D-Wave – a special computing machine with this name has been getting computer scientists and physicists talking for a number of years now. The Canadian technology company of the same name is advertising the machine as a quantum computer. However, whether or not the machine does in fact use quantum effects is the subject of controversial debate amongst experts in the field. If it does, then this would make D-Wave the world's first commercially available quantum computer. The company sold its system to illustrious customers, piquing the interest of the scientific community ...

NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Gillian's remnants in the southern Arafura Sea today, as it passes north of Australia's "Top End." During the week of March 10, Tropical Cyclone Gillian formed in the northern Gulf of Carpentaria and made a brief landfall on the Western Cape York Peninsula, weakening to a remnant low. After re-emerging in the Gulf, Gillian became a tropical storm again and by March 17 had again weakened to a remnant low as it exited the Gulf and moved into the Arafura Sea. The MODIS or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ...

New Rochelle, NY, March 17, 2014–In response to the 2010 Affordable Care Act, employers may no long offer traditional employee health care benefits as they protect themselves from rising health care costs and seek to minimize their risk. How the shifting landscape of health care coverage will impact population health management providers, employers, and employees is the focus of a commentary in Population Health Management, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Population Health Management website at http://www.liebertpub.com/pop. Bruce ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Recent studies have shown that the Earth's tropical belt — demarcated, roughly, by the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn — has progressively expanded since at least the late 1970s. Several explanations for this widening have been proposed, such as radiative forcing due to greenhouse gas increase and stratospheric ozone depletion. Now, a team of climatologists, led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside, posits that the recent widening of the tropical belt is primarily caused by multi-decadal sea surface temperature variability in the ...

University of Cincinnati researchers are reporting on the educational and health benefits of specially created outdoor play environments for children. Victoria Carr, a UC associate professor of education and director of the UC Arlitt Child and Family Research and Education Center, and Eleanor Luken, a former UC research associate for the Arlitt Center and current doctoral student at City University of New York, take a look at this growing trend around the world in an article published this month in the International Journal of Play. Typically called playscapes, these ...

The term a "brighter future" might be a cliché, but in the case of ultra-small probes for lighting up individual proteins, it is now most appropriate. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered surprising new rules for creating ultra-bright light-emitting crystals that are less than 10 nanometers in diameter. These ultra-tiny but ultra-bright nanoprobes should be a big asset for biological imaging, especially deep-tissue optical imaging of neurons in the brain. Working at the Molecular Foundry, ...

(Boston) –Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) physicians have helped create the first set of clinical guidelines for treating patients with pulmonary hypertension in sickle cell disease. Elizabeth Klings, MD, director of the pulmonary hypertension inpatient and education program at BMC and associate professor of medicine at BUSM, spearheaded the development of these guidelines, which are published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Several studies conducted in the past decade have demonstrated that ...

The immune system plays a pivotal role in targeting cancer cells for destruction. However, tumor cells are smart and have developed ways to avoid immune detection. A collaborative team of researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center recently discovered a novel mechanism that lung cancer cells use to block detection by a type of immune cell called a natural killer cell (NK cell). NK cells find and destroy virally infected cells and also play an important role in detecting and killing tumor cells. However, tumors produce high amounts of a protein called Transforming Growth ...

Playing a science-based mobile gaming app for 25 minutes can reduce anxiety in stressed individuals, according to research published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study suggests that "gamifying" a scientifically-supported intervention could offer measurable mental health and behavioral benefits for people with relatively high levels of anxiety. "Millions of people suffering from psychological distress fail to seek or receive mental health services. A key factor here is that many evidence-based treatments ...

Just a fifth of people with hearing problems wear a hearing aid, a study by The University of Manchester has found. The study, published in the journal Ear and Hearing, looked at the habits of 160,000 people in the UK aged 40 to 69 years. It found 10.7 per cent of adults had significant hearing problems when listening to speech in the presence of background noise - but only 2.1 per cent used a hearing aid. One in 10 middle aged adults had substantial hearing problems and were more likely to be from a working class or ethnic minority background. Dr Piers Dawes, from ...

An area of the canine brain associated with reward responds more strongly to the scents of familiar humans than it does to the scents of other humans, or even to those of familiar dogs. The journal Behavioural Processes published the results of the first brain-imaging study of dogs responding to biological odors. The research was led by Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University. "It's one thing when you come home and your dog sees you and jumps on you and licks you and knows that good things are about to happen," Berns says. "In our experiment, ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have analyzed 50 years' worth of hit songs to identify key themes that marketing professionals can use to craft advertisements that will resonate with audiences. "People are exposed to a barrage of advertisements and they often respond by tuning out those advertisements. We wanted to see what we could learn from hit songs to help advertisers break through all that clutter," says Dr. David Henard, a professor of marketing at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the research. "We also wanted to see if there were ...

Rats' brains may remember odors they were exposed to while deeply anesthetized, suggests research in rats published in the April issue of Anesthesiology. Previous research has led to the belief that sensory information is received by the brain under general anesthesia but not perceived by it. These new findings suggest the brain not only receives sensory information, but also registers the information at the cellular level while anesthetized without behavioral reporting of the same information after recovering from anesthesia. In the study, rats were exposed to a ...

