University of Nebraska-Lincoln materials engineers have developed a structural nanofiber that is both strong and tough, a discovery that could transform everything from airplanes and bridges to body armor and bicycles. Their findings are featured on the cover of this week's April issue of the American Chemical Society's journal, ACS Nano. "Whatever is made of composites can benefit from our nanofibers," said the team's leader, Yuris Dzenis, McBroom Professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and a member of UNL's Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience. "Our ...

A first-ever vaccine created by University of Guelph researchers for gut bacteria common in autistic children may also help control some autism symptoms. The groundbreaking study by Brittany Pequegnat and Guelph chemistry professor Mario Monteiro appears this month in the journal Vaccine. They developed a carbohydrate-based vaccine against the gut bug, Clostridium bolteae. C. bolteae is known to play a role in gastrointestinal disorders, and it often shows up in higher numbers in the GI tracts of autistic children than in those of healthy kids. More than 90 per ...

WOODS HOLE, Mass.—The often damaging impacts of intensive agriculture on nearby streams, rivers, and their wildlife has been well documented in temperate zones, such as North America and Europe. Yet a new study in an important tropical zone—the fast-changing southern Amazon, a region marked by widespread replacement of native forest by cattle ranches and more recently croplands—suggests that at least some of those damaging impacts may be buffered by the very deep and highly permeable soils that characterize large areas of the expanding cropland. The study, led by Christopher ...

PHILADELPHIA - Deep brain stimulation (DBS) in a precise region of the brain appears to reduce caloric intake and prompt weight loss in obese animal models, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The study, reported in the Journal of Neuroscience, reinforces the involvement of dopamine deficits in increasing obesity-related behaviors such as binge eating, and demonstrates that DBS can reverse this response via activation of the dopamine type-2 receptor. "Based on this research, DBS may provide therapeutic relief to binge eating, ...

In an advance toward coping with bacteria that shrug off existing antibiotics and sterilization methods, scientists are reporting development of a new family of selective antimicrobial agents that do not rely on traditional antibiotics. Their report on these synthetic colloid particles, which can be custom-designed to recognize the shape of specific kinds of bacteria and inactivate them, appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Vesselin Paunov and colleagues point out that many bacteria have developed resistance to existing antibiotics. They sought a new ...

Life on Earth may have originated not in warm tropical seas, but with weird tubes of ice — sometimes called "sea stalactites" — that grow downward into cold seawater near the Earth's poles, scientists are reporting. Their article on these "brinicles" appears in ACS' journal Langmuir. Bruno Escribano and colleagues explain that scientists know surprisingly little about brinicles, which are hollow tubes of ice that can grow to several yards in length around streamers of cold seawater under pack ice. That's because brinicles are difficult to study. The scientists set out ...

Because it has no source of energy, a dead star — known as a white dwarf — will eventually cool down and fade away. But circumstantial evidence suggests that white dwarfs can still support habitable planets, says Prof. Dan Maoz of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy. Now Prof. Maoz and Prof. Avi Loeb, Director of Harvard University's Institute for Theory and Computation and a Sackler Professor by Special Appointment at TAU, have shown that, using advanced technology to become available within the next decade, it should be possible to detect biomarkers ...

URBANA – Although U.S. cattle genetics are exported all over the world in the form of frozen semen, the same is not true for pigs because boar semen does not freeze well. In an attempt to improve semen storage and pig reproduction, animal scientists at the University of Illinois are looking at how sperm survives in the sow oviduct. "Many mammals and birds will store sperm for some period of time," said associate professor of animal sciences David Miller. "Pigs will store sperm for 24 to 48 hours." Sperm must be stored in species in which mating and ovulation are poorly ...

A team of Virginia Tech researchers has discovered that humans are passing antibiotic resistance to wildlife, especially in protected areas where numbers of humans are limited. In the case of banded mongoose in a Botswana study, multidrug resistance among study social groups, or troops, was higher in the protected area than in troops living in village areas. The study also reveals that humans and mongoose appear to be readily exchanging fecal microorganisms, increasing the potential for disease transmission. "The research identifies the coupled nature of humans, ...

The newly proposed scientific project to understand the most complicated 3 pounds of material in the world — the human brain — is the topic of an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. In the article, Lauren Wolf, C&EN associate editor, focuses on the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, previously known as the Brain Activity Map project, which President Barack Obama announced earlier in April. Sometimes ...

WASHINGTON — Long waits for insurance authorization allowing psychiatric patients to be admitted to the hospital from the emergency department waste thousands of hours of physician time, given that most requests for authorization are ultimately granted. A study to be published in the May issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine argues that pre-authorization process is akin to health care "rationing by hassle factor" ("Insurance Prior Authorization Approval Does Not Substantially Lengthen the Emergency Department Length of Stay for Patients with Psychiatric Conditions"). "An ...

New, low-tech teaching techniques used by novice instructors may improve training for healthcare providers in performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on children who suffer cardiac arrest. Researchers in a large multicenter study say their findings hold the potential to standardize and upgrade life support training by hundreds of thousands of instructors around the world. "In the U.S. alone, over 8,000 children a year have a cardiac arrest, but providers may encounter such a catastrophic event only once or twice in their careers," said the study's senior author, ...

