Modern telecommunications happens because of fast electrons and fast photons. Can it get better? Can Moore's law---the doubling of computing power ever 18 months or so---be sustained? Can the compactness (nm-scale components) of electronics be combined with the speed of photonics? Well, one such hybrid approach is being explored at the Joint Quantum Institute (*), where scientists bring together three marvelous physics research fields: microfluidics, quantum dots, and plasmonics to probe and study optical nanostructures with spatial accuracy as fine as 12 nm. ...

February 5, 2013—Ottawa—Ottawa scientists have discovered a trigger that turns muscle stem cells into brown fat, a form of good fat that could play a critical role in the fight against obesity. The findings from Dr. Michael Rudnicki's lab, based at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, were published today in the prestigious journal Cell Metabolism. "This discovery significantly advances our ability to harness this good fat in the battle against bad fat and all the associated health risks that come with being overweight and obese," says Dr. Rudnicki, a senior scientist ...

Among older women, getting a mammogram every two years was just as beneficial as getting a mammogram annually, and led to significantly fewer false positive results, according to a study led by UC San Francisco. The national study of more than 140,000 women between the ages of 66 and 89 appears online February 5, 2013, in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. "Screening every other year, as opposed to every year, does not increase the probability of late-stage breast cancer in older women," said lead author Dejana Braithwaite, PhD, a UCSF assistant professor ...

Anyone who has seen the movie "Impossible" or watched footage from the Japanese tsunami has learned the terror that can strike with little warning. In those cases, when there is no time to flee, there may still be time to reach higher ground, called vertical evacuation. But as you race to the third floor, how do you know if the building will hold up? Walls of water are not the only danger. Another potentially lethal challenge is water-driven debris - such as 60,000-pound fully loaded cargo containers - transformed into projectiles. Often pulled behind semi-trucks on highways, ...

Here's another reason why you should include olive oil in your diet: A new research report published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology suggests that at least one compound in olive oil significantly reduces intestinal ischemia (restricted blood supply) and the resulting reperfusion injury (tissue damage caused when blood supply returns). The compound, called "oleuropein aglycone," is the most prominent polyphenol found in olive oil and could become a novel therapeutic target aimed at treating intestinal ischemia and reperfusion injury in humans. Ultimately, this research ...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a classroom design that gives instructors increased flexibility in how to teach their courses and improves accessibility for students, while slashing administrative costs. Specifically, the new classrooms take advantage of the fact that students are bringing their own technology – such as laptops – to class. The classrooms also include mobile infrastructure, where whiteboards, desks and tables can be reconfigured according to the needs of students and instructors. "These classrooms work really well in terms ...

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Feb. 5, 2013 – Patients who experience chest pain in the 24 hours preceding a heart attack, also called preinfarction angina, have smaller heart attacks and improved cardiac function in the contemporary cardiac stenting era, researchers found in a study published Jan. 22 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions. "Even before we began treating heart attack patients with angioplasty and stenting, physicians recognized that patients with chest pain prior to their heart attack seem to have better outcomes," says the study's senior author, Jay H. Traverse, ...

COMPASS uses the Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and Inclined Geosynchronous Satellite Orbit (IGSO) satellites, which are more suitable for regional services. Its constellation is composed of 14 satellites, including 5 GEO, 5 IGSO satellites and 4 Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites. As of 2012, 13 satellites have been launched. Except for G2 (unusable) and M1 (testing only), the remaining 11 satellites, including 4GEO+5IGSO+2MEO, have successfully transmitted signals and broadcasted navigational messages, to prepare for full operation starting in 2013. Positioning accuracy ...

Research has shown that mutations in the psen1 gene are common in the familial forms of Alzheimer's disease, and the Presenilin-1 protein that the gene encodes is known to be involved in the cleavage of the amyloid precursor protein. In Alzheimer's disease the amyloid precursor protein is not cleaved the normal way, and the protein accumulates in the brain damaging neuronal tracts and neurons. It is still unknown if the psen1 gene is involved in the etiology of Alzheimer's disease via another mechanism. Professor Pertti Panula's research team at the University of Helsinki ...

A previously poorly investigated signalling pathway is crucial for the growth and proliferation of prostate cancer cells. An international research team discovered this when studying the enzyme "soluble adenylyl cyclase" that produces the second messenger molecule cAMP. When the scientists inhibited the enzyme, the cancer cell proliferation was suppressed. The team led by Dr. Yury Ladilov from the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum reported together with colleagues from the Department of Urology at the RUB and the Cornell University in New ...

Topological insulators are novel materials that are insulating in the bulk but have surface states that are conducting. These surface states are topologically protected and possess several intriguing properties with the promise of potential applications. As a result, topological insulators have attracted many theoretical and experimental studies in the last few years. More recently, the potential of interfacing topological insulators with other materials with quantum states to make hybrid structures has been recognized and a slew of new studies are underway. Professor Jian ...

A study conducted by University of Granada and Virgen de las Nieves U.H. researchers has revealed that in Andalusian public hospitals radiotherapy is provided to lung cancer patients with a frequency 25 % below that established by clinical protocols. Failure to provide such treatment results in a total of 3,000 survival-day loss for all lung cancer patients. To carry out this study –recently published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology–, the researchers reviewed the medical records and radiotherapy provided to all lung cancer patients in 2007 in the 12 Andalusian public ...

