Barnacles might seem like a given part of a seasoned ship's hull, but they're literally quite a drag and cause a ship to burn more fuel. To prevent these and other hangers-on from slowing ships down, scientists are developing a sustainable paint ingredient from plants that can repel clingy sea critters without killing them. The report appears in the ACS journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. Guillermo Blustein and colleagues explain that barnacles and other ocean creatures that stick to hulls create a cascade of problems. By increasing water resistance, ...

Any method that leads to the production of more oil seems counter to the prevailing wisdom on climate change that says use of more greenhouse-gas-emitting fuel is detrimental. But there's one oil-recovery process that some say could be part of the climate change solution and now unites unlikely allies in industry, government and environmental groups, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society. Jeff Johnson, a senior correspondent at C&EN, explains that a process called enhanced oil recovery ...

In modern dentistry, amalgam fillings have become unpopular. Instead, white composite materials are more commonly used, which at first glance can hardly be distinguished from the tooth. The majority of these composites are based on photoactive materials that harden when they are exposed to light. But as the light does not penetrate very deeply into the material, the patients often have to endure a cumbersome procedure in which the fillings are applied and hardened in several steps. The Vienna University of Technology in collaboration with the company Ivoclar Vivadent have ...

The galaxy known as M87 has a fastball that would be the envy of any baseball pitcher. It has thrown an entire star cluster toward us at more than two million miles per hour. The newly discovered cluster, which astronomers named HVGC-1, is now on a fast journey to nowhere. Its fate: to drift through the void between the galaxies for all time. "Astronomers have found runaway stars before, but this is the first time we've found a runaway star cluster," says Nelson Caldwell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Caldwell is lead author on the study, which will ...

The amount of time children spend in front of TV, phone and computer screens is closely associated with their parents' own habits, with much higher weekend viewing than during the week, a new study has found. Researchers at the University of Bristol analysed the amount of time children aged five and six spent watching television, playing video games and using computers, tablets and smartphones – activities associated with a range of health problems, including obesity. The study showed that 12 per cent of boys and eight per cent of girls in this age group watched more ...

CHICAGO --- Pushing a shopping cart or a vacuum doesn't take a lot of effort, but enough of this sort of light physical activity every day can help people with or at risk of knee arthritis avoid developing disabilities as they age, according to a new Northwestern Medicine® study. It is known that the more time people spend in moderate or vigorous activities, the less likely they are to develop disability, but this is the first study to show that spending more time in light activities can help prevent disability, too. "Our findings provide encouragement for adults who ...

The Apodanthaceae are small parasitic plants living almost entirely inside other plants. They occur in Africa, Iran, Australia, and the New World. Bellot and Renner propose the first revision of the species relationships in the family based on combined molecular and anatomical data. They show that Apodanthaceae comprise 10 species, which are specialized to parasitize either legumes or species in the willow family. Few plants are obligate parasites, and fewer still are endo-parasites, meaning they live entirely within their host, emerging only to flower and fruit. Naturally, ...

Dartmouth researchers have found that tweens (preadolescents aged 10-14) who participate in a coached team sport a few times a week or more are less likely to try smoking. Their findings on the relationship between extracurricular activity and health risk behaviors are reported in "The relative roles of types of extracurricular activity on smoking and drinking initiation among tweens," which was recently published in Academic Pediatrics. "How children spend their time matters," said lead author Anna M. Adachi-Mejia, PhD, a member of Norris Cotton Cancer Center's Cancer ...

Sell-side analysts lean towards high valuation companies for comparison, Rotman study shows. Toronto – Brokerage-based analysts have a tendency to benchmark companies they are researching against others in the same category whose stock is already expensively-priced, shows a study from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. The result is that the company being researched may look undervalued and a good buy compared to the high valuation company. The finding provides some support for the idea that sell-side analysts choose "peer" companies strategically, ...

A gene known to repair DNA damage in healthy cells may also provide new insights about treating a genetic disorder of the bone marrow, Caltech researchers say. This finding was published in the May 15 print edition of the journal Cell Cycle. In the study led by Judith Campbell, professor of chemistry and biology at Caltech, the researchers investigated the relationship between two genes—FANCD2 and DNA2—both known to play roles in fixing broken or damaged strands of DNA within a cell, called DNA repair. A defective version of the FANCD2 gene can result in the genetic ...

Children under 14 are more likely than adults to be 'blinded' to their surroundings when focusing on simple things, finds a new UCL study. It explains a somewhat frustrating experience familiar to many parents and carers: young children fail to notice their carer trying to get their attention because they have little capacity to spot things outside their area of focus. The findings suggest that even something simple like looking at a loose thread on a jumper or an advert on the side of a bus might be enough to make children 'blind' to oncoming traffic and other dangers ...

New research has helped unpick a long-standing mystery about how dietary fibre supresses appetite. In a study led by Imperial College London and the Medical Research Council (MRC), an international team of researchers identified an anti-appetite molecule called acetate that is naturally released when we digest fibre in the gut. Once released, the acetate is transported to the brain where it produces a signal to tell us to stop eating. The research, published in Nature Communications, confirms the natural benefits of increasing the amount of fibre in our diets to ...

VIDEO: This shows heart tissue grown in a dish from mouse cardiac progenitor cells (CPCs). The CPCs, and the tissue they built, were engineered to produce a red protein. Click here for more information. A type of cell that builds mouse hearts can renew itself, Johns Hopkins researchers report. They say the discovery, which likely applies to such cells in humans as well, may pave the way to using them to repair hearts damaged by disease — or even grow new heart tissue for transplantation. ...

