This news release is available in French. Going back to the drawing board to find a way to overcome the technical limitations of their laser, a team led by François Légaré, professor at the INRS Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre, developed a new concept offering a simpler laser design, control over new parameters, and excellent performance potential. Called "frequency domain optical parametric amplification" (FOPA), the concept supersedes traditional time domain amplification schemes that have been the linchpin of ultrafast laser science for 20 years. ...

When a massive star collapses under its own gravity during a supernova explosion it forms either a neutron star or black hole. Magnetars are an unusual and very exotic form of neutron star. Like all of these strange objects they are tiny and extraordinarily dense — a teaspoon of neutron star material would have a mass of about a billion tonnes — but they also have extremely powerful magnetic fields. Magnetar surfaces release vast quantities of gamma rays when they undergo a sudden adjustment known as a starquake as a result of the huge stresses in their crusts. The Westerlund ...

VIDEO: This is a microscopic view of the new microchip-like technology sorting and storing magnetic particles in a three-by-three array. Click here for more information. DURHAM, N.C. -- A U.S. and Korean research team has developed a chip-like device that could be scaled up to sort and store hundreds of thousands of individual living cells in a matter of minutes. The system is similar to a random access memory chip, but it moves cells rather than electrons. Researchers at ...

Lubricants are required wherever moving parts come together. They prevent direct contact between solid elements and ensure that gears, bearings, and valves work as smoothly as possible. Depending on the application, the ideal lubricant must meet conflicting requirements. On the one hand, it should be as thin as possible because this reduces friction. On the other hand, it should be viscous enough that the lubricant stays in the contact gap. In practice, grease and oils are often used because their viscosity increases with pressure. Biological lubrication in contrast is ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (May 14, 2014)—Women who go through menopause early—at ages 40 to 45—have a higher rate of heart failure, according to a new study published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). Smoking, current or past, raises the rate even more. Research already pointed to a relationship between early menopause and heart disease—usually atherosclerotic heart disease. But this study from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, is the first to demonstrate a link with heart failure, the inability of the heart to pump ...

Virginia Tech has updated results of its adult football helmet ratings, which are designed to identify key differences between the abilities of individual helmets to reduce the risk of concussion. All five of the new adult football helmets introduced this spring earned the five-star mark, which is the highest rating awarded by the Virginia Tech Helmet Ratings™. The complete ratings of the helmets manufactured by Schutt Sports and Xentih LLC, each with two new products, and Rawlings Sporting Goods Co., with one helmet, are publicly available at the helmet ratings website. The ...

Lincoln, Neb., May 14, 2014 – A chimpanzee will wait more than two minutes to eat six grapes, but a black lemur would rather eat two grapes now than wait any longer than 15 seconds for a bigger serving. It's an echo of the dilemma human beings face with a long line at a posh restaurant. How long are they willing to wait for the five-star meal? Or do they head to a greasy spoon to eat sooner? A paper published today in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B explores the evolutionary reasons why some primate species wait for a ...

PHILADELPHIA - Stimulation of a certain population of neurons within the brain can alter the learning process, according to a team of neuroscientists and neurosurgeons at the University of Pennsylvania. A report in the Journal of Neuroscience describes for the first time that human learning can be modified by stimulation of dopamine-containing neurons in a deep brain structure known as the substantia nigra. Researchers suggest that the stimulation may have altered learning by biasing individuals to repeat physical actions that resulted in reward. "Stimulating the substantia ...

A new report by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, published in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, shows the socioeconomic status of congestive heart failure patients does not influence hospital rankings for heart failure readmissions. In the study, researchers assessed whether adding a standard measure for indicating the socioeconomic status of heart failure patients could alter the expected 30-day heart failure hospital risk standardized readmission rate (RSRR) among New York City hospitals. For each patient a standard socioeconomic ...

Several medications can help people with alcohol use disorders maintain abstinence or reduce drinking, according to research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The work, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), provides additional options for clinicians to effectively address this global concern. Although alcohol use disorders are associated with many health problems, including cancers, stroke and depression, fewer than one-third of people with the ...

With warmer weather, it's time to get outdoors. And now you can breathe easy about it: A new study from the University of Iowa reports Iowa's air quality falls within government guidelines for cleanliness. The UI researchers analyzed air quality and pollution data compiled by state and county agencies over nearly three years at five sites spread statewide—urban areas Cedar Rapids, Davenport and Des Moines and rural locations in Montgomery county in southwest Iowa and Van Buren county in the southeast. The result: The air, as measured by a class of fine particulate pollutants ...

In pharmaceutical production, identifying enzyme catalysts that help improve the speed and efficiency of the process can be a major boon. Figuring out exactly why a particular enzyme works so well is an altogether different quest. Take the cholesterol-lowering drug simvastatin. First marketed commercially as Zocor, the statin drug has generated billions of dollars in annual sales. In 2011, UCLA scientists and colleagues discovered that a mutated enzyme could help produce the much sought-after pharmaceutical far more efficiently than the chemical process that had been ...

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., May 13, 2014 -- A simple new technique to form interlocking beads of water in ambient conditions could prove valuable for applications in biological sensing, membrane research and harvesting water from fog. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a method to create air-stable water droplet networks known as droplet interface bilayers. These interconnected water droplets have many roles in biological research because their interfaces simulate cell membranes. Cumbersome fabrication methods, however, have limited ...

