PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — For protein-based drugs such as insulin to be taken orally rather than injected, bioengineers need to find a way to shuttle them safely through the stomach to the small intestine where they can be absorbed and distributed by the bloodstream. Progress has been slow, but in a new study, researchers report an important technological advance: They show that a "bioadhesive" coating significantly increased the intestinal uptake of polymer nanoparticles in rats and that the nanoparticles were delivered to tissues around the body in a way that ...

A new species of the peculiarly shaped spoon worms has been recently discovered in Japan, and described in the open access journal Zookeys. These animals derive their name from their elongated and spoon-like projection (the proboscis), issuing from the barrel- or sweet potato-like roundish body proper (the trunk). The new species Arhynchite hayaoi was discovered on a sandy tidal flat named Hachi-no-higata of the Seto Inland Sea, Japan. Like most spoon worms, the new species has the typical peculiar spoon shaped proboscis. The animal is of a pinkish-yellow colour, and ...

This news release is available in German. Their results show during which process stages the growth can be accelerated and when additional time is required to reduce defects. Their work has now been published online in Advanced Energy Materials. Today's chalcopyrite thin film cells based on copper indium gallium selenide are already reaching efficiencies of more than 20 percent. For the fabrication of the extremely thin polycrystalline layers, the process of coevaporation has lead to the best results so far: During coevaporation, two separate elements are evaporated ...

Two symposia focusing on the ecological dynamics of infectious diseases such as avian influenza, Yellow Fever, and Lyme will take place during the Ecological Society of America's 98th Annual Meeting, held this year in Minneapolis, Minnesota. One will look at human influences on viral and bacterial diseases through our alteration of landscapes and ecological processes, while the other will focus on the emerging field of eco-epidemiology that seeks to integrate biomedical and ecological research approaches to address human health threats. The symposium on Monday, August ...

Male sea lampreys may not be the best-looking creatures swimming in our lakes and streams, but they apparently have something going for them that the ladies may find irresistible. Research by a team of Michigan State University scientists found that the males have a secondary sex characteristic that creates heat when they get near a female lamprey, something the females find hard to say no to. The work of the team focused on a small bump located near the male's anterior dorsal fin. Close examination of this bump determined that it was full of fat cells, cells that are ...

A new method, which analyzes the sounds in a child's cough, could soon be used in poor, remote regions to diagnose childhood pneumonia reliably. According to Udantha Abeyratne from the University of Queensland in Australia and colleagues, this simple technique of recording coughs with a microphone on the patient's bedside table, has the potential to revolutionize the management of childhood pneumonia in remote regions around the world. Their work¹ is published online in Springer's journal Annals of Biomedical Engineering². Pneumonia is the leading killer of young children ...

WASHINGTON, June 27, 2013—Contact lenses correct many people's eyesight but do nothing to improve the blurry vision of those suffering from age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness among older adults in the western world. That's because simply correcting the eye's focus cannot restore the central vision lost from a retina damaged by AMD. Now a team of researchers from the United States and Switzerland led by University of California San Diego Professor Joseph Ford has created a slim, telescopic contact lens that can switch between normal and ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Our daily routines can become so ingrained that we perform them automatically, such as taking the same route to work every day. Some behaviors, such as smoking or biting your fingernails, become so habitual that we can't stop even if we want to. Although breaking habits can be hard, MIT neuroscientists have now shown that they can prevent them from taking root in the first place, in rats learning to run a maze to earn a reward. The researchers first demonstrated that activity in two distinct brain regions is necessary in order for habits to crystallize. ...

Bethesda, Md. -- The American Physiological Society (APS) issued the following statement today in response to the announcement on the use of chimpanzees in medical research: "The American Physiological Society looks forward to a careful review of Dr. Collins' decision regarding NIH's implementation of the IOM principles and criteria. The APS previously offered comments on the Working Group report. We are hopeful that Dr. Collins has taken into account our concerns, which include implementing flexible, outcome-oriented guidelines for chimpanzee housing and social groups; ...

AUSTIN, Texas – By creating a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater, chemists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany have introduced a new method for the desalination of seawater that consumes less energy and is dramatically simpler than conventional techniques. The new method requires so little energy that it can run on a store-bought battery. The process evades the problems confronting current desalination methods by eliminating the need for a membrane and by separating salt from water at a microscale. The technique, ...

In order to get a better understanding of these effects, researchers from the Inserm cardiovascular, metabolism, diabetology and nutrition unit (U1060 « Laboratoire de recherche en cardiovasculaire, métabolisme, diabétologie et nutrition » Inserm/Inra/Université Lyon 1) introduced a "cocktail" of contaminants mixed with low doses of dioxin, PCB, bisphenol A and phtalates into the feeding of mice that had already been rendered obese by a high-fat diet. The results show that metabolic changes occur in these mice, but that the effects differ depending on the gender. Females ...

WASHINGTON — Emergency patients over the age of 74 have significantly different and more complex health and social needs than their younger counterparts, even after controlling for illness severity, which has important implications about aging populations and emergency departments of the future. The results of the most extensive international study of the characteristics and outcomes of older emergency patients to be reported to date were published online Tuesday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Profiles of Older Patients in the Emergency Department: Findings from the ...

