HOUSTON – (June 19, 2014) – Rice University scientists have created a one-step process for producing highly efficient materials that let the maximum amount of sunlight reach a solar cell. The Rice lab of chemist Andrew Barron found a simple way to etch nanoscale spikes into silicon that allows more than 99 percent of sunlight to reach the cells' active elements, where it can be turned into electricity. The research by Barron and Rice graduate student and lead author Yen-Tien Lu appears in the Royal Society of Chemistry's Journal of Materials Chemistry A. The more ...

The circuitry of the central nervous system is immensely complex and, as a result, sometimes confounding. When scientists conduct research to unravel the inner workings at a cellular level, they are sometimes surprised by what they find. Patrick Keeley, a postdoctoral scholar in Benjamin Reese's laboratory at UC Santa Barbara's Neuroscience Research Institute, had such an experience. He spent years analyzing different cell types in the retina, the light-sensitive layer of tissue lining the inner surface of the eye that mediates the first stages of visual processing. The ...

THUNDER BAY – June 19, 2014 – With the Ontario government poised to spend $1 billion to promote development in the Ring of Fire, a new paper from Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Canada and Ecojustice identifies risks inherent in the current planning legislation and provides a solution. Ontario's Far North is the world's largest ecologically intact area of boreal forest. It contains North America's largest wetlands, is home to a number of at-risk species, including caribou and lake sturgeon, and is a one of the world's critical storehouses of carbon. First Nations ...

Following a thorough peer-review process, the researchers who previously announced the detection of B-mode polarization in a patch of the microwave sky have published their findings today in the journal Physical Review Letters (PDF available at http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.241101). The researchers provide some evidence that the signals they have found may be the result of gravitational waves from the earliest moments of the universe's existence and thus might constitute the first observation of phenomena from the rapid expansion of the universe ...

Pancreatic cancer tumors addicted to mutant Kras signaling for their growth and progression have a ready-made substitute to tap if they're ever forced to go cold-turkey on the mutant oncogene, scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report in the journal Cell. When researchers dialed up mutant Kras to spur pancreatic cancer growth in mice, and then shut it down, a group of recurrent tumors grew back independently of mutant Kras, reliant on a different oncogene. "There's a great deal of effort under way trying to find ways to target Kras or some ...

Biologists have long considered cells to function like self-cleaning ovens, chewing up and recycling their own worn out parts as needed. But a new study challenges that basic principle, showing that some nerve cells found in the eye pass off their old energy-producing factories to neighboring support cells to be "eaten." The find, which may bear on the roots of glaucoma, also has implications for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other diseases that involve a buildup of "garbage" in brain cells. The study was led by Nicholas Marsh-Armstrong, ...

DOHA, QATAR (June 17, 2014) -- HIV epidemics are emerging among people who inject drugs in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Though HIV infection levels were historically very low in the Middle East and North Africa, substantial levels of HIV transmission and emerging HIV epidemics have been documented among people who inject drugs in at least one-third of the countries of this region, according to findings published today in PLOS Medicine. The HIV epidemics among people who inject drugs (PWID) are recent overall, starting largely around 2003 and ...

A few years ago, a molecule known as "JQ1" was developed, which can block so called BET bromodomain proteins. This switch off the known cancer gene MYC thereby preventing cancer cells from dividing. The discovery was regarded as a major breakthrough. A problem was that JQ1 did not function optimally in animal experiments, and this means that it has not been possible to test the treatment on cancer patients. New molecule Jonas Nilsson and his research group have developed, in collaboration with the Canadian company Zenith epigenetics, a new molecule known as "RVX2135", ...

In a study that included long-term follow-up of obese patients with type 2 diabetes, bariatric surgery was associated with more frequent diabetes remission and fewer complications than patients who received usual care, according to a study in the June 11 issue of JAMA, a diabetes theme issue. Obesity and diabetes have reached epidemic proportions and constitute major health and economic burdens. Worldwide, 347 million adults are estimated to live with diabetes and half of them are undiagnosed. Studies show that type 2 diabetes is preventable. The incidence of diabetes ...

Law enforcement authorities need to better understand trafficking patterns of cocaine in the United States to address one of the world's largest illegal drug markets, according to a Michigan State University researcher whose new methodology might help. Siddharth Chandra, an economist, studied wholesale powdered cocaine prices in 112 cities to identify city-to-city links for the transit of the drug. He used data published by the National Drug Intelligence Center of the U.S. Department of Justice from 2002 to 2011, which field intelligence officers and local, regional and ...

A man with almost no hair on his body has grown a full head of it after a novel treatment by doctors at Yale University. There is currently no cure or long-term treatment for alopecia universalis, the disease that left the 25-year-old patient bare of hair. This is the first reported case of a successful targeted treatment for the rare, highly visible disease. The patient has also grown eyebrows and eyelashes, as well as facial, armpit, and other hair, which he lacked at the time he sought help. "The results are exactly what we hoped for," said Brett A. King, M.D., ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (June 19, 2014) – Researchers in Taiwan have found that peripheral blood stem cells can be "mobilized" by injection of a special preparation of granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) into rats that modeled osteoarthritis (OA). The bone marrow was stimulated to produce stem cells, leading to the inhibition of OA progression. The finding, they said, may lead to a more effective therapy for OA, a common joint disease that affects 10 percent of Americans over the age of 60. The study will be published in a future issue of Cell Transplantation and ...

New Rochelle, NY, June 19, 2014—An innovative system using automated 3D printing technology and advanced digital tools to create customized, prefabricated ceramic building blocks, called PolyBricks, is enabling the construction of mortar-less brick building assemblies at much greater scales than was previously possible. The new techniques that use 3D printers to produce modular ceramic bricks from a single material that then interlock and assemble easily into larger units for architectural applications are described in an article in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing ...

