Researchers have found that preterm children are at an increased risk of having general cognitive and mathematic problems. The new study by the University of Warwick and Ruhr-University Bochum, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, sought to understand the relationship between preterm birth and dyscalculia. Dyscalculia, a learning disorder which involves frequent problems with everyday arithmetic tasks, is diagnosed when children do worse in maths than would be expected based on their general intelligence. Study co-author Professor Dieter Wolke from the University ...

The experimental and numerical study of the behaviour of polymers in concentrated solutions is a line of research that is still highly active. In the past, it enabled us to understand why materials like rubber have certain elastic properties. A distinctive feature of these systems is that the long "chained" molecules composing them tend to penetrate each other and interweave at their ends forming very durable bonds that make them always return to their initial conformation whenever they are "stretched". The behaviour of dense solutions of "ring" polymers, i.e., polymers ...

Pohang, Republic of Korea, March 21, 2014 – Earlier today, Korean researchers successfully showcased the installation and operation of a box-shaped, high-pressure tank for the storage of liquefied natural gas in Pohang, Republic of Korea. The development was the first of its kind in the world. Pressure vessels have many applications and are widely used within the petrochemical, energy, and other industrial sectors where the transport and storage of many types of pressurized gases and fluids are essential. Pressure vessels must be designed, manufactured, installed, ...

Alexandria, Va., USA – Today, at the 43rd Annual Meeting & Exhibition of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR), held in conjunction with the 38th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research, Mary Anne Sampaio de Melo, from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, will present a research study titled "Antibacterial Orthodontic Cement Containing a Quaternary Ammonium Monomer Dimethylaminododecyl Methacrylate." Demineralized lesions in enamel around orthodontic brackets are caused by acids from biofilm accumulation. The objectives of this study ...

Researchers at LSTM have discovered how unprecedented multiple and extreme-level resistance is generated in mosquitoes found in the rice fields of Tiassalé in southern Côte d'Ivoire. The paper, "CYP6 P450 enzymes and ACE-1 duplication produce extreme and multiple insecticide resistance in the malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae" published in PLoS Genetics today, highlights the combination of stringently-replicated whole genome transcription profiling, in vivo transgenic gene expression and in vitro metabolism assays to identify and validate genes from the P450 detoxification ...

Critical illness polyneuropathy and critical illness myopathy are frequent complications of severe illness that involve sensorimotor axons and skeletal muscles, respectively. Differentiating critical illness polyneuropathy from Guillain-Barré syndrome, especially the axonal variants, may be difficult on purely clinical grounds, as Guillain-Barré syndrome is known for its variable atypical manifestations. Prof. Hongliang Zhang and team from the First Bethune Hospital, Jilin University in China provide the latest knowledge concerning the pathophysiology of critical illness ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Although markets for trading carbon emission credits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have stalled in United States federal policy-making, carbon markets are emerging at the state level within the U.S. and around the world, teaching us more about what does and doesn't work. In a Policy Forum article in the March 21 edition of Science magazine, Duke University's Richard Newell, William Pizer and Daniel Raimi discuss the key lessons from a decade of experience with carbon markets. They also discuss what it might take for these markets to develop and possibly ...

To date, it remains poorly understood whether astrocytes can be easily reprogrammed into neurons. Mash1 and Brn2 have been previously shown to cooperate to reprogram fibroblasts into neurons. Dr. Yongjun Wang and team from Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in China found that and found that Brn2 was expressed in astrocytes from 2-month-old Sprague-Dawley rats, but Mash1 was not detectable. Thus, the researchers hypothesized that Mash1 alone could be used to reprogram astrocytes into neurons. Murine stem cell virus (MSCV)-Mash1 recombinant plasmid was constructed ...

Researchers from Lund University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History have made a unique discovery in a well-preserved fern that lived 180 million years ago. Both undestroyed cell nuclei and individual chromosomes have been found in the plant fossil, thanks to its sudden burial in a volcanic eruption. The well-preserved fossil of a fern from the southern Swedish county of Skåne is now attracting attention in the research community. The plant lived around 180 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, when Skåne was a tropical region where the fauna was dominated ...

Cell migration is highly coordinated and occurs in processes such as embryonic development, wound healing, the formation of new blood vessels, and tumour cell invasion. For the successful control of cell movement, this process has to be determined and maintained with great precision. In this study, the scientists used tracheal cells of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to unravel the signalling mechanism involved in the regulation of cell movements. The research describes a new molecular component that controls the expression of a molecule named Fibroblast Growth ...

This news release is available in German. Scientists of the KIT and the University of Kiev have produced an antibiotic, whose biological activity can be controlled with light. Thanks to the robust diarylethene photoswitch, the antimicrobial effect of the peptide mimetic can be applied in a spatially and temporally specific manner. This might open up new options for the treatment of local infections, as side effects are reduced. The researchers present their photoactivable antibiotic with the new photomodule in a "Very Important Paper" of the journal "Angewandte Chemie". ...

The Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed) presents its new microchip 'Tomahawk 2' at the DATE'14 Conference in the International Congress Center Dresden from March 24 to 28, 2014. The new Tomahawk is extremely fast, energy-efficient and resilient. It is a heterogeneous multi-processor which can easily integrate very different kinds of devices. The researchers of the Cluster of Excellence for microelectronics of Technische Universität Dresden use the new prototype to prepare the so-called 'tactile internet'. With this, very big data volumes shall be transmitted ...

