Hair loss can be devastating for the millions of men and women who experience it. Now scientists are reporting that a substance from honeybee hives might contain clues for developing a potential new therapy. They found that the material, called propolis, encouraged hair growth in mice. The study appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Ken Kobayashi and colleagues note that propolis is a resin-like material that honeybees use to seal small gaps in their hives. Not only does it work as a physical barrier, but it also contains active compounds that fight ...

Cigarette smoking generates as much as $170 billion in annual health care spending in the United States, according to a new study co-authored by researchers at Georgia State University's School of Public Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and RTI International. Dr. Terry F. Pechacek, a professor of health management and policy at Georgia State, was the senior author of the study, "Annual Healthcare Spending Attributable to Cigarette Smoking (An Update)," which was published Wednesday by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study ...

Touch can be a subtle sense, but it communicates quickly whether something in our hands is slipping, for example, so we can tighten our grip. For the first time, scientists report the development of a stretchable "electronic skin" closely modeled after our own that can detect not just pressure, but also what direction it's coming from. The study on the advance, which could have applications for prosthetics and robotics, appears in the journal ACS Nano. Hyunhyub Ko and colleagues explain that electronic skins are flexible, film-like devices designed to detect pressure, ...

Fatigue and pain, along with other symptoms, prevent many people with multiple sclerosis (MS) from exercising. But a new how-to guide for a home-based exercise program, tested by researchers at Case Western Reserve University's nursing school and the Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, offers a way for people with MS to stay more physically active. The researchers developed a 24-week exercise program based on a series of pamphlets with varying levels of difficulty. The program helps inactive individuals start at a lower, shorter level of activity and gradually ...

Windows allow brilliant natural light to stream into homes and buildings. Along with light comes heat that, in warm weather, we often counter with energy-consuming air conditioning. Now scientists are developing a new kind of "smart window" that can block out heat when the outside temperatures rise. The advance, reported in ACS' journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, could one day help consumers better conserve energy on hot days and reduce electric bills. Xuhong Guo, Kaimin Chen, Yanfeng Gao and colleagues explain that researchers are pursuing smart windows ...

HOUSTON - (Dec. 10, 2014) - Like a baseball player sliding into third, a hot monomer skids in a straight line along a cold surface until it's safely among its fellow molecules. This is not what usually happens when scientists assemble monomers to make thin films for next-generation electronics, but the details remained a puzzle until a team led by Rice University got involved. Monomers are organic molecules that, in this application, form clusters and eventually complete layers. Researchers at Rice and the University of Maryland led by Rice theoretical physicist ...

A Danish Research Team identified a molecular mechanism that ensures that when cells divide, the genomic material passes correctly to the resulting daughter cells: "The process, known as chromosome segregation, is vitally important because incorrect passage of the genomic material makes cells prone to develop into cancer cells," says Jakob Nilsson, associate professor at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research. The new discovery depends on a protein called BubR1 which if mutated can cause cancer. The results have just been published in the scientific ...

The Ebola virus travels from person to person through direct contact with infected body fluids. But how long can the virus survive on glass surfaces or countertops? How long can it live in wastewater when liquid wastes from a patient end up in the sewage system? In an article published Dec. 9 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, Kyle Bibby of the University of Pittsburgh reviews the latest research to find answers to these questions. He and his co-investigators didn't find many answers. "The World Health Organization has been saying you can put ...

A team of researchers from the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and environmental testing firm URS reports that a small subset of natural gas wells are responsible for the majority of methane emissions from two major sources -- liquid unloadings and pneumatic controller equipment -- at natural gas production sites. With natural gas production in the United States expected to continue to increase during the next few decades, there is a need for a better understanding of methane emissions during natural gas production. The study team ...

A happy worker is a productive worker. That adage may be true, according to a new study from The University of Texas at Dallas. Two UT Dallas public affairs researchers found that family-friendly policies are beneficial for increasing productivity of employees in public organizations, and the authors said the finding likely lends itself to job satisfaction and commitment. The study, published in the Public Personnel Management, investigated the effects of family-friendly human resources policies in public organizations. Using the Korea Workplace Panel Survey data from ...

