Scientists are reporting a simple way to improve the sensitivity of the test often used to detect traces of explosives on the hands, carry-ons and other possessions of passengers at airport security screening stations. Their report appears in ACS' The Journal of Physical Chemistry C. Yehuda Zeiri and colleagues explain that most tests for traces of explosives begin by rubbing a swab made from glass fiber, Teflon or cotton over the suspect material. Analysis of the swab in a detector — usually a device called an ion mobility spectrometer — alerts agents to any explosive ...

The search for a sustainable slow-release fertilizer — a key to sustaining global food production at a time of burgeoning population growth — has led scientists to an ingredient used in some diarrhea medicines. They describe use of the substance, attapulgite, as a "carrier" for plant nutrients in a report in ACS' journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. Boli Ni and colleagues explain that about half of the 150 million tons of fertilizer used worldwide every year goes to waste. That's because most fertilizers release nutrients too fast for the crops to use. ...

One of the most promising innovations of nanotechnology has been the ability to perform rapid nanofabrication using nanometer-scale tips. The fabrication speed can be dramatically increased by using heat. High speed and high temperature have been known to degrade the tip… until now. "Thermal processing is widely used in manufacturing," according to William King, the College of Engineering Bliss Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We have been working to shrink thermal processing to the nanometer scale, where we can use a nanometer-scale heat ...

The aftershock of a stellar explosion rippling through space is captured in this new view of supernova remnant W44, which combines far-infrared and X-ray data from ESA's Herschel and XMM-Newton space observatories. W44, located around 10 000 light-years away within a forest of dense star-forming clouds in the constellation of Aquila, the Eagle, is one of the best examples of a supernova remnant interacting with its parent molecular cloud. The product of a massive star that has already reached the end of its life and expelled its outer layers in a dramatic explosion, ...

The rapid growth in "citizen science" projects during the past decade is enabling more and more science enthusiasts, hobbyists, students and other ordinary people to participate in the excitement of real-world scientific research and help solve serious scientific mysteries. That's the topic of the cover story in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. Deirdre Lockwood, C&EN contributing editor, traces the growth of citizen science from the Audubon Christmas Bird Count of 1900 ...

Not only is TV not endangered, but it also has a unifying social impact on the nuclear family across the country. This is the main conclusion of a cross-Canada study—Are the Kids All Right?—on the television viewing habits of families with at least one child aged between 9 and 12 years. The study was conducted by a team of researchers led by André H. Caron, professor of communications at Université de Montréal and Director of the Centre for Youth and Media Studies (CYMS). "Young Canadians today live in a different world than that experienced by previous generations. In ...

Neuroscientists studying the link between poor sleep and schizophrenia have found that irregular sleep patterns and desynchronised brain activity during sleep could trigger some of the disease's symptoms. The findings, published in the journal Neuron, suggest that these prolonged disturbances might be a cause and not just a consequence of the disorder's debilitating effects. The possible link between poor sleep and schizophrenia prompted the research team, led by scientists from the University of Bristol, the Lilly Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and funded by the ...

Researchers from the Universities of Nottingham and Leicester are leading the largest ever study of the genetics relating to lung disease. The project will investigate what determines an individual's lung health and why smoking harms the lungs of some people more than others and will use health information held by UK Biobank, a major national resource holding health information from half a million volunteers. The study, funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and also involving scientists at St George's, University of London, is aiming to shed light on why some ...

A new government-funded study is to be carried out into how Britain's roads could be made safer for cyclists to reduce the risk of cycling injuries, encourage more people to use bikes and improve public health. Amid fresh calls for action on road safety after the recent separate accidents involving world-famous cyclist Bradley Wiggins and the top cycling mentor Shane Sutton, researchers at The University of Nottingham are leading a study which will assess the effectiveness of the current cycling infrastructure and ask 'which features installed for cyclists are most effective ...

A new surveying technique developed at The University of Nottingham is giving geologists their first detailed picture of how ground movement associated with historical mining is changing the face of our landscape. The new development by engineers at the University has revealed a more complete map of subsidence and uplift caused by the settlement of old mines in the East Midlands and other areas of the country and has shown that small movements in the landscape are bound by natural fault lines and mining blocks. It appears to support concerns that movement associated ...

It's likely that fellow users on your favorite supercomputer have widely varying needs. The applications, compilers, and libraries that you need are probably different from the ones other users need. That is where modern environment module systems come in. A good module system "sets the table " for users by loading the packages each user needs. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has developed an innovative module system that addresses some unique challenges facing modern computing centers. Life in the world of computing has become much more complicated since ...

Caterpillar fungi (Cordyceps) are rare parasites found on hibernating caterpillars in the mountains of Tibet. For centuries they have been highly prized as a traditional Chinese medicine - just a small amount can fetch hundreds of pounds. Scientists at The University of Nottingham have been studying how this fungus could work by studying cordycepin, one of the drugs found in these mushrooms. They have already discovered that cordycepin has potential as a cancer drug. Their new work indicates that it could also have anti-inflammatory characteristics with the potential ...

Like the impact of an elephant herd grazing on grassland, multinational banks shape the financial environment to an extent that far outweighs their small number. And like a contagious person on a transnational flight, when these giant, interconnected banks succumb to financial ills, they are uniquely positioned to infect wide swaths of the financial system. Researchers from Princeton University, the Bank of England and the University of Oxford applied methods inspired by ecosystem stability and contagion models to banking meltdowns and found that large national and international ...

