As health care reform takes shape in the U.S., vast amounts of attention have been given to the fact that more and more people with pre-existing illnesses will have access to professional care to relieve their physical and emotional suffering. Far less public attention has been given to the nurses and physicians who provide that care, and the authors of a recent study say there is evidence that many already experience serious "moral distress" that may interfere with their own health and their efforts on behalf of seriously ill and dying patients. "Studies and case histories ...

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA (13 September 2013)—In a series of papers to be presented next week, scientists offer new evidence that a potent chemical mechanism operating in the roots of a tropical grass used for livestock feed has enormous potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Referred to as "biological nitrification inhibition" or BNI, the mechanism markedly reduces the conversion of nitrogen applied to soil as fertilizer into nitrous oxide, according to papers prepared for the 22nd International Grasslands Congress. Nitrous oxide is the most powerful and aggressive greenhouse ...

Model organisms, brought into labs because they are easy to work with, adapt to the lab, often shedding characteristics that allowed them to survive in the wild. Scientists who work with model organisms rarely look at the wild strains, but when they do, they can be surprised by what they find. This is what happened with the soil-living social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum, or Dicty. The single-celled amoebas crawl through the soil eating bacteria until food becomes scarce. Then the amoebas gather by the tens of thousands to form a multicellular slug, which transforms ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Sept. 13, 2013 – By inserting platinum atoms into an organic semiconductor, University of Utah physicists were able to "tune" the plastic-like polymer to emit light of different colors – a step toward more efficient, less expensive and truly white organic LEDs for light bulbs of the future. "These new, platinum-rich polymers hold promise for white organic light-emitting diodes and new kinds of more efficient solar cells," says University of Utah physicist Z. Valy Vardeny, who led a study of the polymers published online Friday, Sept. 13 in the journal ...

A new special issue of NeoBiota journal has been published, following the 2012 meeting of the International Pest Risk Mapping Workgroup (IPRMW). The workshop was sponsored by the OECD's Co-operative Research Program on Biological Resource Management for Sustainable Agricultural Systems, and focused on pest risks in the foodchain. The new issue addresses the interface between pest risk science and policy in an attempt to secure adequate pest control measures against potential invasions accompanying economic globalization and the intensified movement of people and goods. With ...

As the climate changes and oceans' acidity increases, tiny plankton seem set to succeed. An international team of marine scientists has found that the smallest plankton groups thrive under elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. This could cause an imbalance in the food web as well as decrease ocean CO2 uptake, an important regulator of global climate. The results of the study, conducted off the coast of Svalbard, Norway, in 2010, are now compiled in a special issue published in Biogeosciences, a journal of the European Geosciences Union. "If the tiny plankton blooms, it ...

Researchers from the NUTRIMENTHE project have addressed this in a five-year study involving hundreds of European families with young children. Researchers looked at the effect of, B-vitamins, folic acid, breast milk versus formula milk, iron, iodine and omega-3 fatty acids, on the cognitive, emotional and behavioural development of children from before birth to age nine. The study has found that folic acid, which is recommended in some European countries, to be taken by women during the first three months of pregnancy, can reduce the likelihood of behavioural problems ...

For the first time, researchers have successfully demonstrated an interaction between ocean currents and bacteria: The unexpected interaction leads to the production of vast amounts of nitrogen gas in the Pacific Ocean. This takes place in one of the largest oxygen free water masses in the world - and these zones are expanding. This can ultimately weaken the ocean's ability to absorb CO2. Three places in the world harbor extensive oxygen free water masses, called Oxygen Minimum Zones. In these zones, microbes produce atmospheric nitrogen gas - the gas that accounts for ...

Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and Regensburg University, both in Germany, and the University of Lisboa, in Portugal, have discovered a promising potential drug target for cystic fibrosis. Their work, published online today in Cell, also uncovers a large set of genes not previously linked to the disease, demonstrating how a new screening technique can help identify new drug targets. Cystic fibrosis is a hereditary disease caused by mutations in a single gene called CFTR. These mutations cause problems in various organs, most ...

Camden, UK, September 13, 2013 – A new type of coronavirus, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, MERS-CoV, was first found a year ago in a patient who died. It took several months before it was discovered that a new virus had emerged. New cases have been reported from Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). France, Germany, Italy, Tunisia and the United Kingdom have reported imported cases coming from the Middle East. The virus has since been identified in just over 90 patients infected in the Middle East of which approximately 50% have ...

VIDEO: Scientists report the first self-healing thermoset elastomer that requires no intervention to induce its repair. Taken from the following paper: A Rekondo et al, Mater. Horiz., 2014, http://xlink.rsc.org/?doi=10.1039/c3mh00061c... Click here for more information. Scientists in Spain have reported the first self-healing polymer that spontaneously and independently repairs itself without any intervention. The new material could be used to improve the security and lifetime ...

The smallest of the small seem to be among the winners in the ocean of the future. In a five-week long experiment, an international team of scientists showed that particularly tiny plankton, so-called pico- and nanophytoplankton, grows more strongly under elevated carbon dioxide levels and produces more organic carbon. "If the tiny plankton booms, it consumes the nutrients that are normally also available to larger plankton species", explains Prof. Ulf Riebesell from GEOMAR, head of the KOSMOS mesocosm experiments. "We could clearly see that the boom at the base of the ...

