According to the new research results of the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, lignocellulosic biomass can be used in the production of high-quality biofuels for the price of less than one euro per litre. A new technology developed in Finland allows the transfer of more than half the energy of wood raw materials to the end-product. The technology is considered ready for the construction of a commercial-scale production plant in Europe. VTT has assessed the techno-economics of the production of renewable liquid transportation fuels from forest residues. The case ...

The European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) has released updated recommendations for the management of RA. According to this latest guidance, treatment with disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) should be initiated as soon as a diagnosis of RA is made, with the aim of reaching a target of remission or low disease activity in every patient. As first-line treatment, EULAR recommends rheumatologists administer methotrexate (MTX) or combination therapy of MTX with other conventional synthetic DMARDs. Low-dose glucocorticoids should also be considered in combination ...

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have shown that young people who show impulsive tendencies are more prone to drinking heavily at an early age. The research suggests that targeting personality traits, such as impulsivity, could potentially be a successful intervention in preventing adolescent drinking from developing into problems with alcohol in later life. Studies in the UK show that approximately 24% of 12 year olds have reported at least one episode of alcohol consumption, rising to 77% of 15 year olds. Previous research has suggested that impulsive ...

Amsterdam, July 3, 2013 - Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced the publication of a recent retrospective study in Reproductive BioMedicine Online to better understand treatment considerations and outcomes for same-sex male couples and single men when using assisted reproduction treatment. The number of same-sex male couples and single men using assisted reproduction assistance to have a family has been increasing over time (since 2003 a 21-fold increase has been reported). However, there ...

Exercise, even in small doses, changes the expression of our innate DNA. New research from Lund University in Sweden has described for the first time what happens on an epigenetic level in fat cells when we undertake physical activity. "Our study shows the positive effects of exercise, because the epigenetic pattern of genes that affect fat storage in the body changes", says Charlotte Ling, Associate Professor at Lund University Diabetes Centre. The cells of the body contain DNA, which contains genes. We inherit our genes and they cannot be changed. The genes, however, ...

Working in a team is not always easy, and achieving our aims often turns out to be much harder than we thought it would be. What can we do to increase our chances of gaining ultimate success? A new study from Aarhus University's transdisciplinary Interacting Minds Centre (IMC) provides insight into how to improve productivity when members of a group share a clearly identifiable goal. "Our study focused on how to improve levels of cooperation. What we found was that when people know exactly what they're supposed to be doing as members of a team, they are more willing ...

WASHINGTON D.C., June 28, 2013 -- A new method for creating thin films of diamonds, which is described in the journal Applied Physics Letters, produced by AIP Publishing, may allow manufacturers to enhance future electronics. In industrial and high-tech settings, diamonds are particularly valued for their hardness, optical clarity, smoothness, and resistance to chemicals, radiation and electrical fields. For electronics applications, researchers "dope" diamonds in order to make them conductive, introducing the semiconductor boron into the diamond manufacturing process. ...

Subjectivity is problematic when evaluating fingerprints, and quality is in the eye of the examiner. But three computer programs used together can give fingerprint grading unprecedented consistency and objectivity, according to Penn State researchers. "People leave behind all kinds of fingerprints, and the job of a forensic examiner is then to look at a fingerprint and identify a person who could have left it," said Akhlesh Lakhtakia, Charles Godfrey Binder Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, Penn State. "Various scenarios can be envisioned where a fingerprint ...

Two Brazilian physicists have now devised a method to automatically elucidate the meaning of words with several senses, based solely on their patterns of connectivity with nearby words in a given sentence – and not on semantics. Thiago Silva and Diego Amancio from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, reveal, in a paper about to be published in EPJ B, how they modelled classics texts as complex networks in order to derive their meaning. This type of model plays a key role in several natural processing language tasks such as machine translation, information retrieval, content ...

(Boston)--Despite it being more than 30 years since the "fountain of youth drug" Gerovital H3 was banned in the United States, it may be making a comeback. In an editorial published in this month's Journal of the American Geriatrics Society BUSM researcher Thomas Perls, MD, points out that a few U.S.-based anti-aging and longevity clinics have begun to advertise Gerovital H3 in pill form and as intravenous infusions despite the fact that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned it in 1982. Gerovital H3 is the dental anesthetic procaine hydrochloride (novocaine), ...

The wasp family Platygastridae is a large group of tiny, exclusively parasitoid wasps distributed worldwide. The genera Odontacolus and Cyphacolus, belonging to this family, are among the most distinctive wasps because of the peculiar hump-like formation on the rear part of their bodies. Despite their intriguing body shape, the generic status of these two groups has remained unclear. A new extensive study published in the open access Zookeys presents a morphological phylogenetic analysis including an astonishing 32 new species. The peculiar shape of the so called horn ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Using a unique data set spanning 40 years of dengue fever incidence in Thailand, an international team led by biostatistician Nicholas Reich at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has for the first time estimated from data that after an initial dengue infection, a person is protected from infection with other strains for between one and three years. Their results have implications for designing more effective vaccine studies, say Reich and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the University of Michigan and the Armed ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Some blue whales off the coast of California change their behavior when exposed to the sort of underwater sounds used during U.S. military exercises. The whales may alter diving behavior or temporarily avoid important feeding areas, according to new research. The Southern California Behavioral Response Study exposed tagged blue whales in the California Bight to simulated mid-frequency (3.5-4 kHz) sonar sounds significantly less intense than the military uses. "Whales clearly respond in some conditions by modifying diving behavior and temporarily avoiding ...

