A new study suggests uric acid may play a role in causing metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors that increases the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Uric acid is a normal waste product removed from the body by the kidneys and intestines and released in urine and stool. Elevated levels of uric acid are known to cause gout, an accumulation of the acid in the joints. High levels also are associated with the markers of metabolic syndrome, which is characterized by obesity, high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar and high cholesterol. But it has been unclear ...

WASHINGTON -- Learning to play a musical instrument or to sing can help disadvantaged children strengthen their reading and language skills, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association's 122nd Annual Convention. The findings, which involved hundreds of kids participating in musical training programs in Chicago and Los Angeles public schools, highlight the role learning music can have on the brains of youth in impoverished areas, according to presenter Nina Kraus, PhD, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University. "Research has shown that ...

The air pressure that makes inflatable parade floats, foil balloons and even inflatable buildings easy to deploy and cost effective can be challenging to designers of those same inflatables due to limitations in today's fabrication process, but a new interactive computational tool enables even non-experts to create intricate inflatable structures. Developed by a team from Disney Research Zurich, ETH Zurich and Columbia University, the method reverse-engineers the physics of inflation as the designer sketches the shape of the structure and the placement of seams. As a ...

Tops and yo-yos are among the oldest types of playthings but researchers at Disney Research Zurich and ETH Zurich have given them a new spin with an algorithm that makes it easier to design these toys so that they have asymmetric shapes. The algorithm can take a 3D model of an object and, within less than a minute, calculate how mass can be distributed within the object to enable a stable spin around a desired axis. Sometimes, adding voids within the object is sufficient to provide stability; in other cases, the object's shape might need to be altered a bit or a heavier ...

Sound effects and visual effects have long been standard tools for entertaining audiences, but even as storytellers increasingly turn to haptic feedback to engage the sense of touch in games, theme park rides and movies, they have lacked a common vocabulary to describe or access these "feel effects." Researchers at Disney Research Pittsburgh are beginning to fill that gap. In a study to be presented at the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, Aug. 8-9, in Vancouver, Canada, Disney researchers worked with human participants and a Carnegie Mellon University psychologist ...

Perhaps no aspect of 3D printing has captured the popular imagination more than personalized figurines with the facial features of real people. Now, researchers at Disney Research Zurich and the University of Zaragoza have developed a method that can incorporate an individual's hairstyle as well. The researchers will present their new method at ACM SIGGRAPH 2014, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Vancouver, Aug. 10-14. Miniature statues with a person's likeness are nowadays produced by scanning the individual's face with ...

For centuries, horse riding was largely restricted to males. The previous situation is in stark contrast to the present day, when nearly 80 percent of riders are women. Modern-day equestrian sports are unique in that men and women compete directly against one another at all levels, from beginners in gymkhanas to national champions in the Olympic Games. "For this reason it is interesting to consider whether a theory of riding that was developed exclusively for men can be applied to women," explains Natascha Ille, the first author of the recent publication. A rider is ...

The immediate aftermath of an oil spill The fate of oil during the first day after an accidental oil spill is still poorly understood, with researchers often arriving on the scene only after several days. New findings from a field experiment carried out in the North Sea provide valuable insight that could help shape the emergency response in the immediate wake of disasters. It is well known that oil and water don't mix. Less well known is the fact that when petroleum is spilt onto a water surface, a fraction of the oil immediately begins to evaporate into the air or ...

(PHILDELPHIA) – MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate protein-coding gene abundance levels by interacting with the 3´ end of various messenger RNAs. Each target site matches the first few nucleotides of the targeting miRNA, the so called "seed" region, and this interaction leads to the degradation of the target or prevents its translation into amino acids. This dogma has led researchers to largely look for perfect base-pair matching of the "seed" region among candidate targets. New research published today (August 8th) in Nature's open access journal Scientific Reports suggests ...

In the developing brain, special proteins that act like molecular tugboats push or pull on growing nerve cells, or neurons, helping them navigate to their assigned places amidst the brain's wiring. How a single protein can exert both a push and a pull force to nudge a neuron in the desired direction is a longstanding mystery that has now been solved by scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and collaborators in Europe and China. Jia-huai Wang, PhD, who led the work at Dana-Farber and Peking University in Beijing, is a corresponding author of a report published ...

After injury, damaged axons have the capacity to regenerate, but the regenerative capacity of the axon, particularly axons of the central nervous system, is quite limited. This is because the damaged axons tend to retract, because they encounter obstacles such as scar tissue and inhibitory molecules, and because their growth rates simply do not match those of a juvenile axon. Prof. Peter W. Baas from Drexel University, USA focus on microtubules as among the most important factors in encouraging injured adult axons to regenerate. Microtubules are hollow polymeric filaments ...

Recent studies have demonstrated that Notch-1 expression is increased in the hippocampus of Alzheimer's disease patients. Huimin Liang and co-workers from Second Affliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, China speculate that Notch-1 signaling may be involved in PC12 cell apoptosis induced by amyloid beta-peptide (25-35) (Aβ25-35). In a study reported on the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 13, 2014), PC12 cells were cultured with different doses (0, 0.1, 1.0, 10 and 100 nmol/L) of N-[N-(3,5-Difuorophen-acetyl)-L-alanyl]-S-phenylglycine t-butyl ester, a Notch-1 ...