Researchers with the National Science Foundation-funded BICEP2 Collaboration today announced that their telescope in Antarctica has allowed them to collect what they believe is the first direct evidence for cosmic inflation. Inflation is the cataclysmic event in which, in a fleeting fraction of a second following the Big Bang, the infant universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of the best telescopes. Modern astronomy is built around the theory that almost 14 billion years ago, the universe burst into existence in an extraordinary event that ...

VIDEO: Ben-Shahar describes research with fruit flies that shows messenger RNA plays an active as well as a passive role in the cell. In addition to encoding for a protein, it... Click here for more information. Our genome, we are taught, operates by sending instructions for the manufacture of proteins from DNA in the nucleus of the cell to the protein-synthesizing machinery in the cytoplasm. These instructions are conveyed by a type of molecule called messenger RNA (mRNA). Francis ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke engineers have devised a way to improve the efficiency of lithotripsy -- the demolition of kidney stones using focused shock waves. After decades of research, all it took was cutting a groove near the perimeter of the shock wave-focusing lens and changing its curvature. "I've spent more than 20 years investigating the physics and engineering aspects of shock wave lithotripsy," said Pei Zhong, the Anderson-Rupp Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University. "And now, thanks to the willingness of Siemens (a leading lithotripter ...

The team led by evolutionary and developmental biologist Ulrich Technau at the University of Vienna discovered that sea anemones display a genomic landscape with a complexity of regulatory elements similar to that of fruit flies or other animal model systems. This suggests, that this principle of gene regulation is already 600 million years old and dates back to the common ancestor of human, fly and sea anemone. On the other hand, sea anemones are more similar to plants rather to vertebrates or insects in their regulation of gene expression by short regulatory RNAs called ...

Bei Shi, Xianping Long, Ranzun Zhao, Zhijiang Liu, Dongmei Wang and Guanxue Xu, researchers at the First Affiliated Hospital of Zunyi Medical College within the Guizhou Province of China, have reported an approach for improving the use of stem cells for improvement of infarcted heart function and damage to the arteries in the March 2013 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine. They have discovered that mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) transfected with a recombinant adenovirus containing the human receptor activity-modifying protein 1 (hRAMP1) gene (EGFP-hRAMP1-MSCs) when ...

A consortium led by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has conducted the largest survey yet of how information encoded in an animal genome is processed in different organs, stages of development, and environmental conditions. Their findings paint a new picture of how genes function in the nervous system and in response to environmental stress. They report their research this week in the Advance Online Publication of the journal Nature. The scientists studied the fruit fly, an important model organism ...

March 16, 2014, Shenzhen, China – In a collaborative study, researchers from Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, BGI, Shantou University Medical College and other institutions identified important alterations of tumor-associated genes and tumorigenic pathways in esophageal squamous cell cancer (ESCC), one of the leading cause of cancer death worldwide. The all-round work was published online today in the international journal Nature, providing a new eye-opening insight into developing novel biomarkers for therapeutic strategies of this ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (March 16, 2014) – For several years, a class of anti-diabetic drugs known as biguanides, has been associated with anti-cancer properties. A number of retrospective studies have shown that the widely used diabetes drug metformin can benefit some cancer patients. Despite this intriguing correlation, it has been unclear how metformin might exert its anti-cancer effects and, perhaps more importantly, in which patients. Now, Whitehead Institute scientists are beginning to unravel this mystery, identifying a major mitochondrial pathway that imbues cancer ...

UNSW scientists have developed a new evolutionary theory on why consuming a diet that is very low in nutrients extends lifespan in laboratory animals - research that could hold clues to promoting healthier ageing in humans. Scientists have known for decades that severely restricted food intake reduces the incidence of diseases of old age, such as cancer, and increases lifespan. "This effect has been demonstrated in laboratories around the world, in species ranging from yeast to flies to mice. There is also some evidence that it occurs in primates," says lead author, Dr ...

Bottom Line: The use of electronic media, such as watching television, using computers and playing electronic games, was associated with poorer well-being in children. Author: Trina Hinkley, Ph.D., of Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues. Background: Using electronic media can be a sedentary behavior and sedentary behavior is associated with adverse health outcomes and may be detrimental at a very young age. How the Study Was Conducted: The authors used data from the European Identification and Prevention of Dietary- and Lifestyle-Induced Health ...

Bottom Line: A diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in older adults was associated with increased risk for mild cognitive impairment (MCI), especially MCI of skills other than memory, and the greatest risk was among patients who had COPD for more than five years. Author: Balwinder Singh, M.D., M.S., of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., and colleagues. Background: COPD is an irreversible limitation of airflow into the lungs, usually caused by smoking. More than 13.5 million adults 25 years or older in the U.S. have COPD. Previous research has suggested ...

SAN DIEGO, Calif. (March 17, 2014)—Whenever fishing vessels harvest fish, other animals can be accidentally caught or entangled in fishing gear as bycatch. Numerous strategies exist to prevent bycatch, but data have been lacking on the global scale of this issue. A new in-depth analysis of global bycatch data provides fisheries and the conservation community with the best information yet to help mitigate the ecological damage of bycatch and helps identify where mitigation measures are most needed. "When we talk about fisheries' catch, we're talking about what fishers are ...