Catalysts are everywhere. They make chemical reactions that normally occur at extremely high temperatures and pressures possible within factories, cars and the comparatively balmy conditions within the human body. Developing better catalysts, however, is mainly a hit-or-miss process. Now, a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Trieste and Brookhaven National Laboratory has shown a way to precisely design the active elements of a certain class of catalysts, showing which parameters are most critical for improving performance. This ...

UBC astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to track the orbital motion of 33,000 stars in one of the Galaxy's oldest globular clusters, offering new insights into the formation of the Milky Way. The careful examination of 'cosmic choreography' enabled researchers, for the first time, to link the movement of stars within the cluster to the stars' ages. The study reveals two distinct generations of stars within globular cluster 47 Tucanae, 16,700 light-years from Earth. Photo editors: Images and more information about 47 Tucanae: http://hubblesite.org/news/2013/25 http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/objects-from/pr1997035c/npp/all/ "When ...

A breakdown of the skin barrier and inflammation in the skin that occurs in eczema could play a key role in triggering food sensitivity in babies, a new study reveals. Scientists say this finding indicates that food allergies may develop via immune cells in the skin rather than the gut, highlighting eczema as a potential target for preventing food allergy in children. A link between eczema and food allergy has been known for some time, but researchers from King's College London and the University of Dundee say this study, published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, ...

Here's yet another reason to get off the couch: new research findings suggest that regularly breaking a sweat may lower the risk of having a stroke. A stroke can occur when a blood vessel in the brain gets blocked. As a result, nearby brain cells will die after not getting enough oxygen and other nutrients. A number of risk factors for stroke have been identified, including smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and being inactive. For this study, published in the journal Stroke, Michelle N. McDonnell, Ph.D., from the University of South Australia, Adelaide and her ...

Children born with a complete absence of the external ear canal, even if only one ear is affected, are more likely than their peers to struggle in school, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Hearing amplification and corrective surgery are available for the condition, called aural atresia. But many children with single ear atresia (unilateral atresia) often are not treated, even though they have significant hearing loss in their affected ear. The assumption has been that having one good ear is adequate for children with ...

Astronomers using the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have taken the first-ever image of a snow line in an infant solar system. This frosty landmark is thought to play an essential role in the formation and chemical make-up of planets around a young star. On Earth, snow lines typically form at high elevations where falling temperatures turn atmospheric moisture to snow. In much the same way, snow lines are thought to form around young stars in the distant, colder reaches of the disks from which solar systems form. Depending on the distance ...

In an international collaborative project, scientists have recorded the times, places and concentrations of oceanic plankton occurrences worldwide. Their data has been collected in a global atlas that covers organisms from bacteria to krill. Oceans cover 70 per cent of the earth's surface. The animal and plant species concealed within these vast expanses and almost fathomless depths have been researched relatively little in comparison with those of terrestrial ecosystems. To date, very little is known about the distribution of plankton – those organisms that are too small ...

Boston, Mass., July 18, 2012 – Ending a 30-year search by scientists, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital have identified two proteins in the inner ear that are critical for hearing, which, when damaged by genetic mutations, cause a form of delayed, progressive hearing loss. Findings were published online July 18 by the journal Neuron. The mutations, affecting genes known as TMC1 and TMC2, were reported in 2011 by the laboratory of Jeffrey Holt, PhD, in the Department of Otolaryngology at Boston Children's. Until now, however, it wasn't clear what the genes do. ...

BOWLING GREEN, O.—Fewer women are getting married and they're waiting longer to tie the knot when they do decide to walk down the aisle. That's according to a new Family Profile from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) at Bowling Green State University. According to "Marriage: More than a Century of Change," the U.S. marriage rate is 31.1, the lowest it's been in over a century. That equals roughly 31 marriages per 1,000 married women. Compare that to 1920, when the marriage rate was a staggering 92.3. Since 1970, the marriage rate has declined ...

Looking at the extent of a tropical cyclone's clouds from space doesn't tell you all you need to know about a storm, so satellites use infrared, microwave and multi-spectral imagery to look "under the hood." Two NASA satellites provided an outside and inside look at Tropical Storm Cimaron as it was starting to make landfall in China. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured an infrared image of Tropical Storm Cimaron on July 17 at 17:29 UTC (1:29 p.m. EDT). Infrared data helps determine temperature, such as the ...

Americans used more natural gas, solar panels and wind turbines and less coal to generate electricity in 2012, according to the most recent U.S. energy charts released by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Each year, the Laboratory releases energy flow charts that track the nation's consumption of energy resources. Natural gas use is up particularly in the electricity generation sector, where it has basically substituted directly for coal, while sustained low natural gas prices have prompted a shift from coal to gas in the electricity generating sector, according ...

ACCRA, GHANA (19 July, 2013)—A new study released today finds that so much water may be lost in the Volta River Basin due to climate change that planned hydroelectric projects to boost energy and food production may only tread water in keeping up with actual demand. Some 24 million people in Ghana, Burkina Faso and four other neighboring countries depend on the Volta River and its tributaries as their principal source of water. Specifically, the researchers with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and their partners concluded that the combined effects ...

