Athens, Ga. – The sun provides the most abundant source of energy on the planet. However, only a tiny fraction of the solar radiation on Earth is converted into useful energy. To help solve this problem, researchers at the University of Georgia looked to nature for inspiration, and they are now developing a new technology that makes it possible to use plants to generate electricity. "Clean energy is the need of the century," said Ramaraja Ramasamy, assistant professor in the UGA College of Engineering and the corresponding author of a paper describing the process in ...

The Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development, Neiker-Tecnalia, has developed a new method for the early detection of the diseases mildew, powdery mildew and botrytis in vines. The new methodology based on molecular biology techniques makes it possible to detect the disease before the symptoms appear on the plant. That way it is possible to carry out the rapid treatment of the plots or areas affected and prevent the disease from spreading all over vineyard, which reduces infective pressure. The R&D centre has also studied the evolution of infection by the ...

TORONTO, May 9, 2013—More than 80 per cent of youth who die by suicide had some form of contact with the health care system in the year before their death, according to a new study from St. Michael's Hospital. "This suggests there are a lot of opportunities for prevention," said Dr. Anne Rhodes, a research scientist at the hospital's Suicide Studies Research Unit. "Most of these youth were seen by an outpatient physician or went to an emergency department where they could have potentially benefited from an intervention." Among those seen by an outpatient physician, ...

People who experience warmer, more upbeat emotions may have better physical health because they make more social connections, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research, led by Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Bethany Kok of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences also found it is possible for a person to self-generate positive emotions in ways that make him or her physically healthier. "People tend to liken their emotions ...

TORONTO, ON – The offspring of parents who were addicted to drugs or alcohol are more likely to be depressed in adulthood, according to a new study by University of Toronto researchers. In a paper published online in the journal Psychiatry Research this month, investigators examined the association between parental addictions and adult depression in a representative sample of 6,268 adults, drawn from the 2005 Canadian Community Health Survey. Of these respondents, 312 had a major depressive episode within the year preceding the survey and 877 reported that while they ...

For young women in high school, the risk of childbearing may depend on the prevalence of obesity in their schools, according to sociologists, who found that as the prevalence of obesity rises in a school, so do the odds of obese high school students bearing children. "We did find that obese females are at lower risk of having a child while in high school," said Jennifer Buher Kane, recent Penn State Ph. D. recipient and current postdoctoral fellow at Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina. "But that relative risk depends a lot on the type of school ...

Alexandria, VA — Antibiotics for acute rhinosinusitis (ARS) are prescribed frequently— especially for younger adult patients and in primary care settings—despite recent consensus guidelines that discourage antibiotic use in mild cases, according to a study in the May 2013 issue of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery. "These variations should be of high relevance to policy makers, patients, and clinicians, with implications for payment for quality," the authors state. The authors set out to identify national variations in using antibiotics to treat ARS. Study data ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – May 9, 2013 – Predicting outcomes for cancer patients based on tumor-immune system interactions is an emerging clinical approach, and new research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center is advancing the field when it comes to the most deadly types of breast cancer. "We know that one function of our immune system is to detect and destroy pre-malignant cells before they can become cancer," said lead author Lance D. Miller, Ph.D., associate professor of cancer biology at Wake Forest Baptist. "However, sometimes the immune system becomes unresponsive ...

Cases of type 2 diabetes continue to rise in the US. And while the development of the disease is more commonly associated with risk factors such as obesity, high blood pressure, and physical inactivity, research has shown that stress can also have a significant impact. Now Dr. Sharon Toker of Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Management has found that low levels of social support and high levels of stress in the workplace can accurately predict the development of diabetes over the long term — even in employees who appear to be healthy otherwise. Published in the Journal ...

Why do brands such as Manchester United and Apple capture hearts and minds? When consumers feel a strong emotional attachment to a brand, there is seemingly nothing we would not do–from paying more for it to defending it against detractors. For all the millions of dollars spent on advertising and other efforts, however, consumers rarely feel an affinity for brands. So how do marketers make consumers develop a strong attachment for a product or service? According to a recent study from USC Marshall School of Business, it is achieved by appealing to people's aesthetic needs ...

The stars, known as white dwarfs — small, dim remnants of stars once like the Sun — reside 150 light-years away in the Hyades star cluster, in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull). The cluster is relatively young, at only 625 million years old. Astronomers believe that all stars formed in clusters. However, searches for planets in these clusters have not been fruitful — of the roughly 800 exoplanets known, only four are known to orbit stars in clusters. This scarcity may be due to the nature of the cluster stars, which are young and active, producing stellar flares ...

New Rochelle, NY, May 9, 2013—Insomnia and other sleep disturbances are common among perimenopausal and postmenopausal women and may increase their risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Evidence that a combination of altered sleep duration and insomnia among women ages 50-79 doubled their risk of both CHD and CVD over a period of more than 10 years is presented in an article in Journal of Women's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Journal of Women's Health website ...