PHILADELPHIA — A mutation in a protein called menin causes a hereditary cancer syndrome called MEN1 (multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1). Individuals with MEN1 are at a substantially increased risk of developing neuroendocrine tumors, including cancer of the pancreatic islet cells that secrete insulin. Yet knowing these connections and doing something to improve fighting the syndrome are two different things. Researchers still did not exactly understand how menin mutations lead to MEN1 syndrome, and more importantly, what molecular pathways might be dysregulated by ...

PHILADELPHIA — Obese men were more likely to have precancerous lesions detected in their benign prostate biopsies compared with nonobese men and were at a greater risk for subsequently developing prostate cancer, according to data published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "Our study is focused on a large group of men who have had a prostate biopsy that is benign but are still at a very high risk for prostate cancer," said Andrew Rundle, Dr.P.H., associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia ...

New scientific research published today in the journal PLoS Biology shows that bacteria can evolve resistance more quickly when stronger antibiotics are used. Researchers from the University of Exeter and Kiel University in Germany treated E. coli with different combinations of antibiotics in laboratory experiments. Unexpectedly they found that the rate of evolution of antibiotic resistance speeds up when potent treatments are given because resistant bacterial cells flourish most during the most aggressive therapies. This happens because too potent a treatment eliminates ...

White people who have types of skin cancer other than melanoma (non-melanoma skin cancer) may be at increased risk of having other forms of cancer in the future, according to a study by US researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine. The analysis, led by Dr. Jiali Han, an Associate Professor from Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School in the US, found that men and women with a history of non-melanoma skin cancers—the most common form of cancer in the United States and includes basal cell and squamous cell carcinoma—had a 15% and 26% increased risk, ...

Long term exposure to air pollution may be linked to heart attacks and strokes by speeding up atherosclerosis, or "hardening of the arteries", according to a study by U.S. researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine. The researchers, led by Sara Adar, John Searle Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, University of Michigan School of Public Health, and Joel Kaufman, Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and Medicine, University of Washington, found that higher concentrations of fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) were linked to a faster thickening ...

The alcohol industry, including the major supermarkets ignored, misrepresented and undermined international evidence on effective alcohol control policies in an attempt to influence public health policy in Scotland to its advantage, according to UK experts writing in this week's PLOS Medicine. The experts, led by Jim McCambridge from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, analysed the alcohol industry's input into the Scottish Government's 2008 Consultation on "Changing Scotland's relationship with alcohol" policy proposals which included measures to introduce ...

BOSTON — Most of us probably know at least one woman, and maybe quite a few more, with endometriosis. Despite the disease's prevalence, there is no consensus on the cause of it, the existing treatment options leave a lot to be desired, and there are too few ways for women to, at the very least, effectively numb the pain that the disease provokes. Scientists – who over the years have suspected hormones, the immune system, environmental toxins, genetics or some combination – still have a long way to go in terms of better understanding the disease's molecular bases. Researchers ...

Boston, MA—More restaurants are displaying calorie information on their menus than ever before. It's not a coincidence; by law, retail food establishments that are part of a chain with twenty or more locations nationwide must disclose the calorie content of each menu item. The goal is to encourage consumers to make healthier, informed food choices. The majority of studies, however, show that providing information on calorie content does not lead to fewer calories ordered or consumed. A new angle for encouraging reduced calorie intake in these establishments would be welcome ...

Maternal use of valproate (a drug used for the treatment of epilepsy and other neuropsychological disorders) during pregnancy was associated with a significantly increased risk of autism in offspring, according to a study in the April 24 issue of JAMA. The authors caution that these findings must be balanced against the treatment benefits for women who require valproate for epilepsy control. "Anti-epileptic drug exposure during pregnancy has been associated with an increased risk for congenital malformations and delayed cognitive development in the offspring, but little ...

In a study that included nearly 3,000 adults from Denmark, a diagnosis of meningococcal, pneumococcal, or Haemophilus influenzae meningitis in childhood was associated with lower educational achievement and economic self-sufficiency in adult life, according to a study in the April 24 issue of JAMA. Bacterial meningitis may lead to brain damage due to several factors, and survivors of childhood bacterial meningitis are at particular risk of hearing loss, seizure disorders, motor deficits, and cognitive impairment. Learning disabilities are well documented as a result ...

For women with abdominal pain or vaginal bleeding during early pregnancy, patient history and clinical examination alone are insufficient to indicate or eliminate the possibility of ectopic pregnancy, while transvaginal sonography appears to be the single best diagnostic method for evaluating suspected ectopic pregnancy, according to an analysis of previous studies reported in the April 24 issue of JAMA. The rapid identification and accurate diagnosis of women who may have an ectopic pregnancy is critically important for reducing the maternal illness and death associated ...

Patients at elevated cardiac risk who were treated with beta-blockers on the day of or following noncardiac, nonvascular surgery had significantly lower rates of 30-day mortality and cardiac illness, according to a study in the April 24 issue of JAMA. "The effectiveness and safety of perioperative beta-blockade [the process of inhibiting beta-receptor activity] for patients undergoing noncardiac surgery remains controversial. Class I recommendations in the current American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology Foundation Guidelines on Perioperative Evaluation ...

"Given recent firearm-related fatalities combined with declining gun research funding, it is important to monitor firearm injuries in youths. Injury death rates are available but provide an incomplete picture of these potentially preventable injuries," writes Angela Sauaia, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Colorado School of Public Health, Denver and colleagues. As reported in a Research Letter, the authors investigated the trends from 2000 to 2008 of both fatal and nonfatal firearm injuries in children and adolescents 4 to 17 years of age presenting to 2 Colorado urban ...