ANN ARBOR—It looks like Mother Nature was wasting her time with a multimillion-year process to produce crude oil. Michigan Engineering researchers can "pressure-cook" algae for as little as a minute and transform an unprecedented 65 percent of the green slime into biocrude. "We're trying to mimic the process in nature that forms crude oil with marine organisms," said Phil Savage, an Arthur F. Thurnau professor and a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan. The findings will be presented Nov. 1 at the 2012 American Institute of Chemical Engineers ...

Scientists have identified a molecular 'flag' in women with breast cancer who do not respond or have become resistant to the hormone drug tamoxifen. Tamoxifen – used alongside traditional chemotherapy and radiotherapy – blocks the female hormone oestrogen that, in certain breast cancers, is required by the tumour to grow; it has been shown to improve cancer survival rates by up to one third. However, about one third of patients with the appropriate type of breast cancer – known as oestrogen receptor positive breast cancer – do not respond to tamoxifen or develop resistance ...

This press release is available in German. Fog is an atmospheric phenomenon that afflicts millions of drivers every day, impairing visibility and increasing the risk of an accident. The ways people respond to conditions of reduced visibility is a central topic in vision research. It has been shown that people tend to underestimate speeds when visibility is reduced equally at all distances, as for example, when driving with a uniformly fogged windshield. But what happens when the visibility decreases as you look further into the distance, as happens when driving in ...

"Nature teaches beasts to know their friends," wrote Shakespeare. In humans, nature may be less than half of the story, a team led by University of Colorado Boulder researchers has found. In the first study of its kind, the team found that genetic similarities may help to explain why human birds of a feather flock together, but the full story of why people become friends "is contingent upon the social environment in which individuals interact with one another," the researchers write. People are more likely to befriend genetically similar people when their environment ...

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. – Cancer cells grow fast. That's an essential characteristic of what makes them cancer cells. They've crashed through all the cell-cycle checkpoints and are continuously growing and dividing, far outstripping our normal cells. To do this they need to speed up their metabolism. CSHL Professor Adrian Krainer and his team have found a way to target the cancer cell metabolic process and in the process specifically kill cancer cells. Nearly 90 years ago the German chemist and Nobel laureate Otto Warburg proposed that cancer's prime cause was a change ...

Until now, we knew that ticks primarily transmit two pathogens to humans in Switzerland: the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi – which causes borreliosis – and the early-summer-meningoencephalitis virus, which can cause cerebral inflammation. Now, microbiologists from the University of Zurich confirm the existence of another tick disease in Switzerland – neoehrlichiosis. The pathogenic bacteria Candidatus Neoehrlichia mikurensis was first discovered in ticks and rodents in Europe and Asia in 1999. In 2010, Head of Molecular Diagnostics at the Institute of Medical Microbiology ...

Older adults left in the wake of Hurricane Sandy will likely suffer disproportionately in the days ahead, based on data from other recent natural disasters. For example, three quarters of those who perished in Hurricane Katrina were over the age of 60, according to the spring 2006 edition of Public Policy & Aging Report from The Gerontological Society of America (GSA). Similarly, a recent issue of the Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences reported that the May 2008 earthquake in Wenchuan, China, was associated with a twofold increase ...

A new RAND Corporation study examining the impact of retail medical clinics on the receipt of primary medical care finds mixed evidence about whether the clinics may disrupt doctor-patient relationships. The study found that people who visit retail medical clinics are less likely to return to a primary care physician for future illnesses and have less continuity of care. However, there was no evidence retail medical clinics disrupted preventive medical care or management of diabetes, two important measures of quality of primary care. The findings, published online by ...

Stanford University scientists have built the first solar cell made entirely of carbon, a promising alternative to the expensive materials used in photovoltaic devices today. The results are published in the Oct. 31 online edition of the journal ACS Nano. "Carbon has the potential to deliver high performance at a low cost," said study senior author Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a working solar cell that has all of the components made of carbon. This study builds on previous ...

Clinical hypnosis can effectively reduce hot flashes and associated symptoms among postmenopausal women, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Baylor University's Mind-Body Medicine Research Laboratory. Hypnotic relaxation therapy reduced hot flashes by as much as 80 percent, and the findings also showed participants experienced improved quality of life and a lessening of anxiety and depression. The mind-body therapy study of 187 women over a five-week period measured both physical symptoms of hot flashes and women's self-reporting of flashes. The women ...

There's good news for fans of black raspberries: A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientist and his commercial colleague have found black raspberries that have resistance to a disease-spreading aphid. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) horticulturist Chad Finn with the agency's Horticultural Crops Research Unit in Corvallis, Ore., and colleague Michael Dossett of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada are the first to find and report black raspberry resistance to the large raspberry aphid. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency, and this research ...

Women who drink green tea may lower their risk of developing some digestive system cancers, especially cancers of the stomach/esophagus and colorectum, according to a study led by researchers from Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. The study by lead author Sarah Nechuta, Ph.D., MPH, assistant professor of Medicine, was published online in advance of the Nov. 1 edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Wei Zheng, M.D., Ph.D., MPH, professor of Medicine, chief of the Division of Epidemiology and director of the Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center, was the principal ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A Medicare rule that blocks thousands of nursing home residents from receiving simultaneous reimbursement for hospice and skilled nursing facility (SNF) care at the end of life may result in those residents receiving more aggressive treatment and hospitalization, according a new analysis. "This study is the first, to the knowledge of the authors, to attempt to understand how treatments and outcomes vary for nursing home residents with advanced dementia who use Medicare SNF care near the end of life and who do or do not enroll in Medicare ...

