Wood and its response to stress or strain has been less known at a fundamental level - until now. The structural properties of brittle materials like rock or ceramic, such as cracking under stress, have long been studied in detail, providing insight into avalanches, earthquakes and landslides. Wood and its response to stress or strain has been less known at a fundamental level - until now. Scientists, from the Department of Applied Physics at Aalto University in Finland, have applied well-established methods for studying all kinds of materials to wood, namely through ...

Philadelphia, PA, July 20, 2015 - Exposure therapy is a commonly used and effective treatment for anxiety disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and phobias. The goal of such therapy is to extinguish fear, which is accomplished by presenting cues that are known to predict a negative experience in the absence of that experience. Over time, learning that the 'danger cue' is no longer dangerous produces extinction of the fearful response. However, fears and the associated defensive behaviors resulting from that fear often return ...

FLORENCE - There are almost 275,000 acres of corn planted in South Carolina, with an economic impact of approximately $130 million. Though this is dwarfed by Midwest states such as Iowa (13.7 million acres, $8.75 billion), it's still a lot of corn - enough, at least, to make a person think S.C. would be a utopia for the insects that like to feast on tasty yellow kernels. But instead of being a slice of paradise, a cornfield can often be a far-from-optimal host for pests such as the corn earworm. Francis Reay-Jones, an associate professor and research scientist for Clemson ...

A new study from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio found that mothers with chemical intolerances are two to three times more likely than other women to have a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The medical study was published in the July-August 2015 issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. People who are chemically intolerant often have serious reactions to common chemicals and some become too sick to carry out routine functions. Chemical intolerance affects about ...

New research reveals that the more people think they know about a topic in general, the more likely they are to allege knowledge of completely made-up information and false facts, a phenomenon known as "overclaiming." The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Our work suggests that the seemingly straightforward task of judging one's knowledge may not be so simple, particularly for individuals who believe they have a relatively high level of knowledge to begin with," says psychological scientist Stav Atir ...

(New York, July 18, 2015) Researchers from the NYU Langone Medical Center, NYU School of Medicine will present new findings at the 2015 Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Washington, D.C., July 18-23-2015. The NYU Langone Alzheimer's Disease Center is comprised of the Center for Cognitive Neurology, Center for Brain Health and the Parkinson's and Movement Disorders Center. It is one of thirty Alzheimer's disease research centers in the United States supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA). As an NIA-supported research facility, the center's ...

HER2 membrane proteins play a special role in certain types of breast cancer: amplified levels of HER2 drive unrestricted cell growth. HER2-tailored antibody-based therapeutics aim to prevent cancer cell growth. However, two-thirds of HER2 positive breast cancer patients develop resistance against HER2-targeting drugs. The reason for this is not yet understood. Researchers now found out, that HER2 dimers appeared to be absent from a small sub-population of resting SKBR3 breast cancer cells. This small subpopulation may have self-renewing properties that are resistant to ...

SAN ANTONIO (July 17, 2015) -- Researchers from the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio have found evidence that directly links disrupted metabolism (energy production in cells) to a common and often fatal type of lymphoma. The finding was announced Thursday (July 16) in Nature Communications. "The link between metabolism and cancer has been proposed or inferred to exist for a long time, but what is more scarce is evidence for a direct connection -- genetic mutations in metabolic enzymes," said senior author Ricardo C.T. ...

Lower levels of cholesterol in certain immune cells--a result of enhanced cholesterol metabolism within those cells--may help explain why some HIV-infected people are able to naturally control disease progression, according to research that will be presented in a poster at the 8th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention (IAS 2015) in Vancouver, Canada, and the pre-conference 2015 Towards an HIV Cure Symposium. The findings provide a basis for potential development of new approaches to control HIV infection by regulating cellular ...

Washington, DC - July 17, 2015 - The success of probiotics for boosting human health may depend partly upon the food, beverage, or other material carrying the probiotics, according to research published on July 10th in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. "Our findings indicate that the manner in which a probiotic is delivered--whether in food or supplement form--could influence how effective that probiotic is in delivering the desired health benefits," said corresponding author Maria Marco, PhD, an associate professor ...

When a power company wants to build a new wind farm, it generally hires a consultant to make wind speed measurements at the proposed site for eight to 12 months. Those measurements are correlated with historical data and used to assess the site's power-generation capacity. At the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence later this month, MIT researchers will present a new statistical technique that yields better wind-speed predictions than existing techniques do -- even when it uses only three months' worth of data. That could save power companies time ...

Researchers at Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego, have developed a new user-friendly resource to accompany the powerful gene editing tool called CRISPR/Cas9, which has been widely adopted to make precise, targeted changes in DNA. This breakthrough has the potential to facilitate new discoveries in gene therapies and basic genetics research. The research was published in the July 13 issue of Nature Methods. The study describes an approach to simplify a laborious part of the gene editing process using the CRISPR/Cas9 system: choosing the best ...

ROSEMONT, IL - Teaching coaches about injury prevention and contact restrictions pays off, say researchers who tracked injury rates among youth football players during the 2014 season. "With an estimated three million youth aged 7 to 14 years old playing tackle football each year, preventing injuries is key. Our study showed that kids who received a comprehensive education from a coach had fewer injuries," said lead author Zachary Y. Kerr, PhD, MPH of the Datalys Center for Injury Research and Prevention. Kerr and his team had athletic trainers evaluate and track ...

