The control of modern infrastructure such as intelligent power grids needs lots of computing capacity. Scientists of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg have developed an algorithm that might revolutionise these processes. With their new software the SnT researchers are able to forego the use of considerable amounts of computing capacity, enabling what they call micro mining. Their achievements, which the team headed by Prof. Yves Le Traon published in the International Conference on Software Engineering ...

The Caribbean has the second highest global human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevalence in the world outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, with HIV/AIDS as leading cause of death among people aged 20–59 years within the region. Particularly hard-hit are the Dominican Republic (DR) and Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola, accounting for approximately 70% of all people living with HIV in the Caribbean region. Insufficient attention has been paid to the intersection of drugs and tourism as contributing factors for the region's elevated HIV/AIDS risk. Caribbean studies ...

The first study to examine prenatal exposure to the phthalate DiNP finds it is associated with a shorter anogenital distance (AGD) in Swedish boys at the age of 21 months. These findings raise concern since animal research has linked DiNP exposure to a shorter AGD, and studies on humans have related shorter AGD to male genital birth defects as well as impaired reproductive function in adult males, and the levels of DiNP metabolites in humans are increasing globally. Background Phthalates are used as plasticizers in soft polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and found in a large ...

More than 110,000 individual deaths and their causes across 13 countries, including Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Bangladesh and Vietnam, are contained in the new INDEPTH dataset. The data, collected by hundreds of researchers over two decades, are the first meaningful community-based information about cause of death in countries where individual deaths are not recorded automatically by national governments. The INDEPTH cause of death findings are published in a special issue of the journal Global Health Action, which is fully open access. There are six multisite papers ...

Chicago, October 29, 2014 – Aortic valve replacement (AVR) can safely be used to treat severe aortic stenosis in patients age 90 years and older and is associated with a low risk of operative stroke and mortality, according to a study in the November 2014 issue of The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. Key points Aortic valve replacement appears to be safe and effective for patients over age 90 years with severe aortic stenosis. Four out of five (81.3%) patients were alive 1 year following AVR. TAVR had similar rates of morbidity and mortality as traditional surgical ...

Bethesda, MD (Oct. 29, 2014) — Fecal immunochemical tests (FIT) may be as effective as colonoscopies when it comes to detecting colorectal cancer among first-degree relatives of patients with colorectal cancer, according to a new study in Gastroenterology1, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. "In our study, repeat FIT screening detected all colorectal cancers in asymptomatic first-degree relatives of patients with colorectal cancer," said lead study authors Enrique Quintero, MD, PhD, and Marta Carrillo, MD, from Hospital Universitario ...

In its latest Emerging Cyber Threats Report, Georgia Tech warns about loss of privacy; abuse of trust between users and machines; attacks against the mobile ecosystem; rogue insiders; and the increasing involvement of cyberspace in nation-state conflicts. Such topics are discussed at length in the annual report, which is published by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). The report will be released this week at the 12th Georgia Tech Cyber Security Summit (GT CSS), which has become the Atlanta IT community's ...

A new technology that may assist in the treatment of brain cancer and other neurological diseases is the subject of an article in a recent issue of the journal Technology, published by World Scientific Publishing Company. According to the authors, the current medical use of chemotherapy to treat brain cancer can be inefficient because of the blood-brain-barrier that impedes the delivery of drugs out of blood vessels and into the tumor. The researchers from the Virginia Tech – Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences described in their ...

Smoke and haze hang over a large portion of eastern China in this image captured by the Aqua satellite on October 29, 2014. China uses the method of "slash and burn" agriculture to rid their fields of leftover plants. Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants. While fire helps enhance crops and grasses for pasture, the fires also produce smoke that degrades air quality as seen in this image. The U.S. Consulate in Beijing records an air quality index of 226 for October 29 putting it in the "Very Unhealthy" region. ...

With fears growing over chemical and biological weapons falling into the wrong hands, scientists are developing microrockets to fight back against these dangerous agents, should the need arise. In the journal ACS Nano, they describe new spherical micromotors that rapidly neutralize chemical and biological agents and use water as fuel. Joseph Wang and colleagues point out that titanium dioxide is one of the most promising materials available for degrading chemical and biological warfare agents. It doesn't require harsh chemicals or result in toxic by-products. Current ...

Plants rely on sunlight to make their food, but they also need protection from its harmful rays, just like humans do. Recently, scientists discovered a group of molecules in plants that shields them from sun damage. Now, in an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, one team reports on the mechanics of how these natural plant sunscreens work. Timothy Zwier and colleagues at Purdue University note that the harsh ultraviolet radiation plants are exposed to daily can cause serious damage to plant DNA and, as a result, hinder plant growth. Biochemical tests ...

An overwhelming number of chemicals from household and industrial products are in the environment – and hundreds are in our bodies. But for most of them, scientists have yet to determine whether they cause health problems. Now they've taken the first step toward doing that by estimating which substances people are exposed to the most. Their new method is published in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology. John F. Wambaugh and colleagues note that the risks to human health of any given substance depend primarily on two factors: the potential hazards ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 29, 2014--Unable to fly, nestling birds depend on their parents for both food and protection: vocal communication between parents and offspring helps young birds to determine when they should beg for food and when they should crouch in the nest to avoid a predator seeking an easy meal. A group of researchers from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia has found that ambient, anthropomorphic noise – from traffic, construction and other human activities – can break this vital communications link, leaving nestlings vulnerable ...

