WASHINGTON, Oct. 2, 2013—For hundreds of years, optical devices like telescopes and microscopes have relied on solid lenses that slide up and down to magnify and to focus. To tune how much light is received, conventional devices use mechanical contraptions like the blades that form the adjustable aperture in cameras. To meet demands for ever smaller imaging systems, researchers are working to create entirely unconventional ways of focusing light. In pursuit of this vision, engineers from the University of Freiburg in Germany have built a novel type of imaging system inspired ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- In a year-long case study of a major American transportation company, researchers at The Ohio State University have uncovered the strategies that helped the company maintain safety and meet customer demand during 2012's Hurricane Sandy. One key to the company's effective response was its setup of a weather event management team, an ad hoc group that set planning priorities as the storm approached the United States, ensuring the protection of personnel and equipment in hurricane's path. More surprisingly, as landfall was imminent, the company's schedulers ...

This news release is available in German. How far above sea level is a place located? And where exactly is "sea level"? It is one objective of the geodesists to answer these questions with 1 cm accuracy. Conventional measurement procedures or GPS technologies via satellites, however, reach their limits here. Now optical atomic clocks offer a new approach, because the tick rate of a clock is influenced by gravity. This well-known, but tiny effect was measured with unprecedented precision in 2010 using two optical clocks – however, they were located at the same institute. ...

A new study has found that liquid wastes from hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," that was treated and released into local streams in Pennsylvania still contained elevated levels of salts and other contaminants, which could be dangerous to aquatic life and human health. The study also reports high levels of radioactive materials in stream sediments at the disposal site. Published in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, it states that the scientists recommend use of advanced treatment technologies to further remove the potentially harmful material. Avner ...

The harmful effects of increasingly popular designer cannabis products called "Spice" or "K2" have puzzled scientists for years, but now a group of researchers is reporting progress toward understanding what makes them so toxic. The study, published in the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry, describes development of a method that could someday help physicians diagnose and treat the thousands of young adults and teens who end up in emergency rooms after taking the drugs. Jeffery Moran and colleagues note that synthetic marijuana, often marketed as "natural incense," "potpourri," ...

The notorious bacteria E. coli is best known for making people sick, but scientists have reprogrammed the microbe — which also comes in harmless varieties — to make it seek out and fight other disease-causing pathogens. The researchers' report appears in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology and describes development of this new type of E. coli that can even kill off slimy groups of bacteria called biofilms that are responsible for many hard-to-treat infections, such as those that take hold in the lungs, the bladder and on implanted medical devices. Matthew Wook Chang and ...

Toronto -- "We found that a critical element was having the freedom to choose whether to do it or not," says John Trougakos, , who is an associate professor in the Department of Management at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and holds a cross-appointment to the UofT's Rotman School of Management. "The autonomy aspect helps to offset what we had traditionally thought was not a good way to spend break time." Co-written with Bonnie Cheng, a Rotman PhD student, Prof. Ivona Hideg of Wilfrid Laurier University (who is also a graduate of the Rotman PhD program) and Prof. ...

Three-dimensional printers can make artists' and hobbyists' dreams a reality, opening up a new world of inexpensive, on-demand plastic parts manufacturing, producing anything from garden gnome figurines to nuts and screws, but there's also a dark side. As these printers — now available at major U.S. retail stores — become more popular, concerns are growing about their use for designing and building custom plastic firearms — weapons that could conceivably go undetected. The cover story in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, ...

Philadelphia, PA—A photo captures only as much as the camera in use will allow, and is therefore limited by the field of view of the camera's lens. In the case of smartphones and many advanced cameras, the view from the lens is much smaller than the view from your own eyes. Panoramic photographs were invented to capture large objects or scenes that could not otherwise fit within the constraints of a single photo. Panoramic photography is achieved through image stitching, a process that combines two or more photographs, seamlessly blending input images with overlapping ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- The timing of the first leaves on trees and plants can make or break an agricultural season. Too early, and the leaves might be blasted by the last frost. Too late and they miss out on maximizing the growing season. But as climate change brings warmer-than-usual winters to the U.S., the plants may be more vulnerable to imprecise timing, and the tools traditionally used by farmers and horticulturists to predict the season may be inadequate. "How do we do a better job of seeing the climate the way the plants see it?" asks James Clark, the Blomquist Professor ...

A team of scientists led by Dr. Antoine Adamantidis, a researcher at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and an assistant professor at McGill University, has released the findings from their latest study, which will appear in the October issue of the prestigious scientific journal Nature Neuroscience.(1) Previous studies had established an association between the activity of certain types of neurons and the phase of sleep known as REM (rapid eye movement). Researchers on the team of Dr. Antoine Adamantidis identified, for the first time, a precise causal link ...

Technology, not uninsured patients, likely explains the steep rise in the cost of hospital care in Texas in recent years, according to Vivian Ho, the chair in health economics at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, a professor of economics at Rice and a professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. Her findings were reported in an article appearing in the Oct. 1 online edition of the journal Healthcare Management, Practice and Innovation. Ho emphasized her findings contradict a public perception that the rising numbers of uninsured persons explains ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new analysis by Oregon State University researchers of California's mental health system finds that comprehensive, community-based mental health programs are helping people with serious mental illness transition to independent living. Published in the October issue of the American Journal of Public Health, this study has important implications for the way that states finance and deliver mental health programs, and speaks to the effectiveness of well-funded, comprehensive community programs. In November of 2004, California voters passed the Mental ...