May 9, 2013, New York, NY and San Diego, CA – A large, multi-institutional research team involved in the NIH Epigenome Roadmap Project has published a sweeping analysis in the current issue of the journal Cell of how genes are turned on and off to direct early human development. Led by Bing Ren of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Joseph Ecker of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and James Thomson of the Morgridge Institute for Research, the scientists also describe novel genetic phenomena likely to play a pivotal role not only in the genesis of the embryo, ...

New Orleans, LA – Research conducted by Xiao-Cheng Wu, MD, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of the Louisiana Tumor Registry at the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Public Health, and colleagues, reports adolescents and young adults with cancer may be at higher risk for social isolation and that a substantial proportion of them have unmet social needs that could adversely affect their health. The research is published online in the Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology. More than 500 participants in the Adolescent and Young Adult Health Outcomes ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (May 9, 2013) – The stimulant drug methylphenidate "normalizes" activation of several brain areas in young patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a review published in the May Harvard Review of Psychiatry. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) show increased activation of key brain areas after a dose of methylphenidate in young patients with ADHD, according to the systematic review by Constance A. Moore, ...

TORONTO, ON, May 9, 2013 — Despite previous scientific studies that suggest diabetes drug metformin has anti-cancer properties, a new, first-of-its-kind study from Women's College Hospital has found the drug may not actually improve survival rates after breast cancer in certain patients. The study, published in the journal Diabetes Care, failed to show an improved survival rate in older breast cancer patients with diabetes taking the drug metformin, a first-line treatment for diabetes. However, the authors caution further research is necessary to validate the study's ...

The loss of eastern hemlock from forests in the Southern Appalachian region of the United States could permanently change the area's hydrologic cycle, reports a new study by U.S. Forest Service scientists at the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory (Coweeta) located in Otto, North Carolina, published online in the journal Ecological Applications and available now in preprint format. "The hemlock woolly adelgid, an exotic invasive insect, has caused widespread hemlock mortality," says Steven Brantley, a post-doctoral researcher at Coweeta and lead author of the paper. "Hemlock ...

People with higher levels of cadmium in their urine — evidence of chronic exposure to the heavy metal found in industrial emissions and tobacco smoke — appear to be nearly 3.5 times more likely to die of liver disease than those with lower levels, according to a study by Johns Hopkins scientists. The research findings do not show that cadmium directly causes liver disease, the scientists caution, but do suggest an association that needs more investigation. Reviewing information from a large population-based survey, the Johns Hopkins investigators say the cadmium-liver ...

Advanced biofuels – liquid fuels synthesized from the sugars in cellulosic biomass – offer a clean, green and renewable alternative to gasoline, diesel and jet fuels. Bringing the costs of producing these advanced biofuels down to competitive levels with petrofuels, however, is a major challenge. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a bioenergy research center led by Berkeley Lab, have taken another step towards meeting this challenge with the development of a new technique for pre-treating cellulosic biomass with ionic ...

LA JOLLA, CA – Scientists have long known that control mechanisms known collectively as "epigenetics" play a critical role in human development, but they did not know precisely how alterations in this extra layer of biochemical instructions in DNA contribute to development. Now, in the first comprehensive analysis of epigenetic changes that occur during development, a multi-institutional group of scientists, including several from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, has discovered how modifications in key epigenetic markers influence human embryonic stem cells ...

Bacteria on a surface wander around and often organize into highly resilient communities known as biofilms. It turns out that they organize in a rich-get-richer pattern similar to many economies, according to a new study by researchers at UCLA, Northwestern University and the University of Washington. The study, published online May 8 in the journal Nature, is the first to identify the strategy by which bacteria form the micro-colonies that become biofilms, which can cause lethal infections. The research may have significant implications for battling stubborn bacterial ...

PITTSBURGH, May 9, 2013 – A physician's choice of words when talking with family members about whether or not to try cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) if a critically ill patient's heart stops may influence the decision, according to a study by University of Pittsburgh researchers in the June edition of Critical Care Medicine and now available online. "It's long been known that the way a choice is framed can influence people's decisions," noted Amber E. Barnato, M.D., M.P.H., M.S., lead author of the study and associate professor of clinical and translational science ...

A laugh may signal mockery, humor, joy or simply be a response to tickling, but each kind of laughter conveys a wealth of auditory and social information. These different kinds of laughter also spark different connections within the "laughter perception network" in the human brain depending on their context, according to research published May 8 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Dirk Wildgruber and colleagues from the University of Tuebingen, Germany. Laughter in animals is a form of social bonding based on a primordial reflex to tickling, but human laughter has ...

Cone receptors in the human eye lose their color sensitivity with age, but our subjective experience of color remains largely unchanged over the years. This ability to compensate for age-related changes in color perception rests in higher levels of the visual system, according to research published May 8 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Sophie Wuerger from the University of Liverpool, UK. The study included 185 participants aged 18 to 75 years with normal color vision, and revealed that the appearance of color remains largely unaffected by known age-related changes ...

Before rice cultivation became prevalent, ancient populations on the southern coast of China likely relied on sago palms as staple plant foods, according to research published May 8 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Xiaoyan Yang and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China. Little is known about prehistoric diets of those who lived in southern subtropical China, as the acidic soils and humid climate of the region cause poor preservation of plant remains. Though literature and archaeological discoveries have suggested that roots and tubers ...