A new pitfall trap designed to capture bed bugs is more effective than those currently on the market, according to the authors of an article appearing in the next issue of the Journal of Economic Entomology. The authors also found that traps baited with an experimental chemical lure mixture caught 2.2 times as many bed bugs as traps without the lure. Their findings suggest that an effective and affordable bed bug monitor can be made incorporating the new pitfall trap design, a chemical lure, and a sugar-and-yeast mixture to produce carbon dioxide, which is also known to ...

Charlottesville, VA (August 6, 2013). The D-dimer test is often used to rule out the presence of venous thromboembolism; however, the test has been considered unreliable in postoperative patients because D-dimer levels may rise after surgery. Researchers from the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Halle in Germany hypothesized that this rise might be systematic and predictable, in which case a feasible postoperative threshold of D-dimer indicating venous thromboembolism could be determined. The results of this study show that the researchers were able to determine ...

Adults could be at greater risk of becoming anxious and vulnerable to poor mental health if they were deprived of certain hormones while developing in the womb according to new research by scientists at Cardiff and Cambridge universities. New research in mice has revealed the role of the placenta in long-term programming of emotional behaviour and the first time scientists have linked changes in adult behaviour to alterations in placental function. Insulin-like growth factor-2 has been shown to play a major role in foetal and placental development in mammals, and changes ...

"Pressing the button of the lift at your work place, or apartment building is an automatic action – a habit. You don't even really look at the different buttons; your hand is almost reaching out and pressing on its own. But what happens when you use the lift in a new place? In this case, your hand doesn't know the way, you have to locate the buttons, find the right one, and only then your hand can press a button. Here, pushing the button is a goal-directed action." It is with this example that Rui Costa, principal investigator at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme ...

VIDEO: Neurosurgeons at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center are among the first in the United States to successfully implant an MRI-safe spinal cord stimulator to help patients suffering from... Click here for more information. COLUMBUS, Ohio – Neurosurgeons at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center are among the first in the United States to successfully implant an MRI-safe spinal cord stimulator to help patients suffering from chronic back or limb ...

Warming oceans are impacting the breeding patterns and habitat of marine life, effectively re-arranging the broader marine landscape as species adjust to a changing climate, according to a three-year international study published today in Nature Climate Change. The international team led by CSIRO's Climate Adaptation Flagship and University of Queensland marine ecologists Elvira Poloczanska and Anthony Richardson, based their findings on a review of peer-reviewed literature from around the world, identifying more than 1700 changes, including 222 in Australia. CSIRO's ...

The bacterial pathogen Salmonella has a notorious capacity for infection. Last year alone, according to the Center for Disease Control, various species of Salmonella caused multistate disease outbreaks linked with contaminated peanut butter, mangoes, ground beef, cantaloupe, poultry, tuna fish, small turtles and dry dog food. The troublesome invader, however, can be turned to human advantage. Through genetic manipulation, the species S. Typhi can be rendered harmless and used in vaccines in order to prevent, rather than cause illness. In new research, reported in the ...

A team of scientists led by Associate Professor Zeng Qi [1] from A*STAR's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) have discovered a new biomarker which will help physicians predict how well cancer patients respond to cancer drugs. Having the means to identify patients who are most likely to benefit from currently available cancer drugs not only reduces substantially the healthcare cost for the patient, it could mean saving precious lives by getting the right drugs to the right patient at the onset of the treatment. This study published and featured on August cover ...

Australian soils are losing about 1.6 million tonnes of carbon per year from wind erosion and dust storms affecting agricultural productivity, our economy and carbon accounts, according to new research. Top soil is rich in nutrients and carbon but is increasingly being blown away by events such as the 'Red Dawn' in Sydney in 2009. When wind lifts carbon dust into the atmosphere it changes the amount and location of soil carbon. Some carbon falls back to the ground while some leaves Australia or ends up in the ocean. CSIRO research scientist Dr Adrian Chappell ...

A team of researchers led by North Carolina State University has developed a technique that provides real-time images of how magnesium changes at the atomic scale when exposed to radiation. The technique may give researchers new insights into how radiation weakens the integrity of radiation-tolerant materials, such as those used in space exploration and in nuclear energy technologies. "We used high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) to simultaneously irradiate the magnesium and collect images of the material at the atomic scale," says Weizong Xu, a Ph.D. ...

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, together with colleagues in the US and Australia, have developed a method to control a quantum bit for electronic quantum communication in a series of quantum dots, which behave like artificial atoms in the solid state. The results have been published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters. In a conventional computer, information is made up of bits, comprised of 0's and 1's. In a quantum computer the 0 and 1 states can simultaneously exist, allowing a kind of parallel computation in which a large number of computational ...

For biologists it is an easy matter: spiders have eight legs and insects have six. This fact is important when beholding and recognizing the tiny new species of Spider Water Beetles from the Philippine Island of Mindoro discovered by researchers of the Ateneo de Manila University. Zookeys, an open access international scientific journal launched to accelerate biodiversity research, has published the paper about the curious creatures in its latest issue [Zookeys 321: 35–64 (2013)]. Primarily, the study was intended to find and describe the larvae of known species of the ...

