Major steps forward in the use of plants for renewable materials, energy and for building construction could soon arise, thanks to a key advance in understanding the structure of wood. The step forward follows research by the Universities of Warwick and Cambridge and the unexpected discovery of a previously unknown arrangement of molecules in plant cell walls. The paper describing this work was Editors' Choice for the American Chemical Society for March 25th. The researchers investigated the polymer xylan, which comprises a third of wood matter. Professor Ray ...

A study by researchers at The University of Manchester and the University of Liverpool has examined the psychological treatment of more than 300 people suffering from psychosis, showing that, whatever the therapy, it is the relationship between the patient and therapist which either improves or damages wellbeing. The research relates to one of the more controversial ideas in psychotherapy research - the Dodo bird conjecture. Named after a bird in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which sent several characters on a race and then declared them all winners, this conjecture ...

Consumers whose drinking water can be contaminated by the release of untreated wastewater after heavy rains face increased risk for gastrointestinal illness, according to a report in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. "Combined" sewer systems collect both sewage and stormwater runoff on the way to treatment facilities. When heavy rainfall fills these systems beyond their capacity, untreated wastewater can back up into homes. To reduce the risk of home flooding during heavy precipitation, municipalities often discharge some of the untreated flow into nearby ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio--A new study provides an inside look at the most powerful explosions in the universe: gamma-ray bursts. These rare explosions happen when extremely massive stars go supernova. The stars' strong magnetic fields channel most of the explosion's energy into two powerful plasma jets, one at each magnetic pole. The jets spray energetic particles for light-years in both directions, at close to light speed. On Earth, we detect bits of the resulting debris as gamma rays. Researchers also suspect--but haven't been able to prove conclusively--that GRBs are the source ...

Scientists from South Carolina's leading public universities--the University of South Carolina and Clemson University--have made a discovery that could dramatically improve the efficiency of batteries and fuel cells. The research, which is published in the journal Nature Communications, involves improving the transport of oxygen ions, a key component in converting chemical reactions into electricity. The team studied a well-known material, gadolinium doped ceria (GDC), which transports oxygen ions and is currently in use as a solid oxide fuel cell electrolyte. Through ...

Washington, DC (April 10, 2015) - Using tech, like iPads, in schools has turned into a heated political debate. Los Angeles infamously spent $1.3 billion on a program to give iPads to each student that has subsequently been plagued with problems. In the United Kingdom the head of the National Association of Head Teachers claimed he was dubious about using tech as a teaching aid in non-IT classes. One solution could be using shared tech in classrooms. A promising study by a researcher at Northwestern University found that kindergartners in classes with shared iPads significantly ...

In 1997 when the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM, was launched, its mission was scheduled to last just a few years. Now, 17 years later, the TRMM mission has come to an end. NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) stopped TRMM's science operations and data collection on April 8 after the spacecraft depleted its fuel reserves. TRMM observed rainfall rates over the tropics and subtropics, where two-thirds of the world's rainfall occurs. TRMM carried the first precipitation radar flown in space, which returned data that were made into 3-D imagery, ...

In one of the most comprehensive multi-observatory galaxy surveys yet, astronomers find that galaxies like our Milky Way underwent a stellar "baby boom," churning out stars at a prodigious rate, about 30 times faster than today. Our sun, however, is a late "boomer." The Milky Way's star-birthing frenzy peaked 10 billion years ago, but our sun was late for the party, not forming until roughly 5 billion years ago. By that time the star formation rate in our galaxy had plunged to a trickle. Missing the party, however, may not have been so bad. The sun's late appearance ...

New evidence published in Science by Smithsonian geologists dates the closure of an ancient seaway at 13 to 15 million years ago and challenges accepted theories about the rise of the Isthmus of Panama and its impact on world climate and animal migrations. A team analyzed zircon grains from rocks representing an ancient sea and riverbeds in northwestern South America. The team was led by Camilo Montes, former director of the Panama Geology Project at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is now at the Universidad de los Andes. The team's new date for closure ...

New research shows that Lake Erie's dead zones are actually quite active, greatly affecting fish distributions, catch rates and the effectiveness of fishing gear. Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey, the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant and partners recently found that dead zones caused by hypoxia, the depletion of oxygen in water, are unexpectedly variable in Lake Erie, sometimes disappearing and reemerging elsewhere in the matter of hours. They also found that fish like yellow perch cluster at the edges of these areas. The discovery of erratic dead zones can help ...

PITTSBURGH-- Three leading cognitive scientists from Carnegie Mellon University are questioning the gender representation of invited contributors in the special February 2015 issue, "The Changing Face of Cognition," published by the international journal Cognition. Cognition, a highly regarded scientific journal, publishes theoretical and experimental papers on the study of the mind - a topic that has been a research strength of CMU for decades and that is receiving intense focus through the federal government's BRAIN Initiative. In an opinion piece to appear in Cognition, ...

A study in the scientific journal BMC Health Services Research shows that early and guideline adherent physical therapy following an initial episode of acute, nonspecific low back pain (LBP) resulted in substantially lower costs and reduced use of health care resources over a 2-year period. Physical therapist researchers John D. Childs, PT, PhD, et al analyzed 122,723 patients who went to a primary care physician following an initial LBP episode and received physical therapy within 90 days. Of these, 24% (17,175) received early physical therapy (within 14 days) that adhered ...

