The new PandaX facility, located deep underground in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, hosts a large liquid-xenon detector designed to search for direct evidence of dark matter interactions with the nuclei of xenon and to observe 136Xe double-beta decay. The detector's central vessel was designed to accommodate a staged target volume increase from an initial 120 kg (stage I) to 0.5 t (stage II) and ultimately to a multi-ton scale. The technical design of the PandaX facility and detector is outlined in a new paper co-authored by Ji Xiangdong, of the Institute ...

Basement membrane degradation and blood-brain barrier damage appear after cerebral infarction, severely impacting neuronal and brain functioning. Matrix metalloproteinase-9 is able to degrade the major components of the basement membrane around cerebral blood vessels and to mediate extracellular matrix remodeling. Therefore, Dr. Huilian Hou and colleagues from the First Affiliated Hospital of Medical School of Xi'an Jiaotong University, China induced cerebral infarction in stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rats by intragastric administration of high-sodium water (1.3% ...

Neuroprotection by ischemic preconditioning has been confirmed by many studies, but the precise mechanism remains unclear. In a study released in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 11, 2014), Dr. Yong Liu and co-workers from Tongji Hospital Affiliated to Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China performed cerebral ischemic preconditioning in rats by simulating a transient ischemic attack, and explored the mechanism underlying the neuroprotective effect of ischemic preconditioning. Researchers discovered that the infarct volume ...

Scientists with the NH Agricultural Experiment Station are working to restore New Hampshire and Maine's only native rabbit after new research based on genetic monitoring has found that in the last decade, cottontail populations in northern New England have become more isolated and seen a 50 percent contraction of their range. The endangered New England cottontail is now is at risk of becoming extinct in the region, according to NH Agricultural Experiment Station researchers at the University of New Hampshire College of Life Sciences and Agriculture who believe that restoring ...

Leading experts have joined together for the first time to call for better screening of psoriatic arthritis to help millions of people worldwide suffering from the condition. Psoriatic arthritis (PsA) causes painful joint inflammation and can cause irreversible joint damage if left untreated. PsA tends to affect people with the skin condition psoriasis, which causes a red, scaly rash, and affects approximately two per cent of people in the UK. Around one in five go on to develop PsA – usually within ten years of the initial skin problem being diagnosed. Coming ...

This beautiful star cluster, NGC 3293, is found 8000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina (The Keel). This cluster was first spotted by the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in 1751, during his stay in what is now South Africa, using a tiny telescope with an aperture of just 12 millimetres. It is one of the brightest clusters in the southern sky and can be easily seen with the naked eye on a dark clear night. Star clusters like NGC 3293 contain stars that all formed at the same time, at the same distance from Earth and out of the same cloud ...

Los Angeles, CA (July 23, 2014) Both short and tall men in the military are more at risk for depression than their uniformed colleagues of average height, a new study finds. This study was published today in the open access journal SAGE Open. Despite the researchers' original hypothesis that shorter men in the military would be more psychologically vulnerable than their taller counterparts, researchers Valery Krupnik and Mariya Cherkasova found that men both shorter and taller than average by one standard deviation may be predisposed to higher rates of depressive disorders. ...

CHICAGO --- Controlling pain during childbirth and post delivery may reduce the risk of postpartum depression, writes Katherine Wisner, M.D., a Northwestern Medicine® perinatal psychiatrist, in a July 23 editorial in Anesthesia & Analgesia. Wisner's editorial is based on a new Chinese study that found women who had pain control with epidural anesthesia during a vaginal delivery had a much lower risk for postpartum depression than women who didn't have the epidural. "Maximizing pain control in labor and delivery with your obstetrician and anesthesia team might help ...

With nearly four in five older Americans living with multiple chronic medical conditions, a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health finds that the more ailments you have after retirement age, the shorter your life expectancy. The analysis, one of the first to examine the burden of multiple chronic conditions on life expectancy among the elderly, may help explain why increases in life expectancy among older Americans are slowing. A report on the findings, based on an analysis of 1.4 million Medicare enrollees, appears in the August issue ...

The degree to which consumers perceive themselves to be knowledgeable about a product influences the likelihood that they will buy a particular product, researchers find in a series of studies published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Together, our findings suggest that subjective knowledge may play an important role in determining ideal size for choice sets," explains researcher Liat Hadar of the Arison School of Business at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel. "That is, more options should be provided in ...

Lipid emulsions are crucial for providing essential fatty acids and energy to infants and children who need intravenous feeding. There has been concern that soybean-based emulsions could compromise immune functions and promote liver damage due to its composition. Combination lipid emulsions based on triglyceride oil, fish oil, or olive oil have been developed to address this concern. However, researchers at Rutgers and Tufts universities found that concern may be unwarranted, according to a review published today in the OnlineFirst version of the Journal of Parenteral ...

Heroic worldwide conservation efforts have made great strides in saving China's endangered national treasure, the giant panda. Now, in China, there are over 65 giant panda reserves that have been established and three large breeding centers. But despite these efforts, just 1596 pandas remain in the wild. Breeding programs in conservation centers and zoos hope to save the panda by improving genetic diversity, avoid inbreeding and ultimately, introduce pandas back to the wild. Just how are these high-profile programs doing so far? In a new study appearing in the advanced ...

