EUGENE, Ore. -- Nov. 20, 2014 -- A potential path to identify imperfections and improve the quality of nanomaterials for use in next-generation solar cells has emerged from a collaboration of University of Oregon and industry researchers. To increase light-harvesting efficiency of solar cells beyond silicon's limit of about 29 percent, manufacturers have used layers of chemically synthesized semiconductor nanocrystals. Properties of quantum dots that are produced are manipulated by controlling the synthetic process and surface chemical structure. This process, however, ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The majority of preschoolers may not be getting the amount of sleep they need each night, placing them at higher risk of being overweight or obese within a year, according to a new study. Published online by the journal Sleep Medicine, the study investigated links between mothers' employment status and their children's weight over time, exploring the impact of potential mediators, such as children's sleep and dietary habits, the amount of time they spent watching TV and family mealtime routines. "The only factor of the four that we investigated that ...

Washington, DC--Levels of testosterone and other naturally-occurring reproductive hormones play a limited role in driving menopausal women's interest in sex and sexual function, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. While testosterone is the main sex hormone in men, women also have small amounts of it. The ovaries naturally produce testosterone. Researchers set out to examine the role the hormone plays in sexual function as women go through menopause. "While levels of testosterone and other reproductive ...

Washington, DC--As many as one in five people with Type 2 diabetes do not see any improvement in blood sugar management when they engage in a supervised exercise regimen, according to a new scientific review published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. People develop Type 2 diabetes when their bodies become resistant to the hormone insulin, which carries sugar from the blood to cells. This leads to excess sugar in the bloodstream. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects about 40 percent of Americans will develop ...

Enzymes carry out fundamental biological processes such as photosynthesis, nitrogen fixation and respiration, with the help of clusters of metal atoms as "active" sites. But scientists lack basic information about their function because the states thought to be critical to their chemical abilities cannot be experimentally observed. Now, researchers at Princeton University have reported the first direct observation of the electronic states of iron-sulfur clusters, common to many enzyme active sites. Published on August 31 in the journal Nature Chemistry, the states were ...

LIVERMORE, California -- Using ocean observations and a large suite of climate models, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists have found that long-term salinity changes have a stronger influence on regional sea level changes than previously thought. "By using long-term observed estimates of ocean salinity and temperature changes across the globe, and contrasting these with model simulations, we have uncovered the unexpectedly large influence of salinity changes on ocean basin-scale sea level patterns," said LLNL oceanographer Paul Durack, lead author of a paper ...

BANGALORE, INDIA (November 20, 2014) - Participation of non-scientists as volunteers in conservation can play a significant role in saving wildlife, finds a new scientific research led by Duke University, USA, in collaboration with Wildlife Conservation Society and Centre for Wildlife Studies, Bengaluru. The study has shown that citizen science projects greatly contribute to 'increased environmental awareness among the general public'. It also reported direct impacts on conservation including - shift in formal profession by volunteers to become conservationists, initiation ...

Moderate rainfall was occurring around the center of Tropical Storm Adjali before it dissipated, according to data from NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM satellites. Adjali became the first named storm of the Southwest Indian Ocean 2014/2015 cyclone season when it formed on November 16, 2014. Adjali became a strong tropical storm the next day and just two days later started to dissipate. The GPM observatory captured data on Adjali's rainfall rates on Nov. 18. GPM's Microwave Imager (GMI) instrument is similar to ...

This new survey was released November 19 as a Web First by Health Affairs. The full text is available free until November 26. International Survey Of Older Adults Finds Shortcomings In Access, Coordination, And Patient-Centered Care By Robin Osborn, Donald Moulds, David Squires, Michelle M. Doty, and Chloe Anderson All authors are affiliated with The Commonwealth Fund in New York. This study was supported by The Commonwealth Fund and also will appear in the December issue of Health Affairs. The study surveyed 15,617 adults ages sixty-five and older in Australia, ...

In many firms sales people spend as much time negotiating internally for lower prices as they do interacting with customers. A new study appearing in the November issue of Marketing Science, a publication of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) finds that firms should allow their sales people to "waste" energy on internal negotiations. In fact, it says, firms should make the process wasteful on purpose. The study, "Why do sales people spend so much time lobbying for low prices?" was conducted by Duncan Simester, the Nanyang Technological ...

When blood vessels are damaged through surgery, it can trigger an endless cycle of scarring and repair. "Scar tissue will always form inside the blood vessel and, in many cases, eventually block blood flow," said Guillermo Ameer, professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering. "Then surgeons have to go back in, eliminate the obstruction, or put in a new graft or stent to restore blood flow. In the case of a prosthetic vascular graft used for bypass surgery, it will scar again and ultimately fail." Ameer, who is also ...

High blood pressure is a leading cause of death around the world, and its prevalence continues to rise. A study published by Cell Press on November 20th in the journal Immunity shows that a protein in the spleen called placental growth factor (PlGF) plays a critical role in activating a harmful immune response that leads to the onset of high blood pressure in mice. The findings pave the way for the development of more effective treatments for this common and deadly condition. High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, affects more than 1 billion people worldwide ...