PHILADELPHIA (June 19, 2014) – We already know haters are predisposed to be that way. Now we see they also spend a lot of time at fewer activities than their non-hater counterparts. But in a twist of irony, that grumpy person at work may actually be pretty good at their job since they spend so much time on fewer activities, thereby giving them the opportunity to hone their skills in specific tasks. It's all covered in a new study published in the journal Social Psychology. It seems that a person's "dispositional attitude" – whether the person is a "hater" or a "liker" ...

A mathematical tool used by the Metropolitan Police and FBI has been adapted by researchers at Queen Mary University of London to help control outbreaks of malaria, and has the potential to target other infectious diseases. In cases of serial crime such as murder or rape, police typically have too many suspects to consider, for example, the Yorkshire Ripper investigation in the UK generated a total of 268,000 names. To help prioritise these investigations, police forces around the world use a technique called geographic profiling, which uses the spatial locations of ...

For thousands of years, Mother Nature has taken the blame for tremendous human suffering caused by massive flooding along the Yellow River, long known in China as the "River of Sorrow" and "Scourge of the Sons of Han." Now, new research from Washington University in St. Louis links the river's increasingly deadly floods to a widespread pattern of human-caused environmental degradation and related flood-mitigation efforts that began changing the river's natural flow nearly 3,000 years ago. "Human intervention in the Chinese environment is relatively massive, remarkably ...

A new proposed scheme, by Wen-Xing Yang, from the Department of Physics, Southeast University, China, and colleagues, analyzed in detail the optical steady behavior in GaAs quantum well structure driven by an elliptically polarized field (EPF) in a unidirectional ring cavity. They show that the controllable optical steady behavior including multi-stability (OM) and optical bistability (OB) can be obtained via nonradiation coherence, and the frequency detuning, cooperation parameter and the amplitude of the EPF. Most interestingly, the conversion between OB and OM can ...

Houghton, Mich., June 19, 2014: Over the next 100 years, Minnesota's iconic boreal forest and deep snow may change into a deciduous forest with winters warm enough for some precipitation to fall as rain, according to a new U.S. Forest Service assessment of the vulnerability of Minnesota forests to climate change. "Minnesota Forest Ecosystem Vulnerability Assessment and Synthesis" was published by the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Station and is available online at: http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/45939 The assessment describes effects of climate change that ...

Jena (Germany) In a chemistry lab at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany): Prof. Dr. Alexander Schiller works at a rectangular plastic board with 384 small wells. The chemist carefully pipets some drops of sugar solution into a row of the tiny reaction vessels. As soon as the fluid has mixed with the contents of the vessels, fluorescence starts in some of the wells. What the Junior Professor for Photonic Materials does here – with his own hands – could also be called in a very simplified way, the 'sweetest computer in the world'. The reason: the sugar molecules ...

Researchers from the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group, co-ordinated through the editorial base in LSTM, conducted an independent review of the effects of treating cholera with antimicrobial drugs, published in The Cochrane Library today. Cholera is an acute watery diarrhoea caused by infection with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which can cause rapid dehydration and death. Effective treatment requires early diagnosis and rehydration using oral rehydration salts or intravenous fluids. This review looked at the effects of adding antimicrobial drugs to this treatment. Thirty-nine ...

Researchers of the group of cellular and molecular neurobiology of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the University of Barcelona, led by researcher Artur Llobet, have shown that synaptic levels of the protein clathrin are a determinant factor for synaptic plasticity of neurons. Chemical synapses and synaptic vesicular transmission cycle Neurons transmit information in a specialized contact points called synapses. These structures consist of two elements: the presynaptic one, information donor, and postsynaptic, which receives the information. In ...

A study of 8 European countries presented at this year's European Congress on Obesity (ECO)in Sofia, Bulgaria, shows that children consuming a diet more in line with the rules of the Mediterranean one are 15% less likely to be overweight or obese than those children who do not. The research is by Dr Gianluca Tognon, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden, and colleagues across the 8 countries: Sweden, Germany, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Belgium, Estonia and Hungary. The researchers used data from the IDEFICS study (Identification and Prevention of Dietary – and lifestyle ...

The World Cup in Brazil may be attracting a global armchair audience of millions, but new research has shown that playing football could help lower blood pressure in women aged 35-50. Women within this age group with mild high blood pressure achieve a significant reduction in blood pressure and body fat percentage through playing recreational football for 15 weeks. This is the finding of a new study conducted in a collaboration between researchers across four countries, including Professor Peter Krustrup of the University of Exeter. The acclaimed Scandinavian Journal ...

New research by the Brigham and Women's Hospital, in partnership with Howard University College of Medicine, explores the effect of healthcare reform in Massachusetts on coronary intervention and mortality in adults by race/ethnicity, gender and the level of education in the neighborhood where the patient resides. Published in the June 17, 2014, issue of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, these findings indicate that healthcare reform in Massachusetts has not yet impacted the likelihood of receiving coronary interventions by gender, race/ethnicity ...

SAN ANTONIO, June 19, 2014 – Research conducted at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Pigment Cell and Melanoma, has established unequivocally in a natural animal model that the incidence of malignant melanoma in adulthood can be dramatically reduced by the consistent use of sunscreen in infancy and childhood. According to senior author John L. VandeBerg, Ph.D., the research was driven by the fact that, despite the increasing use of sunscreen in recent decades, the incidence of malignant melanoma, the most ...