TORONTO, ON – In many species, the possession of X and Y chromosomes determines whether an individual develops into a male or female. In humans, for example, individuals who inherit their father's Y chromosome become male (XY), and individuals who inherit their father's X chromosome become female (XX). This system of sex determination has evolved independently multiple times and a striking feature of its evolution is that Y chromosomes have degenerated genetically, losing many genes over time. What is not well understood, however, is what happens to the Y chromosome during ...

The diversity of the world's life forms — from corals to carnivores — is under assault. Decades of scientific studies document the fraying of ecosystems and a grim tally of species extinctions due to destroyed habitat, pollution, climate change, invasives and overharvesting. Which makes a recent report in the journal Science rather surprising. Nick Gotelli, a professor at the University of Vermont, with colleagues from Saint Andrews University, Scotland, and the University of Maine, re-examined data from one hundred long-term monitoring studies done around the world ...

May 13, 2014 – (BRONX, NY) – Healthy stem cells work to restore or repair the body's tissues, but cancer stem cells have a more nefarious mission: to spawn malignant tumors. Cancer stem cells were discovered a decade ago, but their origins and identity remain largely unknown. Today, the Ruth L. and David S. Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University hosted its second Stem Cell Symposium, focusing on cancer stem cells. Leading scientists from the U.S., Canada and Belgium discussed ...

With the commodification of digital cameras, digital video has become so easy to produce that human beings can have trouble keeping up with it. Among the tools that computer scientists are developing to make the profusion of video more useful are algorithms for activity recognition — or determining what the people on camera are doing when. At the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June, Hamed Pirsiavash, a postdoc at MIT, and his former thesis advisor, Deva Ramanan of the University of California at Irvine, will present a new activity-recognition ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — May 13, 2014 — A Mayo Clinic review of 47 studies found that 30-day readmissions can be reduced by almost 20 percent when specific efforts are taken to prevent them. Key among these are interventions to help patients deal with the work passed on to them at discharge. The results of the review are published in this week's issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. "Reducing early hospital readmissions is a policy priority aimed at improving quality of care and lowering costs," says Aaron Leppin, M.D., a research associate in Mayo Clinic's Knowledge and Evaluation ...

The devastating loss of memory and consciousness in Alzheimer's disease is caused by plaque accumulations and tangles in neurons, which kill brain cells. Alzheimer's research has centered on trying to understand the pathology as well as the potential protective or regenerative properties of brain cells as an avenue for treating the widespread disease. Now Prof. Illana Gozes, the incumbent of the Lily and Avraham Gildor Chair for the Investigation of Growth Factors and director of the Adams Super Center for Brain Studies at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine and a member ...

PHILADELPHIA (May 13, 2014)— Kryptoglanis shajii is a strange fish – and the closer scientists look, the stranger it gets. This small subterranean catfish sees the light of day and human observers only rarely, when it turns up in springs, wells and flooded rice paddies in the Western Ghats mountain region of Kerala, India. It was first described as a new species in 2011. Soon after that, John Lundberg, PhD, one of the world's leading authorities on catfishes, started taking a closer look at several specimens. "The more we looked at the skeleton, the stranger it got," ...

A new study by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston is the first to show that premature aging of the placenta due to oxidative stress is the cause of many preterm births. The study appears today in the American Journal of Pathology. Researchers took fetal membranes, exposed them to oxidative stress in a lab setting (specifically cigarette smoke extract) and examined whether it caused rapid aging of the placental tissue. It did. Oxidative stress factors include environmental toxins and pollution and are an inevitable component of normal ...

Johns Hopkins researchers have found evidence in mice that a tuberculosis (TB) infection in the lungs triggers immune system signaling to the gut that temporarily decreases the diversity of bacteria in that part of the digestive tract. The Johns Hopkins researchers showed that this decrease in diversity of gut bacteria as measured in fecal samples happened quickly — within six days after mice were exposed to an aerosol mixture of M. tuberculosis, the TB bacteria. This prompt shift in diversity, they say, suggests that the immune system is attacking the gut bacteria, decreasing ...

Putting off tasks until later, or procrastination, is a common phenomenon – but new research suggests that "pre-crastination," hurrying to complete a task as soon as possible, may also be common. The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that people often opt to begin a task as soon as possible just to get it off their plate, even if they have to expend more physical effort to do so. "Most of us feel stressed about all the things we need to do – we have to-do lists, not just on slips of paper ...

ARLINGTON, Va — Stronger storms, rising seas, and flooding are placing hundreds of millions people at risk around the world, and big part of the solution to decrease those risks is just off shore. A new study finds that coral reefs reduce the wave energy that would otherwise impact coastlines by 97 percent. "Coral reefs serve as an effective first line of defense to incoming waves, storms and rising seas," said Dr. Michael Beck, lead marine scientist of The Nature Conservancy and a co-author of the study, "200 million people across more than 80 nations are at risk if ...

LA JOLLA—Using new stem cell technology, scientists at the Salk Institute have shown that neurons generated from the skin cells of people with schizophrenia behave strangely in early developmental stages, providing a hint as to ways to detect and potentially treat the disease early. The findings of the study, published online in April's Molecular Psychiatry, support the theory that the neurological dysfunction that eventually causes schizophrenia may begin in the brains of babies still in the womb. "This study aims to investigate the earliest detectable changes in the ...