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Science26 Nov 2012

Burning more calories is easier when working out with someone you perceive as better

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- The key to motivation in physical activity may be feeling inadequate. One Kansas State University researcher found that those who exercised with a teammate whom they perceived to be better increased their workout time and intensity by as much as 200 percent. Brandon Irwin, assistant professor of kinesiology, was the principle investigator in a study that tested whether individuals engage in more intense physical activity when alone, with a virtual partner or competing against a teammate. "People like to exercise with others and make it a social activity," ...

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Energy26 Nov 2012

Funneling the sun's energy

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The quest to harness a broader spectrum of sunlight's energy to produce electricity has taken a radically new turn, with the proposal of a "solar energy funnel" that takes advantage of materials under elastic strain. "We're trying to use elastic strains to produce unprecedented properties," says Ju Li, an MIT professor and corresponding author of a paper describing the new solar-funnel concept that was published this week in the journal Nature Photonics. In this case, the "funnel" is a metaphor: Electrons and their counterparts, holes — which are ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Stopping flies before they mature

An insect growth regulator is one of the latest technologies U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are adding to their arsenal to help fight house flies that spread bacteria to food. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists at the agency's Center for Medical, Agricultural, and Veterinary Entomology in Gainesville, Fla., are using an insect growth regulator called pyriproxyfen to kill house flies that spread bacteria that can cause diarrhea and other illnesses. When pyriproxyfen is applied to larval breeding sites such as manure, it mimics a hormone in ...

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Medicine26 Nov 2012

Scanning innovation can improve personalized medicine

New combinations of medical imaging technologies hold promise for improved early disease screening, cancer staging, therapeutic assessment, and other aspects of personalized medicine, according to Ge Wang, director of Virginia Tech's Center for Biomedical Imaging, in a recent paper that appeared in the refereed journal PLOS ONE. The integration of multiple major tomographic scanners into a single framework "is a new way of thinking in the biomedical imaging world" and is evolving into a "grand fusion" of many imaging modalities known as "omni-tomography," explained Wang, ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Model sheds light on the chemistry that sparked the origin of life

Durham, NC – The question of how life began on a molecular level has been a longstanding problem in science. However, recent mathematical research sheds light on a possible mechanism by which life may have gotten a foothold in the chemical soup that existed on the early Earth. Researchers have proposed several competing theories for how life on Earth could have gotten its start, even before the first genes or living cells came to be. Despite differences between various proposed scenarios, one theme they all have in common is a network of molecules that have the ability ...

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Medicine26 Nov 2012

Deciphering bacterial doomsday decisions

Like a homeowner prepping for a hurricane, the bacterium Bacillus subtilis uses a long checklist to prepare for survival in hard times. In a new study, scientists at Rice University and the University of Houston uncovered an elaborate mechanism that allows B. subtilis to begin preparing for survival, even as it delays the ultimate decision of whether to "hunker down" and withdraw into a hardened spore. The new study by computational biologists at Rice and experimental biologists at the University of Houston is available online in the Proceedings of the National Academy ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Continuing Thanksgiving eruptions on the sun

On Nov. 23, 2012, at 8:54 a.m. EST, the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection or CME. Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and the ESA/NASA mission the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, show that the Nov. 23 CME left the sun at speeds of 375 miles per second, which is a slow to average speed for CMEs. This is the third Earth-directed CME since Nov. 20. Not to be confused with a solar flare, a CME is a solar phenomenon that can send solar particles into space and can reach ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Personalities influence workforce planning

Montreal, November 26, 2012 – What if factory foremen treated their workers less like the machines they operate, and more like people, with personality strengths and differences? Surely the workers would benefit, but might the employers also see positive results in the workplace, as well as being able to cut costs? That's what Concordia researcher Mohammed Othman set out to prove in his paper "Integrating workers' differences into workforce planning," recently published in the journal Computers & Industrial Engineering. Currently, explained Othman, two types of researchers ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Bothered by negative, unwanted thoughts? Just throw them away