As men and women age, increasing quantities of fat tissue inevitably take up residence in skeletal muscle. A small study of older and younger men conducted at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University suggests that a build-up of a fat molecule known as ceramide might play a leading role in muscle deterioration in older adults. The results of the study were published online this month by the Journal of Applied Physiology, a publication of the American Physiological Society. The study enrolled ten 10 men in their mid-seventies to ...

VIDEO: For the last decade, prematurity has been the leading cause of infant mortality in the US. As a result of prematurity, many infants enter this world too early with a... Click here for more information. For the last decade, prematurity has been the leading cause of infant mortality in the United States. As a result of prematurity many infants enter this world too early with a small chance of survival. In order to help treat these extremely premature infants, physicians ...

A consortium of Quebec researchers coordinated by the Medical Genetics Service of the Sainte-Justine UHC has just published the findings of a 25-year study on the treatment of tyrosinemia, a life-threatening liver disease of genetic origin, which is screened at birth in the province of Quebec, where it is much more frequent than anywhere else in the world. "After five years of treatment, no trace of the disease can be detected in the liver of newborns who were treated with nitisinone starting from the first month of life," states Dr. Grant Mitchell of the Sainte-Justine ...

Flame retardants in the polyurethane foam of millions of upholstered sofas, overstuffed chairs and other products have ignited a heated debate over safety, efficacy and fire-safety standards -- and a search for alternative materials. That's the topic of a cover story package in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of ACS, the world's largest scientific society. An overview of the package describes the controversy, fostered largely by a California chemist, who claims that flame retardants pose unacceptable toxic hazards and ...

The yeast used to make beer has yielded what may be the first gene for beer foam, scientists are reporting in a new study. Published in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the discovery opens the door to new possibilities for improving the frothy "head" so critical to the aroma and eye appeal of the world's favorite alcoholic beverage, they say. Tomás G. Villa and colleagues explain that proteins from the barley and yeast used to make beer contribute to the quality of its foam. The foamy head consists of bubbles containing carbon dioxide gas, which yeast ...

In an advance toward analyzing blood and urine instantly at a patient's bedside instead of waiting for results from a central laboratory, scientists are reporting development of a new micropump capable of producing pressures almost 500 times higher than the pressure in a car tire. Described in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry, the pumps are for futuristic "labs-on-a-chip," which reduce entire laboratories to the size of a postage stamp. Shaorong Liu and colleagues explain that powerful pumps are critical for high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), a mainstay laboratory ...

Using the legendary properties of heartwood from the black locust tree as their inspiration, scientists have discovered a way to improve the performance of softwoods widely used in construction. The method, reported in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, involves addition of similar kinds of flavonoid compounds that boost the health of humans. Ingo Burgert and colleagues explain that wood's position as a mainstay building material over the centuries results from a combination of desirable factors, including surprising strength for a material so light in weight. ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Hypertension is one of the greatest epidemics threatening the health of people in low and middle-income countries. For patients struggling with high blood pressure in countries with limited access to health care, the key to improving health may be as simple as a phone call. New University of Michigan research evaluated the impact of automated calls from a U.S.-based server to the mobile phones of patients with hypertension (high blood pressure) in Honduras and Mexico. The program was designed to be a low-cost way of providing long distance checkups ...

A new research discovery has the potential to revolutionize the biological understanding of some childhood psychiatric disorders. Specifically, scientists have found that when a single protein involved in brain development, called "SRGAP3," is malformed, it causes problems in the brain functioning of mice that cause symptoms that are similar to some mental health and neurological disorders in children. Because this protein has similar functions in humans, it may represent a "missing link" for several disorders that are part of an illness spectrum. In addition, it offers ...

This press release is available in German. In male songbirds of the temperate zone, the concentration of sex hormones is rising in spring, which leads to an increase in song activity during the breeding season. In the tropics, there has been little evidence so far about such a clear relationship between hormonal action and behaviour, which is partly due to a lower degree of seasonal changes of the environment. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen have now discovered that in duetting African white-browed sparrow weavers, the solo song of ...

New Rochelle, NY, October 31, 2012—In a paper published today by Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers, researchers found that New York Times readers who were led to believe the newspaper's paywall was motivated by financial need were generally supportive and willing to pay, while those who believed it was motivated by profit were generally unsupportive and unwilling to pay. The article "Paying for What Was Free: Lessons from the New York Times Paywall," written by Jonathan Cook, Associate Research ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Rhode Island Hospital researcher Mark Zimmerman, M.D., director of outpatient psychiatry, has found that patients suffering from major depressive disorder (MDD) define remission from depression differently than clinicians. While many psychiatrists and clinicians view remission from a symptom-based standpoint, the study found that patients put much more emphasis on life satisfaction and sense of well-being than on actual symptoms. The paper is published online in advance of print in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. "Current standards for treating ...