Researchers from McGill University, RIKEN (The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, Wako, Japan) and the Institute for Molecular Science (Okazaki, Japan) have discovered a way to make the widely used chemical process of hydrogenation more environmentally friendly – and less expensive. Hydrogenation is a chemical process used in a wide range of industrial applications, from food products, such as margarine, to petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. The process typically involves the use of heavy metals, such as palladium or platinum, to catalyze the chemical reaction. ...

Researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have developed a new method for visualizing material defects in thin-film solar cells. An LMU research team led by Bert Nickel has, for the first time, succeeded in functionally characterizing the active layer in organic thin-film solar cells using laser light for localized excitation of the material. The findings are reported in the scientific journal "Advanced Materials". "We have developed a method in which the material is raster-scanned with a laser, while the focused beam is modulated in different ways, ...

New observations of a star known as Gliese 667C have revealed a system with at least six planets, including a record-breaking three super-Earths orbiting in the star's "habitable zone" where liquid water could exist on the planets. This is the first planetary system found to have a fully packed habitable zone. "The three planets in the habitable zone are roughly Earth-sized, and only about three to four times the mass of the Earth," said Steven Vogt, University of California, Santa Cruz astronomy and astrophysics professor who is on a team with Paul Butler of the Carnegie ...

Humans are amazing throwers. We are unique among all animals, including our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, in our ability to throw projectiles at high speeds and with incredible accuracy. This trait was critical to the survival and success of our ancestors, aiding their hunting and protective skills, according to National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded research featured on the cover of this week's journal Nature. Harvard University researchers supported by NSF's Biological Anthropology Program discovered that humans are able to throw projectiles at incredible ...

People punish generous group members by rejecting them socially — even when the generosity benefits everyone — because the "big givers" are nonconformists, according to a Baylor University study. The study, published in Social Science Research journal, showed that besides socially rejecting especially generous givers, others even "paid" to punish them through a points system. "This is puzzling behavior," said researcher Kyle Irwin, Ph.D., an assistant professor of sociology in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences. "Why would you punish the people who are doing the most ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Automakers and other private firms should be required by law to carry insurance policies to pay for tearing down their factories and buildings, recommends a hard-hitting study from Michigan State University's Center for Community and Economic Development. Such a requirement would prevent commercial and industrial companies from "walking away" from shuttered facilities – a problem plaguing the nation, said Rex LaMore, director of the CCED and lead author on the study. In the automotive industry alone, there are 135 abandoned plants nationwide. ...

We know it's out there, debris from 50 years of space exploration — aluminum, steel, nylon, even liquid sodium from Russian satellites — orbiting around the Earth and posing a danger to manned and unmanned spacecraft. According to NASA, there are more than 21,000 pieces of 'space junk' roughly the size of a baseball (larger than 10 centimeters) in orbit, and about 500,000 pieces that are golf ball-sized (between one to 10 centimeters). Sure, space is big, but when a piece of space junk strikes a spacecraft, the collision occurs at a velocity of 5 to 15 kilometers per ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- The power of the brain lies in its trillions of intercellular connections, called synapses, which together form complex neural "networks." While neuroscientists have long sought to map these complex connections to see how they influence specific brain functions, traditional techniques have yet to provide the desired resolution. Now, by using an innovative brain-tracing technique, scientists at the Gladstone Institutes and the Salk Institute have found a way to untangle these networks. Their findings offer new insight into how specific brain regions ...

They have also shown that any pancreatic β cells can be regenerated several times and that chemically-induced diabetes in mice can thus be "treated" repeatedly. The challenge for the researchers is now to show that these procedures can be applied to humans. Their work is published online in the Developmental Cell journal dated 27 June 2013. Type I diabetes, characterised by the selective loss of pancreatic, insulin-producing β cells, is a condition that affects more than 30 million people worldwide. Despite current treatments, type I diabetic patients have ...

CHICAGO --- The minds of murderers who kill impulsively, often out of rage, and those who carefully carry out premeditated crimes differ markedly both psychologically and intellectually, according to a new study by Northwestern Medicine® researcher Robert Hanlon. "Impulsive murderers were much more mentally impaired, particularly cognitively impaired, in terms of both their intelligence and other cognitive functions," said Hanlon, senior author of the study and associate professor of clinical psychiatry and clinical neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School ...

When young children gaze intently at something or furrow their brows in concentration, you know their minds are busily at work. But you're never entirely sure what they're thinking. Now you can get an inside look. Psychologists led by the University of Iowa for the first time have peered inside the brain with optical neuroimaging to quantify how much 3- and 4-year-old children are grasping when they survey what's around them and to learn what areas of the brain are in play. The study looks at "visual working memory," a core cognitive function in which we stitch together ...

The Inserm researchers at unit 1018, "The Epidemiology and Public Health Research Centre", working in collaboration with researchers from England and Finland have demonstrated that it is essential to be vigilant about this and to take it very seriously when people say that they are stressed, particularly if they believe that stress is affecting their health. According to the study performed by these researchers, with 7268 participants, such people have twice as much risk of a heart attack, compared with others. These results have been published in European Heart Journal. ...

Ingestion of commonly encountered nanoparticles at typical environmental levels is unlikely to cause overt toxicity, according to US researchers. Nevertheless there is insufficient evidence to determine whether chronic exposures could lead to subtle alterations in intestinal immune function, protein profiles, or microbial balance. Writing in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Biomedical Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, researchers have compared existing laboratory and experimental animal studies pertaining to the toxicity of nanoparticles most likely to ...