Transgendered androphilic males were accepted in traditional hunter-gatherer cultures because they were an extra set of hands to support their families. Conversely, by investing in and supporting their kin, these males ensured that their familial line – and therefore also their own genetic make-up – passed on to future generations despite their not having children of their own. This is according to an ethnographic study led by Doug VanderLaan of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Canada, published in Springer's journal Human Nature. The study reports that this ...

Women who gain excessive weight in pregnancy are more likely to have overweight and obese children, according to a new study published this week in PLOS Medicine. A study by David Ludwig from Boston Children's Hospital in the USA and colleagues has concluded that even after making allowances for differences in birthweight, the likelihood of a child becoming obese is linked to the amount of weight that the mother gained in pregnancy. In order to find out whether childhood obesity was due just to the conditions during pregnancy (which influence birthweight) or whether ...

Community health officers (health workers who are not trained midwives) can safely give injections of the drug oxytocin to prevent severe bleeding after delivery (postpartum hemorrhage) when attending home births in rural areas of Ghana, according to a study by US and Ghanaian researchers in this week's PLOS Medicine. The researchers, led by Cynthia Stanton from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US, also found that oxytocin injections halved the risk of postpartum hemorrhage in women who delivered at home -- an important finding given that ...

Extended follow-up of the two Women's Health Initiative hormone therapy trials does not support use of hormones for chronic disease prevention, although the treatment may be appropriate for menopausal symptom management in some women, according to a study in the October 2 issue of JAMA. The hormone therapy trials of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) were stopped after investigators found that the health risks outweighed the benefits. Menopausal hormone therapy continues in clinical use, but questions remain regarding its risks and benefits over the long-term for chronic ...

In a group of patients who took chronic opioids for noncancer pain and who underwent bariatric surgery, there was greater chronic use of opioids after surgery compared with before, findings that suggest the need for proactive management of chronic pain in these patients after surgery, according to a study in the October 2 issue of JAMA. "Bariatric surgery is used to treat obesity, as well as its comorbid conditions such as cardiovascular and metabolic diseases and chronic pain. Bariatric surgery-related weight loss is associated with improvements in osteoarthritis-associated ...

In Denmark between 2001 and 2010 there was an increase in bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) that was associated with an increase in survival following out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, according to a study in the October 2 issue of JAMA. Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest affects approximately 300,000 individuals in North America annually. "Despite efforts to improve prognosis, survival remains low, with aggregated survival-to-discharge rates less than 8 percent. In many cases, time from recognition of cardiac arrest to the arrival of emergency medical services ...

The researchers argue that more trials comparing the effectiveness of exercise and drugs are urgently needed to help doctors and patients make the best treatment decisions. In the meantime, they say exercise "should be considered as a viable alternative to, or alongside, drug therapy." Physical activity has well documented health benefits, yet in the UK, only 14% of adults exercise regularly, with roughly one third of adults in England meeting recommended levels of physical activity. In contrast, prescription drug rates continue to skyrocket, sharply rising to an average ...

The findings stress the important role of higher BMI in the increasing rates of death from cardiovascular disease in Asia, which could be managed by policy and prevention strategies, say the authors. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death globally and is predicted to steadily increase over the next few decades. Many Asian populations that used to be physically active with a low BMI now have some of the world's highest rates of obesity. Studies of BMI and CVD risk have generally been conducted in Europe and North America and no data is available ...

Colonies of rock ants (Temnothorax albipennis) need to find ideal homes for the safety and productivity of the queen mother and all of her offspring. They are regularly confronted with the dilemma of whether to move to a better property or remain in their current one, but unlike humans who are susceptible to housing bubbles, ants seem to invest in their housing market in ways that are consistent and rational. PhD student Carolina Doran and Professor Nigel R. Franks of Bristol's School of Biological Sciences showed experimentally that in order to be ahead of the game, ...

Boston, MA - A study of 41,133 mothers and their children in Arkansas has shown that high pregnancy weight gain increases the risk of obesity in those children through age 12. The findings, published Oct. 1 in PLoS Medicine, suggest pregnancy may be an especially important time to prevent obesity in the next generation. "From the public health perspective, excessive weight gain during pregnancy may have a potentially significant influence on propagation of the obesity epidemic," says the study's senior author David S. Ludwig, MD, PhD, director of the New Balance Foundation ...

BOSTON (Oct. 1, 2013) — As Baby Boomers age, many experience difficulty in hearing and understanding conversations in noisy environments such as restaurants. People who are hearing-impaired and who wear hearing aids or cochlear implants are even more severely impacted. Researchers know that the ability to locate the source of a sound with ease is vital to hear well in these types of situations, but much more information is needed to understand how hearing works to be able to design devices that work better in noisy environment. Researchers from the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories ...

(New York City, October 1, 2013)- A study led by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has found that the association between body fat and mortality due to cardiovascular disease differs between south and east Asians, a finding that has important implications for global health recommendations. Cardiovascular disease, a condition in which arteries thicken and restrict blood flow, kills more than 17 million people annually, making it the leading cause of death worldwide. In an analysis published today in the British Medical ...