WASHINGTON -- The potential benefits of successful development of an inertial confinement fusion-based energy technology justify investment in fusion energy research and development as part of the long-term U.S. energy R&D portfolio, says a new report from the National Research Council. Although ignition of the fusion fuel has not yet been achieved, scientific and technological progress in inertial confinement fusion over the past decade has been substantial. Developing inertial fusion energy would require establishment of a national, coordinated, broad-based program, ...

The base pairs that hold together two pieces of RNA, the older cousin of DNA, are some of the most important molecular interactions in living cells. Many scientists believe that these base pairs were part of life from the very beginning and that RNA was one of the first polymers of life. But there is a problem. The RNA bases don't form base pairs in water unless they are connected to a polymer backbone, a trait that has baffled origin-of-life scientists for decades. If the bases don't pair before they are part of polymers, how would the bases have been selected out from ...

Among life's many tragedies, the death of a child is one that is perhaps the greatest for parents. No matter what the age of the child or the cause of death, the irrefutable fact of the loss is one that shatters the normal cycle of life, leaving parents traumatized and often incapacitated by grief. Research on coping with bereavement has focused primarily on the individual, despite the fact that family and married relationships are all profoundly disrupted by the loss. But in the wealth of studies about parental grief, little attention has been paid to precisely how couples ...

DETROIT – Resveratrol, a substance found in red grapes and red wine, may have the potential to protect against hearing and cognitive decline, according to a published laboratory study from Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. The study shows that healthy rats are less likely to suffer the long-term effects of noise-induced hearing loss when given resveratrol before being exposed to loud noise for a long period of time. "Our latest study focuses on resveratrol and its effect on bioinflammation, the body's response to injury and something that is believed to be the cause of ...

ATLANTA – Children with brain lesions suffered before or around the time of birth are able to use gestures – an important aspect of the language learning process– to convey simple sentences, a Georgia State University researcher has found. Şeyda Özçalışkan, assistant professor of psychology, and fellow researchers at the University of Chicago, looked at children who suffered lesions to one side of the brain to see whether they used gestures similar to typically developing children. She examined gestures such as pointing to a cookie while saying "eat" to ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Two major health reform laws, enacted 25 years apart, both try to meet an ethical standard to provide broad access to basic health care. Neither quite gets there -- but it's not too late for modern health care reform to bring the nation closer to a goal of comprehensive and coordinated care for all. That's the conclusion of a commentary published in the new issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association by a team of University of Michigan Health System physicians. The authors – a family physician, an emergency physician and a primary care ...

Professor Hermann Brenner and colleagues analyzed the data of 8.807 individuals aged between 50 and 74 years using data of Saarland citizens. "We were able to show that the risk of smokers for cardiovascular diseases is more than twice that of non-smokers. However, former smokers are affected at almost the same low rate as people of the same age who never smoked," says Brenner. "Moreover, smokers are affected at a significantly younger age than individuals who have never smoked or have stopped smoking." For example, a 60-year-old smoker has the same risk of myocardial infarction ...

The traditional Medicare program allocates only 1 percent of total spending to overhead compared with 6 percent when the privatized portion of Medicare, known as Medicare Advantage, is included, according to a study in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. The 1 percent figure includes all types of non-medical spending by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plus other federal agencies, such as the IRS, that support the Medicare program, and is based on data contained in the latest report of the Medicare trustees. The 6 percent ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- It took only a few years for high-definition televisions to make the transition from high-priced novelty to ubiquitous commodity — and they now seem to be heading for obsolescence just as quickly. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, several manufacturers debuted new ultrahigh-definition, or UHD, models (also known as 4K or Quad HD) with four times the resolution of today's HD TVs. In addition to screens with four times the pixels, however, UHD also requires a new video-coding standard, known as high-efficiency video coding, or HEVC. Also ...

This press release is available in French. Diagnosed in toddlers, X-linked hypophosphatemia (XLH) is the most common form of heritable rickets, in which soft bones bend and deform, and tooth abscesses develop because infections penetrate soft teeth that are not properly calcified. Researchers at McGill University and the Federal University of Sao Paulo have identified that osteopontin, a major bone and tooth substrate protein, plays a role in XLH. Their discovery may pave the way to effectively treating this rare disease. The findings were made by the laboratories ...

By studying the origins of different isotope ratios among the elements that make up today's smorgasbord of planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and interplanetary ice and dust, Mark Thiemens and his colleagues hope to learn how our solar system evolved. Thiemens, Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, has worked on this problem for over three decades. In recent years his team has found the Chemical Dynamics Beamline of the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ...

Rockville, Md., February 13, 2013 – With substandard and counterfeit medicines a dangerous and growing problem in the developing world and elsewhere, identifying new technologies to detect such drugs is an urgent matter. In a new study published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis, scientists from the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) evaluated a handheld Raman device's potential to detect counterfeit and substandard medicines. The device, called TruScan®, is currently used to test Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) and finished pharmaceutical ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — A natural, nontoxic product called genistein-combined polysaccharide, or GCP, which is commercially available in health stores, could help lengthen the life expectancy of certain prostate cancer patients, UC Davis researchers have found. Paramita GhoshMen with prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body, known as metastatic cancer, and who have had their testosterone lowered with drug therapy are most likely to benefit. The study, recently published in Endocrine-Related Cancer, was conducted in prostate cancer cells and in mice. Lowering ...

