Researchers from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER), and Brookhaven National Laboratory, have discovered a new family of non-precious metal catalysts. These catalysts exhibit better performance than platinum in oxygen-reduction reaction (ORR) only with 10 % of the production cost of a platinum catalyst. The finding, described in Nature's Scientific Reports (published online on Step. 23, 2013), provides an important step towards circumventing the biggest obstacle to widespread- commercialization of fuel ...

BOSTON – Nursing home residents with advanced dementia commonly experience burdensome, costly interventions that do not improve their quality of life or extend their survival. Now a new study suggests that providing intensive primary care services may result in less burdensome and less costly care for these terminally ill residents. Led by researchers at the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife, New York University School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the study appears in ...

SAN DIEGO, CA – Researchers from Boston University's Slone Epidemiology Center and UC San Diego, in collaboration with the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology (AAAAI), have found 'reassuring' evidence of the H1N1 influenza vaccine's safety during pregnancy. The national study, which was launched shortly after the pandemic H1N1 influenza outbreak of 2009 and funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), will be summarized in two companion papers published online this month in the journal, ...

(Boston)--Researchers from Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found frequency of marijuana use was not significantly associated with health services utilization or health status. These findings currently appear online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. As marijuana's legal status changes across the US, its impact on health has become of great interest. Marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug, yet its impact on health and healthcare utilization has not been studied extensively. The researchers studied ...

Approximately 30 million pounds of fumigant pesticides are used each year on soil that yields valuable California crops— strawberries, tomatoes, peppers and the like — in an attempt to control pests. Responsibility for the safety of pesticides must be evaluated and approved by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation in a process known as registration. A new report issued by UCLA's Sustainable Technology and Policy Program, a joint program of the Fielding School of Public Health and the School of Law, shows that in at least one case, the system failed by approving ...

ATLANTA – Sept. 23, 2013. Protecting the stem cells that reside in and around the hippocampus – a C-shaped area in the temporal lobe on both sides of the brain associated with the ability to form and store memories – substantially reduces the rate of cancer patients' memory loss during whole-brain radiotherapy without a significant risk of recurrence in that area of the brain, a new study shows. Results of the Phase II clinical trial of patients with brain metastases are being presented today at the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) annual meeting. "Memory ...

Working with mice, Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered that weeks of treatment with a repurposed FDA-approved drug halted the growth of — and ultimately left no detectable trace of — brain tumor cells taken from adult human patients. The scientists targeted a mutation in the IDH1 gene first identified in human brain tumors called gliomas by a team of Johns Hopkins cancer researchers in 2008. This mutation was found in 70 to 80 percent of lower-grade and progressive forms of the brain cancer. The change occurs within a single spot along a string of thousands of genetic ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Rice containing an overactive gene that makes it resistant to a common herbicide can pass that genetic trait to weedy rice, prompting powerful growth even without a weed-killer to trigger the modification benefit, new research shows. Previously, scientists have found that when a genetically modified trait passes from a crop plant to a closely related weed, the weed gains the crop's engineered benefit – resistance to pests, for example – only in the presence of the offending insects. This new study is a surprising example of gene flow from crops to ...

WACO, Texas (Sept. 23, 2013) — Baylor University professors Stephen Trumble, Ph.D., and Sascha Usenko, Ph.D., have developed a novel technique for reconstructing contaminant and hormone profiles using whale earplugs, determining—for the first time—lifetime chemical exposures and hormone profiles—from birth to death—for an individual whale, information that was previously unattainable. (Find this story on our website: http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=132825) Using a blue whale's earplug, Trumble and Usenko were able to extract and ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Many ancient crustaceans went extinct following a massive collapse of reefs across the planet, and new University of Florida research suggests modern species living in rapidly declining reef habitats may now be at risk. Available online and scheduled to appear in the November issue of Geology, the study shows a direct correlation between the amount of prehistoric reefs and the number of decapod crustaceans, a group that includes shrimp, crab and lobster. The decline of modern reefs due to natural and human-influenced changes also could be detrimental, ...

Anyone who's stuffed a smart phone in their back pocket would appreciate the convenience of electronic devices that could bend. Flexible electronics could spawn new products: clothing wired to cool or heat, reading tablets that could fold like newspaper, and so on. Alas, electronic components such as chips, displays and wires are generally made from metals and inorganic semiconductors -- materials with physical properties that make them fairly stiff and brittle. In the quest for flexibility many researchers have been experimenting with semiconductors made from plastics ...

After more than four decades of research, strong evidence now shows that Kawasaki disease has a distinct seasonal occurrence shared by regions across the Northern hemisphere. The first global analysis of the seasonality of Kawasaki disease, published September 18 by PLOS ONE, was carried out using data obtained between 1970 and 2012. It included 296,203 cases from 39 locations in 25 countries around the globe, with 27 of those locations in the extra-tropical Northern hemisphere, eight in the tropics, and four in the extra-tropical Southern hemisphere. Kawasaki disease ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Fiber optics has made communication faster than ever, but the next step involves a quantum leap –– literally. In order to improve the security of the transfer of information, scientists are working on how to translate electrical quantum states to optical quantum states in a way that would enable ultrafast, quantum-encrypted communications. A UC Santa Barbara research team has demonstrated the first and arguably most challenging step in the process. The paper, published in Nature Physics, describes a nanomechanical transducer that provides strong ...