The Leishmania parasite, which causes the human disease leishmaniasis, acts as a probiotic in the insect that transmits it to humans, protecting them from bacterial disease. Findings published in the open access journal Parasites and Vectors suggest that using bacterial controls to stop the spread of leishmaniasis could sometimes have the opposite effect to that intended, by benefiting flies carrying the parasite. Around 12 million people are currently infected with leishmaniasis worldwide, mostly in South America, Africa and Asia. It is estimated to kill 20-50,000 people ...

Researchers studying banded mongooses in Uganda have discovered that those who work hard to care for pups may be less likely to invest in future offspring in the same way due to elevated stress hormones. Dr Jennifer Sanderson, from the University of Exeter, has been observing wild banded mongooses to understand why working hard makes them less likely to work hard in the future. She discovered that when a banded mongoose invests heavily to care for mongoose pups, it experiences an increase in circulating stress hormones (or 'glucocorticoids'), and these high stress ...

Athens, Ga. – Scientists have long known that providing supplemental food for wildlife, or resource provisioning, can sometimes cause more harm than good. University of Georgia ecologists have developed a new mathematical model to tease apart the processes that help explain why. Their research, which has implications for public health and wildlife conservation, appears in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. Wildlife of many kinds are increasingly finding their meals in human environments, gathering at places like backyard bird feeders, landfills or farms that offer ...

PHILADELPHIA (July 22, 2014) – New research from the Monell Center reveals that simply believing that an odor is potentially harmful can increase airway inflammation in asthmatics for at least 24 hours following exposure. The findings highlight the role that expectations can play in health-related outcomes. "Asthmatics often are anxious about scents and fragrances. When we expect that an odor is harmful, our bodies react as if that odor is indeed harmful," said study lead author Cristina Jaén, PhD, a Monell physiologist. "Both patients and care providers need to understand ...

Recent published research in the Journal of Clinical Investigation demonstrates how changes in dopamine signaling and dopamine transporter function are linked to neurological and psychiatric diseases, including early-onset Parkinsonism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). "The present findings should provide a critical basis for further exploration of how dopamine dysfunction and altered dopamine transporter function contribute to brain disorders" said Michelle Sahai, a postdoctoral associate at the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University, ...

Freezing and thawing might not be good for the average steak, but it seems to help wood frogs each fall as they prepare to survive Alaska's winter cold. "Alaska wood frogs spend more time freezing and thawing outside than a steak does in your freezer and the frog comes back to life in the spring in better shape than the steak," said Don Larson, University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student and lead author on a recent paper demonstrating that freeze tolerance in Alaska wood frogs is more extreme than previously thought. Although wood frogs are well-studied freeze-tolerant ...

Among women undergoing a minimally invasive hysterectomy using electric power morcellation, uterine cancers were present in 27 per 10,000 women at the time of the procedure, according to a study published by JAMA. There has been concern that this procedure, in which the uterus is fragmented into smaller pieces, may result in the spread of undetected malignancies. Despite the commercial availability of electric power morcellators for 2 decades, accurate estimates of the prevalence of malignancy at the time of electric power morcellation (in this study referred to as morcellation) ...

If you're a member of the Clean Plate Club – you eat pretty much everything you put on your plate – you're not alone! A new Cornell University study shows that the average adult eats 92% of whatever he or she puts on his or her plate. "If you put it on your plate, it's going into your stomach," says Brian Wansink Ph.D., author of the forthcoming book, Slim by Design, Professor of Marketing and Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. Wansink and co-author Katherine Abowd Johnson analyzed 1179 diners and concluded that we're a Clean Plate Planet. Although diners ...

Computer scientists at MIT and Israel's Technion have discovered an unexpected source of information about the world's languages: the habits of native speakers of those languages when writing in English. The work could enable computers chewing through relatively accessible documents to approximate data that might take trained linguists months in the field to collect. But that data could in turn lead to better computational tools. "These [linguistic] features that our system is learning are of course, on one hand, of nice theoretical interest for linguists," says Boris ...

VIDEO: Zoom into an artist's rendering of AY Sextantis, a binary star system whose pulsar switched from radio emissions to high-energy gamma rays in 2013. This transition likely means the pulsar's... Click here for more information. In late June 2013, an exceptional binary containing a rapidly spinning neutron star underwent a dramatic change in behavior never before observed. The pulsar's radio beacon vanished, while at the same time the system brightened fivefold in gamma rays, ...

A 45 per cent rise in diagnostic imaging tests ordered by Australian GPs is being driven by increasing GP visits, a rising number of problems managed at consultations and a higher likelihood that GPs order imaging tests for these problems, according to a new University of Sydney study released today. Based on a long term national survey of 9,802 GPs between 2002 and 2012, the report draws on data from more than 980,000 GP-patient encounter records to assess the extent to which GP's order tests in line with diagnostic imaging guidelines. "Most imaging tests ordered by ...

When it comes to heart disease, Dr. Ross Feldman says women are often in the dark. Historically, it was thought that heart disease was a men's-only disease, however, data has shown that post-menopausal women are just as likely as men to get heart disease and are less likely to be adequately diagnosed and treated. New research from Western University published online this week in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology brings to light a genetic basis for heart disease in women and helps to identify which women are more prone to heart disease. The study, led by Dr. ...

If you're allergic to dust mites (and chances are you are), help may be on the way. Researchers at the University of Iowa have developed a vaccine that can combat dust-mite allergies by naturally switching the body's immune response. In animal tests, the nano-sized vaccine package lowered lung inflammation by 83 percent despite repeated exposure to the allergens, according to the paper, published in the AAPS (American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists) Journal. One big reason why it works, the researchers contend, is because the vaccine package contains a booster ...