COLUMBIA, Mo. – Self-employment can allow older workers to stay in the labor market longer and earn additional income, yet little research has addressed if reasons for self-employment vary across gender and culture. Now, University of Missouri researchers have studied factors that contribute to self-employment and found these factors differ for men and women in the United States and New Zealand. "Gender is one of the most enduring social factors in the U.S. and New Zealand, a fact that is particularly evident in differing economic opportunities for men and women and their ...

Progressive degeneration of photoreceptors—the rods and cones of the eyes—causes blinding diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration. While there are currently no available treatments to reverse this degeneration, a newly developed compound allows other cells in the eye to act like photoreceptors. As described in a study appearing in the February 19 issue of the Cell Press journal Neuron, the compound may be a potential drug candidate for treating patients suffering from degenerative retinal disorders. The retina has three layers of nerve ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Keep this in mind: Scientists say they've learned how your brain plucks information out of working memory when you decide to act. Say you're a busy mom trying to wrap up a work call now that you've arrived home. While you converse on your Bluetooth headset, one kid begs for an unspecified snack, another asks where his homework project has gone, and just then an urgent e-mail from your boss buzzes the phone in your purse. During the call's last few minutes these urgent requests — snack, homework, boss — wait in your working memory. ...

CHICAGO --- If you're 60 and older, every additional hour a day you spend sitting is linked to doubling the risk of being disabled -- regardless of how much moderate exercise you get, reports a new Northwestern Medicine® study. The study is the first to show sedentary behavior is its own risk factor for disability, separate from lack of moderate vigorous physical activity. In fact, sedentary behavior is almost as strong a risk factor for disability as lack of moderate exercise. If there are two 65-year-old women, one sedentary for 12 hours a day and another sedentary ...

The switch in the brain that sends us off to sleep has been identified by researchers at Oxford University's Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour in a study in fruit flies. The switch works by regulating the activity of a handful of sleep-promoting nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain. The neurons fire when we're tired and need sleep, and dampen down when we're fully rested. 'When you're tired, these neurons in the brain shout loud and they send you to sleep,' says Professor Gero Miesenböck of Oxford University, in whose laboratory the new research was performed. Although ...

WASHINGTON (Feb. 19, 2014) — Collaborative research out of the George Washington University (GW) reveals new information on the pathogenesis of feeding and swallowing difficulties often found in children with neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and intellectual disability. Using an animal model of DiGeorge/22q11 Deletion Syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes autism and intellectual disability, the GW group found clear signs of early feeding and swallowing disruption, and underlying changes in brain development. The research, featured on the cover of Disease ...

URBANA, Ill. – Is a date with your partner as important to you as a meeting at work? A University of Illinois study recommends that couples develop a relationship work ethic that rivals—or at least equals—their professional work ethic. "When people enter the workplace, they make an effort to arrive on time, be productive throughout the day, listen attentively to co-workers and supervisors, try to get along with others, and dress and groom themselves to make a good impression," said Jill R. Bowers, a researcher in the U of I's Department of Human and Community Development. ...

An entrepreneurial climate is more important than access to financing and banks in encouraging self-employment growth, according to rural economists. "Because people who get laid off may end up working for themselves, self-employment can be a good news, bad news situation," said Stephan Goetz, professor of agricultural and regional economics, Penn State, and director of the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development. "However, the self-employed do tend to support other nearby businesses and that can lead to employment growth and income growth across the county." The ...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19–The future of computing may lie not in electrons, but in photons – that is, in microprocessors that use light instead of electrical signals. But these so-called photonic devices are typically built using customized methods that make them difficult and expensive to manufacture. Now, engineers have demonstrated that low power photonic devices can be fabricated using standard chip-making processes. They have achieved what the researchers dub a major milestone in photonic technology. The work will be presented at this year's OFC Conference and Exposition, ...

MANHATTAN, KAN. -- A Kansas State University epidemiologist is helping cats, pet owners and soldiers stay healthy by studying feline tularemia and the factors that influence its prevalence. Ram Raghavan, assistant professor of diagnostic medicine and pathobiology, and collaborative researchers have found that a certain combination of climate, physical environment and socio-ecologic conditions are behind tularemia infections among cats in the region. More than 50 percent of all tularemia cases in the U.S. occur in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas, Raghavan said. Francisella ...

Babies who develop leukemia during the first year of life appear to inherit an unfortunate combination of genetic variations that can make the infants highly susceptible to the disease, according to a new study at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota. The research is available online in the journal Leukemia. Doctors have long puzzled over why it is that babies just a few months old sometimes develop cancer. As infants, they have not lived long enough to accumulate a critical number of cancer-causing mutations. "Parents ...

NASA satellite data was an "eye opener" when it came to Tropical Cyclone 15S, now known as Guito in the Mozambique Channel today, Feb. 19, 2014. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Guito and visible imagery revealed a ragged eye had developed as the tropical cyclone intensified. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Guito on Feb. 19 at 1140 UTC/6:40 a.m. EST as it continued moving south through the Mozambique Channel. The image revealed a ragged-looking eye with a band ...

Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, and other groups have found that the fishing villages of Madagascar—a country with little history of natural resource regulation—are generally supportive of fishing regulations, an encouraging finding that bodes well for sustainable strategies needed to reduce poverty in the island nation. Specifically, Malagasy fishers perceive restrictions on certain kinds of fishing gear as being beneficial for their livelihoods, according to the results of a survey conducted with ...

