More efficient use of the food production chain and a decrease in the amount of food losses will dramatically help maintaining the planet's natural resources and improve people's lives. Researchers in Aalto University, Finland, have proved a valid estimation, for the first time, for how many people could be fed with reducing food losses. The world's population is an estimated seven billion people. An additional one billion can be fed from our current resources, if the food losses could be halved. This can be achieved if the lowest loss percentage achieved in any region ...

Polarstern is expected back from the Central Arctic expedition "IceArc" in Bremerhaven on 8 October 2012 after a good two months. 54 scientists and technicians from twelve different countries conducted research on the retreat of the sea ice and the consequences for the Arctic Ocean and its ecosystems over a period of two months in the High North. A number of new technologies were used for to film and photograph life in and below the ice down to a depth of 4400 metres. Since its departure from Tromsø (Norway) on 2 August 2012 Polarstern has travelled some 12,000 kilometres ...

Do you have it in mind to go to a mountain top and study beetles that nobody else has ever seen? Well, there are two fewer such mountains available now that beetle species discovered on Mont Tohiea and Mont Mauru in the Society Islands have been named. James Liebherr, Curator of the Cornell University Insect Collection, has just described 14 species of predatory carabid beetle, also called ground beetles, as part of a U.S. National Science Foundation team that surveyed the insects and spiders of French Polynesia. Liebherr described the species in two papers published ...

New research from North Carolina State University, Brigham Young University and the University of California, Irvine finds that parental involvement is a more significant factor in a child's academic performance than the qualities of the school itself. "Our study shows that parents need to be aware of how important they are, and invest time in their children – checking homework, attending school events and letting kids know school is important," says Dr. Toby Parcel, a professor of sociology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the work. "That's where the payoff is." The ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Liberal arts colleges continue redefining their historical missions or flat-out disappearing – a trend that threatens to diminish America's renowned higher education system, argues a study co-authored by a Michigan State University scholar. Of the 212 liberal arts colleges identified in a landmark 1990 study, only 130 remain in their traditional form – a 39 percent reduction, according to the new research. While some liberal arts schools have closed or become part of larger universities due to financial problems, Roger Baldwin, MSU professor of ...

Researchers at HIIT and Max Planck Institute for Informatics show how computer vision -based hand tracking and vibration feedback on the user's hand can be used to steer the user's hand toward an object of interest. A study shows an almost three-fold advantage in finding objects from complex visual scenes, such as library or supermarket shelves. Finding an object from a complex real-world scene is a common yet time-consuming and frustrating chore. What makes this task complex is that humans' pattern recognition capability reduces to a serial one-by-one search when the ...

DURHAM, N.H. – The angel investor market in the first two quarters of 2012 showed signs of steady recovery since the correction in the second half of 2008 and the first half of 2009, with total investments at $9.2 billion, an increase of 3.1 percent over the same period in 2011, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. A total of 27,280 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding during the first half of 2012, a 3.7 percent increase from the same period in 2011, and the number of active investors in Q1 and Q2 2012 was 131,145 ...

UPTON, NY-Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, with collaborators from Harvard University, the University of Madrid, Princeton University, and the University of Zurich, have discovered a new mechanism that may alter principle understandings of molecular interactions within a cell's nucleus. The discovery illustrates how two proteins of the human adenovirus use DNA as an efficient form of transportation inside a newly synthesized virus particle. The proteins use what the scientists are calling a "molecular sled," which slides ...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9, 2012—By using an ordinary green laser pointer, the kind commonly found in offices and college lecture halls, an Israeli research team has developed a new and highly portable Raman spectrometer that can detect extremely minute traces of hazardous chemicals in real time. The new sensor's compact design makes it an excellent candidate for rapid field deployment to disaster zones and areas with security concerns. The researchers will present their findings at Laser Science XXVIII—the American Physical Society Division of Laser Science's Annual Meeting—collocated ...

The findings have been presented in a study from Lund University in Sweden, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "It was surprising to find such a clear link to the risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease as well as to breast cancer. Obesity is a common risk factor for all three conditions, but the connection with neurotensin is not explained by obesity or other known risk factors", says Professor Olle Melander from the Department of Clinical Sciences at Lund University, who is also a consultant at Skåne University Hospital. "This ...

Researchers of the group High Performance Computing for Efficient Applications and Simulation (HPC4EAS) of the Department of Computer Architecture and Operating Systems of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), in collaboration with the team at the Emergency Services Unit at Hospital de Sabadell (Parc Taulí Healthcare Corporation), have developed an advanced computer simulator to help in decision-making processes (DSS, or decision support system) which could aid emergency service units in their operations management. The model was designed based on real data provided ...

The American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM) is pleased to announce the collaborative development of the AIUM Practice Guideline for the Performance of a Focused Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility Scan. Indications for an ultrasound examination for a focused reproductive endocrinology and infertility scan include but are not limited to monitoring of ovulation induction and ovarian stimulation. The American College of Nurse-Midwives, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American College of Osteopathic Obstetricians and Gynecologists, ...