Decision makers who feel powerful and in control of resources are more likely than others to make decisions that will benefit their future selves, according to researchers at the USC Marshall School of Business. Conversely, those who lack feelings of power tend to prefer smaller immediate gains – those that benefit the present self – to potentially greater benefits in the future, according to "Power and Reduced Temporal Discounting," a research paper by Nathanael Fast, an assistant professor of management and organization at and Priyanka Joshi, a doctoral candidate ...

Performing sensitive biological experiments is always a delicate affair. Few researchers, however, contend with the challenges faced by Cheryl Nickerson, whose working laboratory aboard the International Space Station (ISS) is located hundreds of miles above the Earth, traveling at some 17,000 miles per hour. Nickerson, a microbiologist at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, is using the ISS platform to pursue new research into the effects of microgravity on disease-causing organisms. Nickerson presented her research findings and charted the course for ...

Can an individual's state of mind effect how well a vaccine may work? In the case of seniors and shingles, the answer is yes. Reporting in the current online edition of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, Dr. Michael Irwin, a professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, demonstrates a link between untreated depression in older adults and decreased effectiveness of the herpes zoster —or shingles — vaccine. Shingles is a painful, blistering skin rash that can last for months or even years. It's caused by the varicella–zoster ...

(Boston) – A review article by researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) proposes a new epigenetic hypothesis linked to tumor production and novel ideas about what causes progenitor cells to develop into cancer cells. Published in the February 2013 issue of Epigenomics, the article provides examples of how epigenetic drug treatments could be beneficial in treating cancers while also decreasing the likelihood of cancer relapse. The article was written by researchers at the Boston University Cancer Center. Sibaji Sarkar, PhD, adjunct instructor of medicine ...

Some infants raised in poverty exhibit physical traits that make them more vulnerable to poor caregiving, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The combination of physiological vulnerability and poor caregiving may lead these children to show increased problem behaviors later in childhood. For infants growing up in poverty, the ability to adapt and regulate — both biologically and behaviorally — in response to various environmental pressures seems to be critical for successful development. To ...

In a pair of new papers, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences upend a long-held view about the basic functioning of a key receptor molecule involved in signaling between neurons, and describe how a compound linked to Alzheimer's disease impacts that receptor and weakens synaptic connections between brain cells. The findings are published in the Feb. 18 early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Long the object of study, the NMDA receptor is located ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Using a grown-up version of the rock-paper-scissors game, Indiana University cognitive scientists offer a new theory of the group dynamics that arise in situations as varied as cycles of fashion, fluctuations of financial markets, eBay bidding wars and political campaign strategies. In a study written about this week in PLOS ONE, the researchers analyzed situations in which each person's decision depends on what they think other people will decide, looking at the riddle of "what you think I think you think I think." What they found, said Seth Frey, ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Chemists at the University of California, Riverside have developed a compound that holds much promise in the laboratory in fighting renal (kidney) cancer. Named TIR-199, the compound targets the "proteasome," a cellular complex in kidney cancer cells, similar to the way the drug bortezomib, approved by the Food and Drug Administration, targets and inhibits the proteasome in multiple myeloma cells, a cancer coming from bone marrow. Michael Pirrung, a distinguished professor of chemistry at UC Riverside, announced the development of TIR-199 in a lecture ...

VIDEO: Scientists at the University of Montreal's Quebec Research Group in Animal Pharmacology have found a way to recognize and treat osteoarthritis in cats -- a condition that the owner might... Click here for more information. Scientists at the University of Montreal's Quebec Research Group in Animal Pharmacology have found a way to recognize and treat osteoarthritis in cats – a condition that the owner might not notice and that can make even petting painful. "Osteoarthritis ...

If you want to read a mouse's mind, it takes some fluorescent protein and a tiny microscope implanted in the rodent's head. Stanford scientists have demonstrated a technique for observing hundreds of neurons firing in the brain of a live mouse, in real time, and have linked that activity to long-term information storage. The unprecedented work could provide a useful tool for studying new therapies for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. The researchers first used a gene therapy approach to cause the mouse's neurons to express a green fluorescent protein ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Understanding exactly how droplets and bubbles stick to surfaces — everything from dew on blades of grass to the water droplets that form on condensing coils after steam drives a turbine in a power plant — is a "100-year-old problem" that has eluded experimental answers, says MIT's Kripa Varanasi. Furthermore, it's a question with implications for everything from how to improve power-plant efficiency to how to reduce fogging on windshields. Now this longstanding problem has finally been licked, Varanasi says, in research he conducted with graduate student ...

There are "things hidden in plain sight" all around us. But art can help students see their world anew, unlocking discoveries in fields ranging from plant biology to biomedical imaging, according to University of Delaware professor John Jungck. Jungck's sentiments were echoed by a panel of experts speaking on "Artful Science" on Feb. 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston. Jungck organized the panel and also spoke at the event. Canoeing on a lake near his home in northwestern Minnesota when he was a youngster, ...