Bethesda, Md. -- The American Physiological Society (APS) issued the following statement today in response to the announcement on the use of chimpanzees in medical research: "The American Physiological Society looks forward to a careful review of Dr. Collins' decision regarding NIH's implementation of the IOM principles and criteria. The APS previously offered comments on the Working Group report. We are hopeful that Dr. Collins has taken into account our concerns, which include implementing flexible, outcome-oriented guidelines for chimpanzee housing and social groups; ...

AUSTIN, Texas – By creating a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, chemists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany have introduced a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques. The new method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery. The process evades the problems confronting current desalination methods by eliminating the need for a membrane and by separating salt from water at a microscale. The technique, ...

In order to get a better understanding of these effects, researchers from the Inserm cardiovascular, metabolism, diabetology and nutrition unit (U1060 « Laboratoire de recherche en cardiovasculaire, métabolisme, diabétologie et nutrition » Inserm/Inra/Université Lyon 1) introduced a "cocktail" of contaminants mixed with low doses of dioxin, PCB, bisphenol A and phtalates into the feeding of mice that had already been rendered obese by a high-fat diet. The results show that metabolic changes occur in these mice, but that the effects differ depending on the gender. Females ...

WASHINGTON — Emergency patients over the age of 74 have significantly different and more complex health and social needs than their younger counterparts, even after controlling for illness severity, which has important implications about aging populations and emergency departments of the future. The results of the most extensive international study of the characteristics and outcomes of older emergency patients to be reported to date were published online Tuesday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Profiles of Older Patients in the Emergency Department: Findings from the ...

Researchers from McGill University, RIKEN (The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, Wako, Japan) and the Institute for Molecular Science (Okazaki, Japan) have discovered a way to make the widely used chemical process of hydrogenation more environmentally friendly – and less expensive. Hydrogenation is a chemical process used in a wide range of industrial applications, from food products, such as margarine, to petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. The process typically involves the use of heavy metals, such as palladium or platinum, to catalyze the chemical reaction. ...

Researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have developed a new method for visualizing material defects in thin-film solar cells. An LMU research team led by Bert Nickel has, for the first time, succeeded in functionally characterizing the active layer in organic thin-film solar cells using laser light for localized excitation of the material. The findings are reported in the scientific journal "Advanced Materials". "We have developed a method in which the material is raster-scanned with a laser, while the focused beam is modulated in different ways, ...

New observations of a star known as Gliese 667C have revealed a system with at least six planets, including a record-breaking three super-Earths orbiting in the star's "habitable zone" where liquid water could exist on the planets. This is the first planetary system found to have a fully packed habitable zone. "The three planets in the habitable zone are roughly Earth-sized, and only about three to four times the mass of the Earth," said Steven Vogt, University of California, Santa Cruz astronomy and astrophysics professor who is on a team with Paul Butler of the Carnegie ...

Humans are amazing throwers. We are unique among all animals, including our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, in our ability to throw projectiles at high speeds and with incredible accuracy. This trait was critical to the survival and success of our ancestors, aiding their hunting and protective skills, according to National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded research featured on the cover of this week's journal Nature. Harvard University researchers supported by NSF's Biological Anthropology Program discovered that humans are able to throw projectiles at incredible ...

People punish generous group members by rejecting them socially — even when the generosity benefits everyone — because the "big givers" are nonconformists, according to a Baylor University study. The study, published in Social Science Research journal, showed that besides socially rejecting especially generous givers, others even "paid" to punish them through a points system. "This is puzzling behavior," said researcher Kyle Irwin, Ph.D., an assistant professor of sociology in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences. "Why would you punish the people who are doing the most ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Automakers and other private firms should be required by law to carry insurance policies to pay for tearing down their factories and buildings, recommends a hard-hitting study from Michigan State University's Center for Community and Economic Development. Such a requirement would prevent commercial and industrial companies from "walking away" from shuttered facilities – a problem plaguing the nation, said Rex LaMore, director of the CCED and lead author on the study. In the automotive industry alone, there are 135 abandoned plants nationwide. ...

We know it's out there, debris from 50 years of space exploration — aluminum, steel, nylon, even liquid sodium from Russian satellites — orbiting around the Earth and posing a danger to manned and unmanned spacecraft. According to NASA, there are more than 21,000 pieces of 'space junk' roughly the size of a baseball (larger than 10 centimeters) in orbit, and about 500,000 pieces that are golf ball-sized (between one to 10 centimeters). Sure, space is big, but when a piece of space junk strikes a spacecraft, the collision occurs at a velocity of 5 to 15 kilometers per ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- The power of the brain lies in its trillions of intercellular connections, called synapses, which together form complex neural "networks." While neuroscientists have long sought to map these complex connections to see how they influence specific brain functions, traditional techniques have yet to provide the desired resolution. Now, by using an innovative brain-tracing technique, scientists at the Gladstone Institutes and the Salk Institute have found a way to untangle these networks. Their findings offer new insight into how specific brain regions ...

