Laser physicists have found a way to make atomic-force microscope probes 20 times more sensitive and capable of detecting forces as small as the weight of an individual virus. The technique, developed by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU), hinges on using laser beams to cool a nanowire probe to minus 265 degrees Celsius. "The level of sensitivity achieved after cooling is accurate enough for us to sense the weight of a large virus that is 100 billion times lighter than a mosquito," said Dr Ben Buchler from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. The ...

Stem cell researchers at the Blond McIndoe Laboratory, University of Manchester, UK, led by Dr Adam Reid, present a review of the current literature on the suitability of adipose-derived stem cells in peripheral nerve repair. Injuries to peripheral nerves are common and cause life-changing problems for patients alongside high social and health care costs for society. Current clinical treatment relies on sacrificing a nerve from elsewhere in the body to provide a nerve graft at the injury site, but much work has been done to develop a bioengineered nerve graft that would ...

Transport accounts for 30% of CO2 emissions in the EU, with emissions rising 36% between 1990 and 2007. The research, carried out by Lund University and the University of Surrey a found a need to dissect the widely-held view that new technologies, such as biofuel and improved aircraft design, will result in carbon reduction targets being met. In the paper, researchers highlight the fact that policy makers are turning to the perceived benefits of such technologies to drive decarbonisation policy, despite contrary evidence. They argue that in order to cut damaging carbon ...

Researchers at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have discovered that the conductivity at the edges of graphene devices is different to that of the central material. Local scanning electrical techniques were used to examine the local nanoscale electronic properties of epitaxial graphene, in particular the differences between the edges and central parts of graphene Hall bar devices. The research was published in Scientific Reports, an open access publication from Nature Publishing Group. The researchers found that the central part of the graphene channel demonstrated ...

Port scanners are programs that search the Internet for systems that exhibit potential vulnerabilities. According to the report published today by journalists at Heise Online, Hacienda is one such port scanning program. The report says that this program is being put into service by the "Five Eyes," a federation of the secret services of the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. "The goal is to identify as many servers as possible in other countries that can be remotely controlled," explains Dr. Christian Grothoff, Emmy Noether research group leader at the TUM ...

Washington, DC (August 12, 2014) – Determining deception is a tool of the trade for law enforcement. The Good Cop/Bad Cop routine is etched in our minds as an effective method of finding out the truth. But prior research has shown that lie detecting is a 50/50 shot for experts and non-experts alike. So what exactly can we do to find out the truth? A recent study published in Human Communication Research by researchers at Korea University, Michigan State University, and Texas State University - San Marcos found that using active questioning of individuals yielded near-perfect ...

The physical properties of the ultra-white scales on certain species of beetle could be used to make whiter paper, plastics and paints, while using far less material than is used in current manufacturing methods. The Cyphochilus beetle, which is native to South-East Asia, is whiter than paper, thanks to ultra-thin scales which cover its body. A new investigation of the optical properties of these scales has shown that they are able to scatter light more efficiently than any other biological tissue known, which is how they are able to achieve such a bright whiteness. ...

Much has been assumed about the private and public damage of scientific misconduct. Yet few have tried to measure the costs to perpetrators and to society. A recent study calculated some of the career impacts, as well as federal funding wasted, when biomedical research papers are retracted. The results appear in the Aug. 15 issue of the journal eLife. In questioning common assumptions, the study authors determined that scientific misconduct typically, but not always, exacts a personal toll in derailing careers. On the public side, the cost to federal funding sources ...

Links between a number of common respiratory diseases and an increased risk of developing lung cancer have been found in a large pooled analysis of seven studies involving more than 25,000 individuals. "Associations between various respiratory diseases and lung cancer have been shown in earlier studies, but few of these studies considered multiple respiratory diseases simultaneously," said researcher Ann Olsson, PhD, of the International Agency for Research in Cancer in Lyon, France. "In our pooled analysis of seven case-control studies involving more than 12,500 cases ...

HOUSTON – (August 15, 2014) – For premature infants, adequate growth while in the neonatal intensive care unit is an indicator of better long-term health and developmental outcomes. Researchers at the USDA/ARS Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital have now successfully incorporated a cream supplement into premature infants' diets that improved their growth outcomes in the NICU. The report appears today in the Journal of Pediatrics. "For premature babies who weigh less than 1,000 grams (about 2 pounds, 2 ounces), ...

A handful of genes arm the woodrat against the toxic chemicals in its foodstuff, the creosote plant, according to research published in the open access journal BMC Ecology. It's long been a mystery exactly how the woodrat developed the ability to handle the chemicals in the creosote plant, which are toxic to other rodents. Previous research has suggested that they are protected by factors such as gut bacteria. But the new study identifies the genes switched on in two species of woodrat with resistance to the plant poisons, showing that the genes that they are born with ...

An experimental vaccine to prevent the mosquito-borne viral illness chikungunya elicited neutralizing antibodies in all 25 adult volunteers who participated in a recent early-stage clinical trial conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The results are reported in the current issue of The Lancet. The most distinctive symptom of chikungunya infection is severe joint pain accompanied by headache and fever. There are currently no vaccines or specific drug treatments for chikungunya. ...

