DETROIT— While Mother Nature continues to challenge drivers across the country, a team of traffic engineers is working hard on a new way to make rush-hour commutes safer and faster in any weather. "We can't do much about snow falling, but we can do something about road capacity and congestion," said Joseph Hummer, traffic engineering expert and Wayne State University College of Engineering chair of civil and environmental engineering. Hummer and a team of traffic engineers at the Regional Transportation Alliance and North Carolina State University believe metered roundabouts, ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Shame on you. These three simple words can temporarily — or, when used too often, permanently — destroy an individual's sense of value and self-worth. "In modernity, shame is the most obstructed and hidden emotion, and therefore the most destructive," said Thomas Scheff, professor emeritus of sociology at UC Santa Barbara. "Emotions are like breathing — they cause trouble only when obstructed." When hidden, he continued, shame causes serious struggles not only for individuals but also for groups. In an article published in the current issue ...

Tropical Cyclone Lusi is battling vertical wind shear that has been pushing the bulk of precipitation away from its center. NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of the storm that showed the strongest thunderstorms were being pushed away from the center. On March 12 at 22:25 UTC/6:25 p.m. EDT, The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Lusi in the South Pacific Ocean. The image showed a concentration of thunderstorms just south of the center of circulation. On ...

Ex-Tropical Cyclone Gillian weakened to a remnant low pressure area after making landfall in the Western Cape York Peninsula of Queensland, Australia then returned into the Gulf of Carpentaria. NASA's Aqua satellite flew over the tropical low as it struggled to re-intensify. The MODIS or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Ex-Tropical Cyclone Gillian moving through Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria on March 13 at 4:25 UTC/12:45 a.m. EDT. Gillian appeared to have moved about two-thirds ...

New York, NY, March 13, 2014 – Researchers at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals Case Medical Center have assessed the impact of the 2012 U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations against routine prostate specific antigen (PSA) cancer screenings, which cited evidence that the risks of screening outweigh the benefits. Results of the current study indicate that the USPSTF recommendations have resulted in a decrease in the number of PSA screenings ordered by doctors, with the greatest decline seen among urologists. The findings are ...

Although the remarkable benefits of combined training have been clarified by numerous investigations, fitness enthusiasts struggle with the same question: Does the order of cardio- and resistance training influence the effectiveness of a training program? This question has now been the focus of a series of investigations in the Department of Biology of Physical Activity at the University of Jyväskylä. The international research group led by Professor Keijo Häkkinen and coordinated by PhD student Moritz Schumann has recruited a total of almost 200 recreationally active ...

VIDEO: Without Twist1 expression, mammary duct tissue fragments maintain a smooth surface (left). When Twist1 is turned on, cells rapidly detach and migrate away from the tissue (right). Both tissue fragments... Click here for more information. Studying epithelial cells, the cell type that most commonly turns cancerous, Johns Hopkins researchers have identified a protein that causes cells to release from their neighbors and migrate away from healthy mammary, or breast, tissue ...

Cardiovascular calcification (deposits of minerals in heart valves and blood vessels) is a primary contributor to heart disease, the leading cause of death among both men and women in the United States according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "Unfortunately, there currently is no medical treatment for cardiovascular calcification, which can lead to acute cardiovascular events, such as myocardial infarction and stroke, as well as heart failure," says Elena Aikawa, MD, PhD, Director of the Vascular Biology Program at the Center for Interdisciplinary ...

New Rochelle, NY, March 13, 2014—A soft-bodied, self-contained robotic fish with a flexible spine that allows it to mimic the swimming motion of a real fish also has the built-in agility to perform escape maneuvers. The innovative design and capabilities of this complex, autonomous robot is described in Soft Robotics (SoRo), a new peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Soft Robotics website at http://www.liebertpub.com/soro. Andrew Marchese, Cagdas Onal, and Daniela Rus, from MIT (Cambridge, MA) and Worcester ...

Every cell in the body has to sense and respond to chemicals such as hormones and neurotransmitters. They do so by relaying information from receptors to intracellular biochemical pathways that control cell behaviour, but relatively little is known about how cells decode the information in dynamic stimuli. A team of researchers have found that differences in response kinetics working down the intracellular signalling pathway dictate differential sensitivity to different features of pulsatile hormone inputs. The study funded by the BBSRC and published today [14 March] ...

Oxygen-16, one of the key elements of life on earth, is produced by a series of reactions inside of red giant stars. Now a team of physicists, including one from North Carolina State University, has revealed how the element's nuclear shape changes depending on its state, even though other attributes such as spin and parity don't appear to differ. Their findings may shed light on how oxygen is produced. Carbon and oxygen are formed when helium burns inside of red giant stars. Carbon-12 forms when three helium-4 nuclei combine in a very specific way (called the triple alpha ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Researchers have discovered that creating a graphene-copper-graphene "sandwich" strongly enhances the heat conducting properties of copper, a discovery that could further help in the downscaling of electronics. The work was led by Alexander A. Balandin, a professor of electrical engineering at the Bourns College of Engineering at the University of California, Riverside and Konstantin S. Novoselov, a professor of physics at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Balandin and Novoselov are corresponding authors for the paper just published ...