Integrins are adhesion molecules expressed on the surface of cells. They play a crucial role in "integrating" the cell exterior and the interior cytoskeleton in cells. The beta2-integrin family members are highly expressed in dendritic cells that are very important in immune responses. Dendritic cells pick up antigens in inflamed tissues and move to lymph nodes where they present the antigen to T cells and activate them to help fight infection. Dr Susanna Fagerholm's groups at the Institute of Biotechnology in Helsinki, Finland, and at the University of Dundee, UK, found ...

Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing a special feature of 31 articles describing the data gathered by Planck over 15 months of observations and released by ESA and the Planck Collaboration in March 2013. This series of papers presents the initial scientific results extracted from this first Planck dataset. The Planck satellite was launched in May 2009. With the highest accuracy to date, it measures the remnants of the radiation that filled the Universe immediately after the Big Bang. It is the oldest light in the Universe, emitted when it was 380000 years old. This ...

October 27, 2014 — Cambridge, MA and Hebei, China — BGI Tech and Hebei Agricultural University jointly announced the complete, high quality sequencing of the Jujube genome. Jujube is the most economically important member of the Rhamnaceae family, and the Jujube genome is particularly difficult to sequence due the high level of heterozygosity and other complicating factors. It is the first time that a genome in the Rhamnaceae (Buckthorn) family has been sequenced. This study has been recently published in Nature Communications. Jujube is a major commercial ...

The development of minimally and even non-invasive technologies is increasing in the medical field. It is now possible, for instance, to carry out a range of operative procedures using keyhole surgery with minimal use of the scalpel, leaving only tiny scars as a result. Similar opportunities are now becoming available when providing doses of active agents to patients – instead of using injections or probes to deliver drugs, it will in future be possible to supply them via a plaster which continuously, gently and painlessly delivers the required dosage through the ...

Virtually all organisms in the living world compete with members of their own species. However, individuals differ strongly in how much they invest into their competitive ability. Some individuals are highly competitive and eager to get access to high-quality resources, while others seem to avoid competition, instead making prudent use of the lower-quality resources that are left over for them. Moreover, the degree of competitiveness in animal and human societies seems to fluctuate considerably over time. A theoretical study published in "Nature Communications" this week ...

Philadelphia, PA, October 29, 2014 – Ghrelin is a hormone released by the stomach and it stimulates appetite and food intake. Alcohol is commonly viewed as a psychoactive substance that primarily affects brain function, but it is also a highly caloric food. This knowledge, combined with findings from animal studies, led researchers to the hypothesis that ghrelin has the potential to stimulate alcohol craving. Dr. Lorenzo Leggio and his colleagues tested this in humans and found that, as they had anticipated, alcohol craving was increased in heavy drinkers following ...

TORONTO, ON, Oct. 28, 2014 — People living in rural areas are at no greater risk of dying from heart disease than their urban counterparts, according to a new study by researchers at Women's College Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). The study, the first to examine outpatient quality of care between urban and rural communities, counters existing research, which suggested gaps in care for those living in rural areas. "Research has long suggested people with heart disease in rural areas are at a disadvantage when it comes to access ...

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have sequenced the genome of enterovirus D68 sampled from patients treated at St. Louis Children's Hospital. Nationwide, the virus has spread rapidly in recent months and caused severe respiratory illness in young children, with some patients requiring hospitalization. "Having the DNA sequence of this virus enables additional research," said senior author Gregory A. Storch, MD, the Ruth L. Siteman Professor of Pediatrics. "It can be used to create better diagnostic tests. It also may help us understand ...

DENVER (Oct. 29, 2014) – The severe flooding that devastated a wide swath of Colorado last year might have been less destructive if the bridges, roads and other infrastructure had been upgraded or modernized, according to a new study from the University of Colorado Denver. "People need to understand the importance and seriousness of infrastructure," said Jimmy Kim, PhD, associate professor of structural engineering at the CU Denver College of Engineering and Applied Science and lead author the study. "There is an assumption that a bridge will stand forever and that's ...

The research team previously identified that changes in the brain occur two decades before patients show signs of dementia. These changes can be detected through expensive brain imaging procedures. The new early detection blood-test could predict these changes and a person's risk of developing AD much earlier than is currently possible. The blood test has the potential to improve prediction for AD to 91 per cent accuracy. However, this needs to be further tested in a larger population across three to five years, due to AD being a progressive disease. In an initial ...

A multidisciplinary engineering team at the University of California, San Diego developed a new nanoparticle-based material for concentrating solar power plants designed to absorb and convert to heat more than 90 percent of the sunlight it captures. The new material can also withstand temperatures greater than 700 degrees Celsius and survive many years outdoors in spite of exposure to air and humidity. Their work, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's SunShot program, was published recently in two separate articles in the journal Nano Energy. By contrast, current ...

Washington D.C, October 29, 2014 -- Ant nests can offer a lot to organisms other than just ants. They are well-protected, environmentally-stable and resource-rich spaces -- in many ways everything a tiny creature could ask for in a home. So long as you can live with an army of ants of course. For the thousands of species of insects that squat inside ant nests, survival means finding ways to live with the ants -- by foiling the chemical cues ants use to distinguish friend from foe, for instance. Now a team of scientists from the University of Turin in Italy have been ...