PHILADELPHIA— Restoring diminished levels of a protein shown to prevent and reverse heart failure damage could also have therapeutic applications for patients with critical limb ischemia (CLI), suggests a new preclinical study published online October 9 in Circulation Research from researchers at the Center for Translational Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University . Low levels of the protein S100A1 have been linked to congestive heart failure and high blood pressure, and now appear to be associated with critical lower limb ischemia, a condition found in type 2 diabetic ...

Philadelphia, PA, October 10, 2012 – A new study reinforces the finding that a region of the genome involved in immune system function, called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), is involved in the genetic susceptibility to schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is among the most disabling psychiatric disorders. Approximately 80% of the risk for developing schizophrenia is heritable, but there has been slow progress in identifying genetic variation that contributes to the risk for schizophrenia. The current paper contributes to this growing literature by identifying ...

People who live near livestock or in livestock farming communities may be at greater risk of acquiring, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), according to a new study led by an international team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Dutch Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) and VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam. A comparison of livestock density, place of residence and existing information on risk factors found that regional density of livestock is an important risk factor for nasal carriage ...

A study in the current issue of Scientific Reports, a new online journal from the Nature Publishing Group, shows that small forage fish like anchovies can play an important role in the "biological pump," the process by which marine life transports carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and surface ocean into the deep sea—where it contributes nothing to current global warming. The study, by Dr. Grace Saba of Rutgers University and professor Deborah Steinberg of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, reports on data collected during an oceanographic expedition to the California ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The majority of languages — roughly 85 percent of them — can be sorted into two categories: those, like English, in which the basic sentence form is subject-verb-object ("the girl kicks the ball"), and those, like Japanese, in which the basic sentence form is subject-object-verb ("the girl the ball kicks"). The reason for the difference has remained somewhat mysterious, but researchers from MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences now believe that they can account for it using concepts borrowed from information theory, the discipline, invented ...

The experience of being bullied is particularly detrimental to the psychological health of school girls who don't have social support from either adults or peers, according to a new study by Dr. Martin Guhn and colleagues from the University of British Columbia in Canada. In contrast, social support from adults or peers (or both) appears to lessen the negative consequences of bullying in this group, namely anxiety and depression. The work is published online in Springer's Journal of Happiness Studies. Guhn and his team looked at whether the combination of high levels ...

Researchers at Western University have created a mouse model that reproduces some of the chemical changes in the brain that occur with Alzheimer's, shedding new light on this devastating disease. Marco Prado, Vania Prado and their colleagues at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry's Robarts Research Institute, looked at changes related to a neurotransmitter or chemical messenger, named acetylcholine (ACh), and the kinds of memory problems associated with it. The research is now published online by PNAS. The researchers, including first author Amanda Martyn, ...

HOUSTON – (Oct. 10, 2012) – Materials scientists at Rice University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created very thin color-changing films that may serve as part of inexpensive sensors for food spoilage or security, multiband optical elements in laser-driven systems and even as part of high-contrast displays. The new work led by Rice materials scientist Ned Thomas combines polymers into a unique, self-assembled metamaterial that, when exposed to ions in a solution or in the environment, changes color depending on the ions' ability to infiltrate ...

In recent years it has become clear that athletes who experience repeated impacts to the head may be at risk of potentially serious neurological and psychiatric problems. But a study of sports programs at three major universities, published in the October 2 Journal of Neurosurgery, finds that the way the injury commonly called concussion is usually diagnosed – largely based on athletes' subjective symptoms – varies greatly and may not be the best way to determine who is at risk for future problems. In addition, the way the term concussion is used in sports injuries may ...

October 10, 2012 (Toronto) – Mental illnesses and addictions take more of a toll on the health of Ontarians than cancer or infectious diseases, according to a new report by the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences and Public Health Ontario – yet this burden could be reduced with treatment, say scientists from Canada's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). "The majority of people with mental illness or addiction aren't receiving treatment, even though effective interventions are available," says report co-author Dr. Paul Kurdyak, Chief of General and Health ...

Three thousand new cases of Mantle Cell Lymphoma (MCL), a form of blood cancer, appear in the United States each year. With a median survival span of only five to seven years, according to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, this disease is devastating, and new therapies are sorely needed. One of the characteristics that defines MCL is heightened activity in the gene CCND1, which leads to the aggressive over-production of Cyclin D1, a protein that controls the proliferation of cells, explains Prof. Dan Peer of Tel Aviv University's Department of Cell Research and Immunology. ...

New Georgia Tech research shows that cell stiffness could be a valuable clue for doctors as they search for and treat cancerous cells before they're able to spread. The findings, which are published in the journal PLoS One, found that highly metastatic ovarian cancer cells are several times softer than less metastatic ovarian cancer cells. Assistant Professor Todd Sulchek and Ph.D. student Wenwei Xu used a process called atomic force microscopy (AFM) to study the mechanical properties of various ovarian cell lines. A soft mechanical probe "tapped" healthy, malignant and ...

In this week's PLOS Medicine, Anna Borquez from Imperial College London and an international group of authors developed a mathematical model representing the HIV epidemic among men who have sex with men (MSM) and transwomen in Lima, Peru as a test-case for the effectiveness of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). The model was used to investigate the population-level impact, cost, and cost-effectiveness of PrEP under a range of different scenarios. The authors found that strategic PrEP intervention could be a cost-effective addition to existing HIV prevention strategies ...