"Mottronics" is a term seemingly destined to become familiar to aficionados of electronic gadgets. Named for the Nobel laureate Nevill Francis Mott, Mottronics involve materials – mostly metal oxides - that can be induced to transition between electrically conductive and insulating phases. If these phase transitions can be controlled, Mott materials hold great promise for future transistors and memories that feature higher energy efficiencies and faster switching speeds than today's devices. A team of researchers working at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) have ...

A new University of British Columbia study identifies an important molecular change that occurs in the brain when we learn and remember. Published this month in Nature Neuroscience, the research shows that learning stimulates our brain cells in a manner that causes a small fatty acid to attach to delta-catenin, a protein in the brain. This biochemical modification is essential in producing the changes in brain cell connectivity associated with learning, the study finds. In animal models, the scientists found almost twice the amount of modified delta-catenin in the brain ...

Reports coming from Australia are more positive than negative now with regards to the Morwell fire, but officials say they still have a "long way to go." Considerable progress has been made in extinguishing the fire, but there is still significant heat that continues to generate smoke from the open mine. Fire activity has been cut in half since February 11, but there are still "weeks of firefighting ahead" according to Craig Lapsley, Fire Services Commissioner on the County Fire Authority website. According to the Australian News, "The [Morwell] fire, which started ...

February 24, 2014 – (BRONX, NY) –One in every six people in the U.S. is Hispanic/Latino and as a group they live longer than non-Hispanic whites (81.4 years vs. 78.8 years). Yet, despite their strong representation and relative longevity, little is understood about this group's health conditions and behaviors. The Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL), the landmark research study of Hispanic/Latino health funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has released initial findings that show significant variations in disease prevalence and health ...

MANHATTAN -- A critical job performance evaluation can have a negative effect on any employee, a Kansas State University researcher has found. By studying how people view positive or negative feedback, Satoris Culbertson, assistant professor of management, has determined that nobody -- even people who are motivated to learn -- likes negative performance reviews. Culbertson is developing ways to help managers improve the process for reviewing employees. Culbertson and collaborators at Eastern Kentucky University and Texas A&M University surveyed more than 200 staffers ...

Producing second-generation biofuel from dead plant tissue is environmetally friendly - but it is also expensive because the process as used today needs expensive enzymes, and large companies dominate this market. Now a Danish/Iraqi collaboration presents a new technique that avoids the expensive enzymes. The production of second generation biofuels thus becomes cheaper, probably attracting many more producers and competition, and this may finally bring the price down. The world's need for fuel will persist, also when the Earth's deposits of fossil fuels run out. Bioethanol, ...

DURHAM, N.H. – New research from Plymouth State University and the University of New Hampshire indicates that collecting and bleeding horseshoe crabs for biomedical purposes causes short-term changes in their behavior and physiology that could exacerbate the crabs' population decline in parts of the east coast. Each year, the U.S. biomedical industry harvests the blue blood from almost half a million living horseshoe crabs for use in pharmaceuticals — most notably, a product called Limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL), used to ensure vaccines and medical equipment are free ...

DENVER –The findings of a recent study indicate that routine testing with both fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) and immunohistochemistry (IHC) may enhance the detection of ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Accurate determination of ALK-positive tumors is necessary to identify patients with advanced NSCLC who are most likely to benefit from targeted therapy with an ALK inhibitor. The discovery of ALK rearrangement in about 1% to 7% of NSCLCs led to the development of ALK inhibitors, such as crizotinib, which have significantly improved treatment ...

In a surprising new finding, researchers have discovered that bacterial movement is impeded in flowing water, enhancing the likelihood that the microbes will attach to surfaces. The new work could have implications for the study of marine ecosystems, and for our understanding of how infections take hold in medical devices. The findings, the result of microscopic analysis of bacteria inside microfluidic devices, were made by MIT postdoc Roberto Rusconi, former MIT postdoc Jeffrey Guasto (now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University), and Roman ...

There's more to dieting than just sheer willpower and self-control. The presence of friends, late night cravings or the temptation of alcohol can often simply be too strong to resist. Research led by Heather McKee of the University of Birmingham in the UK monitored the social and environmental factors that make people, who are following weight management programs, cheat. The study¹ is published in the Springer journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine.² Eighty people who were either part of a weight-loss group or were dieting on their own participated in the one-week study. ...

DENVER – Researchers have developed a novel technique for detecting ALK rearrangements in non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLCs) that is more sensitive and easier to perform than currently available techniques. The technique can help enhance the routine practice of diagnostic ALK testing on NSCLCs, which is crucial for identifying patients with advanced NSCLC who are most likely to benefit from targeted therapy with an ALK inhibitor. None of the current three routine methods used to detect ALK rearrangements in NSCLC is without drawbacks, especially for tissue specimens ...

Ovarian cancer accounts for more deaths of American women than any other cancer of the female reproductive system. According to the American Cancer Society, one in 72 American women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and one in 100 will ultimately die of the condition. Now Prof. Dan Peer of Tel Aviv University's Department of Cell Research and Immunology has proposed a new strategy to tackle an aggressive subtype of ovarian cancer using a new nanoscale drug-delivery system designed to target specific cancer cells. He and his team – Keren Cohen and Rafi Emmanuel from ...