They have also shown that any pancreatic β cells can be regenerated several times and that chemically-induced diabetes in mice can thus be "treated" repeatedly. The challenge for the researchers is now to show that these procedures can be applied to humans. Their work is published online in the Developmental Cell journal dated 27 June 2013. Type I diabetes, characterised by the selective loss of pancreatic, insulin-producing β cells, is a condition that affects more than 30 million people worldwide. Despite current treatments, type I diabetic patients have ...

CHICAGO --- The minds of murderers who kill impulsively, often out of rage, and those who carefully carry out premeditated crimes differ markedly both psychologically and intellectually, according to a new study by Northwestern Medicine® researcher Robert Hanlon. "Impulsive murderers were much more mentally impaired, particularly cognitively impaired, in terms of both their intelligence and other cognitive functions," said Hanlon, senior author of the study and associate professor of clinical psychiatry and clinical neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School ...

When young children gaze intently at something or furrow their brows in concentration, you know their minds are busily at work. But you're never entirely sure what they're thinking. Now you can get an inside look. Psychologists led by the University of Iowa for the first time have peered inside the brain with optical neuroimaging to quantify how much 3- and 4-year-old children are grasping when they survey what's around them and to learn what areas of the brain are in play. The study looks at "visual working memory," a core cognitive function in which we stitch together ...

The Inserm researchers at unit 1018, "The Epidemiology and Public Health Research Centre", working in collaboration with researchers from England and Finland have demonstrated that it is essential to be vigilant about this and to take it very seriously when people say that they are stressed, particularly if they believe that stress is affecting their health. According to the study performed by these researchers, with 7268 participants, such people have twice as much risk of a heart attack, compared with others. These results have been published in European Heart Journal. ...

Ingestion of commonly encountered nanoparticles at typical environmental levels is unlikely to cause overt toxicity, according to US researchers. Nevertheless there is insufficient evidence to determine whether chronic exposures could lead to subtle alterations in intestinal immune function, protein profiles, or microbial balance. Writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Biomedical Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, researchers have compared existing laboratory and experimental animal studies pertaining to the toxicity of nanoparticles most likely to ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A computer analysis of nearly 2 million text messages (tweets) on the online social network Twitter found that Christians use more positive words, fewer negative words and engage in less analytical thinking than atheists. Christians also were more likely than atheists to tweet about their social relationships, the researchers found. The findings are reported in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science. "Whether religious people experience more or less happiness is an important question in itself," the authors of the new analysis wrote. ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Many researchers around the world are seeking ways to "scrub" carbon dioxide (CO2) from the emissions of fossil-fuel power plants as a way of curbing the gas that is considered most responsible for global climate change. But most such systems rely on complex plumbing to divert the steam used to drive the turbines that generate power in these plants, and such systems are not practical as retrofits to existing plants. Now, researchers at MIT have come up with a scrubbing system that requires no steam connection, can operate at lower temperatures, and would ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Engineers at Oregon State University are studying a new approach to organize and route truck transportation that could save millions of dollars, improve the quality of life for thousands of truck drivers and make freight transportation far more efficient. The findings, published recently in Transportation Research Part E, show the feasibility of the new system. More research is still needed before implementation, but there's potential to revolutionize the way that truck transportation is handled in the United States and around the world, some experts ...

(Santa Barbara, California) –– Building on research published eight years ago in the journal Chemistry and Biology, Kenneth S. Kosik, Harriman Professor in Neuroscience and co-director of the Neuroscience Research Institute (NRI) at UC Santa Barbara, and his team have now applied their findings to two distinct, well-known mouse models, demonstrating a new potential target in the fight against Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases. The results were published online June 4 as the Paper of the Week in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. As a Paper of the Week, ...

The day of the big barbecue arrives and it's time to fire up the grill. But rather than toss the hamburgers and hotdogs haphazardly onto the grate, you wait for the heat to reach an optimal temperature, and then neatly lay them out in their apportioned areas according to size and cooking times. Meanwhile, your friend is preparing the beverages. Cups are grabbed face down from the stack, turned over, and – using the other hand – filled with ice. While these tasks – like countless, everyday actions – may seem trivial at first glance, they are actually fairly complex, according ...

To keep costs low, companies often incentivize healthy lifestyles. Now, new research suggests that how these incentives are framed — as benefits for healthy-weight people or penalties for overweight people — makes a big difference. The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that policies that carry higher premiums for overweight individuals are perceived as punishing and stigmatizing. Researcher David Tannenbaum of the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles wanted ...

A new UC San Francisco study highlights the potential importance of the vast majority of human DNA that lies outside of genes within the cell. The researchers found that about 85 percent of these stretches of DNA make RNA, a molecule that increasingly is being found to play important roles within cells. They also determined that this RNA-making DNA is more likely than other non-gene DNA regions to be associated with inherited disease risks. The study, published in the free online journal PLOS Genetics on June 20, 2013, is one of the most extensive examinations of the ...

When University of Alberta researcher Duane Froese found an unusually large horse fossil in the Yukon permafrost, he knew it was important. Now, in a new study published online today in Nature, this fossil is rewriting the story of equine evolution as the ancient horse has its genome sequenced. Unlike the small ice age horse fossils that are common across the unglaciated areas of the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia that date to the last 100,000 years, this fossil was at least the size of a modern domestic horse. Froese, an associate professor in the U of A Department of Earth ...