Physicists from Umeå University and Humboldt University in Berlin have solved a mystery that has puzzled scientists for half a century. They show with the help of powerful microscopes that the distance between graphite oxide layers gradually increases when water molecules are added. That is because the surface of graphite oxide is not flat, but varies in thickness with "hills" and "valleys" of nanosize. The new findings are published in the scientific journal Nano Letters. "Now we can better understand the mechanisms of solvent insertion between layers of graphene oxide. ...

Carbon nanotubes "unzipped" into graphene nanoribbons by a chemical process invented at Rice University are finding use in all kinds of projects, but Rice scientists have now found a chemical-free way to unzip them. The Rice lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan discovered that nanotubes that hit a target end first turn into mostly ragged clumps of atoms. But nanotubes that happen to broadside the target unzip into handy ribbons that can be used in composite materials for strength and applications that take advantage of their desirable electrical properties. The ...

With the plethora of research and published studies on stem cells over the last decade, many would say that the definition of stem cells is well established and commonly agreed upon. However, a new review article appearing in the July 2014 issue of The FASEB Journal , suggests that scientists have only scratched the surface of understanding the nature, physiology and location of these cells. Specifically, the report suggests that embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells may not be the only source from which all three germ layers in the human body (nerves, liver or ...

The research shows that managers hold more negative attitudes to private use of social media at work than subordinates. About 11,000 Norwegian employees participated in the researchers' study Predictors of Use of Social Network Sites at Work. "It is very interesting that top executives, who are negative to private web-surfing during working hours, are the ones who surf the most for private purposes when at work," says Doctor Cecilie Schou Andreassen at UiB's Department of Psychosocial Science. She suggests that this can be explained by the fact that top executives have ...

It turns out that the same types of drugs that help reduce watery eyes and runny noses during allergy season might also help ward off tumors too. A new research report appearing in the July 2014 issue of The Journal of Leukocyte Biology suggests that antihistamines may have significant anti-cancer properties as they interfere with the function of a type of cell that is known to reduce the body's ability to fight tumors (called "myeloid derived suppressor cells"). "This research is very exciting as it draws a connection between two diseases that aren't commonly linked: ...

(PHILADELPHIA) – Heavy drinking damages the body in many ways. In addition to liver failure, alcoholics are at a much greater risk of developing pneumonia and life threatening acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), for which there is no treatment. Researchers suspect that alcoholics are more susceptible to these lung diseases because the immune system in the lung is no longer strong enough to protect from infection and damage, but, it had been unclear why the immune system in the lung fails. Now, researchers at Thomas Jefferson University have discovered that one ...

A team of physicists from the Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik (PDI) in Berlin, Germany, NTT Basic Research Laboratories in Atsugi, Japan, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has used a scanning tunneling microscope to create quantum dots with identical, deterministic sizes. The perfect reproducibility of these dots opens the door to quantum dot architectures completely free of uncontrolled variations, an important goal for technologies from nanophotonics to quantum information processing as well as for fundamental studies. The complete findings are ...

Singapore, 30 June 2014—Scientists from the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB), a research institute under the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), have discovered that obese individuals lack a protein that is essential for regulating blood glucose levels, causing them to face higher risks of developing diabetes. The protein is one of the first molecular links found between obesity to diabetes and is potentially a target for treatment or prevention of diabetes in obese individuals. Obesity and diabetes are two common health problems faced ...

Bethesda, MD (June 30, 2014) — A team of representatives from five gastroenterology and hepatology societies have created a toolbox designed to help gastroenterology training directors meet the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Internal Medicine Subspecialty Reporting Milestones requirements while training fellows to independently care for patients. Thirteen core tasks, known as "entrustable professional activities," or EPAs, have been identified that define the work of gastroenterologists and hepatologists. A toolbox for each task includes, among ...

Water splitting is one of the critical reactions that sustain life on earth, and could be a key to the creation of future fuels. It is a key in the process of photosynthesis, through which plants produce glucose and oxygen from water and carbon dioxide, using sunlight as energy. However, there are still significant mysteries about the process. Nature's own water-splitting catalysts?which are based on manganese rather than more common elements such as iron, copper, or nickel?are incredibly efficient, and scientists have long been studying why this is so and how we can mimic ...

Researchers have made a giant leap towards the goal of 'bio-printing' transplantable tissues and organs for people affected by major diseases and trauma injuries, a new study reports. Scientists from the Universities of Sydney, Harvard, Stanford and MIT have bio-printed artificial vascular networks mimicking the body's circulatory system that are necessary for growing large complex tissues. "Thousands of people die each year due to a lack of organs for transplantation," says study lead author and University of Sydney researcher, Dr Luiz Bertassoni. "Many more are ...

A group of researchers from Russia, Belarus and Spain, including Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology professor Yury Lozovik, have developed a microscopic force sensor based on carbon nanotubes. The device is described in an article published in the journal Computational Materials Science and is also available as a preprint. The scientists proposed using two nanotubes, one of which is a long cylinder with double walls one atom thick. These tubes are placed so that their open ends are opposite to each other. Voltage is then applied to them, and a current of about ...

The ability of microorganisms to overcome antibiotic treatments is one of the top concerns of modern medicine. The effectiveness of many antibiotics has been reduced by bacteria's ability to rapidly evolve and develop strategies to resist antibiotics. Bacteria achieve this by specific mechanisms that are tailored to the molecular structure or function of a particular antibiotic. For example, bacteria would typically develop drug resistance by evolving a mutation that breaks down the drug. Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem set out to determine if they could ...

