Patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and other gastrointestinal (GI) disorders may be exposed to significant doses of diagnostic radiation, according to a new study in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. "Our results show that significant increases in radiation exposure in the last decade have paralleled the increased use of computed tomography imaging," said Alan N. Desmond, MB, BMedSc, MRCPI, of the Cork University Hospital, Ireland, and lead author of this study. "While cumulative ...

An international team that includes University of British Columbia physicists has used ultra-fast laser pulses to identify the microscopic interactions that drive high-temperature superconductivity. In the experiment, to be outlined this Friday in the journal Science, electrons in a prototypical copper-oxide superconductor were excited by extremely short 100-femtosecond (0.0000000000001-second) laser pulses. As the material's electrons relax back to an equilibrium state, they release their excess energy via deformation of the superconductor's atomic lattice (phonons) ...

Physicists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered patterns which underlie the properties of a new state of matter. In a paper published in the March 29 issue of the journal Nature, the scientists describe the emergence of "spontaneous coherence," "spin textures" and "phase singularities" when excitons—the bound pairs of electrons and holes that determine the optical properties of semiconductors and enable them to function as novel optoelectronic devices—are cooled to near absolute zero. This cooling leads to the spontaneous production of a new coherent ...

MaxiAids Products for Independent Living (www.MaxiAids.com), a leading supplier of products for the blind, low vision, deaf, hard of hearing and those with special needs, today announced the addition of Barry Reiter as director of business development. "We are happy to welcome Barry to the MaxiAids family," said Elliot Zaretsky, the company's president and founder. "His strong knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry is a perfect fit for our business and our goals." Mr. Reiter spent a majority of his career as chief operating officer of a major ...

Conventional wisdom tells us that in the business world, "you are who you know" — your social background and professional networks outweigh talent when it comes to career success. But according to a Tel Aviv University researcher, making the right connection only gets your foot in the door. Your future success is entirely up to you, says Prof. Yoav Ganzach of TAU's Recanati School of Management. When intelligence and socio-economic background (SEB) are pitted directly against one another, intelligence is a more accurate predictor of future career success, he asserts. ...

The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres (JGR-D), Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets (JGR- E), and Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences (JGR-G). In this release: Regional models expect drier, stormier western United States Declining sea ice to lead to cloudier Arctic Improving plume forecasts using Fukushima data How did the equatorial ridge on Saturn's moon Iapetus form? Thermokarst lakes increased atmospheric methane ...

A new study estimates that 1 in 88 children in the United States has an autism spectrum disorder. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report Thursday (March 29) that looked at data gathered in 2008 from 14 communities, including central North Carolina. The new data show that autism rates in the U.S. are higher than previous estimates released in 2009, which found 1 in 110 children were diagnosed with autism or a related disorder. The latest figures also show that autism spectrum disorders are almost five times more common among boys than girls ...

A new study evaluates the seismic hazards for the entire Central America, including specific assessments for six capital cities, with the greatest hazard expected for Guatemala City and San Salvador, followed by Managua and San José, and notably lower in Tegucigalpa and Panamá City. The study, published in the April issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA), included input from seismic hazard experts from Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Norway and Spain. All seismic experts from Central American countries, except ...

Idan Ginsburg, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy, studies some of the fastest moving objects in the cosmos. When stars and their orbiting plants wander too close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, their encounter with the black hole's gravitational force can either capture them or eject them from the galaxy, like a slingshot, at millions of miles per hour. Although their origin remains a mystery and although they are invisible, black holes found at galaxy centers make their presence known through the effects ...

Greater lifetime exposure to the stress of traumatic events was linked to higher levels of inflammation in a study of almost 1,000 patients with cardiovascular disease led by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco. In the first study to examine the relationship between cumulative traumatic stress exposure and inflammation, the scientists found that the more traumatic stress a patient was exposed to over the course of a lifetime, the greater the chances the patient would have elevated levels of inflammatory markers ...

Exlar Corporation announces its innovative line of Tritex II DC actuators are now CSA certified and in compliance with CSA 139 (Valve Actuator Standard). The actuators accommodate applications requiring CSA Class I, Division 2 Groups A, B, C and D certification--making them suitable for hazardous location operation. Tritex II DC actuators integrate a servo drive, digital position controller, brushless motor and linear or rotary actuator in one compact, sealed package. Linear actuators employ Exlar's patented inverted roller screw mechanism, seamlessly converting rotary ...

DALLAS (SMU) – SMU Geothermal energy expert David Blackwell gave a Capitol Hill briefing Tuesday, March 27, on the growing opportunities for geothermal energy production in the United States, calling "unconventional" geothermal techniques a potential game changer for U.S. energy policy. Blackwell's presentation outlined the variety of techniques available for geothermal production of electricity, the accessibility of unconventional geothermal resources across vast portions of the United States and the opportunities for synergy with the oil and gas industry. Also speaking ...

Some people like company. Others prefer to be alone. The same holds true for the particles that constitute the matter around us: Some, called bosons, like to act in unison with others. Others, called fermions, have a mind of their own. Different as they are, both species can show "collective" behavior -- an effect similar to the wave at a baseball game, where all spectators carry out the same motion regardless of whether they like each other. Scientists generally believed that such collective behavior, while commonplace for bosons, only appeared in fermions moving in ...