Malaria is a life-threatening condition that exposes approximately half of the world's population to the risk of developing a severe and often lethal form of disease. In a study published in the latest issue of the journal Cell Host & Microbe*, Miguel Soares and his team at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), Portugal, discovered that the development of severe forms of malaria can be prevented by a simple mechanism that controls the accumulation of iron in tissues of the infected host. They found that expression of a gene that neutralizes iron inside cells, named H Ferritin, ...

Toronto – Businesses will get more accurate assessments of potential and current employees if they do away with self-rated personality tests and ask those being assessed to find someone else to rate them, suggest results from a new study. Previous job performance studies have shown that outsiders are best at rating an individual's personality in terms of how they work on the job. But observers in these studies have always been co-workers. The recent paper by Prof. Brian Connelly, who is cross-appointed to the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and ...

This press release is available in German. Naturally, our brain activity waxes and wanes. When listening, this oscillation synchronizes to the sounds we are hearing. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences have found that this influences the way we listen. Hearing abilities also oscillate and depend on the exact timing of one's brain rhythms. This discovery that sound, brain, and behaviour are so intimately coupled will help us to learn more about listening abilities in hearing loss. Our world is full of cyclic phenomena: For ...

The heart of the computer industry is known as "Silicon Valley" for a reason. Integrated circuit computer chips have been made from silicon since computing's infancy in the 1960s. Now, thanks to a team of USC researchers, carbon nanotubes may emerge as a contender to silicon's throne. Scientists and industry experts have long speculated that carbon nanotube transistors would one day replace their silicon predecessors. In 1998, Delft University built the world's first carbon nanotube transistors – carbon nanotubes have the potential to be far smaller, faster, and consume ...

New research at the University of Adelaide has demonstrated that teenagers born prematurely may suffer brain development problems that directly affect their memory and learning abilities. The research, conducted by Dr Julia Pitcher and Dr Michael Ridding from the University of Adelaide's Robinson Institute, shows reduced 'plasticity' in the brains of teenagers who were born preterm (at or before 37 weeks gestation). The results of the research are published today in the Journal of Neuroscience. "Plasticity in the brain is vital for learning and memory throughout life," ...

Recent studies questioning the role of specialist heart attack centres produced misleading results because doctors tend to send the sickest patients to have the best care, according to new research. Many heart attack patients in the UK are sent to a specialist centre for primary angioplasty - a surgical procedure to reopen the blocked artery. Randomised trials have found that angioplasty is much more successful than drug treatment alone, but research based on "real-world" data suggest that patients given an angioplasty don't tend to do better. Now researchers at Imperial ...

Washington, DC — Men in committed relationships choose to keep a greater distance between themselves and an unknown woman they find attractive when given the hormone oxytocin, according to new research in the November 14 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings suggest oxytocin may help promote fidelity within monogamous relationships. Oxytocin plays a vital role in triggering childbirth and facilitating nursing. The hormone, which is produced in a region of the brain called the hypothalamus, is also involved in the formation of social bonds. In humans and other ...

Despite widespread condemnation of female genital surgeries as a form of mutilation and a violation of human rights, an international advisory group argues that the practice is poorly understood and unfairly characterized. In a public policy statement in the Hastings Center Report, the Public Policy Advisory Network on Female Genital Surgeries in Africa, a group that includes doctors, anthropologists, legal scholars, and feminists, argues that media coverage of the practice is hyperbolic and one sided, "painting the now familiar portrait of African female genital surgeries ...

Older North American farmers work fewer hours than their younger peers but spend more time operating heavy machinery and equipment—raising their risk of serious injury, according to new research from the University of Alberta. A survey of 2,751 Saskatchewan farmers showed that as farmers age they turn to less physically strenuous work such as operating machinery. Farmers aged 45 to 64 years spent six to eight more days a year operating tractors and combines than farmers 20 years their junior—a situation that puts older farmers at risk, say the study authors. "It's important ...

In this News Digest: Summary of a study being published online November 13, 2012 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, reporting that earlier discussions about end of life (EOL) care preferences are strongly associated with less aggressive care in the last days of life and increased use of hospice care for patients with advanced cancer. EOL care discussions that took place before the last 30 days of life resulted in less frequent use of chemotherapy in the last 14 days of life and lower use of acute or ICU care in the last 30 days of life, which are both known to ...

Global climate models abound. What is harder to pin down, however, is how a warmer global temperature might affect any specific region on Earth. Dr. Marco Tedesco, associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at The City College of New York, and a colleague have made the global local. Using a regional climate model and the output of three global climate models, they predict how different greenhouse gas scenarios would change the face of Greenland over the next century and how this would impact sea level rise. The resulting fine-scale model gives a high-resolution ...

With grilled chicken, salads and oatmeal now on fast food menus, you might think fast food has become healthier. And indeed, there has been greater attention in the media and legislatively, paid to the healthfulness of fast food. But a close look at the industry has found that calorie counts have changed little, while the number of food items has doubled. A study led by Katherine W. Bauer, assistant professor in Temple University's Department of Public Health and Center for Obesity Research and Education, found that the average calorie content of foods offered by eight ...