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP passed over Tapah and captured a visible image of the storm that gave a hint of weakening as clouds began to fill its eye. On April 30 at 0900 UTC/5 a.m. EDT, Tropical Storm Tapah continued to weaken as wind shear began to increase and the storm moved toward cooler waters in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed over Tropical Storm Tapah on April 30 and the VIIRS instrument aboard captured a visible image of the storm as it weakened from a typhoon to a tropical storm. The imagery showed that Tapah's eye was becoming ...

The University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM) and Novavax, Inc. (NASDAQ: NVAX) today announced that an investigational vaccine candidate developed by Novavax against the recently emerged Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) blocked infection in laboratory studies. UM SOM and Novavax also reported that a vaccine candidate against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) developed by Novavax on a similar platform also inhibited virus infection. Researchers reported these findings in an article published in the April 13, 2014 issue ...

New evidence shores up findings that whey protein, which is found in milk and cheese, could have health benefits for people who are obese and do not yet have diabetes. The study, which appears in ACS' Journal of Proteome Research, examined how different protein sources affect metabolism. Lars O. Dragsted, Kjeld Hermansen and colleagues point out that obesity continues to be a major public health problem worldwide. In the U.S. alone, about 35 percent of adults and about 17 percent of children are obese, a condition that can lead to a number of health issues, including ...

A team of researchers investigating the genome of a healthy supercentenarian since 2011 has found many somatic mutations – permanent changes in cells other than reproductive ones – that arose during the woman's lifetime. Led by Erik Sistermans and Henne Holstege from the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, the team recently published its findings in the journal Genome Research as reported by GenomeWeb. While previous studies have examined mutations that arise in certain disease conditions such as leukemia, Sistermans said that it was not well known how many mutations ...

TORONTO -- A possible therapeutic target for control of blood glucose in the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity has been identified by Dr. Anita Johswich and her colleagues. Their findings were published in Journal of Biological Chemistry, online April 17, 2014. An imbalance in the competing action of insulin and glucagon is widely viewed as a critical factor in onset of type 2 diabetes, a relentlessly increasing health problem. A delicate balance between two hormones controls blood glucose levels day and night. After a meal, blood glucose rises, which stimulates ...

If you pull up a soybean or bean plant and shake off the dirt, you might see odd swellings or bumps, like rheumatic finger joints, on its roots. Inside the cool, soil-covered bumps are bacteria that are making nitrogen with the help of an enzyme, something chemical factories can do only with the help of a catalyst and at high temperature and pressure. The bacteria, typically members of the genus Rhizobia, break the strong triple bond between the nitrogen molecules in the air and repackage the nitrogen atoms in chemical compounds the plant can use. In return, the plant ...

Decades after the genomics revolution, half of known eukaryote lineages still remain unstudied at the genomic level--with the field displaying a research bias against 'less popular', but potentially genetically rich, single-cell organisms. This lack of microbial representation leaves a world of untapped genetic potential undiscovered, according to an exhaustive survey conducted by UBC researchers of on-going genomics projects. The survey results are published in the May issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution. "We're still mostly analyzing the same well-known eukaryotic ...

Kīlauea volcano, on the Big Island of Hawai'i, typically has effusive eruptions, wherein magma flows to create ropy pāhoehoe lava, for example. However, Kīlauea less frequently erupts more violently, showering scoria and blocks over much of the surface of the island. To explain the variability in Kīlauea's eruption styles, a team including Bruce Houghton, the Gordon Macdonald Professor of Volcanology in Geology and Geophysics at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UHM) School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) and colleagues from ...

This news release is available in German. HZB-scientist Emad Aziz, who leads the Joint lab between HZB and Freie Universität Berlin, has developed and installed a new tool to investigate ultrafast dynamics in solutions and at interfaces with the use of ultrashort Laser pulses. Liquid phases are a natural environment for many interesting processes in chemistry and biology, and short light pulses allow insights into electronic and structural dynamics of molecules and molecular complexes. In particular, photoelectron spectroscopy with extreme ultraviolet (XUV) radiation ...

UPTON, NY—Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory are seeking ways to synchronize the magnetic spins in nanoscale devices to build tiny yet more powerful signal-generating or receiving antennas and other electronics. Their latest work, published in Nature Communications, shows that stacked nanoscale magnetic vortices separated by an extremely thin layer of copper can be driven to operate in unison, potentially producing a powerful signal that could be put to work in a new generation of cell phones, computers, and other applications. The ...

A NOAA-led research team has found the first evidence that acidity of continental shelf waters off the West Coast is dissolving the shells of tiny free-swimming marine snails, called pteropods, which provide food for pink salmon, mackerel and herring, according to a new paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Researchers estimate that the percentage of pteropods in this region with dissolving shells due to ocean acidification has doubled in the nearshore habitat since the pre-industrial era and is on track to triple by 2050 when coastal waters become 70 ...

Climate change is set to affect the quality of the wines of the Tempranillo grape variety, according to the conclusions of a piece of research conducted by the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development Neiker-Tecnalia, in collaboration with the University of Navarre and the Aula Dei (EEAD) Experimental Station of the National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). Scientists from these bodies have studied the behaviour of the vines in conditions of climate change; in other words, higher temperature, increased presence of CO2 and greater environmental aridity. ...