Tel Aviv — The incidence of type 1 childhood diabetes has been increasing rapidly worldwide. If blood sugar levels aren't well-controlled, juvenile diabetes can affect nearly every organ of a child's body. And while long-term complications of the disease develop gradually, they may become disabling and even life-threatening. The exact cause of juvenile diabetes has eluded scientists, but a new study from Tel Aviv University suggests a likely trigger before birth. In a recent paper published in Diabetic Medicine, Prof. Zvi Laron, Professor Emeritus of Pediatric Endocrinology ...

A team of researchers, led by the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the University of Southampton, has demonstrated a breakthrough technique that offers the first possibility of silicon detectors for telecommunications. For decades, silicon has been the foundation of the microelectronics revolution and, owing to its excellent optical properties in the near- and mid-infrared range, is now promising to have a similar impact on photonics. The team's research, reported in the journal Nature Materials, describes engineering the electronic band structure of laser-crystallised ...

A study conducted in more than 100 Mongolian schoolchildren found that daily treatment with a vitamin D supplement significantly reduced the symptoms of winter-related atopic dermatitis, a type of eczema. Led by a Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) physician, the report in the October issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology supports the results of a preliminary study that showed similar results in a small group of children in Boston. "While we don't know the exact proportion of patients with atopic dermatitis whose symptoms worsen in the winter, the ...

As global life expectancy increases, adults want to maintain healthy and active lifestyles well into retirement. In fact, research shows that adults think, feel and behave five to ten years younger than their actual age.1-2 But new findings from a review paper published in Age and Ageing show that approximately one out of three adults age 50 and older suffer from sarcopenia, a condition that could interfere with aging adults' ability to live a full and active life.3 Sarcopenia, as it is known in the medical field, is a condition when a person has progressive loss of ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass--When someone crumples a sheet of paper, that usually means it's about to be thrown away. But researchers have now found that crumpling a piece of graphene "paper" — a material formed by bonding together layers of the two-dimensional form of carbon — can actually yield new properties that could be useful for creating extremely stretchable supercapacitors to store energy for flexible electronic devices. The finding is reported in the journal Scientific Reports by MIT's Xuanhe Zhao, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental ...

October 3, 2014 – Children who require long-term parenteral nutrition are at risk of a potentially devastating complication called intestinal failure-associated liver disease (IAFLD). The diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of IAFLD are discussed in a new position paper in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, official journal of the European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition (ESPGHAN) and the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams ...

TORONTO, October 3, 2014 – Ache, agony, distress and pain draw more attention than non-pain related words when it comes to people who suffer from chronic pain, a York University research using state-of-the-art eye-tracking technology has found. "People suffering from chronic pain pay more frequent and longer attention to pain-related words than individuals who are pain-free," says Samantha Fashler, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Health and the lead author of the study. "Our eye movements — the things we look at — generally reflect what we attend to, and knowing how ...

Previously undiscovered secrets of how human cells interact with a bacterium which causes a serious human disease have been revealed in new research by microbiologists at The University of Nottingham. The scientists at the University's Centre for Biomolecular Sciences have shed new light on how two proteins found on many human cells are targeted by the human pathogen Neisseria meningitidis which can cause life-threatening meningitis and septicaemia. The proteins, laminin receptor (LAMR1) and galectin-3 (Gal-3) are found in and on the surface of many human cells. Previous ...

The world's fiber-optic network spans more than 550,000 miles of undersea cable that transmits e-mail, websites, and other packets of data between continents, all at the speed of light. A rip or tangle in any part of this network can significantly slow telecommunications around the world. Now engineers at MIT, along with computer scientists at Columbia University, have developed a method that predicts the pattern of coils and tangles that a cable may form when deployed onto a rigid surface. The research combined laboratory experiments with custom-designed cables, computer-graphics ...

By creating a global database an international consortium of scientists has increased the detailed knowledge of the variation in the cattle genome by several orders of magnitude. The first generation of the new data resource, which will be open access, forms an essential tool for scientists working with cattle genetics and livestock history. The results are published in an article in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Genetics. It's momentous, says one of the scientists behind the international effort, associate professor Bernt Guldbrandtsen from the Center for ...

A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA have demonstrated a novel automated fabrication process consisting of a three-step sol-gel extrusion, structure freezing and drying, and mechanical drawing process which results in production of highly aligned polymer films. Alignment of molecular chains within polymers is a desirable trait for many applications as it results in superior mechanical and thermal properties in the polymeric materials. Although these highly aligned polymer films (HAPFs) are in demand, previous fabrication ...

When you take a shower and rinse the soap and shampoo off your body, the foam conveniently disappears between your toes and down the drain. Have you ever thought about what happens to the surfactants afterwards? Whether they seep into the groundwater, lakes and streams, where they could pose a risk to fish and frogs? Not likely. This is shown in a new and very comprehensive report of the potential impact on the environment of the enormous amounts of common surfactants used day in and day out by consumers all over the world. "We humans use several million tons of ...

Microfluidic tools for precision measurements of cell migration speed reveal that migratory speed of individual cells changes stochastically from parent cells to their descendants, while the average speed of the cell population remains constant through successive generations. A team of researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston has developed technologies for precision measurement of cell migration speed before and applied the new tool to study the variations of migration speed in population of cancer cells. This tool enabled ...