Certain pediatric surgeries carry such low risk of serious blood loss that clinicians can safely forgo expensive blood typing and blood stocking before such procedures, suggest the results of a small study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. The finding, published ahead of print in the journal Pediatric Anesthesia, was accompanied by a list of 10 operations with "zero" transfusion risk, according to the investigators who reviewed the records of thousands of pediatric surgeries performed at The Johns Hopkins Hospital over 13 months. Unnecessary pre-emptive ...

Imagine an electronic display nearly as clear as a window, or a curtain that illuminates a room, or a smartphone screen that doubles in size, stretching like rubber. Now imagine all of these being made from the same material. Researchers from UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a transparent, elastic organic light-emitting device, or OLED, that could one day make all these possible. The OLED can be repeatedly stretched, folded and twisted at room temperature while still remaining lit and retaining its original shape. OLED ...

SEATTLE – Scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have uncovered a new mechanism by which influenza can infect cells – a finding that ultimately may have implications for immunity against the flu. Influenza viruses have two main proteins on their surface that allow them to do their dirty work: a protein called hemagglutinin allows viruses to infect cells, while a protein called neuraminidase allows viruses to escape from cells. Now in a paper published online ahead of the December print issue of the Journal of Virology, Jesse Bloom, Ph.D., an evolutionary ...

A new study by a team of University of Notre Dame researchers, which appears in the Sept. 2 edition of the journal PLoS ONE, is a significant step in understanding the molecular genetic and physiological basis for a spectrum of metabolic diseases related to circadian function. Obesity and diabetes have reached epidemic levels and are responsible for increased morbidity and mortality throughout the world. Furthermore, the incidence of metabolic disease is significantly elevated in shift-work personnel, revealing an important link between the circadian clock, the sleep-wake ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – New research from the University of Missouri indicates escapism, social interaction and rewards fuel problematic video-game use among "very casual" to "hardcore" adult gamers. Understanding individual motives that contribute to unhealthy game play could help counselors identify and treat individuals addicted to video games. "The biggest risk factor for pathological video game use seems to be playing games to escape from daily life," said Joe Hilgard, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychological Sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. ...

HOUSTON – (Sept. 23, 2013) – Pacemakers, insulin pumps, defibrillators and other implantable medical devices often have wireless capabilities that allow emergency workers to monitor patients. But these devices have a potential downside: They can be hacked. Researchers at Rice University have come up with a secure way to dramatically cut the risk that an implanted medical device (IMD) could be altered remotely without authorization. Their technology would use the patient's own heartbeat as a kind of password that could only be accessed through touch. Rice electrical ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — A scientific survey of gun dealers and pawnbrokers in 43 U.S. states has found nearly unanimous support for denying gun purchases based on prior convictions and for serious mental illness with a history of violence or alcohol or drug abuse – conditions that might have prevented Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis from legally purchasing a firearm. The research, conducted by the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program, is to be published in the Journal of Urban Health. The research is the third report from the UC Davis' Firearm Licensee ...

Researchers have determined that fingerstick cardiac troponin I assay testing using thepoint-of-care i-STAT device is not accurate enough to determine the exact troponin level without the application of a corrective term. The study was funded by the Department of Emergency Medicine, Loyola University Medical Center and was published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. The study was conducted by Devin Loewenstein, BS, Christine Stake, MA and Mark Cichon, DO of Loyola University Chicago, Department of Emergency Medicine. "Cardiac tropnin assays commonly ...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23, 2013 – Audio CDs, all the rage in the '90s, seem increasingly obsolete in a world of MP3 files and iPods, leaving many music lovers with the question of what to do with their extensive compact disk collections. While you could turn your old disks into a work of avant-garde art, researchers in Taiwan have come up with a more practical application: breaking down sewage. The team will present its new wastewater treatment device at the Optical Society's (OSA) Annual Meeting, Frontiers in Optics (FiO) 2013, being held Oct. 6-10 in Orlando, Fla. "Optical ...

Our brains give us the remarkable ability to make sense of situations we've never encountered before—a familiar person in an unfamiliar place, for example, or a coworker in a different job role—but the mechanism our brains use to accomplish this has been a longstanding mystery of neuroscience. Now, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have demonstrated that our brains could process these new situations by relying on a method similar to the "pointer" system used by computers. "Pointers" are used to tell a computer where to look for information stored elsewhere ...

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Boston University, in collaboration with the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology (AAAAI), have found evidence of the H1N1 influenza vaccine's safety during pregnancy. The national study, which was launched shortly after the H1N1 influenza outbreak of 2009, is summarized in two companion papers published online on September 19 in the journal Vaccine. "The overall results of the study were quite reassuring about the safety of the flu vaccine formulations that contained the pandemic ...

Pediatric researchers have found race- and ethnicity-based disparities in pain management and length of stay among children who came to hospital emergency departments for treatment of abdominal pain. A study team reported on their analysis of a national database of hospital visits in the October issue of Pediatrics. Overall, black, Hispanic and "other" race children were less likely to receive analgesics than white children. After adjusting for confounders, black patients were less likely to receive any analgesic or a narcotic analgesic than white children. Similarly, ...