Alexandria, VA – On a beautiful, clear June morning in 1954, a massive wave suddenly swept out of Lake Michigan killing at least seven people along the Chicago waterfront. At the time, the wave was attributed to a storm that had earlier passed over northern Lake Michigan, but how it came to swamp faraway Chicago, with no warning, was not understood. The Great Lakes, along with the Mediterranean, Japan and many other parts of the world, have a long history of such waves, which have characteristics similar to tsunamis triggered by earthquakes or landslides. Only recently, ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A researcher at the Cardiovascular Institute (CVI) at Rhode Island, The Miriam and Newport hospitals has found that a new class of drugs, originally developed to treat cancer, reduces sudden cardiac death risk after a heart attack. The findings were published online in advance of print in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. "Currently, there are limited options to reduce sudden cardiac death following a heart attack," said principal investigator Samuel C. Dudley, M.D., Ph.D., chief of cardiology at the CVI. "The benefit of most drugs ...

This news release is available in German. Bacteria have developed many different ways of smuggling their toxic cargo into cells. Tripartite Tc toxin complexes, which are used by bacteria like the plague pathogen Yersinia pestis and the insect pathogen Photorhabdus luminescens, are particularly unusual. Stefan Raunser from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund and his colleagues from the University of Freiburg have produced extremely accurate and detailed images of these "toxic injections"; they reveal from where the molecule complexes take ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Feb. 24, 2014 — Blacks may be twice as likely as whites to develop multiple myeloma because they are more likely to have a precursor condition known as monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS), a Mayo Clinic study has found. Not only is MGUS more common in blacks, but the type seen in the black population is also more apt to have features associated with a higher risk of progression to full-blown multiple myeloma, a cancer of a type of white blood cell in bone marrow. The findings, which appear in the journal Leukemia, are from the ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Pregnant and postpartum women with bipolar disorder more frequently have significant mental health and early mothering challenges than other perinatal women undergoing psychiatric treatment, according to a study in the Journal of Affective Disorders. The findings indicate the importance of properly identifying the disorder and developing specific treatments for women during and after pregnancy, the lead author said. "Similar to what you find with bipolar disorder in the nonperinatal population, the overall level of clinical severity ...

Along with eggs, soup and rubber toys, the list of the chicken's most lasting legacies may eventually include advanced materials such as self-organizing colloids, or optics that can transmit light with the efficiency of a crystal and the flexibility of a liquid. The unusual arrangement of cells in a chicken's eye constitutes the first known biological occurrence of a potentially new state of matter known as "disordered hyperuniformity," according to researchers from Princeton University and Washington University in St. Louis. Research in the past decade has shown that ...

Coral Gables, Fla (Feb. 19, 2014) -- There are more than a trillion cells called neurons that form a labyrinth of connections in our brains. Each of these neurons contains millions of proteins that perform different functions. Exactly how individual proteins interact to form the complex networks of the brain still remains as a mystery that is just beginning to unravel. For the first time, a group of scientists has been able to observe intact interactions between proteins, directly in the brain of a live animal. The new live imaging approach was developed by a team of ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. – Costs of care differ significantly across hospitals for children born with heart defects, according to new research led by a University of Michigan researcher. Congenital heart defects are known to be the most common birth defects, impacting nearly 1 in every 100 births. The cost of care for children with congenital heart disease undergoing surgical repair varied as much as nine times across a large group of U.S. children's hospitals, says lead author Sara K. Pasquali, M.D., M.H.S., associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical ...

(New York) – Identifying the specific pathways that promote opioid addiction, pain relief, and tolerance are crucial for developing more effective and less dangerous analgesics, as well as developing new treatments for addiction. Now, new research from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai reveals that opiate use alters the activity of a specific protein needed for the normal functioning of the brain's reward center. Investigators were able to block the protein, as well as increase its expression in the mouse nucleus accumbens, a key component of the brain's reward ...

New research from Uppsala University shows that saturated fat builds more fat and less muscle than polyunsaturated fat. This is the first study on humans to show that the fat composition of food not only influences cholesterol levels in the blood and the risk of cardiovascular disease but also determines where the fat will be stored in the body. The findings have recently been published in the American journal Diabetes. The study involved 39 young adult men and women of normal weight, who ate 750 extra calories per day for seven weeks. The goal was for them to gain three ...

VIDEO: This video shows the rapid "twinkling " or intensity fluctuations of the speckle pattern in a drop of unclotted whole blood. The rapid "twinkling " is due to the fast thermally-driven motion... Click here for more information. WASHINGTON, Feb. 24—Defective blood coagulation is one of the leading causes of preventable death in patients who have suffered trauma or undergone surgery. The body's natural defense against severe blood loss is the clotting ...

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have demonstrated that they can make sensitive chemical analyses of minute samples of nanoparticles by, essentially, roasting them on top of a quartz crystal. The NIST-developed technique, "microscale thermogravimetric analysis," holds promise for studying nanomaterials in biology and the environment, where sample sizes often are quite small and larger-scale analysis won't work.* Chemical analysis of nanoparticles is a challenging task, and not just because ...

Our cells don't live in a vacuum. They are surrounded by a complex, nurturing matrix that is essential for many biological functions, including growth and healing. In all multicellular organisms, including people, cells make their own extracellular matrix. But in the lab, scientists attempting to grow tissue must provide a scaffold for cells to latch onto as they grow and proliferate. This engineered tissue has potential to repair or replace virtually any part of our bodies. Typically, researchers construct scaffolds from synthetic materials or natural animal or human ...