This news release is available in German. Malignant tumours often spread to remote areas of the body. In the majority of cases, metastases formation develops via the blood vascular system. The blood platelets thereby provide invaluable help to the tumour cells in penetrating new organs. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim have identified the P2Y2 receptor molecule on the cells of the blood platelet wall as the gateway that allows the cancer cells to enter the organs. They now aim to prevent the formation of metastases ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—July 3, 2012—The ability to form blood vessels is one of evolution's crowning achievements, and something that separates vertebrates (animals with a backbone) from the rest of the animal kingdom. The two types of blood vessels, arteries and veins, are formed from the same precursor cell type—endothelial cells—that become committed to an arterial or venous cell fate during embryonic development. Yet precisely what drives this commitment, which is essential for shaping cardiovascular development, has long eluded researchers. Now, scientists at the Gladstone ...

The tropical storm that has been hugging the southwestern coast of Mexico moved toward open ocean and strengthened into a hurricane on July 2. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Dalila after moving away from the coast and strengthening into a hurricane. Dalila has become the third hurricane of the Eastern Pacific Ocean hurricane season after Barbara and Cosme. As Dalila starts to weaken, a new tropical low appears to be developing to the southeast. On July 2 at 20:55 UTC (4:55 p.m. EDT) flew over Dalila after the storm became a hurricane. The Moderate Resolution Imaging ...

At present the forest fires plaguing the area near James Bay in Quebec are causing air quality problems in the area and as far away as Maine. According to CBC News on July 02, 2013, "A smog warning is in effect for most of southwestern Quebec — from Gatineau to Montreal to Drummondville — and a smog advisory has already been effect for eastern Ontario, which was expanded all the way through Toronto and Hamilton. This current advisory is mostly due to smoke that is blowing into the warning areas from an extensive forest fire near James Bay, which has consumed around 250,000 ...

Montréal, July 3, 2013 – A team of researchers at the IRCM, led by Dr. Javier M. Di Noia in the Immunity and Viral Infections research division, discovered a novel research model for the study of auto-immune diseases. The Montréal scientists are the first to find a way to separate two important mechanisms that improve the quality of antibodies. This study was featured in a recent issue of The Journal of Immunology. Dr. Di Noia's team studies B cells, a group of white blood cells known as lymphocytes whose main function is to produce antibodies to fight against antigens. ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Humans have been affecting their environment since the ancestors of Homo sapiens first walked upright, but never has their impact been more detrimental than in the 21st century. "The loss of biodiversity has much greater and more profound ecosystem impacts than had ever been imagined," said David Tilman, professor of ecology, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. Human-driven environmental disturbances, such as increasing levels of reactive nitrogen and carbon dioxide ...

Research published today shows why people find it hard to follow Government guidelines to cut their fat and sugars intake at the same time - a phenomenon known as the sugar-fat seesaw. The review, published in the journal Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, looked at 53 scientific papers and found a strong and consistent inverse association in the percentage of energy coming from fats and sugars. People with diets low in sugars were likely to be high in fat, and vice-versa. Nutritionists have labelled this the 'sugar-fat seesaw'. Dr Michele Sadler, who ...

Diabetes is strongly associated with socioeconomic status (SES): low income, low education, and low occupational status are all linked to a higher risk for diabetes. Trying to understand the mechanisms underlying the association, Silvia Stringhini from the Institute for Social and Preventive Medicine in Lausanne, Switzerland and colleagues report in this week's PLOS Medicine that a substantial part of it appears to be attributable to chronic inflammation. "Taking together the evidence linking socioeconomic adversity to inflammation and inflammation to type 2 diabetes" ...

A new automated diagnostic test can quickly and accurately identify most leading causes of Gram-positive bacterial blood stream infections and the presence of three antibiotic resistance genes, according to a new study published this week in PLOS Medicine. The findings from the study, conducted by a team of researchers led by Nathan Ledeboer from the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), USA, suggest that the new technology could lead to faster diagnosis and treatment of patients suffering from sepsis. Severe sepsis is a life-threatening condition that is usually triggered ...

An intervention that consisted of home blood pressure (BP) telemonitoring with pharmacist management resulted in improvements in BP control and decreases in BP during 12 months, compared with usual care, and improvement in BP that was maintained for 6 months following the intervention, according to a study in the July 3 issue of JAMA. "High blood pressure is the most common chronic condition for which patients visit primary care physicians, affecting about 30 percent of U.S. adults, with estimated annual costs exceeding $50 billion. Decades of research have shown that ...

In a study that included more than 2.5 million children born in Sweden, compared with spontaneous conception, any in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment was not associated with autistic disorder but was associated with a small but statistically significantly increased risk of mental retardation, according to a study in the July 3 issue of JAMA. The authors note that the prevalence of these disorders was low, and the increase in absolute risk associated with IVF was small. "Between 1978 and 2012, approximately 5 million infants worldwide were born from in vitro fertilization," ...

Among patients at risk of heart failure, collaborative care based on screening for certain levels of brain-type natriuretic peptide reduced the combined rates of left ventricular systolic dysfunction, diastolic dysfunction, and heart failure as well as emergency cardiovascular hospitalizations, according to a study in the July 3 issue of JAMA. "The increasing prevalence of heart failure [HF] remains a major public health concern underlining the need for an effective prevention strategy. Present-day approaches, focusing mainly on risk factor intervention, have brought ...