of influenza outbreaks in subtropical climates, such as Hong Kong, where flu seasons can occur at irregular intervals year-round. The team of scientists from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the University of Hong Kong used data from a network of 50 outpatient clinics and laboratory reports in Hong Kong from 1998 to 2013 as a test case ...

This news release is available in Japanese. During the first ever landing of a probe on a comet, the world held its breath as Philae survived a bouncy landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12, 2014. This special issue of Science highlights seven new studies that delve further into the data that has been transmitted back by Philae. In a detailed account, Jens Biele et al. describe the critical moments where Philae descends on 67P, only to bounce off the soft, intended landing area and finally settle on a harder surface farther away. Analysis ...

This news release is available in Japanese. By studying how water striders jump on water, Je-Sung Koh and colleagues have created a robot that can successfully launch itself from the surface of water. As the team watched the water strider jump on water surfaces using high-speed cameras, they noticed that the long legs accelerate gradually, so that the water surface doesn't retreat too quickly and lose contact with the legs. Using a theoretical model of a flexible cylinder floating on liquid, the authors found that the maximum force of the water striders' legs is always ...

This news release is available in Japanese. The international pet trade threatens to spread a deadly fungal infection to North America's rich wild salamander population and must be frozen, according to the authors of this Policy Forum. Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal) is a highly virulent, often fatal fungus that infects salamanders, and there is no effective way to control it after it infects a wild population, say Tiffany Yap and colleagues. It is theorized that Bsal started in Asia and spread to wild European salamanders via the international pet ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - July 30, 2015 - A study released today at the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery 12th Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California, indicates that strict adherence to two commonly-used tools to weigh the risk of treating unruptured aneurysms may not prevent the majority of morbidity-mortality outcomes associated with ruptured intracranial aneurysms. Thus, the International Study of Unruptured Intracranial Aneurysms (ISUIA) criteria and the PHASES score require additional research to determine their effectiveness. Published in 2003, the ISUIA study ...