HOUSTON – (Oct. 8, 2013) – Blowing bubbles in the backyard is one thing and quite another when searching for oil. That distinction is at the root of new research by Rice University scientists who describe in greater detail than ever precisely how those bubbles form, evolve and act. A new study led by Rice chemical and biomolecular engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal and published in the journal Soft Matter describes two previously unknown ways that bubbles form in foam. The work should be of interest to those who make and use foam for a variety of reasons, from shaving cream ...

This news release is available in French. Montreal, October 8, 2013 — Susan is a highly productive employee but is absent more often than her co-workers. She has decided to take a me-day because she believes that her absence will not affect her overall productivity. Legitimate reason to be out of the office, or punishable offence? Depending on where "Susan" lives, it can be either shows new research from Concordia University's John Molson School of Business. According to a study recently published in Cross Cultural Management, there are considerable differences ...

(New York, New York) October 8, 2013 - A loving touch, characterized by a slow caress or stroke - often an instinctive gesture from a mother to a child or between partners in romantic relationships – may increase the brain's ability to construct a sense of body ownership and, in turn, play a part in creating and sustaining a healthy sense of self. These findings come from a new study published online in Frontiers of Psychology, led by Neuropsychoanalysis Centre Director Dr. Aikaterini (Katerina) Fotopoulou, University College London, and NPSA grantee Dr. Paul Mark Jenkinson ...

A new review answers what do we really know about manipulating portion sizes and what questions still remain. Professor Benton, at Swansea University, reviewed the scientific evidence available on portion sizes and this highlights a number of the complexities surrounding the Public Health Responsibility Deal's call for reduced portion sizes, as a way of obtaining reductions in the nation's caloric intakes. The review, to be published in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, found that simply reducing portion sizes is not an easy solution to reducing our energy ...

Babies learn how to anticipate touch while in the womb, according to new research by Durham and Lancaster universities. Using 4-d scans psychologists found, for the first time, that fetuses were able to predict, rather than react to, their own hand movements towards their mouths as they entered the later stages of gestation compared to earlier in a pregnancy. The Durham-led team of researchers said that the latest findings could improve understanding about babies, especially those born prematurely, their readiness to interact socially and their ability to calm themselves ...

Multilateral Initiative on Malaria Pan African Conference, Durban, South Africa — Results from a large-scale Phase III trial, presented today in Durban, show that the most clinically advanced malaria vaccine candidate, RTS,S, continued to protect young children and infants from clinical malaria up to 18 months after vaccination. Based on these data, GSK now intends to submit, in 2014, a regulatory application to the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The World Health Organization (WHO) has indicated that a policy recommendation for the RTS,S malaria vaccine candidate is possible ...

The bottom of the deep sea is largely deserted. Oases occur for example at cold seeps where water transports dissolved elements from the seabed: Specialized microbes convert methane and sulfate from sea water to hydrogen sulfide releasing carbon dioxide. Highly adapted bacteria, many of which live in symbiosis with worms and clams, use the hydrogen sulfide for their growth. In their cells, they incorporate carbon originating from the chemical reaction of methane. "The co-existence of organisms that have settled at the cold seeps is already well understood", says Dr. Peter ...

An international research team led by medical scientists at the University of Alberta has shown that new medications based on resveratrol — a compound found in red wine and nuts — may be used to treat a common heart-rhythm problem known as atrial fibrillation. Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry researcher Peter Light and his colleagues recently published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal, British Journal of Pharmacology. They discovered that new resveratrol-based drugs they created that were used in the lab, helped regulate electrical activity in the heart by inhibiting ...

A new study, published in Springer's Journal of Family Violence, casts light on how health care providers respond to the emotional, sexual and physical violence that female veterans sometimes experience at the hands of their intimate partners. According to the research group, this type of abuse can be common in the lives of women veterans and there is a need to understand how health care providers can best be responsive to this population's health care needs. The research was headed by Dr. Katherine Iverson and colleagues of the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress ...

Scientists at USC have created a mathematical model that explains and predicts the biological process that creates antibody diversity – the phenomenon that keeps us healthy by generating robust immune systems through hypermutation. The work is a collaboration between Myron Goodman, professor of biological sciences and chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; and Chi Mak, professor of chemistry at USC Dornsife. "To me, it was the holy grail," Goodman said. "We can now predict the motion of a key enzyme that initiates hypermutations in immunoglobulin ...

Philadelphia, PA, October 7, 2013 – Atrial fibrillation (AF), characterized by a rapid and irregular heartbeat, is the most common chronic arrhythmia in adults, but is rare in children. In one of the first studies of pediatric "lone AF" (AF without associated heart disease), researchers found a nearly 40% recurrence rate and that AF in the young is accompanied by substantial symptoms. Three patients had significant complications: one with a stroke and two with substantially impaired heart function. The researchers' findings are published in the October issue of the Canadian ...

Now that Major League Baseball's regular season has ended with the exciting one-game tiebreaker that got the Rays to the next round, and with the Rays and the Pirates winning the one game playoff for the wild card team, NJIT math professor Bruce Bukiet has once again begun analyzing the probability of each team advancing through each round of baseball's postseason. "The Los Angeles Dodgers, who many thought were out of contention early in the season after a poor start, have the best chance to win their series (63%) against the Braves while the Detroit Tigers have a 59% ...