Specialty Hospital Of Washington (SHW) began its second Registered Nurse Internship Program earlier this year. Like most prominent hospitals, SHW saw the need to assist graduating nurses make the transition from school to professional clinical settings. SHW's innovative approach is designed to prepare nurses for rewarding careers. The Internship Program assists nurses with the mastery of clinical skills, as well as managing and organizing increased and complex patient care assignments, communicating with physicians and delegating tasks during the transition period from ...

Imagine being able to use electricity to power your car — even if it's not an electric vehicle. Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have for the first time demonstrated a method for converting carbon dioxide into liquid fuel isobutanol using electricity. Today, electrical energy generated by various methods is still difficult to store efficiently. Chemical batteries, hydraulic pumping and water splitting suffer from low energy-density storage or incompatibility with current transportation infrastructure. In a study published ...

PITTSBURGH—Sooner than later, robots may have the ability to "feel." In a paper published online March 26 in Advanced Functional Materials, a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) demonstrated that a nonoscillating gel can be resuscitated in a fashion similar to a medical cardiopulmonary resuscitation. These findings pave the way for the development of a wide range of new applications that sense mechanical stimuli and respond chemically—a natural phenomenon few materials have been able to mimic. A team ...

A short new video takes viewers behind the scenes with the MIRI or the Mid-Infrared Instrument that will fly on-board NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. MIRI is a state-of-the-art infrared instrument that will allow scientists to study distant objects in greater detail than ever before. The three minute and 19 second video called "The MIRI Has Two Faces" is part of an on-going video series about the Webb telescope called "Behind the Webb." It was produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md. and takes viewers behind the scenes with scientists ...

System 96W intensified overnight and became Tropical Storm Pakhar during the morning hours on March 29. NASA's TRMM satellite measured rainfall rates within the storm, and noticed areas of heavy rain west of the center as the storm continued to strengthen. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite passed over Pakhar on March 29, and saw that it was generating mostly light to moderate rainfall around the entire system, with areas of heavy rain in the southwestern and northeastern quadrants. Light to moderate rainfall rates were between .78 to 1.57 inches ...

RealCapitalMarkets.com, LLC (RCM1), the leading provider of a leading provider of marketing and transaction management software for commercial property and note sales, announces updates to the RCM1 platform designed to allow clients to synchronize buyer data with their internal customer relationship management (CRM) systems, speed up execution of key functionality such as uploading and downloading documents, and provide additional time-saving features to clients and investors. "This latest update streamlines many of the daily tasks our clients rely on so they can ...

Asian Canadian teenagers who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual are 30 times more likely to face harassment than their heterosexual peers – a factor that is linked to higher rates of alcohol or drug use, according to University of British Columbia research. Recently published in the Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health, this is the first study in North America to investigate the links between Asian teens dealing with "dual minority discrimination," problem substance use and supports that can help reduce those risks. "Discrimination for both ethnicity and sexual ...

WHAT: Mosquitoes infected with dengue virus experience an array of changes in the activity of genes and associated functions of their salivary glands, and these changes may lead to increased virus transmission, according to a recent study led by George Dimopoulos, Ph.D., of the Malaria Research Institute and Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Some of these changes involve the mosquito's immune system and affect its susceptibility to infection with the virus. Others involve factors that enhance the mosquito's capacity to feed on blood, possibly ...

Boulder, Colorado, USA – The April/May GSA Today science article is now online at www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/. In this issue, Simon Williams and colleagues from the Earthbyte Group of the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney present GPlates, a powerful new method for analyzing geological and geophysical data sets within the context of tectonic reconstructions. GPlates is part of a new generation of plate reconstruction software that incorporates functionality familiar from GIS software with the added dimension of geological time. By enabling the user to ...

Graphite, more commonly known as pencil lead, could become the next big thing in the quest for smaller and less power-hungry electronics. Resembling chicken wire on a nano scale, graphene – single sheets of graphite – is only one atom thick, making it the world's thinnest material. Two million graphene sheets stacked up would not be as thick as a credit card. The tricky part physicists have yet to figure out how to control the flow of electrons through the material, a necessary prerequisite for putting it to work in any type of electronic circuit. Graphene behaves very ...

Amsterdam, NL -- Investigators from the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, have shown that in most elderly patients invasive and expensive techniques, i.e. lumbar puncture and PET scan, are not useful to establish the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. They arrived at this conclusion after analysis of data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), a large collaborative research project of medical centers in the USA and Canada. The Dutch researchers divided the ADNI sample into two halves, a younger (74 y). They showed that the CSF biomarkers (amyloid ...

London -- New strategies injecting cardiovascular disease (CVD) patients with vaccines and monoclonal antibodies to combat atherosclerosis could soon change the treatment landscape of heart disease. Both approaches, Professor Jan Nilsson told delegates at the Frontiers in CardioVascular Biology (FCVB) 2012 meeting, can be considered truly ground breaking since for the first time they target the underlying cause of CVD. The FCVB meeting, organised by the Council on Basic Cardiovascular Science (CBCS) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), held 30 March to 1 April at ...