WASHINGTON D.C., April 8, 2014 -- Some 90 years ago, British polymath J.B.S. Haldane proposed that for every animal there is an optimal size -- one which allows it to make best use of its environment and the physical laws that govern its activities, whether hiding, hunting, hoofing or hibernating. Today, three researchers are asking whether there is a "right" size for another type of huge beast: the U.S. power grid. David Newman, a physicist at the University of Alaska, believes that smaller grids would reduce the likelihood of severe outages, such as the 2003 Northeast ...

HOUSTON – (April 8, 2014) – Creativity and innovation are not sufficiently integrated in either the business world or academic research, according to a new study by Rice University, the University of Edinburgh and Brunel University. The findings are the result of the authors' review of the rapidly growing body of research into creativity and innovation in the workplace, with particular attention to the period from 2002 to 2013. "There are many of us who study employee creativity and many of us who study innovation and idea implementation, but we don't talk to each ...

Montreal, April 8, 2014 — People who check whether their hands are clean or imagine their house might be on fire are not alone. New research from Concordia University and 15 other universities worldwide shows that 94 per cent of people experience unwanted, intrusive thoughts, images and/or impulses. The international study, which was co-authored by Concordia psychology professor Adam Radomsky and published in the Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, examined people on six continents. Radomsky and his colleagues found that the thoughts, images and ...

Scientists know that tapping into local expertise is key to conservation efforts aimed at protecting biodiversity – but researchers rarely give credit to these local experts. Now some scientists are saying that's a problem, both for the local experts and for the science itself. To address the problem, a group of scientists is calling for conservation researchers to do a better job of publicly acknowledging the role of local experts and other non-scientists in conservation biology. "For example, in the rainforests of the Yucatán, scientists couldn't even begin to do ...

DALLAS – April 8, 2014 – UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have demonstrated in both cancer cell lines and in mice that blocking critical DNA repair mechanisms could improve the effectiveness of radiation therapy for highly fatal brain tumors called glioblastomas. Radiation therapy causes double-strand breaks in DNA that must be repaired for tumors to keep growing. Scientists have long theorized that if they could find a way to block repairs from being made, they could prevent tumors from growing or at least slow down the growth, thereby extending patients' survival. ...

This news release is available in French. When you throw a wild pitch or sing a flat note, it could be that your basal ganglia made you do it. This area in the middle of the brain is involved in motor control and learning. And one reason for that errant toss or off-key note may be that your brain prompted you to vary your behavior to help you learn, from trial-and-error, to perform better. But how does the brain do this, how does it cause you to vary your behavior? Along with researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, Indian Institute of Science ...

As Tropical Depression Peipah continues moving toward the central Philippines, NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead and took an infrared look at the cloud top temperatures for clues about its strength. On April 8 at 05:11 UTC/1:11 a.m. EDT/11 p.m. Manila local time, the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder instrument known as AIRS gathered infrared data on Tropical Depression Peipah. AIRS is one of the instruments that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite. The AIRS data showed thunderstorms with very cold cloud-top temperatures surrounded the center of the low-level circulation ...

A research team from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai published the first controlled evidence showing that an intranasal ketamine spray conferred an unusually rapid antidepressant effect –within 24 hours—and was well tolerated in patients with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder. This is the first study to show benefits with an intranasal formulation of ketamine. Results from the study were published online in the peer-reviewed journal Biological Psychiatry on April 2, 2014. Of 18 patients completing two treatment days with ketamine or saline, eight ...

Johns Hopkins researchers say they have confirmed suspicions that DNA modifications found in the blood of mice exposed to high levels of stress hormone — and showing signs of anxiety — are directly related to changes found in their brain tissues. The proof-of-concept study, reported online ahead of print in the June issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology, offers what the research team calls the first evidence that epigenetic changes that alter the way genes function without changing their underlying DNA sequence — and are detectable in blood — mirror alterations in brain tissue ...

This knowledge is of particular interest for producers, since changes in the grape directly affect the chemical composition of the must. The thesis entitled "Estudios avanzados de la fisiología de levadura en condiciones de vinificación. Bases para el desarrollo de un modelo predictivo" [Advanced studies into yeast physiology in vinification conditions. Bases for developing a forecasting model] is part of the Demeter project. This project seeks to study and find out the effects of climate change on viticultural and oenological activities, and to come up with new strategies ...

Boston - April 8, 2014 - Babies and young children make giant developmental leaps all of the time. Sometimes, it seems, even overnight they figure out how to recognize certain shapes or what the word "no" means no matter who says it. It turns out that making those leaps could be a nap away: New research finds that infants who nap are better able to apply lessons learned to new skills, while preschoolers are better able to retain learned knowledge after napping. "Sleep plays a crucial role in learning from early in development," says Rebecca Gómez of the University of ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Studies have shown that a new patient and caregiver centered model of innovative, coordinated brain care for older adults improves health outcomes and quality of care for those with cognitive impairment. A new study from the Regenstrief Institute, Eskenazi Health and Indiana University Center for Aging Research implementation scientists who developed the Healthy Aging Brain Center care model shows that such care also produces impressive cost savings. The Healthy Aging Brain Center care model generated an annual net cost savings of up to $2,856 per patient ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The difference between merely throwing around buzzwords like "personalized medicine" and "big data" and delivering on their medical promise is in the details of developing methods for analyzing and interpreting genomic data. In a pair of new papers, Brown University epidemiologist Yen-Tsung Huang and colleagues show how integrating different kinds of genomic data could improve studies of the association between genes and disease. The kinds of data Huang integrates are single-nucleotide differences in DNA, called SNPs, data on gene ...

