HUNTSVILLE, TX 9/24/14 -- Although membership in a gang often is depicted as a lifelong commitment, the typical gang member joins at age 13 and only stays active for about two years, according to a study at Sam Houston State University. "Gang membership is not a fixed identity or a scarlet letter," said David Pyrooz in an article published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. "Media and popular culture have led to misconceptions about gangs and gang membership, chief among them the myth of permanence, as reflected in the quote from West Side Story –'When you're ...

Understanding how atoms "glide" and "climb" on the surface of 2D crystals like tungsten disulphide may pave the way for researchers to develop materials with unusual or unique characteristics, according to an international team of researchers. "If we don't understand what is behind the materials' characteristics caused by these defects, then we can't engineer the right properties into devices," said Nasim Alem, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, Penn State. "With a closer look, we might find that some of the defects are no good, that we don't want ...

September 24, 2014 – A technique developed by astronomers seeking a clear view of distant objects in space is being intensively studied as a new approach to measuring and correcting visual abnormalities. The October issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry, is a theme issue devoted to research on wavefront refraction and correction. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. The special issue presents new research on the use of wavefront analysis for assessing subtle, ...

Princeton University researchers have developed a new method to increase the brightness, efficiency and clarity of LEDs, which are widely used on smartphones and portable electronics as well as becoming increasingly common in lighting. Using a new nanoscale structure, the researchers, led by electrical engineering professor Stephen Chou, increased the brightness and efficiency of LEDs made of organic materials (flexible carbon-based sheets) by 58 percent. The researchers also report their method should yield similar improvements in LEDs made in inorganic (silicon-based) ...

Confusion over a 1997 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rule that eases the way for food manufacturers to use ingredients "generally regarded as safe," or GRAS, has inspired a new initiative by food makers. Food safety advocates say the current GRAS process allows substances into the food supply that might pose a health risk, while industry defends its record. An article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) details what changes are on the table. Melody M. Bomgardner, a senior editor at C&EN, explains that the rule, which was never finalized, was initially established ...

Washington D.C., September 24, 2014 – A study published in the MONTH 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that children who were conceived either less than 1 year or more than 5 years after the birth of their prior sibling were more likely to be diagnosed with autism than children conceived following an interval of 2-5 years. Using data from the Finnish Prenatal Study of Autism (FIPS-A), a group of researchers led by Keely Cheslack-Postava, PhD, of Columbia University, analyzed records from 7371 children born between ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — More women with cancer in one breast are opting to have both breasts removed to reduce their risk of future cancer. New research shows that in the long term, most have no regrets. Mayo Clinic surveyed hundreds of women with breast cancer who had double mastectomies between 1960 and 1993 and found that nearly all would make the same choice again. The findings are published in the journal Annals of Surgical Oncology. The study made a surprising finding: While most women were satisfied with their decision whether they followed it with breast reconstruction ...

The shorter the interval between two explosions in the solar atmosphere, the more likely it is that the second flare will be stronger than the first one. ETH Professor Hans Jürgen Herrmann and his team have been able to demonstrate this, using model calculations. The amount of energy released in solar flares is truly enormous – in fact, it is millions of times greater than the energy produced in volcanic eruptions. Strong explosions cause a discharge of mass from the outer part of the solar atmosphere, the corona. If a coronal mass ejection hits the earth, it can cause ...

How people perceive and taste alcohol depends on genetic factors, and that influences whether they "like" and consume alcoholic beverages, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. In the first study to show that the sensations from sampled alcohol vary as a function of genetics, researchers focused on three chemosensory genes -- two bitter-taste receptor genes known as TAS2R13 and TAS2R38 and a burn receptor gene, TRPV1. The research was also the first to consider whether variation in the burn receptor gene might influence alcohol sensations, ...

(Philadelphia, PA) – Areas of the brain that respond to reward and pleasure are linked to the ability of a drug known as butorphanol to relieve itch, according to new research led by Gil Yosipovitch, MD, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Dermatology at Temple University School of Medicine (TUSM), and Director of the Temple Itch Center. The findings point to the involvement of the brain's opioid receptors—widely known for their roles in pain, reward, and addiction—in itch relief, potentially opening up new avenues to the development of treatments for chronic itch. The ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers have developed two new anticancer peptide vaccines and two peptide inhibitors as part of a larger peptide immunotherapy effort at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James). Two studies, published in the journal OncoImmunology, identify new peptide vaccines and inhibitors that target the HER-3 and IGF-1R receptors. All four agents elicited significant anti-tumor responses in human cancer cell lines and in animal models. The studies suggest ...

Cell division, the process that ensures equal transmission of genetic information to daughter cells, has been fundamentally conserved for over a billion years of evolution. Considering its ubiquity and essentiality, it is expected that proteins that carry out cell division would also be highly conserved. Challenging this assumption, scientists from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have found that one of the foundational proteins in cell division, previously shown to be essential in organisms as diverse as yeast, flies and humans, has been surprisingly lost on multiple ...