Software development is a complex and difficult task. Software developers and researchers try to deal with software development in a simple way from multiple perspectives. This leads to the use of various kinds of models, including informal, semi-formal, and formal models, and all kinds of development methods, including informal and formal methods. In fact, every software development method contains multiple models from different perspectives. In contrast to an informal method, a formal method is considered to be a set of tools and notations (with formal semantics) used ...

CINCINNATI – Early laboratory tests are the first to successfully use an experimental molecular therapy to block a hard-to-target part of a protein complex linked to several types of invasive cancer. Scientists report online Feb. 4 in PNAS Early Edition the rational design of a small-molecule inhibitor they call Y16. In laboratory tests, the inhibitor helped stop the spread of cultured human breast cancer cells, especially when it was used with another compound known as Rhosin/G04. The study was conducted by researchers in the Cancer and Blood Diseases Institute at ...

A study conducted at the University of Granada has revealed that there is a direct relationship between exposure to pesticides (Persistent Organic Pollutants, CPOs) in food, air and water and prevalence of type 2 diabetes in adults, regardless of age, gender and body mass index. These substances tend to concentrate in body fat, and they might be one of the reasons why obese people are more likely to develop diabetes, since the more fat the higher the COP concentrations in the body. In a paper recently published in the journal Environmental Research, researchers demonstrate ...

The vast majority – approximately 80 percent – of our DNA does not code for proteins, yet it gets transcribed into RNA. These RNA molecules are called non-coding and fulfill multiple tasks in the cell. Alongside a well-studied group of small RNAs, there is also a class of so-called long non-coding RNAs consisting of more than 200 nucleotides. Long non-coding RNAs regulate cellular processes such as cell cycle, growth and cell death. Therefore, it came as no surprise that many of these controlling molecules are linked to the progression of cancer. An example is the non-coding ...

Johns Hopkins researchers have found that mice can recover from physically debilitating strokes that damage the primary motor cortex, the region of the brain that controls most movement in the body, if the rodents are quickly subjected to physical conditioning that rapidly "rewires" a different part of the brain to take over lost function. Their research, featuring precise, intense and early treatment, and tantalizing clues to the role of a specific brain area in stroke recovery, is described online in the journal Stroke. "Despite all of our approved therapies, stroke ...

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine are able to detect deficits in social attention in infants as young as six months of age who later develop Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Published in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry, the results showed that these infants paid less attention to people and their activities than typically developing babies. Katarzyna Chawarska, associate professor at the Yale Child Study Center, and her colleagues investigated whether six-month-old infants later diagnosed with ASD showed prodromal symptoms — early signs of ASD such as ...

Since its October 2008 launch, NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has provided images of the invisible interactions between our home in the galaxy and interstellar space. Particles emanating from this boundary produce a striking, narrow ribbon, which had yet to be explained despite more than a dozen possible theories. In a new "retention model," researchers from the University of New Hampshire and Southwest Research Institute suggest that charged particles trapped in this region create the ribbon as they escape as neutral atoms. The Sun continually sends out ...

The UK dog population is estimated to be around ten million, with dogs producing approximately 1,000 tonnes of excrement each day. New research has shown that dogs act as a major source of the parasite egg, Toxocara, which can potentially contaminate the public environment and infect humans. The aim of the study, led by Dr Eric Morgan and colleagues from the University of Bristol's School of Veterinary Sciences and published in the international scientific journal, Veterinary Parasitology, was to identify where efforts to control the parasite should focus, in the interests ...

How, when and where a pathogen is transmitted between two individuals in a population is crucial in understanding and predicting how a disease will spread. New research has laid the foundation for a new generation of zoonotic disease spreading models, which could allow for more targeted prevention strategies. By using novel complexity sciences tools the study, published in Physical Review Letters, outlines a predictive model of a spatial epidemic spread in a population of territorial animals. By quantifying the instances of transmission events, the research team, ...

Researchers from CSIC's Aula Dei Experimental Station in Zaragoza, Spain have confirmed that the frequency of intense rainfall has been decreasing in the Ebro basin since 1955. Despite what it may seem, intense rain is becoming rarer in the Ebro basin according to two studies carried out by Spanish researchers from the Department of Soil and Water of CSIC's Aula Dei Experimental Station in Zaragoza. Their results have been published in the 'Journal of Hydrology' and the 'Hydrology and Earth System Sciences' journal. Santiago Beguería, one of the authors of both studies, ...

A new ESF position paper calls for increasing use of ICT to deliver health and social care services. A new position paper, Developing a New Understanding of Enabling Health and Wellbeing in Europe, published today by the European Science Foundation, highlights the need for change in health and social care across Europe. As social care and informal care are essential to improving health and preventing health problems, especially in an ageing population, there are still large gaps of knowledge in how best to organise this, and how best to combine it with health care. ...

Athens, Ga. – When Li Tan approached his colleagues at the University of Georgia with some unusual data he had collected, they initially seemed convinced that his experiment had become contaminated; what he was seeing simply didn't make any sense. Tan was examining some of the sugars, proteins and polymers that make up plant cell walls, which provide the structural support and protection that allow plants to grow. Yet his samples contained a mixture of sugars that should not be present in the same structure. However, Tan was convinced that his samples were pure so ...

Despite its appearance, which looks much like countless other galaxies, Messier 106 hides a number of secrets. Thanks to this image, which combines data from Hubble with observations by amateur astronomers Robert Gendler and Jay GaBany, they are revealed as never before. At its heart, as in most spiral galaxies, is a supermassive black hole, but this one is particularly active. Unlike the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, which pulls in wisps of gas only occasionally, Messier 106's black hole is actively gobbling up material. As the gas spirals towards the black ...