The Lancet is pleased to announce that the following papers will be published ahead of the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2014, taking place in Barcelona, Spain, from 30 August to 3 September 2014. This includes a special Series of three papers on lipids and cardiovascular disease. Blood pressure-lowering treatment based on cardiovascular risk: a meta-analysis of individual patient data by Dr Johan Sundström et al This study investigated whether the success of blood pressure-lowering drugs is dependent on baseline cardiovascular risk, and whether this could ...

The first human trial of a new vaccine developed using non-infectious virus-like particles (VLP) appears likely to offer protection against chikungunya virus, a mosquito-borne infection, according to a study published in The Lancet. Since its re-emergence in 2004, chikungunya virus has become a growing public-health threat that has affected millions of people in Africa, Asia, and Europe, and in recent months it has been spreading throughout the Americas. "Chikungunya virus has adapted itself to be transmitted by not only the Aedes aegypti mosquito that lives mainly in ...

Washington, DC (August 14, 2014) — Among black kidney failure patients undergoing dialysis, women are much less likely than men to want to receive kidney transplants from living donors, despite more offers from family and friends. The findings, which are from a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN), suggest that interventions are needed to increase women's acceptance of living donor kidney transplantation. Living donor kidney transplantation is the treatment of choice for patients with kidney failure, ...

Leaf measurements are often critical in plant physiological and ecological studies, but traditional methods have been time consuming and sometimes destructive to plant samples. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have developed Easy Leaf Area—a free software written in an open-source programming language—to allow users to accurately measure leaf area from digital images in seconds. "It has always been a challenge to measure leaf surface area without damaging the plants or spending long hours in the lab, so I decided to attempt to write software to automatically ...

Adults smokers with limited education face a greater risk of stroke than those with a higher education, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Stroke. The combination of smoking and high blood pressure increased stroke risk the most, confirming earlier findings in numerous studies. In a multicenter Danish study, researchers defined lower education as grade school or lower secondary school (maximum of 10 years) education. "We found it is worse being a current smoker with lower education than a current smoker with a higher education," said ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Mass layoffs may trigger increased suicide attempts and other suicide-related behaviors among some teenagers, says new research from Duke University. Lead author Anna Gassman-Pines found that when 1 percent of a state's working population lost jobs, suicide-related behaviors increased by 2 to 3 percentage points among girls and black adolescents in the following year. Among girls, thoughts of suicide and suicide plans rose. Among black teens, thoughts of suicide, suicide plans and suicide attempts all increased. "Job loss can be an unanticipated shock ...

Bottom Line: The odds of having diabetic macular edema (DME), a leading cause of vision loss in patients with diabetes mellitus, appears to be higher in non-Hispanic black patients than white patients, as well as in those individuals who have had diabetes longer and have higher levels of hemoglobin A1c. Author: Rohit Varma, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and colleagues. Background: About 347 million people worldwide have diabetes and diabetic eye disease is a leading cause of vision loss in patients between the ages of 20 and 74 ...

(Boston) – People living in states with stronger alcohol policy environments have a substantially lower likelihood of any binge drinking, frequent binge drinking, and high-intensity binge drinking, according to a new study by researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and Boston Medical Center (BMC), published in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Specifically, the study found, each 10 percentage point increase in the strength of a state's alcohol policy score (reflecting more effective and/or better implemented alcohol ...

A photo is worth a thousand words, but what if it could also represent a hundred thousand other images? New software developed by UC Berkeley computer scientists seeks to tame the vast amount of visual data in the world by generating a single photo that can represent massive clusters of images. This tool can give users the photographic gist of a kid on Santa's lap, housecats, or brides and grooms at their weddings. It works by generating an image that literally averages the key features of the other photos. Users can also give extra weight to specific features to ...

New York, NY, August 14, 2014 – Substance addiction is a large and growing problem for developing societies. A new study that surveyed reports on modalities for treating addiction and their effectiveness in the developing world calls on policymakers to use this information to support the design of programs that meet known population needs. The study also encourages looking at ways to adapt the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) model to fit different cultural norms. The findings are published in the Annals of Global Health. The World Health Organization has indicated that alcohol ...

Strong evidence now shows that human and animal parenting share many nervous system mechanisms. This is the conclusion of Yerkes National Primate Research Center researchers Larry Young, PhD, and James Rilling, PhD, in their review article about the biology of mammalian parenting, published in this week's issue of Science. Better understanding this biology could lead to improved social development, benefitting generations of humans and animals to come. In their article, Young and Rilling review the biological mechanisms governing a shift in mammals' parental motivation ...

Already known for their higher-than-usual risk of asthma and environmental allergies, young inner-city children appear to suffer disproportionately from food allergies as well, according to results of a study led by scientists at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. The federally funded multi-center study, described online Aug. 13 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, found that at least one in 10 children from four large U.S. cities has a food allergy. However, the true number may be even higher, the investigators say, because the study used highly stringent ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study shows a strong association between severe, untreated obstructive sleep apnea and the risk of elevated blood pressure despite the use of high blood pressure medications. The study involved patients who had cardiovascular risk factors or established heart disease and moderate or severe obstructive sleep apnea. Among participants prescribed at least three antihypertensives including a diuretic, resistant elevated blood pressure was more prevalent in those with severe sleep apnea (58.3 %) compared with moderate sleep apnea (28.6%). Further analysis ...