Getty Images last year created a new online image catalog of women in the workplace - one that countered visual stereotypes on the Internet of moms as frazzled caregivers rather than powerful CEOs. A new University of Washington study adds to those efforts by assessing how accurately gender representations in online image search results for 45 different occupations match reality. In a few jobs -- including CEO -- women were significantly underrepresented in Google image search results, the study found, and that can change searchers' worldviews. Across all the professions, ...

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- April 9, 2015 -- Scientists at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), using state-of-the-art genetic technology, have discovered the likely cause of a child's rare type of severe muscle weakness. The child was one of six cases in which TGen sequenced -- or decoded -- the genes of patients with Neuromuscular Disease (NMD) and was then able to identify the genetic source, or likely genetic source, of each child's symptoms, according to a study published April 8 in the journal Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine. "In all six cases of ...

A family of proteins called G proteins are a recognized component of the communication system the human body uses to sense hormones and other chemicals in the bloodstream and to send messages to cells. In work that further illuminates how cells work, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered a new role for G proteins that may have relevance to halting solid tumor cancer metastasis. The study is reported online April 9 in Developmental Cell. "Our work provides the first direct evidence that G proteins are signaling on membranes ...

Bushfires are inevitable in the fire-prone landscapes of Western Australia. Long dry summers, vegetation and undergrowth, and ignition from lightning or human causes mean that bushfires can and do occur every summer. A bushfire is an unplanned fire (in the U.S. this is referred to as a wildfire). Each year Australia's Department of Parks and Wildlife responds to more than 600 bushfires that occur on or near land managed by the department. Bushfires have many causes, some natural such as lightning and some as a result of human activity such as camp fires, escapes from ...

ATLANTA--A combination of mental practice and physical therapy is an effective treatment for people recovering from a stroke, according to researchers at Georgia State University. The findings, published on March 30 in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, examine how the brains of stroke patients change after treatment. Mental practice and physical therapy are interventions used to improve impaired motor movement, coordination and balance following stroke. Mental practice, also known as motor imagery, is the mental rehearsal of a motor action without an overt ...

URBANA, Ill. - Two University of Illinois food scientists have learned that understanding and manipulating porosity during food manufacturing can affect a food's health benefits. Youngsoo Lee reports that controlling the number and size of pores in processed foods allows manufacturers to use less salt while satisfying consumers' taste buds. Pawan Takhar has found that meticulously managing pore pressure in foods during frying reduces oil uptake, which results in lower-fat snacks without sacrificing our predilection for fried foods' texture and taste. Both scientists ...

BOSTON (April 9, 2015)- Making small, consistent changes to the types of protein- and carbohydrate-rich foods we eat may have a big impact on long-term weight gain, according to a new study led by researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University. The results were published on-line this week in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Based on more than 16 years of follow-up among 120,000 men and women from three long-term studies of U.S. health professionals, the authors first found that diets with a high glycemic load (GL) from ...

The one common element in recent weather has been oddness. The West Coast has been warm and parched; the East Coast has been cold and snowed under. Fish are swimming into new waters, and hungry seals are washing up on California beaches. A long-lived patch of warm water off the West Coast, about 1 to 4 degrees Celsius (2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, is part of what's wreaking much of this mayhem, according to two University of Washington papers to appear in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. "In the fall of 2013 and ...

April 9, 2015 - A new University of Utah study is the first to provide clear insight into contributors to suicide risk among military personnel and veterans who have deployed. The study, published today in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, found that exposure to killing and death while deployed is connected to suicide risk. Previous studies that looked solely at the relationship between deployment and suicide risk without assessing for exposure to killing and death have shown inconsistent results. "Many people assume that deployment equals exposure ...

When black holes tango, one massive partner spins head over heels (or in this case heels over head) until the merger is complete, said researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology in a paper published in Physical Review Letters. This spin dynamic may affect the growth of black holes surrounded by accretion disks and alter galactic and supermassive binary black holes, leading to observational effects, according to RIT scientists Carlos Lousto and James Healy. The authors of the study will present their findings at the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore ...

The RapidScat instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station (ISS) provided data about Tropical Cyclone Joalane's surface winds that showed how the strongest sustained winds consolidated as the tropical cyclone intensified and developed an eye. As of April 9, warnings were in effect at Rodrigues Island in the Southern Indian Ocean as Joalane approached. RapidScat measured the surface winds within Tropical Cyclone Joalane late on April 7 and on April 8, revealing that the strongest winds consolidated over a 24 hour period. RapidScat measured Joalane's winds ...

Outbreaks of leukemia that have devastated some populations of soft-shell clams along the east coast of North America for decades can be explained by the spread of cancerous tumor cells from one clam to another. Researchers call the discovery, reported in the Cell Press journal Cell on April 9, 2015, "beyond surprising." "The evidence indicates that the tumor cells themselves are contagious--that the cells can spread from one animal to another in the ocean," said Stephen Goff of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Columbia University. "We know this must be true because ...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can produce strikingly different clinical outcomes in young children, with some having strong conversation abilities and others not talking at all. A study published by Cell Press April 9th in Neuron reveals the reason: At the very first signs of possible autism in infants and toddlers, neural activity in language-sensitive brain regions is already similar to normal in those ASD toddlers who eventually go on to develop good language ability but nearly absent in those who later have a poor language outcome. "Why some toddlers with ASD get ...