Not only do some online video games promote a less-than-active lifestyle for children, the content of some of these games also may be contributing to unhealthy diets. A team of Michigan State University researchers took a closer look at what are called advergames and found they have a tendency to promote foods that are chock full of fat, sugar and sodium. An advergame is defined as an online video game that promotes a particular product, service or company by integrating it into the game, and is typically offered for free. The researchers located hundreds of advergames ...

Microsatellites are molecular markers with numerous applications in biological research. In studies of both plants and animals, they can be used to investigate speciation, gene flow among populations, mating systems, and parentage, as well as many other questions. A new protocol created by researchers at the University of Cincinnati and several other institutions improves the efficiency of current methods, allowing quicker and cheaper development of microsatellite markers for any species of interest. Microsatellites, which consist of repeating units of two to six base ...

In a pilot study by Case Western Reserve University's Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, 20 grandmothers were able to lower their stress levels with a biofeedback device that tracks breathing patterns. According to U. S. Census data, the number of children living with their grandparents has increased 64 percent in the past 20 years. Prior studies at the Case Western Reserve nursing school have found that many grandmothers suffer stress and depression from having to serve as full-time child-care givers at this stage in their lives. Looking at ways to reduce such ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Got heartburn? More than 60 million adults in the U.S. have acid reflux, or heartburn, and approximately 10 percent are at risk for developing esophageal cancer, due in part to complications from Barrett's esophagus. But researchers at Rhode Island Hospital discovered a pathway they believe links Barrett's esophagus to the development of esophageal cancer. Their data suggest that blocking this pathway, such as with a proton pump inhibitor (e.g. omeprazole), may prevent the development of esophageal cancer. The study is published online in advance of print ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Object recognition is one of the most widely studied problems in computer vision. But a robot that manipulates objects in the world needs to do more than just recognize them; it also needs to understand their orientation. Is that mug right-side up or upside-down? And which direction is its handle facing? To improve robots' ability to gauge object orientation, Jared Glover, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is exploiting a statistical construct called the Bingham distribution. In a paper they're presenting ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY -- Think of the smell of freshly baking bread. There is something in that smell, without any other cues – visual or tactile – that steers you toward the bakery. On the flip side, there may be a smell, for instance that of fresh fish, that may not appeal to you. If you haven't eaten a morsel of food in three days, of course, a fishy odor might seem a good deal more attractive. How, then, does this work? What underlying biological mechanisms account for our seemingly instant, almost unconscious ability to determine how attractive (or repulsive) ...

A study by Simon Fraser University researchers has found seniors in long-term care facilities are at high risk of head injuries – nearly 40 per cent of those who fall experience head impact. The researchers studied video footage of 227 falls among 133 residents at a local long-term care facility. They found 37 per cent of falling residents struck their heads upon falling, and hit the ground – most often, linoleum or tile flooring – more than 60 per cent of the time. The researchers conclude: "By any measure, this is an alarmingly high prevalence." More should be done, ...

Small farms and businesses may be the unintended victims of legislation aimed at cutting the federal budget by eliminating certain sets of local and county-based economic data, according to a group of economists. "This local data is really what we use in our lab," said Stephan Goetz, professor of agricultural economics and regional economics, Penn State, and director of the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development. "And, at the end of the day, we're using this information to try to understand how our world is changing." The researchers, who report their findings ...

What makes some people more prone to wedded bliss or sorrow than others? Researchers at UC Berkeley and Northwestern University have found a major clue in our DNA. A gene involved in the regulation of serotonin can predict how much our emotions affect our relationships, according to a new study that may be the first to link genetics, emotions, and marital satisfaction. The study was conducted at UC Berkeley. "An enduring mystery is, what makes one spouse so attuned to the emotional climate in a marriage, and another so oblivious?" said UC Berkeley psychologist Robert ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- At first glance, Mars' clouds might easily be mistaken for those on Earth: Images of the Martian sky, taken by NASA's Opportunity rover, depict gauzy, high-altitude wisps, similar to our cirrus clouds. Given what scientists know about the Red Planet's atmosphere, these clouds likely consist of either carbon dioxide or water-based ice crystals. But it's difficult to know the precise conditions that give rise to such clouds without sampling directly from a Martian cloud. Researchers at MIT have now done the next-best thing: They've recreated Mars-like ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Home-delivered meals bring not only food to seniors but also the opportunity to remain in their homes. A new study by Brown University public health researchers projects that if every U.S. state in the lower 48 expanded the number of seniors receiving meals by just 1 percent, 1,722 more Medicaid recipients avoid living in a nursing home and most states would experience a net annual savings from implementing the expansion. Pennsylvania would see the greatest net savings – $5.7 million – as Medicaid costs for nursing home care dropped ...

LA JOLLA, CA—October 7, 2013—Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have devised a new technique for connecting drug molecules to antibodies to make advanced therapies. Antibody-drug conjugates, as they're called, are the basis of new therapies on the market that use the target-recognizing ability of antibodies to deliver drug payloads to specific cell types—for example, to deliver toxic chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells while sparing most healthy cells. The new technique allows drug developers to forge more stable conjugates than are possible with current ...

Philadelphia, PA, October 7, 2013 – The recognition of a causal link between mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes and increased risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer has intensified the demand for genetic testing. Identifying mutations in these large genes by conventional methods can be time consuming and costly. A report in the November issue of the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics describes a new technique using second-generation sequencing technology that is as sensitive as the standard methodology but has the potential to improve the efficiency and productivity ...