Genetic differences between hemp and marijuana determine whether Cannabis plants have the potential for psychoactivity, a new study by University of Minnesota scientists shows. "Given the diversity of cultivated forms of Cannabis, we wanted to identify the genes responsible for differences in drug content," says U of M plant biologist George Weiblen. While marijuana is rich in psychoactive tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), hemp produces mostly a non-euphoric cannabidiol (CBD), but the genetic basis for this difference was a matter of speculation until now. The study was published ...

A solar cell that produces fuel rather than electricity. Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and FOM Foundation today present a very promising prototype of this in the journal Nature Communications. The material gallium phosphide enables their solar cell to produce the clean fuel hydrogen gas from liquid water. Processing the gallium phosphide in the form of very small nanowires is novel and helps to boost the yield by a factor of ten. And does so using ten thousand times less precious material. The electricity produced by a solar cell can be used ...

This article describes the effect of the preparation method of binary oxide supports (TiO2-Al2O3) on catalytic performance of V2O5/TiO2-Al2O3 catalysts for methanol selective oxidation to dimethoxymethane (DMM). The optimized catalyst exhibits a methanol conversion of 48.9% and a high DMM selectivity of 89.9% at 393 K, superior to V2O5/TiO2 and V2O5/Al2O3 catalysts. Reported by Prof. Gong Jinlong of Tianjin University, the research article titled "Selective Oxidation of Methanol to Dimethoxymethane over V2O5/TiO2-Al2O3 Catalysts" was published on Science Bulletin June ...

Time synchronization between ground and satellites is a key technology for satellite navigation system. With dual-channel satellite, a method called Two-Way Common-View (TWCV) satellite time transfer for Compass system is proposed in recent study. The title of the paper related to the study is "The method and experiment analysis of two-way common-view satellite time transfer for compass system", which is written by LIU Li from Beijing Satellite Navigation Center and published in SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy 2015, 58. The researcher combines both characteristics ...

Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, a small group of otolaryngologists have repeatedly testified, on behalf of the tobacco industry, that heavy smoking did not cause the cancer in cases of dying patients suing for damages, according to a study by a Stanford University School of Medicine researcher. "I was shocked by the degree to which these physicians were willing to testify, in my opinion in an unscientific way, to deny a dying plaintiff -- suffering the aftermath of a lifetime of smoking -- of a fair trial," said Robert Jackler, MD, professor and chair of ...

PHILADELPHIA (July 17, 2015) - A new study from the Monell Center and collaborating institutions suggests that a single set of genes affects a person's perception of sweet taste, regardless of whether the sweetener is a natural sugar or a non-caloric sugar substitute. "Eating too much sugar is often seen as a personal weakness. However, our work suggests that part of what determines our perception of sweetness is inborn in our genetic makeup," said study author Danielle Reed, PhD, a behavioral geneticist at Monell. "Just as people born with a poor sense of hearing may ...

New research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) shows how investors can significantly reduce the cost of implementing portfolio strategies - in some cases by more than 90 per cent. The study, published today in the journal Financial Review, shows that many modern investment strategies often lead to low returns or even lose money in practice, as they are prone to large trading costs. Such costs include bid-ask spreads, brokerage fees and capital gain taxes and can dramatically affect investment returns, turning an otherwise winning strategy into a losing one. Many ...

The location of the second largest volcanic eruption in human history, the waters off Greece's Santorini are the site of newly discovered opalescent pools forming at 250 meters depth. The interconnected series of meandering, iridescent white pools contain high concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and may hold answers to questions related to deepsea carbon storage as well as provide a means of monitoring the volcano for future eruptions. "The volcanic eruption at Santorini in 1600 B.C. wiped out the Minoan civilization living along the Aegean Sea," said Woods Hole Oceanographic ...

Certain patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D) may have specific genetic risk factors that put them at higher risk for developing Alzheimer's disease (AD), according to a study conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published recently in Molecular Aspects of Medicine. Under the leadership of Giulio Maria Pasinetti, MD, PhD, Saunders Family Chair and Professor of Neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Director of Biomedical Training in the Geriatric Research Education and Clinical Centers at J.J. Peters Bronx VA Medical Center, ...

New Haven, Conn. -- Researchers at the Aortic Institute at Yale have tested the genomes of more than 100 patients with thoracic aortic aneurysms, a potentially lethal condition, and provided genetically personalized care. Their work will also lead to the development of a "dictionary" of genes specific to the disease, according to researchers. The study published early online in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. Experts have known for more than a decade that thoracic aortic aneurysms -- abnormal enlargements of the aorta in the chest area --run in families and are caused ...

A newly discovered family of chemical structures, published in Nature today, could increase the value of biogas and natural gas that contains carbon dioxide. The new chemical structures, known as zeolites, have been created by an international team of researchers including Professor Xiaodong Zou and co-workers from the Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry at Stockholm University. The zeolites -- crystalline aluminosilicates with frameworks that contain windows and cavities the size of small molecules -- can separate out carbon dioxide more effectively ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass--Part of a 1929 prediction by physicist Hermann Weyl -- of a kind of massless particle that features a singular point in its energy spectrum called the "Weyl point," -- has finally been confirmed by direct observation for the first time, says an international team of physicists led by researchers at MIT. The finding could lead to new kinds of high-power single-mode lasers and other optical devices, the team says. For decades, physicists thought that the subatomic particles called neutrinos were, in fact, the massless particles that Weyl had predicted -- ...