Curtin University planetary scientists have shed some light on the bombardment history of our solar system by studying a unique volcanic meteorite recovered in Western Australia. Captured on camera seven years ago falling on the WA side of the Nullarbor Plain, the Bunburra Rockhole Meterorite has unique characteristics that suggest it came from a large asteroid that has never before been identified. Associate Professor Fred Jourdan, along with colleagues Professor Phil Bland and Dr Gretchen Benedix from Curtin's Department of Applied Geology, believe the meteorite is ...

Scientists at A*STAR's Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) and the Bioinformatics Institute (BII) have found new clues to early detection and personalised treatment of ovarian cancer, currently one of the most difficult cancers to diagnose early due to the lack of symptoms that are unique to the illness. There are three predominant cancers that affect women – breast, ovarian and womb cancer. Of the three, ovarian cancer is of the greatest concern as it is usually diagnosed only at an advanced stage due to the absence of clear early warning symptoms. Successful treatment ...

WASHINGTON –- Even when not under arrest, juvenile suspects being interrogated for a crime may be strikingly unaware of their constitutional rights and confess without legal counsel or even a parent present, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association's 122nd Annual Convention. An analysis of 57 videotaped juvenile interrogations at 17 police departments around the country revealed none of the suspects, who ranged in age from 13 to 17, had an attorney present while they were questioned, according to Hayley Cleary, PhD, of Virginia Commonwealth ...

WASHINGTON –- Parents play a direct role in distracted teen driving, with more than half of teens talking on cellphones with their mother or father while driving, according to new research presented at the American Psychological Association's 122nd Annual Convention. Researchers interviewed or surveyed more than 400 teen drivers, ages 15 to 18, from 31 states to find out why they continue to talk and text behind the wheel, despite warnings about the serious hazards of distracted driving. "Teens said parents expect to be able to reach them, that parents get mad if they ...

A stroke therapy using stem cells extracted from patients' bone marrow has shown promising results in the first trial of its kind in humans. Five patients received the treatment in a pilot study conducted by doctors at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and scientists at Imperial College London. The therapy was found to be safe, and all the patients showed improvements in clinical measures of disability. The findings are published in the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine. It is the first UK human trial of a stem cell treatment for acute stroke to be published. The ...

Half-metallic ferromagnet CrO2 has attracted much attention not only because of its fundamental physics related with high spin polarization but also because of its possible applications in the emerging area of spintronics. In these applications, synthesis of CrO2 films is of fundamental importance, primarily because of the difficulty in its synthesis, as it is not known to form under ambient pressures in a pure form. Extensive efforts have been made to grow high quality CrO2 films, but the growth technology still deserves research. The high quality CrO2 film on the ...

New 3D printing techniques have made it possible for just about anybody to fabricate fanciful plastic characters and sculptures, two new computational design methods developed by Disney Research Zurich are making it possible for even casual users to bring these creations to life by adding mechanical motion. The methods apply to two specific types of characters – planar mechanical characters that are similar to shadow puppets, and linkage-based characters formed by networks of rigid links and hinged joints. In either case, the researchers have developed tools that lead ...

Video cameras that people wear to record daily activities are creating a novel form of creative and informative media. But this footage also poses a challenge: how to expeditiously edit hours of raw video into something watchable. One solution, according to Disney researchers, is to automate the editing process by leveraging the first-person viewpoints of multiple cameras to find the areas of greatest interest in the scene. The method they developed can automatically combine footage of a single event shot by several such "social cameras" into a coherent, condensed video. ...

Oil might not, at first sight, seem like an inhabited terrain. Within the oil, however, are tiny, suspended water droplets. "Inside them we found complex microbial communities, which play an active part in oil degradation in situ," says first author Prof. Rainer Meckenstock from the Helmholtz Zentrum München (HMGU). Previously it was assumed that microbial oil degradation only occurred at the oil-water interface. The team headed by Prof. Meckenstock from the Institute of Groundwater Ecology and the Department of Biogeochemistry at HMGU along with international colleagues ...

Disney Research Zurich has developed a new tool to help video editors synchronize multiple video clips based on the visual content of the videos, rather than relying on timecodes or other external markers. Current editing tools include a "snapping" interface that aligns video clips based on start-and-end times; by contrast, Disney Research's VideoSnapping method is based on an analysis of the content of the video. This makes it easier to synchronize multiple clips without such cues as global timecodes or audio, and even when clips are shot at different trajectories and ...

Resistance switching of random access memory has been widely explored due to its potential for replacement of flash memory in the next-generation nonvolatile memory applications. One of the problems with resistive switching materials is the variations of switching parameters, which will deteriorate the device endurance. How do we solve this problem? Many methods have been tried to improve the resistive switching performances, such as doping in the insulator film, using appropriate electrodes and inserting interlayer between the electrode and the insulator ...

Workplace stress can have a range of adverse effects on health with an increased risk of cardio-vascular diseases in the first line. However, to date, convincing evidence for a strong association between work stress and incident Type 2 diabetes mellitus is missing. Risk of diabetes about 45 percent higher As the team of scientists headed by Dr. Cornelia Huth and Prof. Karl-Heinz Ladwig has now discovered that individuals who are under a high level of pressure at work and at the same time perceive little control over the activities they perform face an about 45 percent ...

A commonly held belief that global warming will diminish oxygen concentrations in the ocean looks like it may not be entirely true. According to new research published in Science magazine, just the opposite is likely the case in the eastern tropical northern Pacific, with its anoxic zone expected to shrink in coming decades because of climate change. An international team of scientists came to that surprising conclusion after completing a detailed assessment of changes since 1850 in the eastern tropical northern Pacific Ocean's oxygen minimum zone (OMZ). An ocean layer ...