Happiness makes people more productive at work, according to the latest research from the University of Warwick. Economists carried out a number of experiments to test the idea that happy employees work harder. In the laboratory, they found happiness made people around 12% more productive. Professor Andrew Oswald, Dr Eugenio Proto and Dr Daniel Sgroi from the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick led the research. This is the first causal evidence using randomized trials and piece-rate working. The study, to be published in the Journal of Labor Economics, ...

Northwestern Medicine scientists have demonstrated that cancer cells – and not normal cells – can be killed by eliminating either the FAS receptor, also known as CD95, or its binding component, CD95 ligand. "The discovery seems counterintuitive because CD95 has previously been defined as a tumor suppressor," said lead investigator Marcus Peter, professor in medicine-hematology/Oncology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "But when we removed it from cancer cells, rather than proliferate, they died." The findings were published March 20 in Cell Reports. ...

Irvine, Calif., March 20, 2014 — Hematopoietic stem cells are now routinely used to treat patients with cancers and other disorders of the blood and immune systems, but researchers knew little about the progenitor cells that give rise to them during embryonic development. In a study published April 8 in Stem Cell Reports, Matthew Inlay of the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center and Stanford University colleagues created novel cell assays that identified the earliest arising HSC precursors based on their ability to generate all major blood cell types (red blood ...

For most people, infrared technology calls to mind soldiers with night-vision goggles or energy audits that identify where heat escapes from homes during the winter season. But for two Brigham Young University professors, infrared holds the potential to spot from afar whether a site is being used to make nuclear weapons. Statistics professor Candace Berrett developed a model that precisely characterizes the material in each pixel of an image taken from a long-wave infrared camera. The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration funded the project through a grant ...

The same gene family that may have helped the human brain become larger and more complex than in any other animal also is linked to the severity of autism, according to new research from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. The gene family is made up of over 270 copies of a segment of DNA called DUF1220. DUF1220 codes for a protein domain – a specific functionally important segment within a protein. The more copies of a specific DUF1220 subtype a person with autism has, the more severe the symptoms, according to a paper published in the PLoS Genetics. ...

Seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals such as dolphins may not appear to have much in common, other than an affinity for open water. The sad truth is that they are all unintended victims – by-catch – of intensive global fishing. In fact, accidental entanglement in fishing gear is the single biggest threat to some species in these groups. A new analysis co-authored by Stanford biology Professor Larry Crowder provides an unprecedented global map of this by-catch, starkly illustrating the scope of the problem and the need to expand existing conservation efforts in certain ...

TORONTO, March 21, 2014—Homeless and vulnerably housed people who have suffered a traumatic brain injury at some point in their life are more likely to visit an Emergency Department, be arrested or incarcerated, or be victims of physical assault, new research has found. "Given the high costs of Emergency Department visits and the burden of crime on society, these findings have important public health and criminal justice implications," the researchers from St. Michael's Hospital wrote today in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation. Traumatic brain injuries, such as ...

Researchers from Princeton University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have confirmed that during the last ice age iron fertilization caused plankton to thrive in a region of the Southern Ocean. The study published in Science confirms a longstanding hypothesis that wind-borne dust carried iron to the region of the globe north of Antarctica, driving plankton growth and eventually leading to the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Plankton remove the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere during growth and transfer it ...

Depression and obesity have long been associated, but how they relate over time is less clear. New research from a Rutgers University–Camden professor shows that adolescent females who experience one of the disorders are at a greater risk for the other as they get older. "Adolescence is a key developmental period for both obesity and depression, so we thought it significant to look at the onset of these disorders at an early age," says Naomi Marmorstein, an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers–Camden. By assessing a statewide sample of more than 1,500 males ...

Women who are pregnant or trying to fall pregnant and taking a folic acid supplement may be at risk of reducing their folate benefit through sun exposure, a new QUT study has warned. In a paper titled Exposure to solar ultraviolet radiation is associated with decreased folate status in women of childbearing age, published in the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B:Biology, QUT researchers found UV exposure significantly depleted folate levels. Professor Michael Kimlin and Dr David Borradale, from QUT's AusSun Research Lab, said the study of 45 young healthy ...

Chronologies of glacial advances during the last glacial period are not contemporaneous throughout the Tibetan Plateau. Professor YI Chaolu and his research group from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, dated glacial boulders on moraines from the last glacial period in the Nyainqentanglha Mountains, Tibet. They suggested that glacial advances that occurred during a relatively warm period (MIS 3) between two cold stages of the last glacial episode in the Nyainqentanglha may correlate with millennial-scale climate change (Heinrich) events. ...

Nobody has seen them yet; particles that are smaller than the Higgs particle. However theories predict their existence, and now the most important of these theories have been critically tested. The result: The existence of the yet unseen particles is now more likely than ever. "I gave them a very critical review", says Thomas Ryttov, particle physicist and associate professor at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology (CP ³ - Origins), University of Southern Denmark. He refers to the theories, that over the last app. five years have been put forward ...

This news release is available in German. The word "cholesterol" is directly linked in most people's minds with high-fat foods, worrying blood test results, and cardiovascular diseases. However, despite its bad reputation, cholesterol is essential to our wellbeing: It stabilizes cell membranes and is a raw material for the production of different hormones in the cell's power plants – the mitochondria. Now, for the first time, scientists in Göttingen have solved the high-resolution structure of the molecular transporter TSPO, which introduces cholesterol into mitochondria. ...