Sensitive parenting helps protect against the negative effects of being born prematurely on children's school success, a new study has found. Children born prematurely are at risk of a variety of neurological impairments which can mean they are more likely to need special educational support when they reach school age. But a new study led by the University of Warwick shows that parents of very preterm and very low birthweight (VP/VLBW) children can increase their child's academic achievement through sensitive and cognitively stimulating parenting. Researchers looked ...

Ethanol from corn and other plants could become the sustainable, raw material for a huge variety of products, from plastic packaging to detergents to synthetic rubber, that are currently petroleum-based. This was the conclusion of an article published in the ACS journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. Yingzhe Yu and colleagues point out that a chemical called ethylene, now produced from petroleum, is one of the most important raw materials for everyday products. Ethylene is used to make hundreds of products, including polyethylene, the world's most widely ...

Social phenomena fascinate with their complexity, but are not easily understood. Pawel Sobkowicz, an independent researcher based in Warsaw, Poland, has developed a model to study the dynamics of normal people, called 'agents', and their response to a given piece of information, depending on their emotional state. In a study about to be published in EPJ B, the author shows that opinion dynamics differ depending on whether the agent is agitated or not. Key social questions of interest have been the object of previous studies using physics tools. The field of magnetic interactions ...

In cancer research, discovering a new protein that plays a role in cancer is like finding a key and a treasure map: follow the clues and eventually there could be a big reward. At least that's the hope from a new study published in the journal Nature that discovered a novel protein called ceramide-1 phosphate transport protein (CPTP) -- a finding that could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to treat a variety of cancers and other conditions involving inflammation and thrombosis, or blood clotting. The identification of CPTP was the result of an international ...

AUSTIN, Texas — This summer, a radio navigation research team from The University of Texas at Austin set out to discover whether they could subtly coerce a 213-foot yacht off its course, using a custom-made GPS device. Led by assistant professor Todd Humphreys of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the Cockrell School of Engineering, the team was able to successfully spoof an $80 million private yacht using the world's first openly acknowledged GPS spoofing device. Spoofing is a technique that creates false civil GPS signals to gain control ...

Researchers from the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) have discovered two security weaknesses that permit installation of malware onto Apple mobile devices using seemingly innocuous applications and peripherals, uncovering significant security threats to the iOS platform. "Apple utilizes a mandatory app review process to ensure that only approved apps can run on iOS devices, which allows users to feel safe when using any iOS app," said GTISC Associate Director Paul Royal, also a research scientist in the College of Computing. "However, we have discovered ...

With the "green" reputation of large hydroelectric dams already in question, scientists are reporting that millions of smaller dams on rivers around the world make an important contribution to the greenhouse gases linked to global climate change. Their study, showing that more methane than previously believed bubbles out of the water behind small dams, appears in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology. Andreas Maeck and colleagues point out that the large reservoirs of water behind the world's 50,000 large dams are a known source of methane. Like carbon dioxide, ...

BOSTON – Because most human tissues do not regenerate spontaneously, advances in tissue repair and organ regeneration could benefit many patients with a wide variety of medical conditions. Now a research team led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center has identified an entirely new approach to enhance normal tissue growth, a finding that could have widespread therapeutic applications. Their findings were published on-line this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy ...

The world's 50 largest chemical companies — with combined 2012 sales of almost $1 trillion and products that touch the lives of people everywhere — are the topic of the cover story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN is the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. In C&EN's annual snapshot of the sales, profits, R&D spending and other indicators, Senior Correspondent Alexander Tullo points out that the Asian and Middle Eastern juggernauts that shot up the top 50 rankings during the past decade ...

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—July 31, 2013—Altruism is a strong motivating factor for clinical trial participation in the general population and even more so among several minority groups. A significant percentage of African-Americans (61%), Hispanics (57%) and Asians (50%) say it's very important to participate as a volunteer in a clinical trial to improve the health of others, compared to 47% of non-Hispanic whites, according to a new national public opinion poll commissioned by Research!America. These findings are tempered by the reality that participation remains disturbingly ...

This news release is available in German. Abdominal pain, fever, diarrhoea -- these symptoms could point to an infection with the bacterium Yersinia. The bacterium's pathogenic potential is based on a syringe-like injection apparatus called injectisome. For the first time, an international team of researchers including scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany, has unraveled this molecular syringe's spatial conformation. The researchers were able to demonstrate that the length of Yersinia's injectisome's basal body, which ...

Virginia Commonwealth University researchers have discovered, in theory, the possibility of creating large, hollow magnetic cage molecules that could one day be used in medicine as a drug delivery system to non-invasively treat tumors, and in other emerging technologies. Approximately 25 years ago, scientists first made the discovery of C60 fullerene – better known as the Buckminster Fullerene – a molecule composed of 60 carbon molecules that formed a hollow cage. Due to its unique hollow cage structure the molecule offers serious technological potential because it could ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Tiny silicon crystals caused no health problems in monkeys three months after large doses were injected, marking a step forward in the quest to bring such materials into clinics as biomedical imaging agents, according to a new study. The findings, published online July 10 in the journal ACS Nano, suggest that the silicon nanocrystals, known as quantum dots, may be a safe tool for diagnostic imaging in humans. The nanocrystals absorb and emit light in the near-infrared part of the spectrum, a quality that makes them ideal for seeing deeper into tissue ...