A unique population of microbes in the female breast may lay the groundwork for understanding how this bacterial community contributes to health and disease, according to a new study out of Western University (London, Canada). The study titled "Microbiota of human breast tissue," is now published online, in advance of the May issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The human body is home to a large and diverse population of bacteria with properties that are both harmful and beneficial to our health. Studies are revealing the presence of bacteria in unexpected ...

Materials scientists have long known that introducing defects into three-dimensional materials can improve their mechanical and electronic properties. Now a new Northwestern study finds how defects affect two-dimensional crystalline structures, and the results hold information for designing new materials. In packed, two-dimensional crystalline systems, such as in photonic two-dimensional crystals, the particles are organized in hexagonal lattices. One particle is in the center of the hexagon with six neighboring particles around it. A defective lattice is when the center ...

This news release is available in German. They discovered that the so-called HOPE method allows tissue samples to be treated such that they do not only meet the requirements of clinical histology, but can still be characterised later on by modern methods of proteomics, a technique analysing all proteins at once. This is successful, since the structure of the tissue is "fixed" in a way that the protein molecules remain accessible for systematic analysis. This technique therefore meets current requirements in terms of a more personalised medicine and thus opens up ...

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—April 8, 2014—Two-thirds of Americans (66%) say it's important for candidates running for office to assign a high priority to funding medical research, according to America Speaks, Volume 14, a compilation of key questions from public opinion polls commissioned by Research!America. Polling shows that Americans place a high value on U.S. leadership in medical innovation, yet only 12% say they are very well informed about the positions of their senators and representative when it comes to their support of medical and scientific research. http://www.researchamerica.org/poll_summary. ...

Facing the prospect of racial minority groups becoming the overall majority in the United States leads White Americans to lean more toward the conservative end of the political spectrum, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings suggest that increased diversity in the United States could actually lead to a wider partisan divide, with more White Americans expressing support for conservative policies. Psychological scientists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson of Northwestern University ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Many studies have shown that a company's logo is one of the most important aspects of marketing and advertising a brand, or features that distinctly identifies a company's product or service from its competitors. Now, a researcher at the University of Missouri has found that the specific colors used in a company's logo have a significant impact on how that logo, and the brand as a whole, is viewed by consumers. Jessica Ridgway, a doctoral student in the MU Department of Textile and Apparel Management, surveyed 184 adults using generic logos of different ...

Synthetic genetic circuitry created by researchers at Rice University is helping them see, for the first time, how to regulate cell mechanisms that degrade the misfolded proteins implicated in Parkinson's, Huntington's and other diseases. The Rice lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Laura Segatori has designed a sophisticated circuit that signals increases in the degradation of proteins by the cell's ubiquitin proteasome system (UPS). The research appears online today in Nature Communications. The UPS is essential to a variety of fundamental cellular processes, ...

Research from the University of Southampton has shown a drug, used in combination with chemotherapy to treat advanced colorectal cancer, is not effective in some settings, and indeed may result in more rapid cancer progression. The New EPOC study, published in The Lancet Oncology and funded by Cancer Research UK, evaluated whether the drug cetuximab and chemotherapy together worked better than chemotherapy alone as a treatment in addition to surgery for people with bowel cancer that had spread to the liver but could be surgically removed. In the trial patients either ...

Nanoengineering researchers at Rice University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have unveiled a potentially scalable method for making one-atom-thick layers of molybdenum diselenide -- a highly sought semiconductor that is similar to graphene but has better properties for making certain electronic devices like switchable transistors and light-emitting diodes. The method for making two-dimensional molybdenum diselenide uses a technique known as chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and is described online in a new paper in the American Chemical Society journal ...

A fraction of the carbon that finds its way into Earth's oceans -- the black soot and charcoal residue of fires -- stays there for thousands for years, and a new first-of-its-kind analysis shows how some black carbon breaks away and hitches a ride to the ocean floor on passing particles. The study by scientists from Rice University, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of South Carolina offers the first detailed analysis of how black carbon gets into deep ocean sediments, as well as an accounting of the types and amounts of black carbon found in those ...

One of graphene's most sought-after properties is its high conductivity. Argentinian and Brazilian physicists have now successfully calculated the conditions of the transport, or conductance mechanisms, in graphene nanoribbons. The results, recently published in a paper in EPJ B, yield a clearer theoretical understanding of conductivity in graphene samples of finite size, which have applications in externally controlled electronic devices. When the conductivity is high, the electrons, carriers of electrical current, are minimally hampered during transport through graphene. ...

WASHINGTON, April 8, 2014 — A team of researchers at UCLA has transformed Google Glass into powerful, wearable medical testing laboratory. Aydogan Ozcan and his team developed an application that reads dozens of different types of diagnostic tests for malaria, prostate cancer and HIV, to name a few. Glass uploads the results to secure servers and provides anonymous data to epidemiologists. In the American Chemical Society's (ACS') newest Breakthrough Science video, Ozcan demonstrates how the app works, and explains the broad impact it could have on medicine. The video is ...