Valeria Conti Nibali and Prof Dr Martina Havenith-Newen (Cluster of Excellence RESOLV – Ruhr explores Solvation) made this discovery by using a combination of terahertz absorption spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations. The researchers report their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). Choreography of water movements New experimental technologies, such as terahertz absorption spectroscopy, pave the way for studies of the dynamics of water molecules surrounding biomolecules. Using this method, the researchers proved some time ago ...

Dietary supplements, which are marketed to adults and adolescents for weight loss and muscle building, usually do not deliver promised results and can actually cause severe health issues, including death. But because of lax federal oversight of these supplements, state governments need to increase their regulation of these products to protect consumers. That's the finding of a new study, "The Dangerous Mix of Adolescents and Dietary Weight Loss and Muscle Building: Legal Strategies for State Action," published online Sept. 23, in the Journal of Public Health Management ...

New York | Heidelberg, 24 September 2014 - Electronic transport in graphene contributes to its characteristics. Now, a Russian scientist proposes a new theoretical approach to describe graphene with defects—in the form of artificial triangular holes—resulting in the rectification of the electric current within the material. Specifically, the study provides an analytical and numerical theory of the so-called ratchet effect. Its result is a direct current under the action of an oscillating electric field, due to the skew scattering of electronic carriers by coherently oriented ...

Chemists at the University of Leicester have reported a breakthrough in techniques to develop new drugs in the fight against diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's. The team has developed an innovative process allowing them to generate a particular type of synthetic amino acid – and a particular type of designer protein - that has not been done before. The advance is announced by the Jamieson Research Group in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Leicester. Their work, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), is published ...

The majority of athletes included in a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine were able to return to play after having knee surgery to repair an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. In addition, the study found that athletes who had ACL surgery when they were in high school or younger were much more likely to suffer repeat ACL reinjuries than athletes who experienced their first ACL injury during collegiate play. "It's very clear from our data that the younger the elite athlete, the higher risk for reinjury," said Ganesh ...

Irvine, Calif. — Abundant supplies of natural gas will do little to reduce harmful U.S. emissions causing climate change, according to researchers at UC Irvine, Stanford University, and the nonprofit organization Near Zero. They found that inexpensive gas boosts electricity consumption and hinders expansion of cleaner energy sources, such as wind and solar. The study results, which appear Sept. 24 in the journal Environmental Research Letters, are based on modeling the effect of high and low gas supplies on the U.S. power sector. Coal-fired plants, the nation's largest ...

Female populations have been larger than male populations throughout human history, according to research published today in the open access journal Investigative Genetics. The research used a new technique to obtain higher quality paternal genetic information to analyse the demographic history of males and females in worldwide populations. The study compared the paternally-inherited Y chromosome (NRY) with maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of 623 males from 51 populations. The analysis showed that female populations were larger before the out-of-Africa migration ...

The mechanism by which statins increase the risk of type 2 diabetes has been investigated in a large-scale analysis from an international team led by researchers from UCL and the University of Glasgow, using information from genetic studies and clinical trials. Published in The Lancet, the work received support from a number of funders including the Medical Research Council, British Heart Foundation, Rosetrees Trust and National Institute for Health Research University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre. Among nearly 130 000 participants from clinical ...

Skin colour displayed amongst one species of monkey provides a key indicator of how successfully they will breed, a new study has shown. The collaborative international research also shows that skin colouration in male and female rhesus macaques is an inherited quality – the first example of heritability for a sexually-selected trait to be described in any mammal. The team of scientists collected more than 250 facial images of free-ranging rhesus macaques, which are native to South, Central and Southeast Asia and which display red skin colouring around the face, as ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio—Researchers at The Ohio State University have gained new insight into how the body moves when we're walking. They learned everything they needed to know by watching people walk naturally on a treadmill. In normal walking, humans place their foot at slightly different positions on each step. To the untrained eye, this step-to-step variation in foot position just looks random and noisy. But in the Sept. 24, 2014, issue of the journal Biology Letters, the researchers describe a mathematical model that can explain over 80 percent of this apparent randomness ...

Cardiac arrest outside of hospital is a common and catastrophic medical emergency experienced by about 60,000 people a year in the UK. Less than 10% survive to discharge from hospital.   Immediate cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) offers the best chance of survival and ambulance services throughout the developed world tend to take patients in cardiac arrest to hospital, with CPR ongoing.   This seems intuitive, writes Jonathan Benger, Professor of Emergency Care at the University of the West of England, and Consultant at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation ...

Brain cells that multiply to help birds sing their best during breeding season are known to die back naturally later in the year. For the first time researchers have described the series of events that cues new neuron growth each spring, and it all appears to start with a signal from the expiring cells the previous fall that primes the brain to start producing stem cells. If scientists can further tap into the process and understand how those signals work, it might lead to ways to exploit these signals and encourage replacement of cells in human brains that have lost neurons ...

For thousands of years, man has domesticated animals, selecting the best traits possible for survival. Now, livestock such as sheep offer an intriguing animal to examine adaptation to climate change, with a genetic legacy of centuries of selected breeding and a wealth of livestock genome-wide data available. In a first-of-its kind study that combined molecular and environmental data, professor Meng-Hua Li et al., performed a search for genes under environmental selection from domesticated sheep breeds. Their results were published in the advanced online edition of the ...