Concentric hexagons of graphene grown in a furnace at Rice University represent the first time anyone has synthesized graphene nanoribbons on metal from the bottom up -- atom by atom. As seen under a microscope, the layers brought onions to mind, said Rice chemist James Tour, until a colleague suggested flat graphene could never be like an onion. "So I said, 'OK, these are onion rings,'" Tour quipped. The name stuck, and the remarkable rings that chemists marveled were even possible are described in a new paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The ...

PHILADELPHIA—The drug topiramate, typically used to treat epilepsy and more recently weight loss, may also help people addicted to both cocaine and alcohol use less cocaine, particularly heavy users, researchers in the department of Psychiatry at Penn Medicine report in a new study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Results from the double-blind, placebo-controlled trial adds to the growing body of evidence supporting topiramate as a promising medication to treat addiction. Past, separate studies have shown that topiramate can reduce alcohol dependence, as well ...

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been emerging at an alarming rate. In some of the scariest of these pathogens, the mechanism responsible for the bacteria's ability to defeat antibiotics is a complex protein molecule embedded in the bacterial cell wall -- the enzyme β-lactamase. The rapid evolution of β-lactamase is the key factor responsible for the growing antibiotic resistance of some of the most terrifying pathogenic bacteria on the planet – bacteria which are becoming rapidly immune to most, if not all, of our drugs. We can trace the genetic changes ...

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA - http://www.eso.org/alma) have taken the first ever image of the snow line in an infant solar system. On Earth, snow lines form at high altitudes where falling temperatures turn the moisture in the air into snow. This line is clearly visible on a mountain, where the snow-capped summit ends and the rocky face begins. The snow lines around young stars form in a similar way, in the distant, colder reaches of the dusty discs from which solar systems form. Starting from the star and moving outwards, ...

ANN ARBOR—New findings from NASA's Curiosity rover provide clues to how Mars lost its original atmosphere, which scientists believe was much thicker than the one left today. "The beauty of these measurements lies in the fact that these are the first really high-precision measurements of the composition of Mars' atmosphere," said Sushil Atreya, professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences at the University of Michigan. Atreya is co-author of two related papers published in the July 19 issue of Science, and co-investigator on Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars ...

ANN ARBOR—Like the elevation in the Rocky Mountains where the snow caps begin, a snow line in a solar system is the point where falling temperatures freeze and clump together water or other chemical compounds that would otherwise be vapor. Astronomers believe snow lines in space serve a vital role in forming planets because frozen moisture can help dust grains stick together. Astronomers have, for the first time, directly imaged a snow line at another star. Using the new Atacama Larger Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile, they obtained radio-wavelength ...

Alexandria, Va., USA – Today, the International and American Associations for Dental Research (IADR/AADR) published a paper titled "Gingivae Contain Neural-crest- and Mesoderm-derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells." The paper, written by lead author Songtao Shi, Center for Craniofacial Molecular Biology, Ostrow School of Dentistry, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, is published in the OnlineFirst portion of the IADR/AADR Journal of Dental Research. Gingivae represent a unique soft tissue that serves as a biological barrier to cover the oral cavity side of ...

University of Arizona researchers have found in a recent study that ultrasound waves applied to specific areas of the brain appear able to alter patients' moods. The discovery has led the scientists to conduct further investigations with the hope that this technique could one day be used to treat conditions such as depression and anxiety. Dr. Stuart Hameroff, professor emeritus of the UA's departments of anesthesiology and psychology and director of the UA's Center for Consciousness Studies, is lead author on the first clinical study of brain ultrasound, which was published ...

Social media has expanded to reach an unlikely new target: molecules. Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created networks of molecular data similar to Facebook's recently debuted graph search feature. While graph search would allow Facebook users to find all their New York-living, beer-drinking buddies in one quick search, the NIST-designed networks could help scientists rapidly sift through enormous chemical and biological data sets to find substances with specific properties, for example all 5-ring chemicals with an affinity for ...

VIDEO: This is a iime-lapse movie of blood progenitor cells dividing and differentiating in culture. The brightness of green fluorescence indicates the amount of the regulatory protein PU.1 present in each... Click here for more information. Biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have worked out the details of a mechanism that leads undifferentiated blood stem cells to become macrophages—immune cells that attack bacteria and other foreign pathogens. ...

Designing an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine is something of a paradox: a good vaccine would be safe and look enough like HIV to kick-start the immune system into neutralizing the virus – but the problem is that this is exactly what the human immune system has trouble doing even when it's exposed to the real thing. Now a team of researchers led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. has developed a strategy for inducing a key part of an effective immune response to HIV. By tracing the evolution of HIV-recognizing molecules called antibodies taken ...

If you squeeze a normal object in all directions, it shrinks in all directions. But a few strange materials will actually grow in one dimension when compressed. A team of chemists has now discovered a structure that takes this property to a new level, expanding more dramatically under pressure than any other known material. The finding could lead to new kinds of pressure sensors and artificial muscles. Andrew Cairns, a graduate student at the University of Oxford and a member of the research team, will discuss the new material and its applications at the American Crystallographic ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Rhode Island Hospital researchers have found that multiple factors contribute to the burden felt by caregivers of people living with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. These factors include the direct impact of providing care upon the caregivers' lives, guilt, and frustration or embarrassment. The study is published online in advance of print in American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. The study, conducted by Beth A. Springate, Ph.D, and Geoffrey Tremont, Ph.D, of the division of neuropsychology in the department of psychiatry at Rhode Island ...