Scientists at the University of Granada, in collaboration with La Paz University Hospital in Madrid and the University of Texas, San Antonio in the US have demonstrated through several experiments conducted on Zucker obese rats that chronic consumption of melatonine helps combat obesity and diabetes mellitus type two. Their research has confirmed that chronic administration of melatonine in young obese rats with diabetes mellitus type two, similar to its human equivalent, improves mitochondrial dysfunction (i.e. mitochondrial homeostatic functions) in a very efficient ...

Social network analysis could improve knowledge sharing in the healthcare sector, according to research results published in the International Journal of Collaborative Enterprise. Elizabeth Cudney, Steven Corns and Suzanna Long in the department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, in Rolla, Missouri, USA, explain how knowledge management systems (KMS) can be critical in capturing, retaining and communicating project results and staff knowledge. They can prevent knowledge drain and provide training as "lessons ...

Researchers at the University of Granada have designed a new imaging system capable of obtaining up to twelve times more colour information than the human eye and conventional cameras, which implies a total of 36 colour channels. This important scientific development will facilitate the easy capture of multispectral images in real time, and in the not too distant future it could also be used to develop new asisted vehicle driving systems, identify counterfeit bills and documents or obtain medical images much more accurate than current ones, among many other applications. The ...

Many of those who are genetically predisposed to develop atrial fibrillation, which dramatically raises the risk of stroke, can be identified with a blood test. This is shown by new research from Lund University in Sweden. The number of people affected by atrial fibrillation is rising rapidly, partly as a result of the ageing population. Over recent years, a research group at Lund University in Sweden, working with other universities and hospitals in Europe and the USA, has identified twelve genetic variants in the human genome that increase the risk of atrial fibrillation. ...

Johnny Depp has an unforgettable face. Tony Angelotti, his stunt double in "Pirates of the Caribbean," does not. So why is it that when they're swashbuckling on screen, audiences worldwide see them both as the same person? Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, have cracked that mystery. Researchers have pinpointed the brain mechanism by which we latch on to a particular face even when it changes. While it may seem as though our brain is tricking us into morphing, say, an actor with his stunt double, this "perceptual pull" is actually a survival mechanism, ...

yphoon Phanfone's eye appeared the size of a pinhole on visible imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite on Oct.3. The MODIS instrument or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Phanfone moving through the Northwestern Pacific Ocean on Oct. 3 at 4:20 UTC (12:20 a.m. EDT). The tiny open eye of the storm was surrounded by a thick band of thunderstorms. The MODIS image also showed a very thick and large band of thunderstorms south of the center and spiraling into the eye. On Thursday, Oct. 2, Typhoon ...

VIDEO: Mexico's western coast is again dealing with rain, wind and rough surf from another tropical storm. NOAA's GOES-West satellite saw the formation of Tropical Storm Simon on Oct. 2. A... Click here for more information. Mexico's western coast is again dealing with rain, wind and rough surf from another tropical storm. NOAA's GOES-West satellite saw the formation of Tropical Storm Simon on Oct. 2. A NASA animation of NOAA's GOES-West satellite imagery shows the development ...

About one-fifth of the Earth's atmosphere is oxygen, pumped out by green plants as a result of photosynthesis and used by most living things on the planet to keep our metabolisms running. But before the first photosynthesizing organisms appeared about 2.4 billion years ago, the atmosphere likely contained mostly carbon dioxide, as is the case today on Mars and Venus. Over the past 40 years, researchers have thought that there must have been a small amount of oxygen in the early atmosphere. Where did this abiotic ("non-life") oxygen come from? Oxygen reacts quite aggressively ...

Curiosity helps us learn about a topic, and being in a curious state also helps the brain memorize unrelated information, according to researchers at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience. Work published Oct. 2 in the journal Neuron provides insight into how piquing our curiosity changes our brains, and could help scientists find ways to enhance overall learning and memory in both healthy individuals and those with neurological conditions. "Our findings potentially have far-reaching implications for the public because they reveal insights into how a form of intrinsic motivation ...

White Americans may view diversity and multiculturalism more negatively as the U.S. moves toward becoming a minority-majority nation, UCLA psychologists report. As part of their study, the researchers divided 98 white Americans from all regions of the country — half male, half female, with an average age of 37 — randomly into two groups. One group was told that whites will no longer be the majority in the U.S. by 2050; in fact, this is likely to be true as soon as 2043, according to some projections. The second group was told that whites would retain their majority status ...

BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA -- New applications of structures and materials that replicate complex yet efficient arrangements that have evolved in nature over millennia are featured in a special section on biomimetic and bioinspired materials for applications in biophotonics in the October issue of the Journal of Biomedical Optics. The journal is published by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, in the SPIE Digital Library. Several of the peer-reviewed articles are accessible via open access. "Biomimetic and bioinspired materials present an emerging ...

VIDEO: The video compares the two sliding states of the C60 flake attached to the tip of the microscope: a) commensurate state at low temperature where the C60 do not rotate... Click here for more information. About 3500 years ago, man invented the wheel to make life easier. Then, thanks to Leonardo Da Vinci's genius, the wheel was made smaller to obtain ball bearings. And today? "Today we are trying to get even smaller: scientists are thinking about nano-bearings", comments ...