New school and office workspace designs created by a group of Penn State engineering students are intended to allow users to share space and materials while maintaining their own work areas -- a dual purpose the researchers say has been neglected. The research began in 2010 as a class project, according to Joseph M. Mahoney, former Penn State graduate student, now assistant professor of mechanical engineering, Penn State, Berks. "There's a lot of interest from an ergonomics perspective and workplace efficiency perspective of designing workstations for single users," Mahoney ...

In the depths of the Arctic Ocean, buried deep in the sediment, an ancient creature waited for over a million years to be discovered. Paul Valentich-Scott, from the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History (California), and three scientists from the United States Geological Survey (USGS, Menlo Park, California), Charles L. Powell, Brian D. Edwards, and Thomas D. Lorenson were up to the challenge. Each with different expertise, they were able to collect, analyze, and identify a new genus and new species of bivalve mollusk. The path to discovery is seldom simple or easy. ...

Breast cancer is the most common in women. One in nine will suffer breast cancer over their lifetime. Progress in prevention and early detection, and the use of chemotherapy after surgery (adjuvant chemotherapy), have achieved significantly increase survival in this disease in the last ten years, but much remains to be done. The identification of patients with high-risk breast cancer is key to knowing whether a patient will require only the removal of the tumor by surgery or whether if she will need additional chemotherapy to make sure the removal of breast cancer cells. ...

Malaria is one of the most serious health problems worldwide, registering 200 million clinical cases and more than 600,000 attributable deaths per year, according to information from the World Health Organization in 2013. Given the emerging resistance to the standard treatment most widely used throughout the world, which is based on artemisinin and its analogs, there is a need for new antimalarial compounds. In this regard, scientists headed by Lluís Ribas de Pouplana, ICREA researcher at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), report on a new ...

This news release is available in German. FRANKFURT. Frankfurt physicists have once again contributed to resolving a disputed matter of theoretical physics. Science has long since known that, contrary to the old school of thought, helium forms molecules of two, three or even more atoms. Exactly what helium consisting of three atoms looks like, however, has been disputed by theoretical physicists for about 20 years. Besides the intuitive assumption that the three identical components form an equilateral triangle, there was also the hypothesis that the three atoms are ...

Patients suffering from the world's most common heart rhythm disorder can have their long-term outcomes significantly improved with an aggressive management of their underlying cardiac risk factors, according to University of Adelaide researchers. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is increasingly responsible for dementia, stroke and death, and has a significant impact on healthcare costs. With electrical "short circuits" believed to be responsible for the abnormal beating of the heart in AF patients, one currently used treatment is to burn the tissue surrounding the problem area, ...

Mammals that lived during the time of the dinosaurs are often portrayed as innocuous, small-bodied creatures, scurrying under the feet of the huge reptiles. In reality, this wasn't the case, and a new fossil from Madagascar further underscores this point, revealing fascinating perspectives on the growing diversity of Mesozoic mammals. Vintana sertich had previously been described in a preliminary note in November of this year, but a new memoir in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology delves far deeper into the morphology and paleoecology of this amazing fossil animal. ...

A simple supplement could be a safe and cost-effective way of reducing heart disease in individuals born with a low birth weight, suggests research from the University of Cambridge. The study, carried out in rats, also raises the possibility of developing a blood test to indicate how much damage there is in the aortas of these individuals. Researchers at the Institute of Metabolic Science fed low birth weight rats a supplement of the molecule co-enzyme Q (CoQ) and found that in those rats that grew quickly after birth, the supplement prevented cells in the aorta from ...

Techniques now used to reconstruct 3D models based on multiple photos of a building, object or scene can also be leveraged to automatically estimate illumination conditions depicted in a collection of photographs, scientists at Disney Research and Université Laval report. Everyone knows that objects can look markedly different depending on lighting conditions, the physical characteristics of the objects and the angle at which they are viewed. That makes it difficult for photo editors to insert 3D objects into imagery and make them appear as if they are reflecting ...

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, ...