Water is the limiting factor for many plants and trees. Consequently, there are grave concerns that the rainfall patterns altered by climate change could trigger a forest decline on a global scale. According to climate researchers, Switzerland is also affected: The climate models even project hotter and drier summers for this country. An international research team headed by Michael O'Brien, an ecologist at the University of Zurich, is now studying which factors govern the resistance of tropical trees to periods of drought. As the scientists reveal in their study published ...

The World Health Organisation has recommended an intervention developed and tested by partners in four countries and UCL researchers to improve maternal and newborn health. The intervention involves groups of women working together in a four-stage facilitated process: 1) Identifying problems during pregnancy, delivery, and post-partum; 2) Developing strategies to address these problems; 3) Implementing these strategies; and 4) Evaluating the strategies. A meta-analysis of research into Participatory Women's Groups was conducted by Dr Audrey Prost and others, largely ...

Philadelphia, PA, June 30, 2014 – Current pharmacotherapies for addiction follow the dictum "one size fits all". Medications are prescribed in the same way for all patients, regardless of whether they have just started experimenting with a drug or have an established drug habit. Even more troubling, there are no FDA-approved pharmacotherapies for some addictions, such as compulsive cocaine use. Perhaps testing drugs in ways that focus on particular phases of addiction or particular clinical features of addiction, such as a patient's level of impulsivity, might advance ...

If it contains 'nano', it doesn't primarily leak 'nano': at least that's true for silver-coated textiles, explains Bernd Nowack of the Technology and Society division at Empa. During each wash cycle a certain amount of the silver coating is washed out of the textiles and ends up in the waste water. Empa analysed this water; it turned out that nano-coated textiles release hardly any nano-particles. That's quite the opposite to ordinary coatings, where a lot of different silver particles were found. Moreover, nano-coated silver textiles generally lose less silver during washing. ...

In the first genome-wide analysis of postsurgical pain in children, pediatric researchers identified variations in genes that affect a child's need for pain-control drugs. The findings suggest that at some point physicians may calibrate pain-medication dosages according to a child's individual genetic makeup. "Although this research is only a first step for our team, it provides tremendous new insight into the biological mechanisms and brings us a little closer to personalizing medicine for pain control," said Scott D. Cook-Sather, M.D., a pediatric anesthesiologist at ...

New York, NY (June 30, 2014) — By switching off a single gene, scientists at Columbia University's Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center have converted human gastrointestinal cells into insulin-producing cells, demonstrating in principle that a drug could retrain cells inside a person's GI tract to produce insulin. The new research was reported today in the online issue of the journal Nature Communications. "People have been talking about turning one cell into another for a long time, but until now we hadn't gotten to the point of creating a fully functional insulin-producing ...

A genetic discovery by a team of scientists from the Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB), aided by scientists from Orion Genomics, paves the way for increased production of palm oil, which accounts for 45 percent of the world's edible oil, while also helping to conserve sensitive wild habitats at risk of being turned into agricultural land. In the study published in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists identified the VIR gene as responsible for fruit color. Currently, the majority of the oil palm fruit harvested in Malaysia and Indonesia is the nigrescens variety ...

Munich, 30 June 2014: There is "little evidence" that the use of conventional fertility hormones used for ovarian stimulation in the treatment of infertility increases the long-term risk of breast and gynecological cancers, according to the results of a substantial 30-year follow-up study. However, the extended use of clomiphene citrate was associated with a higher risk of breast cancer among women who had used the fertility drug for 12 cycles or more. Gonadotrophins, more commonly used for ovarian stimulation today, were not generally associated with any increased risk, ...

Munich, 30 June 2014: Children born to women with fertility problems have a higher risk of psychiatric disorders than naturally conceived children. The increase in risk was described as "modest" by researchers from Denmark, but was found to persist throughout childhood and into young adulthood. The results, which are presented today at the 30th Annual Meeting of ESHRE in Munich by Dr Allan Jensen of the Danish Cancer Society Research Center at the University of Copenhagen, were derived from a register study of all children born in Denmark between 1969 and 2006. From ...

Munich, 30 June 2014: A large multicentre trial seems finally to have resolved one of IVF's long-running controversies - whether the outlook for women with a poor IVF record can be improved by routine hysteroscopy performed before further IVF treatment.(1) For the TROPHY study, whose results are reported today at the 30th Annual Meeting of ESHRE in Munich by Dr Tarek El-Toukhy from Guy's and St Thomas's Hospital, London, has now found no significant difference in IVF success rates between those who had outpatient hysteroscopy performed before their IVF and those who didn't. ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) —To ease isolation during extended hospitalizations, UC Davis Children's Hospital offers secure videoconferencing for patients and families. While anecdotal accounts have suggested the Family-Link program enhances quality of life during long hospital stays, clinicians wondered if the technology also offered clinical benefits. To answer that, a team led by UC Davis professor James Marcin studied 367 children who were hospitalized for at least four days. They found that access to Family-Link significantly reduced patient stress. The study was published ...

New research reports that more than one third of total knee replacements in the U.S. were classified as "inappropriate" using a patient classification system developed and validated in Spain. The study, published in Arthritis & Rheumatology, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), highlights the need for consensus on patient selection criteria among U.S. medical professionals treating those with the potential need of knee replacement surgery. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reports more than 600,000 knee replacements are performed in the ...