Porous silicon manufactured in a bottom up procedure using solar energy can be used to generate hydrogen from water, according to a team of Penn State mechanical engineers, who also see applications for batteries, biosensors and optical electronics as outlets for this new material. The surface area of this porous silicon is high," said Donghai Wang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. "It is widely used and has a lot of applications." The standard method for manufacturing porous silicon is a subtraction method, similar to making a sculpture. "Silicon is ...

Federal spending after future terrorist attacks on the United States may be higher if the nation's terrorism risk insurance program is allowed to expire, according to a new RAND Corporation study. The analysis finds that in a terrorist attack with losses up to $50 billion, the federal government would spend more helping to cover losses than if it had continued to support a national terrorism risk insurance program. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism risk insurance quickly became either unavailable or very expensive. Congress reacted by ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Currently, there are more than 18,300 golf courses in the U.S. covering over 2.7 million acres. The ecological impacts of golf courses are not always straightforward with popular opinion suggesting that environmentally, golf courses have a negative impact on ecosystems. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have determined that golf courses can offer a viable habitat for stream salamanders, and enhanced management practices may be beneficial to ecosystems within golf courses. "If you look at the literature on golf courses, historically they get ...

University of Chicago researchers and their colleagues at University College London have performed a proof-of-concept experiment that will aid the future development of programmable quantum computers. Many complex problems are difficult and slow to solve using conventional computers, and over the last several years, research has grown steadily toward developing quantum computation. In particular, optimization problems such as the "traveling salesman" problem, which calculates the shortest possible route needed to visit a set of towns, become intractable as the number ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – The Cambrian Period is a time when most phyla of marine invertebrates first appeared in the fossil record. Also dubbed the "Cambrian explosion," fossilized records from this time provide glimpses into evolutionary biology when the world's ecosystems rapidly changed and diversified. Most fossils show the organisms' skeletal structure, which may or may not give researchers accurate pictures of these prehistoric organisms. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found rare, fossilized embryos they believe were undiscovered previously. Their methods ...

PRINCETON, N.J.—Affluent individuals and business corporations already have vastly more influence on federal government policy than average citizens, according to recently released research by Princeton University and Northwestern University. This research suggests that the Supreme Court's continuing attack on campaign finance laws is further increasing the political clout of business firms and the wealthy. Martin Gilens, professor of politics at Princeton, and Benjamin I. Page, Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making, of Northwestern University used a unique ...

Providence, RI---Your financial advisor calls you up to suggest a new investment scheme. Drawing on 20 years of data, he has set his computer to work on this question: If you had invested according to this scheme in the past, which portfolio would have been the best? His computer assembled thousands of such simulated portfolios and calculated for each one an industry-standard measure of return on risk. Out of this gargantuan calculation, your advisor has chosen the optimal portfolio. After briefly reminding you of the oft-repeated slogan that "past performance ...

Two new species of weakly electric fishes from the Congo River basin are described in the open access journal ZooKeys. One of them, known from only a single specimen, is named "Petrocephalus boboto." "Boboto" is the word for peace in the Lingala language, the lingua franca of the Congo River, reflecting the authors' hope for peace in troubled Central Africa. On a 2010 field trip to the Congo River of Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the riverside village of Yangambi-Lokélé, French ichthyologist Sébastien Lavoué of the Taiwan Institute of Oceanography and American ...

KANSAS CITY, MO - As multicellular creatures go, planaria worms are hardly glamorous. To say they appear rudimentary is more like it. These tiny aquatic flatworms that troll ponds and standing water resemble brown tubes equipped with just the basics: a pair of beady light-sensing "eyespots" on their head and a feeding tube called the pharynx (which doubles as the excretory tract) that protrudes from a belly sac to suck up food. It's hard to feel kinship with them. But admiration is another thing, because many planaria species regenerate in wondrous ways—namely, when ...

New Rochelle, NY, April 10, 2014—In early fetal development, skin wounds undergo regeneration and healing without scar formation. This mechanism of wound healing later disappears, but by studying the fetal stem cells capable of this scarless wound healing, researchers may be able to apply these mechanisms to develop cell-based approaches able to minimize scarring in adult wounds, as described in a Critical Review article published in Advances in Wound Care, a monthly publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers and an Official Journal of the Wound Healing Society. ...

New Rochelle, NY, April 10, 2014—Men are three to four times more likely to get bladder cancer than women. The possible causes for this greater risk among men, the importance of early and accurate diagnosis, and the scope of available and emerging surgical, chemotherapeutic, and immunotherapeutic approaches for treating bladder cancer in men are the focus of a comprehensive Review article in Journal of Men's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Journal of Men's Health website. Coauthors R. ...

Ruminant cows and sheep account for a major proportion of the methane produced around the world. Currently around 20 percent of global methane emissions stem from ruminants. In the atmosphere methane contributes to the greenhouse effect – that's why researchers are looking for ways of reducing methane production by ruminants. Comparatively little is known about the methane production of other animal species – but one thing seems to be clear: Ruminants produce more of the gas per amount of converted feed than other herbivores. The only other animal group that regularly ...