West Orange, NJ. February 19, 2014. Kessler Foundation researchers have shown that discarding data from subjects with multiple sclerosis (MS) who exhibit head movement during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) may bias sampling away from subjects with lower cognitive ability. The study was published in the January issue of Human Brain Mapping. (Wylie GR, Genova H, DeLuca J, Chiaravalloti N, Sumowski JF. Functional MRI movers and shakers: Does subject-movement cause sampling bias.) Glenn Wylie, DPhil, is associate director of Neuroscience in Neuropsychology & Neuroscience ...

Astronomers see huge clouds of gas orbiting supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. Once thought to be a relatively uniform, fog-like ring, the accreting matter instead forms clumps dense enough to intermittently dim the intense radiation blazing forth as these enormous objects condense and consume matter, they report in a paper to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, available online now. Video depicting the swirling clouds is posted to YouTube http://youtu.be/QA8nzRkjOEw Evidence for the clouds comes from records collected ...

Computer chips keep getting faster because transistors keep getting smaller. But the chips themselves are as big as ever, so data moving around the chip, and between chips and main memory, has to travel just as far. As transistors get faster, the cost of moving data becomes, proportionally, a more severe limitation. So far, chip designers have circumvented that limitation through the use of "caches" — small memory banks close to processors that store frequently used data. But the number of processors — or "cores" — per chip is also increasing, which makes cache management ...

Life is full of decisions. Some, like what to eat for breakfast, are relatively easy. Others, like whether to move cities for a new job, are quite a bit more difficult. Difficult decisions tend to make us feel stressed and uncomfortable – we don't want to feel responsible if the outcome is less than desirable. New research suggests that we deal with such difficult decisions by shifting responsibility for the decision to fate. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Fate is a ubiquitous supernatural ...

The UK could generate almost half its energy needs from biomass sources, including household waste, agricultural residues and home-grown biofuels by 2050, new research suggests. Scientists from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at The University of Manchester found that the UK could produce up to 44% of its energy by these means without the need to import. The study, published in Energy Policy journal, highlights the country's potential abundance of biomass resources that are currently underutilised and totally overlooked by the bioenergy sector. Instead, ...

The debut of cyborgs who are part human and part machine may be a long way off, but researchers say they now may be getting closer. In a study published in ACS' journal Nano Letters, they report development of a coating that makes nanoelectronics much more stable in conditions mimicking those in the human body. The advance could also aid in the development of very small implanted medical devices for monitoring health and disease. Charles Lieber and colleagues note that nanoelectronic devices with nanowire components have unique abilities to probe and interface with living ...

This news release is available in German. Geckos outclass adhesive tapes in one respect: Even after repeated contact with dirt and dust do their feet perfectly adhere to smooth surfaces. Researchers of the KIT and the Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, have now developed the first adhesive tape that does not only adhere to a surface as reliably as the toes of a gecko, but also possesses similar self-cleaning properties. Using such a tape, food packagings or bandages might be opened and closed several times. The results are published in the "Interface" journal of ...

The chemical leak that contaminated drinking water in the Charleston, W.Va., area last month put in sharp relief the shortcomings of the policies and research that apply to thousands of chemicals in use today. An article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly magazine of the American Chemical Society, delves into the details of the accident that forced 300,000 residents to live on bottled water for days. A team of C&EN reporters and editors note that the main chemical that leaked into the water supply is an obscure one called 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol, or ...

Electronics are getting smaller all the time, but there's a limit to how tiny they can get with today's materials. Researchers now say, however, that they have developed a way to shrink capacitors — key components that store energy — even further, which could accelerate the development of more compact, high-performance next-gen devices. The study appears in the journal ACS Nano. Takayoshi Sasaki and colleagues point out that many recent improvements have already downsized capacitors significantly. But current technology has almost reached its limit in terms of materials ...

Washington, DC (February 19 2014) – The lifelong debate of nature versus nurture continues—this time in what your children watch. A recent paper published in the Journal of Communication found that a specific variation of the serotonin-transporter gene was linked to children who engaged in increased viewing of violent TV and playing of violent video games. Sanne Nikkelen, Helen Vossen, and Patti Valkenburg of the University of Amsterdam's School of Communication Research, in collaboration with researchers at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, analyzed ...

While taking in the scenery during long road trips, passengers also may be taking in potentially harmful ultrafine particles (UFPs) that come into the car through outdoor air vents. Closing the vents reduces UFPs, but causes exhaled carbon dioxide to build up. Now, scientists report in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology that installing a newly developed high-efficiency cabin air filter (HECA) could reduce UFP exposure by 93 percent and keep carbon dioxide levels low. Yifang Zhu and Eon Lee explain that most modern cars come with cabin air filters, but ...

New technology to capture the kinetic energy of our everyday movements, such as walking, and to convert it into electrical energy has come a step closer thanks to research to be published in the International Journal Biomechatronics and Biomedical Robotics. Researchers have for many years attempted to harvest energy from our everyday movements to allow us to trickle charge electronic devices while we are walking without the need for expensive and cumbersome gadgets such as solar panels or hand-cranked chargers. Lightweight devices are limited in the voltage that they ...