Young Malagasy black-and-white ruffed lemurs are more likely to survive when they are raised in communal crèches or "nursery nests" in which their mothers share the draining responsibility of feeding and caring for their offspring. This is according to anthropological research on lemur infant care by Andrea Baden and colleagues of Yale University. The study, published in Springer's journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, describes a rare case in which fitness differences, such as infant survival, between cooperative and non-cooperative lemurs are observed. Baden ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The bacteria Streptococcus pneumoniae harmlessly colonizes the mucous linings of throats and noses in most people, only becoming virulent when they leave those comfortable surroundings and enter the middle ears, lungs or bloodstream. Now, in research published in July in mBio, University at Buffalo researchers reveal how that happens. "We were asking, what is the mechanism behind what makes us sick?" explains Anders P. Hakansson, PhD, assistant professor of microbiology and immunology in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. "We are looking ...

CHICAGO (August 6, 2013) – New guidelines from the United States Public Health Service update the recommendations for the management of healthcare personnel (HCP) with occupational exposure to HIV and use of postexposure prophylaxis (PEP). The guidelines, published online today in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), emphasize the immediate use of a PEP regimen containing three or more antiretroviral drugs after any occupational exposure to HIV. The PEP regimens recommended in the guidelines ...

Patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) often receive donor transplants that effectively "reboot" their own immune defenses, which then attack and potentially cure the hard-to-treat disease. However, there is a high rate of relapse in these patients, and the transplanted immune cells may also harm normal tissues, causing graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). Now, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation that they observed a strong and selective immune response in some patients who received, shortly after ...

CHICAGO (August 6, 2013) – A new study reports that peripherally inserted central catheters (PICCs) do not reduce the risk of central line associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) in hospitalized patients. PICCs have become one of the most commonly used central venous catheters (CVCs) in healthcare settings since they are considered easier and safer to use, with less risk of CLABSIs. The study, published in the September issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, demonstrates that the risk ...

This news release is available in German. Media reports about alleged anti-social and delinquent behavior of entrepreneurs are no rarity. Such reports direct the attention towards possibly 'hidden' anti-social tendencies in entrepreneurial types. Is it true then, that entrepreneurs are a particularly self-serving species with their own moral ideas and ethical principles? Does he really exist, the type of the entrepreneurial 'homo oeconomicus' who first of all is interested in his own benefit and profit and who abandons ethical and social principles? And if so: what ...

VIDEO: This video shows tissue engineering of a human 3D in vitro tumor test system. Click here for more information. On August 6th, JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, will publish two new methods for scientists to study and treat tumor growth. The methods introduce a lab-born, human tissue structure with replicated human biochemistry – offering scientists the opportunity to grow, observe, and ultimately learn how to treat biopsied human tumor cells. The University ...

"Magic" mushrooms are well known for their hallucinogenic properties. Until now, less has been known about their evolutionary development and how they should be classified in the fungal Tree of Life. New research helps uncover the evolutionary past of a fascinating fungi that has wide recreational use and is currently under investigation for a variety of medicinal applications. In the 19th century, the discovery of hallucinogenic mushrooms prompted research into the mushrooms' taxonomy, biochemistry, and historical usage. Gastón Guzmán, a world authority on the genus ...

DURHAM, N.H. – A new University of New Hampshire study challenges the view that online predators are a distinctly dangerous variety of sex offender, requiring special programs to protect youth. The study from the UNH Crimes against Children Research Center finds that sex offenders who target teens increasingly use Internet and cell phone communications to lure teens into sexual relationships. In crimes that involve such communications, offenders who meet and recruit youth online operate in much the same way as offenders who meet and know youth in ordinary offline environments. "These ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Cancer drugs known as ErbB inhibitors have shown great success in treating many patients with lung, breast, colon and other types of cancer. However, ErbB drug resistance means that many other patients do not respond, and even among those who do, tumors commonly come back. A new study from MIT reveals that much of this resistance develops because a protein called AXL helps cancer cells to circumvent the effects of ErbB inhibitors, allowing them to grow unchecked. The findings suggest that combining drugs that target AXL and ErbB receptors could offer ...

WASHINGTON D.C. August 6, 2013 -- The Large Area Picosecond Photodetector (LAPPD) collaboration has developed big detectors that push the timing envelope, measuring the speed of particles with a precision down to trillionths of a second. As described in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, which is produced by the AIP Publishing, a team of researchers within the LAPPD collaboration developed an advanced facility for testing large area photodetectors -- with a level of spatial precision measured in micrometers and time resolutions at or below a picosecond. "Innovation ...

URBANA, Ill. – There was bad news, then good news from University of Illinois broccoli researchers this month. In the first study, they learned that frozen broccoli lacks the ability to form sulforaphane, the cancer-fighting phytochemical in fresh broccoli. But a second study demonstrated how the food industry can act to restore the frozen vegetable's health benefits. "We discovered a technique that companies can use to make frozen broccoli as nutritious as fresh. That matters because many people choose frozen veggies for their convenience and because they're less expensive," ...

Philadelphia, PA, August 6, 2013 – Much attention has focused on school meals, both in the United States and across the globe. Researchers at Uppsala University, Sweden, evaluated teachers eating lunch with the school children. In Sweden, this practice is referred to as "pedagogic meals" because it offers the opportunity of having children learn by modeling adults. The researchers wanted to observe how the teachers interacted with the children during meals in order to better understand how to interpret results of this practice. The study is published in the September/October ...