In an important development for the health of elderly people, University of Liverpool researchers have developed a new method to target bone growth. As people age their bones lose density and, especially in women after the menopause, become more brittle. The new method developed by researchers from the University's Institute of Ageing and Chronic Disease offers the possibility of more effective treatment than currently available. Professor Jonathan Jarvis of Liverpool John Moores University designed miniature muscle pacemakers that were used in the University of Liverpool ...

Chestnut Hill, MA (June 25, 2014) - Strength in numbers may not just be a truism for those seeking moral and emotional support, but it also may be an avenue for those seeking customer support. New research shows peer-to-peer problem solving can lessen the need for firms to actually have to contact their supplier for a traditional customer support service call. "This has never been shown before, this notion that people who have full-time day jobs handling support for their companies also take time to answer other people's questions, thereby significantly reducing their ...

Amsterdam, NL, 25 June 2014 – Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has become a well-recognized non-pharmacologic treatment that improves motor symptoms of patients with early and advanced Parkinson's disease. Evidence now indicates that DBS can decrease the number and severity of non motor symptoms of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) as well, according to a review published in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease. "Non motor features are common in PD patients, occur across all disease stages, and while well described, are still under-recognized when considering their huge ...

(Boston)--Women who are able to naturally have children later in life tend to live longer and the genetic variants that allow them to do so might also facilitate exceptionally long life spans. A Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) study published in Menopause: The Journal of the North American Menopause Society, says women who are able to have children after the age of 33 have a greater chance of living longer than women who had their last child before the age of 30. "Of course this does not mean women should wait to have children at older ages in order to ...

Earlier this year, mounting concerns over the potential health effects of triclosan, a common antimicrobial ingredient, prompted Minnesota to ban the germ-killer from consumer soaps statewide starting in 2017. Are these concerns warranted? An article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society, investigates. Jyllian Kemsley, a senior editor at C&EN, notes that when it was first patented, triclosan was used as an antimicrobial agent in health care settings. It was a much more benign option as a surgical scrub than the ...

As many patients know, treating wounds has become far more sophisticated than sewing stitches and applying gauze, but dressings still have shortcomings. Now scientists are reporting the next step in the evolution of wound treatment with a material that leads to faster healing than existing commercial dressings and prevents potentially harmful bacteria from sticking. Their study appears in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Yung Chang and colleagues note that the need for improved dressings is becoming urgent as the global population ages. With it, health ...

The oil and gas extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, could potentially contribute more pollutants to groundwater than past research has suggested, according to a new study in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology. Scientists are reporting that when spilled or deliberately applied to land, waste fluids from fracking are likely picking up tiny particles in the soil that attract heavy metals and other chemicals with possible health implications for people and animals. Tammo S. Steenhuis and colleagues note that fracking, which involves ...

Testing for cocaine and other drugs usually involves two steps: a quick on-site prescreen, and then a more accurate confirmatory test at a distant laboratory. This process can take days or weeks — but that's too long in many cases where public safety is at risk. Now, researchers report development of a backpack-sized device that can perform highly accurate and sensitive tests anywhere within 15 minutes. The study appears in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry. Aaron Wheeler and colleagues explain that the current two-stage system of testing urine for drugs of abuse is expensive ...

Biological membranes are like a guarded border. They separate the cell from the environment and at the same time control the import and export of molecules. The nuclear membrane can be crossed via many tiny pores. Scientists at the Biozentrum and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute at the University of Basel, together with an international team of researchers, have discovered that proteins found within the nuclear pore function similar to a velcro. In Nature Nanotechnology, they report how these proteins can be used for controlled and selective transport of particles. There ...

This news release is available in German. The human immune system is very complex. A large number of different cells with various functions ensure that invading microorganisms such as viruses or bacteria can quickly be rendered innocuous and the entire organism stays healthy. The immune system also includes natural killer cells (NK cells), which recognise and eliminate tumour or virus-infected cells. NK cells therefore combat the body's own stressed cells to prevent them from becoming a potential hazard. However, this bears its risks. Other immune cells, the specific ...

In the past 20 years, the Laboratory for Shock Wave and Detonation Physics Research in Institute of Fluid Physics (IFP), China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) has conducted the research in hypervelocity launch technology. The State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing of Wuhan University of Technology participated in the research as a cooperator, and took charge of the flier processing. In this project, significant progresses have been made in optimization of the physical design, material processing and experimental measurement ...

Confined water exists widely and plays important roles in natural environments, particularly inside biological nanochannels. Professor Lei Jiang and his group from State Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, set out to study this unified bionic frontier. After several years of innovative research, they developed a series of biomimetic nanochannels, delivered a strategy for the design and construction of smart nanochannels and applied the nanochannels in energy conversion systems. The author thought the inner surface property ...

The gradually increasing complexity of user requirements and runtime environments of software demands software to be of more capabilities and thus become more complex than ever. In the past several decades, there was a trend that the scale of software has been increasing continuously. Nowadays, there are tens or even hundreds of million lines of code in a large scale software system. For example, the Windows operating system scales from 15 million lines of code in 1995 to 60 million lines of code in 2007; in 2011, the scale of software in BMW 7 Series reaches 200 million ...

