Physicists describe how they have synthesized a new material that belongs to the iron-selenide class of superconductors, called LixFe2Se2(NH3)y, in a paper about to be published in EPJ B. The work was carried out by Ernst-Wilhelm Scheidt from the University of Augsburg and colleagues. This material displays promising superconducting transition temperatures of 44 Kelvins (K) at ambient pressure, thus improving upon traditional copper-based high-temperature superconductors. The ultimate goal of scientists developing such materials is to reach superconducting characteristics ...

Millions of years ago fire and water forged the gypsum rocks locked in at Cuatro Ciénegas, a Mexican valley similar to the Martian crater where NASA's Rover Curiosity roams. A team of researchers have now analysed the bacterial communities that have survived in these inhospitable springs since the beginning of life on Earth. "Cuatro Ciénegas is extraordinarily similar to Mars. As well as the Gale crater where Curiosity is currently located on its exploration of the red planet, this landscape is the home to gypsum formed by fire beneath the seabed," as explained to SINC ...

Physicists use hydrodynamics to understand the physical mechanism responsible for changes in the long-range order of groups of particles. Particularly, Aparna Baskaran of Brandeis University, Massachusetts, USA, and Cristina Marchetti of Syracuse University, New York, USA, focused on ordered groups of elongated self-propelled particles. They studied the breakdown of long-range order due to fluctuations that render them unstable and give rise to complex structures, in a study about to be published in EPJ E. The authors coined the term self-propelled nematics to refer ...

Researchers from Inserm and CNRS from the Institute for genetics and molecular and cellular biology (IGBMC) and from the Research Institute at the Strasbourg school of biotechnology (Irebs) have focussed their efforts on PARG, currently thought to be a promising new therapeutic target in the treatment of cancer. Their work has revealed the role of this molecule in regulating gene expression. The results were published on 25 October 2012 in the on-line Molecular Cell review. Cells are subjected to various stresses throughout their life. Some of this stress can damage DNA. ...

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Oct. 29, 2012 — The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched a new era of scientific supercomputing today with Titan, a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second—or 20 petaflops—by employing a family of processors called graphic processing units first created for computer gaming. Titan will be 10 times more powerful than ORNL's last world-leading system, Jaguar, while overcoming power and space limitations inherent in the previous generation of high-performance computers. Titan, ...

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM satellite can measure rainfall rates and cloud heights in tropical cyclones, and was used to create an image to look into Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 28, 2012. Owen Kelly of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. created this image of Hurricane Sandy using TRMM data. At 2:20 p.m. EDT on Sunday, Oct. 28, Hurricane Sandy was a marginal category 1 hurricane and its eyewall is modest, as TRMM reveals, which gives forecasters and scientists hints about its possible future strength. The eyewall appeared somewhat ...

Scientists have discovered a molecular 'tell' in laboratory experiments that could help doctors determine the severity of a patient's prostate cancer. Cancer of the prostate – the most common male cancer in the UK – presents in two distinct ways: a low-risk type, which may never cause any symptoms, and a high-risk form that needs treatment to prevent it spreading to other parts of the body. Knowing which type of prostate cancer each patient has – some 40,000 British men per year – is therefore essential to ensuring they receive the correct treatment. Lead researcher ...

BOSTON, Mass. – Oct. 29, 2012. Elderly women with early-stage breast cancer live longer with radiation therapy and surgery compared with surgery alone, researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have found. The researchers, who collected data on almost 30,000 women, ages 70 to 84, with early, highly treatable breast cancer enrolled in a nationwide cancer registry, are reporting their findings at the 54th annual meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). "Overall survival and breast cancer-specific survival were significantly better ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Employees who are more satisfied with their pay report lower levels of work-family conflict, a study by a University of Illinois labor and employment relations professor shows. A worker's actual salary is as important as pay satisfaction in determining a worker's happiness, according to the research by professor Amit Kramer. "Pay, as you might expect, is a relative thing," Kramer said. "I think most people would agree that a certain level of pay that allows you to meet your needs is critical. However, beyond that level, relative pay becomes an issue ...

A research team led by The University of Texas at Austin, and including engineering and environmental testing firms URS and Aerodyne Research, is conducting a major field study to measure methane emissions from natural gas production, about which little empirical data exist. With a goal of obtaining scientifically rigorous, representative data from multiple producing basins, the study brings together Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the university and nine of the nation's leading natural gas producers: Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, BG Group plc, Chevron, Encana Oil & ...

Tropical Storm Son-tinh made landfall in northern Vietnam is and is curving to the northeast to track over southern China. NASA's Aqua satellite revealed powerful thunderstorms around the storm's center before it made landfall and as it filled up the Gulf of Tonkin. On Oct. 28 at 0553 UTC (2:53 a.m. EDT) the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured infrared imagery of Tropical Storm Son-tinh that showed a concentration of strong thunderstorms around the storm's center before it made landfall. Son-tinh was located over the Gulf ...

An autism intervention program that emphasizes social interactions and is designed for children as young as 12 months has been found to improve cognitive skills and brain responses to faces, considered a building block for social skills. The researchers say that the study, which was completed at the University of Washington, is the first to demonstrate that an intensive behavioral intervention can change brain function in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders. "So much of a toddler's learning involves social interaction, and early intervention that promotes attention ...