Brooklyn, N.Y.—The latest in a series of experiments testing the ability of robots to influence live animals shows that bio-inspired robots can not only elicit fear in zebrafish, but that this reaction can be modulated by alcohol. These findings may pave the way for new methodologies for understanding anxiety and other emotions, as well as substances that alter them. Maurizio Porfiri, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) and Simone Macrì, a collaborator at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità ...

The Standard Model, which has given the most complete explanation up to now of the universe, has gaps, and is unable to explain phenomena like dark matter or gravitational interaction between particles. Physicists are therefore seeking a more fundamental theory that they call "New Physics", but up to now there has been no direct proof of its existence, only indirect observation of dark matter, as deduced, among other things, from the movement of the galaxies. A team of physicists formed by the professor of Physics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) Joaquim Matias, ...

WASHINGTON D.C., July 31, 2013 -- What happens to a resonant wireless power transfer system in the presence of complex electromagnetic environments, such as metal plates? A team of researchers explored the influences at play in this type of situation, and they describe in the American Institute of Physics' journal AIP Advances how efficient wireless power transfer can indeed be achieved in the presence of metal plates. The team discovered that resonance frequency matching, alignment of the magnetic field, and impedance matching are the most important factors for efficient ...

Basic chemistry tells us that a bond between atoms can form if it is energetically more favorable for the atoms to stick together than staying apart. This fundamentally requires an attractive force between the atoms. However, new theoretical predictions show that the combination of a repelling force and controlled noise from an environment can also have the surprising effect of leading to a bound state, although one with quite exotic properties. The research team consisting of Harvard postdoc Mikhail Lemeshko and former Harvard postdoc Hendrik Weimer* report their results ...

In 1924, Science magazine reported on a fatal case of potato poisoning: James B. Matheney of Vandalia, Illinois, had gathered about one and a half bushels of tubers, which had turned green due to sunlight exposure. Two days after eating the potatoes, most of his family -- wife, two daughters and four sons -- showed symptoms of poisoning; the only exceptions were James himself, who didn't eat the potatoes, and a breast-fed baby boy. His wife, aged 45, died a week later, followed by their 16-year-old daughter. The other five members of the family recovered. Although such ...

One of life's most basic processes -- transcription of the genetic code -- resembles road traffic, including traffic jams, accidents and a police force that controls the flow of vehicles. This surprising finding, reported recently by Weizmann Institute researchers in Nature Communications, might facilitate the development of a new generation of drugs for a variety of disorders. Transcription indeed involves a step resembling the motion of a vehicle: Enzymes "ride" along gene "tracks," creating molecules that will later be translated into the various proteins involved ...

Researchers working with tiny components in nanoelectronics face a challenge similar to that of parents of small children: teaching them to manage on their own. The nano-components are so small that arranging them with external tools is impossible. The only solution is to create conditions in which they can be "trusted" to assemble themselves. Much effort has gone into facilitating the self-assembly of semiconductors, the basic building blocks of electronics, but until recently, success has been limited. Scientists had developed methods for growing semiconductor nanowires ...

From how secrets influence our emails to personality traits that increase the risk of obesity – a guide to some talks with new research in personality and social psychology at the APA Convention in Honolulu, July 31 – August 4, 2013 ... Linguistic Fingerprints of Secrets Keeping a secret not only burdens someone with the guilt of withholding information but also changes the way the person interacts with others, according to new research. In two studies, researchers looked at linguistic changes in the emails of people harboring secrets. They found that interactions with ...

Thanks to a new device that is the size of a human hair, it is now possible to detect molecules in a liquid solution and observe their interactions. This is of major interest for the scientific community, as there is currently no reliable way of examining both the behavior and the chemical structure of molecules in a liquid in real time. Developed at Boston University by Hatice Altug and her student Ronen Adato, the process brings together infrared detection techniques and gold nanoparticles. It could potentially make a whole new class of measurements possible, which ...

Shocking as it may seem, wastewater flushed down toilets and sinks is getting a new life thanks to special fuel cells that use it to produce electricity, according to the latest video in the American Chemical Society's (ACS') Bytesize Science series. Produced by the world's largest scientific society, the video is at http://www.BytesizeScience.com. Bruce E. Logan, Ph.D., featured in the video, points out that sewage treatment traditionally has been a big consumer of electricity. With the new fuel cells, that situation could be reversed, with sewage becoming the raw material ...

ST. LOUIS -- In a retrospective study, Saint Louis University researchers have found that patients with melanoma brain metastases can be treated with large doses of interleukin-2 (HD IL-2), a therapy that triggers the body's own immune system to destroy the cancer cells. The study that was recently published in Chemotherapy Research and Practice, reviews cases of eight patients who underwent this therapy at Saint Louis University. John Richart, M.D., associate professor of internal medicine at SLU and principal investigator of the study, first treated a patient with ...

Eight years ago, two former Stanford University postdoctoral fellows, one of them still in California and the other at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) in Cambridge, began exchanging theories about why patients with leukemia stop producing healthy blood cells. What was it, they asked, that caused bone marrow to stop producing normal blood-producing cells? And after almost a decade of bicoastal collaboration, Emmanuelle Passegué, now a professor in the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the University of California, San ...