The willingness of decision makers to take risks increases when they play games of chance with money won earlier. Risk taking also rises when they have the opportunity to compensate for earlier losses by breaking even. This outcome was demonstrated by Dr. Kaisa Hytönen, a Finnish Aalto University researcher in neurofinance, together with her international colleagues. There are frequently various linkages between financial decisions: the circumstances accompanying the decision are rarely completely independent of each other. Both profits and losses, for example, on the ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In U.S. cities, it's not just what you do, but also your address that can determine whether you will get HIV and whether you will survive. A new paper in the American Journal of Public Health illustrates the effects of that geographic disparity – which tracks closely with race and poverty – and calls for an increase in geographically targeted prevention and treatment efforts. "People of color are disproportionately impacted, and their risk of infection is a function not just of behavior but of where they live and the testing and treatment ...

Philadelphia, PA, April 10, 2014 – Two new studies published this week in Biological Psychiatry shed light on the propensity for habit formation in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). These studies suggest that a tendency to develop habits, i.e., the compulsive component of the disorder, may be a core feature of the disorder rather than a consequence of irrational beliefs. In other words, instead of washing one's hands because of the belief that they are contaminated, some people may develop concerns about hand contamination as a consequence of a recurring urge to wash ...

Researchers at the Department of Applied Physics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, in Xi'an, China, are engaged in revealing the mysteries of solidification process and the development of new materials using self-designed experimental instrument which can simulate the space environment such as containerless state. Solidification mechanism is of great importance to better understand the relationship between solidification process and microstructure evolution, so that we can follow them to design and prepare new materials which can meet the application requirements. Dr. ...

A NEW strategy to help young people find jobs that pay fair wages, accompanied by high quality training and better career opportunities, has been developed by a University of Huddersfield professor. Outlined in a specially-commissioned research report, it is beginning to catch the attention of policy-makers throughout the UK. After conducting years of funded research into the challenges that face young people dubbed NEET – meaning that they are not in employment, education or training – Professor Robin Simmons has devised the concept of a Youth Resolution designed to ...

WORCESTER, Mass. – New research from scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School shows that fruit flies are secretly harboring the biochemistry needed to glow in the dark —otherwise known as bioluminescence. The key to activating this latent ability is a novel synthetic analog of D-luciferin developed at UMMS. The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the inherent biochemistry needed for bioluminescence is more common than previously thought. Synthetic luciferins can unmask latent enzymatic ...

Marine scientists keen on finding patterns of coral decline and persistence in gradually warming oceans have a complex challenge: how to save reefs containing the most diversity with limited resources. In the Western Indian Ocean, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the University of Warwick, the ARC Centre for Excellence of Coral Reef Studies, Simon Fraser University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and other groups have found that the corals of the Mozambique Channel should be a priority for protection as climate change continues to threaten ...

The world's reefs are hotbeds of biological diversity, including over 4,500 species of fish. A new study shows that the ancestors of these fish colonized reefs in two distinct waves, before and after the mass extinction event about 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. Reef fish represent one of the largest and most diverse assemblages of vertebrates, according to Samantha Price, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at UC Davis. Price is first author on a paper describing the work, published April 2 in the journal Proceedings ...

Scientists at the University of Colorado School of Medicine have shed light on one of the most common of ailments – the runny nose. Your respiratory tract is under constant attack and the nose is the first line of defense. Often, especially as the weather warms, the assault comes from allergens, which cause the body to fight off a perceived threat. Infections, too, are a problem. But millions of people get a runny nose and have difficulty breathing without an allergic attack or infection. What many people call the sniffles, scientists refer to as "non-allergic rhinitis." Although ...

Maintaining stability in the face of rapid change and growth, and proactively partaking in cooperative global ties in science and technology fields will be key in helping China become an innovation-based economy, according to Denis Simon, vice provost for International Strategic Initiatives at Arizona State University. One of the world's leading experts on science, technology and innovation in China, Simon recently hosted an ASU conference that focused on the evolving role of science and technology in China's international relations. Supplemented with strategic investments ...

UT Arlington and Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital are investigating whether bone grown from the body's own stem cells can replace traditional types of bone grafting. The process, which has been successful in previous lab experiments, uses biodegradable polymer scaffolding material and bone morphogenetic protein, or BMP, which was inserted into the abdomen of mice to attract stem cells that in turn produced bone. BMPs are proteins known to promote bone growth. The research is detailed in a new paper, "Tissue Engineering Bone Using Autologous Progenitor Cells in ...

LOS ANGELES — Concerns about climate change and its impact on the world around us are growing daily. New scientific studies at the La Brea Tar Pits are probing the link between climate warming and the evolution of Ice Age predators, attempting to predict how animals will respond to climate change today. The La Brea Tar Pits are famous for the amazing array of Ice Age fossils found there, such as ground sloths, mammoths, and predators like saber-toothed cats and powerful dire wolves. But the climate during the end of the Ice Age (50,000-11,000 years ago) was unstable, ...

Heroin abuse can damage many brain areas, including the pedunculopontine tegmental nucleus of the midbrain, the ventral tegmental area, and nucleus accumbens. Persistent use of heroin induced irreversible damage to the nervous system. To verify the relationship between acupuncture, neurotrophic factor expression and brain cell structural changes, a research team from Anhui University of Chinese Medicine in China established a rat model of heroin relapse using intramuscular injection of increasing amounts of heroin. During the detoxification period, rat models received acupuncture ...