Employees who use treadmill workstations not only receive physical benefits but also are more productive at work, according to a recently published study by researchers from The University of Texas at Arlington, the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota. Darla Hamann, an assistant professor in the UT Arlington School of Urban and Public Affairs, and four colleagues wrote "Treadmill Workstations: The Effects of Walking while Working on Physical Activity and Work Performance", which was published by the journal PLoS One Feb. 20. In the study, sedentary employees from ...

As long as inexpensive statins, which lower cholesterol, are readily available and patients don't mind taking them, it doesn't make sense to do a heart scan to measure how much plaque has built up in a patient's coronary arteries before prescribing the pills, according to a new study by researchers at UC San Francisco. The researchers created a statistical model to predict whether or not it made sense to do the scan, using data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis and other sources. They modeled the effects of statin treatment in 10,000 55-year-old women with ...

Combining nanodrug-based chemotherapy and cryoablation provides an effective strategy to eliminate cancer stem-like cells (CSCs) the root of cancer resistance and metastasis, which will help to improve the safety and efficacy of treating malignancies that are refractory to conventional therapies. Cryoablation (also called cryosurgery or cryotherapy) is an energy-based, minimally invasive surgical technique that has been investigated to treat a variety of diseases including cancer, which is done by freezing the diseased tissue to subzero temperature to induce irreversible ...

Same-day bilateral knee replacement surgery is safe for select patients with rheumatoid arthritis, researchers from Hospital for Special Surgery in New York have found. Generally, patients with an inflammatory systemic disease such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are sicker than patients with the degenerative condition osteoarthritis (OA), says senior study author Mark Figgie, M.D., chief of the Surgical Arthritis Service at Hospital for Special Surgery, and the hospital's first Allan E. Inglis, MD, Chair in Surgical Arthritis. RA patients are more likely to have conditions ...

Researchers have developed a new heat-based technique for counting and measuring the size of microscopic particles. The technique is less expensive than light-based techniques and can be used on a wider array of materials than electricity-based techniques. The research was performed by faculty at North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Marquette University. "We launched this study purely out of curiosity, but it's developed into a technique that has significant advantages over existing methods for counting and measuring the ...

This news release is available in German. Chemical reactions taking place in outer space can now be more easily studied on Earth. An international team of researchers from the University of Aarhus in Denmark and the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, discovered an efficient and versatile way of braking the rotation of molecular ions. The spinning speed of these ions is related to a rotational temperature. Using an extremely tenuous, cooled gas, the researchers have lowered this temperature to about -265 °C. From this record-low value, the researchers ...

Soft robots — which don't just have soft exteriors but are also powered by fluid flowing through flexible channels — have become a sufficiently popular research topic that they now have their own journal, Soft Robotics. In the first issue of that journal, out this month, MIT researchers report the first self-contained autonomous soft robot capable of rapid body motion: a "fish" that can execute an escape maneuver, convulsing its body to change direction in just a fraction of a second, or almost as quickly as a real fish can. "We're excited about soft robots for a variety ...

Populations of endangered salmonids are supported by releasing large quantities of hatchery-reared fish, but the fisheries' catches have continued to decrease. Earlier research has shown that certain behavioural traits explain individual differences in how fish survive in the wild. A new Finnish study conducted on brown trout now shows that there are predictable individual differences in behavioural traits, like activity, tendency to explore new surroundings and stress tolerance. Furthermore, certain individual differences were observed to contain heritable components. ...

This news release is available in German. How does the hip joint of a crawling weevil move? A technique to record 3D X-ray films showing the internal movement dynamics in a spatially precise manner and, at the same time, in the temporal dimension has now been developed by researchers at ANKA, KIT's Synchrotron Radiation Source. The scientists applied this technique to a living weevil. From up to 100,000 two-dimensional radiographs per second, they generated complete 3D film sequences in real time or slow motion. The results are now published in the Proceedings of the ...

New research reveals that 57% of liver transplant centers use living donor evaluation consent forms that include all the elements required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and 78% of centers addressed two-third or more of the items recommended by the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN). The study published in Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the International Liver Transplantation Society, reviewed the living donor evaluation consent forms from 26 of the 37 transplant centers ...

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that tropical grassy areas, which play a critical role in the world's ecology, are under threat as a result of ineffective management. According to research, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, they are often misclassified and this leads to degradation of the land which has a detrimental effect on the plants and animals that are indigenous to these areas. Tropical grassy areas cover a greater area than tropical rain forests, support about one fifth of the world's population and are critically important ...

More than 100 million humans around the world are infected with hepatitis C virus. The infection gives rise to chronic liver inflammation, which may result in reduced liver function, liver cirrhosis and liver cancer. Even though anti-viral medications often efficiently eliminate the virus, the infection recurs in approximately one fifth of the patients. Prevents incorporation in DNA Martin Lagging and co-workers at the Sahlgrenska Academy have studied an enzyme called inosine trifosfatas (ITPase), which normally prevents the incorporation of defective building blocks ...

LOS ANGELES (March 12, 2014) – Researchers at the Barbra Streisand Women's Heart Center at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute have found that emotional stressors – such as those provoking anger – may cause changes in the nervous system that controls heart rate and trigger a type of coronary artery dysfunction that occurs more frequently in women than men. They will describe their findings at the American Psychosomatic Society's annual meeting on March 13 in San Francisco. In men with coronary artery disease, the large arteries feeding the heart tend to become clogged ...