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- If you want to get rid of unwanted, negative thoughts, try just ripping them up and tossing them in the trash. In a new study, researchers found that when people wrote down their thoughts on a piece of paper and then threw the paper away, they mentally discarded the thoughts as well. On the other hand, people were more likely to use their thoughts when making judgments if they first wrote them down on a piece of paper and tucked the paper in a pocket to protect it. "However you tag your thoughts -- as trash or as worthy of protection -- seems to ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Scientists analyze millions of news articles

A study led by academics at the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory and the School of Journalism at Cardiff University have used Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to analyse 2.5 million articles from 498 different English-language online news outlets over ten months. The researchers found that: • As expected, readability measures show that online tabloid newspapers are more readable than broadsheets and use more sentimental language. Among 15 US and UK newspapers, the Sun is the easiest to read, comparable to the BBC's children's news programme, ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Scientists from Bangalore and Mainz develop new methods for cooling of ions

Among the most important techniques developed in atomic physics over the past few years are methods that enable the storage and cooling of atoms and ions at temperatures just above absolute zero. Scientists from Bangalore and Mainz have now demonstrated in an experiment that captured ions can also be cooled through contact with cold atoms and may thus be stored in so-called ion traps in a stable condition for longer periods of time. This finding runs counter to predictions that ions would actually be heated through collisions with atoms. The results obtained by the joint ...

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Space26 Nov 2012

Geometries presented by Chinese scholars for all possible space-time kinematics and their relations

The possible kinematics and their corresponding geometries were once regarded as an already-solved problem. The de Sitter relativity research group formed by researchers from Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, and Beijing Normal University, restudied the problem and showed that additional, previously unknown realizations exist of possible kinematical algebras, each of which has so(3) isotropy and a ten-generators symmetry group. They presented these geometries corresponding to all these realizations and provided a classification in an article, entitled "Geometries ...

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Environment26 Nov 2012

Interannual variability in soil respiration from terrestrial ecosystems in China

Soil respiration is a critical hydrological process that plays an important role in the terrestrial carbon cycle. Associate Professor CHEN ShuTao and his colleagues from the School of Environmental Science and Engineering at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology set out to estimate annual soil respiration from terrestrial ecosystems in China. They have tabulated published estimates of annual soil respiration and developed an empirically based, semi-mechanistic model that includes climate and soil properties. They found that the highest and lowest annual ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Yuzhou Flora -- a hidden gem of the Middle and Late Permian Cathaysian Flora

About 250 million years ago, four major floral provinces existed on the Earth's surface, the Gondwana Floral Province in temperate Southern Hemisphere, the Angara Floral Province in temperate Northern Hemisphere, and the Euroamerican and the Cathaysian floral provinces in tropical equatorial regions. These floras evolved as the continents drifted. The Cathaysian Flora is mainly distributed in most areas of today's China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. North China lies at the center of the origin of the Cathaysian Flora. During the Permian, the southern part of the North China ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Destruction of the North China Craton

Archean cartons are commonly underlain by a cold, thick (>200 km), isotopically enriched, and compositionally refractory lithospheric keel, and represent some of the most stable regions on our planet. However, the North China Craton (NCC), an old continental geological structure dating back 4.0 Ga, is underlain by a thin lithosphere ( END ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Putrescine water may be Fountain of Youth for eggs

This press release is available in French. Ottawa — An Ottawa scientist has discovered a critical reason why women experience fertility problems as they get older. The breakthrough by Dr. Johné Liu, a senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and professor at the University of Ottawa, also points to a simple solution that could increase the viability of egg cells for women in their late 30s and older — putrescine water. In an online editorial published by Aging based on his recently published findings, Liu outlines how a simple program of drinking water ...