WASHINGTON--U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) research scientists and engineers in the Electronics Science and Technology Division have demonstrated the highest recorded open-circuit voltages for quantum dot solar cells to date. Using colloidal lead sulfide (PbS) nanocrystal quantum dot (QD) substances, researchers achieved an open-circuit voltage (VOC) of 692 millivolts (mV) using the QD bandgap of a 1.4 electron volt (eV) in QD solar cell under one-sun illumination. "These results clearly demonstrate that there is a tremendous opportunity for improvement of open-circuit ...

This news release is available in German. Like mother, like daughter; like father, like son. Evolutionary biologists at the universities in Bielefeld (Germany) and Uppsala (Sweden) have now shown that this proverb also applies to inheriting a long life – at least for fruit flies (Drosophila). The research team found that the descendants of these insects mostly inherit their lifespan from their own sex: male descendants will very probably live about as long as their fathers; female descendants, about as long as their mothers. The scientists have published their findings ...

Even though Danish students have equal access to education, their choice of studies is still influenced by social class. Young people from working class backgrounds are motivated by studies with a clear job profile and high income, while prestige and studies with a strong identity appeal to young people of parents with university degrees when choosing which studies to pursue. This is what researchers from the University of Copenhagen conclude in a new study. Students who have chosen to study medicine, architecture, economy and sociology often come from homes where the ...

Results of an EORTC study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology show that vaccination with GM2/KLH-QS-21 does not benefit patients with stage II melanoma. Vaccination with GM2/KLH-QS-21 stimulates the production of antibodies to the GM2 ganglioside, an antigen expressed by many melanomas. Serological response to GM2 was shown to be a positive prognostic factor in patients with melanoma and was the rationale for this trial. The idea of treating cancer with a vaccine has been around since the first vaccines against infectious disease were developed. The GM2 ganglioside, ...

New versions of genes, called alleles, can appear by mutation in populations. Even when these new alleles turn the individuals carrying them more fit to survive and reproduce, the most likely outcome is that they will get lost from the populations. The theory that explains these probabilities has been postulated by the scientist J.B.S. Haldane almost 90 years ago. This theory has become the cornerstone of modern population genetics, with studies on adaptation to novel environments and conservation of species, for example, being based on it. However, until now there were ...

Computers will someday soon automatically provide short video digests of a day in your life, your family vacation or an eight-hour police patrol, say computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin. The researchers are working to develop tools to help make sense of the vast quantities of video that are going to be produced by wearable camera technology such as Google Glass and Looxcie. "The amount of what we call 'egocentric' video, which is video that is shot from the perspective of a person who is moving around, is about to explode," said Kristen Grauman, ...

The EORTC will have an active presence at the 2013 ECCO-ESMO-ESTRO Meeting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from 27 September to 01 October 2013 and would like to call your attention to the following presentations. Society Session F. Meunier and R. Stupp are co-Chairs of the session "European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) - Multidisciplinary Cancer Clinical Research: What are we up to in 2013?" on Saturday, 28 September 2013 from 16:00 - 18:00 in Room G102. Special sessions J. Bogaerts will chair a Special session, "Dilemma of Crossover ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- In today's computers, moving data to and from main memory consumes so much time and energy that microprocessors have their own small, high-speed memory banks, known as "caches," which store frequently used data. Traditionally, managing the caches has required fairly simple algorithms that can be hard-wired into the chips. In the 21st century, however, in order to meet consumers' expectations for steadily increasing computational power, chipmakers have had to begin equipping their chips with more and more cores, or processing units. And as cores proliferate, ...

NASA's Terra satellite passed over newborn Tropical Storm Man-yi and captured and image that clearly showed two vortices rotating around a large center of circulation. Man-yi formed on Sept. 12 in the northwestern Pacific Ocean as the sixteenth tropical depression and by Sept. 13 it strengthened into a tropical storm. When NASA's Terra satellite passed over newborn Tropical Storm Man-yi in the northwestern Pacific Ocean on Sept. 13 at 01:15 UTC, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument captured a visible image of the storm. The MODIS image ...

This news release is available in German. In future, it will be much easier to produce some active pharmaceutical substances and chemical compounds than was the case to date. An international team working with chemists from the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr have immobilised various catalysts on nylon in a very simple way. Catalysts mediate between the reagents in a chemical reaction and control the process leading to the desired end product. When textile material is used as a support for the chemical auxiliaries, the reaction can ...

WHAT: A National Institutes of Health (NIH) clinical study of healthy adult volunteers who consented to be infected with the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus under carefully controlled conditions has provided researchers with concrete information about the minimum dose of virus needed to produce mild-to-moderate illness. The study also gives a clearer picture of how much time elapses between a known time of infection, the start of viral shedding (a signal of contagiousness), the development of an immune response, and the onset and duration of influenza symptoms. The data obtained ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. Sept. 13, 2013 -- A new, environmentally-friendly electronic alloy consisting of 50 aluminum atoms bound to 50 atoms of antimony may be promising for building next-generation "phase-change" memory devices, which may be the data-storage technology of the future, according to a new paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, which is produced by AIP Publishing. Phase-change memory is being actively pursued as an alternative to the ubiquitous flash memory for data storage applications, because flash memory is limited in its storage density and ...

Southwesterly wind shear has taken its toll on hurricane Humberto, and NASA's TRMM satellite noticed that in rainfall data. When NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite passed over Hurricane Humberto on September 12, 2013 at 1625 UTC/12:25 p.m. EDT the eye was no longer visible. An analysis derived from TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) and Precipitation Radar (PR) data showed that most of the precipitation with Humberto was located in the northwestern quadrant, pushed there by the strong southwesterly wind shear. TRMM found that the most intense rain ...