On Monday, Oct. 29, Hurricane Sandy was ravaging the Mid-Atlantic with heavy rains and tropical storm force winds as it closed in for landfall. Earlier, NASA's CloudSat satellite passed over Hurricane Sandy and its radar dissected the storm get a profile or sideways look at the storm. NASA's Aqua satellite provided an infrared view of the cloud tops and NOAA's GOES-13 satellite showed the extent of the storm. The National Hurricane Center reported at 11 a.m. EDT on Oct. 29 that Hurricane Sandy is "expected to bring life-threatening storm surge and coastal hurricane winds ...

The ability to learn complex, symbolic math is a uniquely human trait, but it is intricately connected to a primitive sense of magnitude that is shared by many animals, finds a study to be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "Our results clearly show that uniquely human branches of mathematics interface with an evolutionarily primitive general magnitude system," says lead author Stella Lourenco, a psychologist at Emory University. "We were able to show how variations in both advanced arithmetic and geometry skills specifically correlated ...

The respected national Institute of Medicine estimates that $750 billion is lost each year to wasteful or excessive health care spending. This sum includes excess administrative costs, inflated prices, unnecessary services and fraud — dollars that add no value to health and well-being. If those wasteful costs could be corralled without sacrificing health care quality, how might that money be better spent? In a study published in the current online edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Frederick J. Zimmerman, professor and chair of the department ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Researchers from Brown University have shown for the first time how ingesting too much silver can cause argyria, a rare condition in which patients' skin turns a striking shade of grayish blue. "It's the first conceptual model giving the whole picture of how one develops this condition," said Robert Hurt, professor of engineering at Brown and part of the research team. "What's interesting here is that the particles someone ingests aren't the particles that ultimately cause the disorder." Scientists have known for years argyria had ...

High birth weight, rapid weight gain and having an overweight mother who smokes can all increase the risk of a baby becoming obese later in childhood, research by experts at The University of Nottingham has found. The study, published in the latest edition of the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, also discovered that children who were breastfed and were introduced to solid food later had a slightly reduced chance of becoming overweight. The findings come following a systematic review and analysis of data from around 30 previous studies looking at the impact ...

In an open letter to company director, Professor Sir John Bell, she says: "Billions of pounds of public money have been spent on [Tamiflu] and yet the evidence on its effectiveness and safety remains hidden from appropriate and necessary independent scrutiny." The letter is published on the BMJ's website (bmj.com/tamiflu ) alongside correspondence by the Cochrane team with Roche, the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organisation (WHO), as part of an open data campaign aimed at persuading Roche to give doctors and patients access to the full data ...

BOSTON, MA—Achieving mindfulness through meditation has helped people maintain a healthy mind by quelling negative emotions and thoughts, such as desire, anger and anxiety, and encouraging more positive dispositions such as compassion, empathy and forgiveness. Those who have reaped the benefits of mindfulness know that it works. But how exactly does it work? Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have proposed a new model that shifts how we think about mindfulness. Rather than describing mindfulness as a single dimension of cognition, the researchers demonstrate ...

PHILADELPHIA — Survivors of many common cancers enjoy a mental and physical health-related quality of life equal to that of adults who have not had cancer, but survivors of other cancers are in poorer health, according to results published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "We did not have a good sense of how cancer survivors across the United States were faring after their cancer diagnosis and immediate treatment," said Kathryn E. Weaver, Ph.D., M.P.H., assistant professor at Wake Forest Baptist ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Would you take part in a weight-loss program in which you were explicitly asked not to lose any weight for the first eight weeks? Although the approach sounds counterintuitive, a study from researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine found that women who spent eight weeks mastering weight-maintenance skills before embarking on a weight-loss program shed the same number of pounds as women who started a weight-loss program immediately. More importantly, the study showed that the "maintenance-first" women had regained only 3 pounds on average ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Oct. 30, 2012 – Beating cancer is just the first step. More than one third of the 12.6 million cancer survivors in the United States have physical or mental problems that put their overall health in jeopardy, according to researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. Their study, published in the October issue of the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, found that 25 percent of cancer survivors reported poor physical health and 10 percent reported poor mental health as compared to 10 percent and 6 percent, respectively, of adults ...

In the largest prospective study to date of children with early and later manifestation of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared to children without ASD, researchers found two distinct patterns of language, social and motor development in the children with ASD. Published in the journal Child Development, the study found that early in development, children who display early signs of ASD show greater initial delay across multiple aspects of development compared to children whose ASD symptoms emerge later. However at 36 months of age, the early differences between these ...

No matter what the economy is doing at any given time, goods must be transported to consumers. These factors may be a good reason to take a look at the Transportation Industry. The book Good Economy and Bad Economy, The Right Career, demonstrates that transportation professionals can leverage their experience to enter many fields in the industry. Milton Collier, the author is the President of TranZcenter, LLC (http://www.TranZcenter.com) retired military veteran with over 25 years or experience in the Transportation Industry. The book is current sold on Amazon at (https://www.createspace.com/3792235) ...

Health care expenditures are projected to reach almost 20 percent of the United States' GDP by 2020. Many economists consider this spending rate unsustainable. Up to 30 percent, or $765 billion, of health care costs were identified as potentially avoidable -- with many of these costs attributed to inappropriate or unnecessary services. Evidence-based performance measures for low-value tests and treatments can be one of the ways to help physicians to provide high value care to their patients, according to the American College of Physicians (ACP) in a new policy paper published ...