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Medicine26 Nov 2012

Combination of two pharmaceuticals proves effective in the treatment of multiple sclerosis

Bonn/Magdeburg/Halle, 26/11/2012. A new substance class for the treatment of multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases now promises increased efficacy paired with fewer side effects. To achieve this, a team of scientists under the leadership of Prof. Gunter Fischer (Max Planck Research Unit for Enzymology of Protein Folding, Halle/Saale, Germany) and Dr. Frank Striggow (German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE)) have combined two already approved pharmaceutical substances with each other using a chemical linker structure. The objectives of this combination ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Putting more cores to work in server farms

Streaming data, social networks, online games and services, databases – the number of interactions we have with the Internet is continually increasing. Every time we click on a link, we trigger an avalanche of computer operations that are then carried out in huge server farms. It's estimated that these massive installations are responsible for 2% of total world electricity consumption. EPFL Scientists are proposing a novel solution to help rein in this runaway consumption. By integrating the same kind of processor cores that are used in smartphones, the amount of energy ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

EARTH: Highlights of 2012

Alexandria, VA – Considered individually, 2012's record high temperatures, droughts, wildfires, storms and diminished snowpack are not necessarily alarming. But combined, the fact that the first seven months of 2012 were hotter than the hottest on record, more than half of the U.S. counties were declared disaster areas due to drought, and the snowpacks were at all-time lows, these indicators are much more significant from a climate standpoint. Two questions then remain: Will we see the same thing in 2013? And how do we increase our ability to weather the storms and other ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Lack of nutrients and metabolic syndrome linked to different subtypes of depression

A low intake of folate and vitamin B12 increases the risk of melancholic depressive symptoms, according to a study among nearly 3,000 middle-aged and elderly Finnish subjects. On the other hand, non-melancholic depressive symptoms are associated with an increased risk for the metabolic syndrome. Based on these new observations, melancholic and non-melancholic depression may be separate depressive subtypes with different etiologies in terms of proinflammation and diet. The study was the first to look at these depressive sub-types separately. "The findings have practical ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

More Facebook friends means more stress, says report

A large number of friends on Facebook may appear impressive but, according to a new report, the more social circles a person is linked to online the more likely social media will be a source of stress. A report from the University of Edinburgh Business School has found that the more groups of people in someone's Facebook friends, the greater potential to cause offence. In particular, adding employers or parents resulted in the greatest increase in anxiety. Stress arises when a user presents a version of themself on Facebook that is unacceptable to some of their online ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Crash landings

Diagnosing an injury in a swan is a far from easy undertaking. Not only are swans large, frequently weighing over 10 kg, but they are generally not happy at being handled and thus many of them can only be examined after sedation, which naturally represents a risk. The hip joints of many species of bird are known to be vulnerable to injury but swans are believed to suffer broken hips only rarely. The traditional way of examining the birds' hips relies on radiography but Gumpenberger and Scope now show that computerized tomography (CT) gives more reliable findings. The ...

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Science26 Nov 2012

Release all Tamiflu data as promised, argue researchers

The latest correspondence is posted online today as part of the BMJ's open data campaign, aimed at persuading Roche to honour the promise it made almost three years ago to make key Tamiflu trial data available for independent scrutiny. Last week, Donald MacLean, Life Cycle Leader for Tamiflu, wrote to Professor Chris Del Mar in his capacity as coordinating editor of the Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infections Group, concerning "our debate on Tamiflu data." The Cochrane researchers say they object to Roche's suggestion that there is a debate on Tamiflu data. "There is ...

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Earth Science26 Nov 2012

How does a volcanic crater grow? Grab some TNT and find out

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A new University at Buffalo study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters examines maar craters, which resemble the bowl-like cavities formed by meteorites but are in some ways more mysterious. Scientists often can discern pertinent details about meteorites -- when they struck, how large they were, the angle they approached Earth and other information -- by measuring the diameter and volume of the impact crater. Maar craters, which form when fissures of magma beneath Earth's surface meet groundwater, causing volcanic explosions, are not as telling, ...

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Medicine26 Nov 2012

BioMAP screening procedure could streamline search for new antibiotics

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have developed a new strategy for finding novel antibiotic compounds, using a diagnostic panel of bacterial strains for screening chemical extracts from natural sources. Public health officials warn of a looming antibiotic crisis due to the steady increase in antibiotic resistance and a dramatic decline in the development of new antibiotics. Most currently available antibiotics are derived from natural compounds produced by microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi. New antibiotics developed by drug companies are ...

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