Research carried out by the Copenhagen Centre for Team Sport and Health in Denmark shows that street football (soccer) improves fitness and multiple health markers in homeless men. After only 12 weeks, the participants had better postural balance and higher muscle mass and bone mineralization, along with lower fat percentage and LDL cholesterol and higher aerobic fitness and exercise capacity. Sixteen original scientific articles about the health effects of football were published on June 19 in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports. One of these articles ...

There are many open questions that the Standard Model cannot answer. One of them is the smallness of the Higgs expectation value vh compared with the Planck scale. In their latest work, Dr Yuta Hamada, Dr Hikaru Kawai and Dr Kiyoharu Kawana at Kyoto University, consider the radiation S of the universe at the late stage as a function of vh, and they show that S reaches its maximum around the observed value vh = 246 GeV. "If we demand that S should be maximized, this conclusion can be the explanation to the above question. The main contribution to S comes from the decay ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (June 23, 2014) – A key cancer-causing gene, responsible for up to 20 percent of cancers, may have a weak spot in its armor, according to new research from the Masonic Cancer Center, University of Minnesota. The partnership of MYC, a gene long linked to cancer, and a non-coding RNA, PVT1, could be the key to understanding how MYC fuels cancer cells. The research is published in the latest issue of the journal Nature. "We knew MYC amplifications cause cancer. But we also know that MYC does not amplify alone. It often pairs with adjacent chromosomal ...

SEATTLE –Using two yeasts that have been used to brew tea and beer for centuries, researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have revealed how reproductive barriers might rapidly arise to create species boundaries. Schizosaccharomyces pombe has been used to brew beer in Africa, whereas its close relative S. kombucha is a component of kombucha tea commonly found in health-food stores. A team of researchers led by Dr. Sarah Zanders of the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutch, has uncovered why hybrids between these yeasts (commonly referred to as fission yeasts) ...

LOS ANGELES (June 24, 2014) – Although deep brain stimulation can be an effective therapy for dystonia – a potentially crippling movement disorder – the treatment isn't always effective, or benefits may not be immediate. Precise placement of DBS electrodes is one of several factors that can affect results, but few studies have attempted to identify the "sweet spot," where electrode placement yields the best results. Researchers led by investigators at Cedars-Sinai, using a complex set of data from records and imaging scans of patients who have undergone successful DBS ...

Ottawa/Toronto, CANADA – June 25, 2014 – Pediatric emergency medicine researchers at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) together with the Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation (ONF) today launch the first comprehensive pediatric concussion guidelines. "There have been recommendations and policies on concussion available in the past, but they tend to have focused on sports-related injury and not on children and youth," said Dr. Roger Zemek, project leader, scientist at CHEO, and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at the University of Ottawa. ...

The incarceration rate has nearly quadrupled since the U.S. declared a war on drugs, researchers say. Along with that, racial disparities abound. Incarceration rates for black Americans are more than six times higher than those for white Americans, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. To explain these growing racial disparities, researchers at Virginia Tech are using the same modeling techniques used for infectious disease outbreaks to take on the mass incarceration problem. By treating incarceration as an infectious disease, the scientists demonstrated ...

Optimality principles have been used, in a holistic approach, to describe flow processes in several important geosystems. Optimality principles refer to the state of a physical system that is controlled by an optimal condition subject to physical and/or resource constraints. While significant successes have been achieved in applying them, some principles appear to contradict each other. For example, scientists have found that the formation of channel networks in a river basin follows the minimization of energy expenditure (MEE) rate, while the Earth-atmosphere system ...

Policymakers should conduct "net energy analyses" when evaluating the long-term sustainability of energy technologies, according to new Stanford University research. Net energy analysis provides a quantitative way to compare the amount of energy a technology produces over its lifetime with the energy required to build and maintain it. The technique can complement conventional energy planning, which often focuses on minimizing the financial cost of energy production, say Stanford researchers. "The clearest answer to 'why is net energy important?' is that net energy, ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Challenging risk assessment methods used for decades by toxicologists, a new review of the literature led by environmental health scientist Laura Vandenberg at the University of Massachusetts Amherst suggests that oral gavage, the most widely accepted method of dosing lab animals to test chemical toxicity, does not accurately mimic how humans are exposed to chemicals in everyday life. Oral gavage refers to the way researchers give chemicals to animals by putting a tube down their throats to deliver substances directly to the stomach. It has been used ...

TORONTO, June 25, 2014–There's good news for the 30 per cent or more of adults who suffer from insomnia--difficulty falling asleep, waking up for prolonged periods during the night or unwanted early morning awakenings. New research from St. Michael's Hospital has found that insomnia does not put them at increased risk of developing high blood pressure. Dr. Nicholas Vozoris, a respirologist at St. Michael's, said there is growing concern among patients and health care providers about the potential medical consequences of insomnia, especially on the cardiovascular system. If ...

The rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has declined. An international team of scientists, including one from Virginia Tech, reviewed published research about policy interventions and commodity market effects, and determined that positive incentives for farmers, counties, and states can do as much to preserve forests as public policies that call for penalties. "The challenge now is to build upon this progress," the team reports in an article in the June 6 issue of Science. "Some immediate and simple positive incentives for responsible, low-deforestation farmers ...