The portion of the adult brain responsible for complex thought, known as the cerebral cortex, lacks the ability to replace neurons that die as a result of Alzheimer's disease, stroke, and other devastating diseases. A study in the International Society for Stem Cell Research's journal Stem Cell Reports, published by Cell Press on November 20 shows that a Sox2 protein, alone or in combination with another protein, Ascl1, can cause nonneuronal cells, called NG2 glia, to turn into neurons in the injured cerebral cortex of adult mice. The findings reveal that NG2 glia represent ...

As we age, we have an increasingly harder time ignoring distractions. But new research online November 20 in the Cell Press journal Neuron reveals that by learning to make discriminations of a sound amidst progressively more disruptive distractions, we can diminish our distractibility. A similar strategy might also help children with attention deficits or individuals with other mental challenges. Distractibility, or the inability to sustain focus on a goal due to attention to irrelevant stimuli, can have a negative effect on basic daily activities, and it is a hallmark ...

CINCINNATI - Researchers have successfully targeted an important molecular pathway that fuels a variety of cancers and related developmental syndromes called "Rasopathies." Reporting their results Nov. 20 in Chemistry & Biology, scientists at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center say they identified a class of lead compounds that successfully recognize a key target in the Ras signaling pathway - opening the door to future development of therapies that could make treatments more effective with fewer side effects. Although still in the early stages of the development ...

While investigating a rare genetic disorder, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered that a ubiquitous signaling molecule is crucial to cellular reprogramming, a finding with significant implications for stem cell-based regenerative medicine, wound repair therapies and potential cancer treatments. The findings are published in the Nov. 20 online issue of Cell Reports. Karl Willert, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, and colleagues were attempting to use induced pluripotent ...

VIDEO: Researchers at the Salk Institute explain how a new technology, called ReBiL, can spot protein interactions more accurately, providing a new tool for cancer and other drug diagnostics. Click here for more information. LA JOLLA--For decades, researchers have struggled to translate basic scientific discoveries about cancer into therapeutics that effectively--and with minimal side effects--shrink a tumor. One avenue that may hold great potential is the development of ...

Researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan have identified a key neuronal pathway that makes learning to avoid unpleasant situations possible. Published online in the November 20 issue of Neuron, the work shows that avoidance learning requires neural activity in the habenula representing changes in future expectations. Learning to avoid threats is an essential survival skill for both humans and animals. To do so, animals must be able to predict a danger and then update their predictions based on their actions and new outcomes. Until now, the neural mechanisms ...

Scientists have created the largest-scale map to date of direct interactions between proteins encoded by the human genome and newly predicted dozens of genes to be involved in cancer. The new "human interactome" map describes about 14,000 direct interactions between proteins. The interactome is the network formed by proteins and other cellular components that 'stick together.' The new map is over four times larger than any previous map of its kind, containing more high-quality interactions than have come from all previous studies put together. CIFAR Senior Fellow ...

PHILADELPHIA - Human existence is basically circadian. Most of us wake in the morning, sleep in the evening, and eat in between. Body temperature, metabolism, and hormone levels all fluctuate throughout the day, and it is increasingly clear that disruption of those cycles can lead to metabolic disease. Underlying these circadian rhythms is a molecular clock built of DNA-binding proteins called transcription factors. These proteins control the oscillation of circadian genes, serving as the wheels and springs of the clock itself. Yet not all circadian cycles peak at the ...

Harvard Stem Cell Institute scientists at Brigham and Women's Hospital have found the cellular origin of the tissue scarring caused by organ damage associated with diabetes, lung disease, high blood pressure, kidney disease, and other conditions. The buildup of scar tissue is known as fibrosis. Fibrosis has a number of consequences, including inflammation, and reduced blood and oxygen delivery to the organ. In the long term, the scar tissue can lead to organ failure and eventually death. It is estimated that fibrosis contributes to 45 percent of all deaths in the developed ...

Liver cancer is one of the most frequent cancers in the world, and with the worst prognosis; according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), in 2012, 745,000 deaths were registered worldwide due to this cause, a figure only surpassed by lung cancer. The most aggressive and frequent form of liver cancer is hepato-cellular carcinoma (HCC); little is known about it and there are relatively few treatment options. Researchers from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), have produced the first mouse model that faithfully reproduces the steps of human HCC development, ...

Mouse cells and tissues created through nuclear transfer can be rejected by the body because of a previously unknown immune response to the cell's mitochondria, according to a study in mice by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and colleagues in Germany, England and at MIT. The findings reveal a likely, but surmountable, hurdle if such therapies are ever used in humans, the researchers said. Stem cell therapies hold vast potential for repairing organs and treating disease. The greatest hope rests on the potential of pluripotent stem cells, which ...

A recently discovered protein complex known as STING plays a crucial role in detecting the presence of tumor cells and promoting an aggressive anti-tumor response by the body's innate immune system, according to two separate studies published in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal Immunity. The studies, both from University of Chicago-based research teams, have major implications for the growing field of cancer immunotherapy. The findings show that when activated, the STING pathway triggers a natural immune response against the tumor. This includes production of chemical ...

Say you ignored one of those "this website is not trusted" warnings and it led to your computer being hacked. How would you react? Would you: A. Quickly shut down your computer? B. Yank out the cables? C. Scream in cyber terror? For a group of college students participating in a research experiment, all of the above were true. These gut reactions (and more) happened when a trio of Brigham Young University researchers simulated hacking into study participants' personal laptops. "A lot of them freaked out--you could hear them audibly make noises from our observation ...