The Annual Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association (ACA) will be held July 28 – Aug. 1, 2012, at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston, Mass. Crystallography is the science devoted to exploring the arrangement of atoms in regular crystalline solids and in complicated molecules. Scientists will present research spanning a diverse array of disciplines, including medicine, genomics, material science, and structural biology. The following summaries link to full news releases and highlight a few of the meeting's many noteworthy talks. Speed and power of X-ray ...

Patients with plantar fasciitis (painful bone heel spur) experience significantly less pain and improved quality of life following a standard dose of external beam radiation therapy, a common cancer treatment similar to receiving an X-ray, according to a randomized, cooperative group study that was published online July 25, 2012, in the International Journal of Radiation, Oncology, Biology, Physics (Red Journal), the official scientific journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). Approximately 8-10 percent of the population has severe bone heel spurs, ...

FINDINGS: Researchers at UCLA have identified a novel molecule in the brain that, after stroke, blocks the formation of new connections between neurons. As a result, it limits the brain's recovery. In a mouse model, the researchers showed that blocking this molecule—called ephrin-A5--induces axonal sprouting, that is, the growth of new connections between the brain's neurons, or cells, and as a result promotes functional recovery. IMPACT: If duplicated in humans, the identification of this molecule could pave the way for a more rapid recovery from stroke and may ...

Tanzania is one developing country that could actually benefit from climate change by increasing exports of corn to the U.S. and other nations, according to a study by researchers at Stanford University, the World Bank and Purdue University. The study, published in the Review of Development Economics, shows the African country better known for safaris and Mt. Kilimanjaro has the potential to substantially increase its maize exports and take advantage of higher commodity prices with a variety of trading partners due to predicted dry and hot weather that could affect those ...

When the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) 052 investigators released their landmark study results last year showing that treatment can reduce HIV transmission by 96% in serodiscordant couples, questions were raised about the cost of early antiretroviral therapy (ART) and if it should be universally implemented. Data presented today at the XIX International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C. show that treatment as prevention is "very cost-effective". Using an HIV microsimulation model (CEPAC-International) to further expand analysis of HPTN 052 data, study investigators ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Policymakers struggling to stop the spread of HIV grapple with "what if" questions on the scale of millions of people and decades of time. They need a way to predict the impact of many potential interventions, alone or in combination. In two papers to be presented at the 2012 International AIDS Society Conference in Washington, D.C., Brandon Marshall, assistant professor of epidemiology at Brown University, will unveil a computer program calibrated to model accurately the spread of HIV in New York City over a decade and to make specific ...

July 27, 2012 (Tampa, FL) – Researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) College of Nursing have shown that brief treatments with Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) substantially reduce symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) including, depression, anxiety, sleep dysfunction and other physical and psychological symptoms. The findings of this first study of ART appear in an on-line article published June 18, 2012 in the Journal Behavioral Sciences. ART is being studied as an alternative to traditional PTSD treatments that use drugs or ...

Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila made history when he earned a gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. His speed and agility won him the gold, but it was barefoot running that made him a legend. When the shoes Bikila was given for the race didn't fit comfortably, he ditched them for his bare feet. After all, that's the way he had trained for the Olympics in his homeland. Racing shoeless led to success for Bikila, and now, more than 50 years later, runners are continuing to take barefoot strides. Several Olympic runners have followed Bikila and nationally the trend ...

In-utero exposure to relatively high magnetic field levels was associated with a 69 percent increased risk of being obese or overweight during childhood compared to lower in-utero magnetic field levels, according to a Kaiser Permanente study that appears in the current online version of Nature's Scientific Reports. Researchers conducted the prospective cohort study, in which participating women in Kaiser Permanente's Northern California region carried a meter measuring magnetic field levels during pregnancy and 733 of their children were followed up to 13 years, to collect ...

Berkeley — A new analysis gives Californians good reason to be optimistic about the green credentials of the state's proposed high-speed rail project, due to begin construction in 2013 thanks to funding recently approved by state legislators. Arpad Horvath at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mikhail Chester at Arizona State University compared the future sustainability of California high-speed rail with that of competing modes of transportation, namely automobile and air travel. They determined that, in terms of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, ...

Scientists at the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have developed an innovative way to combat post-surgical scarring for glaucoma patients. A clinical trial has shown that the use of a new drug delivery method has resulted in 40 per cent fewer injections needed by glaucoma patients to prevent scarring after surgery. This also means fewer hospital visits for these patients in future. Glaucoma, a disease characterised by a build-up of pressure in the eye, is a major cause of blindness worldwide. It affects about 3 per ...

London (July 27 2012). The terms of welfare reform and Labor market activation in the UK need to be re-set, according to a senior university policy expert Andrew Jones, director of the Local Economy Policy Unit at London South Bank University, and editor of Local Economy, published by SAGE. He warns that the UK Government's predominant philosophy towards the UK Welfare state accepts and supports social hierarchy and defends privilege. This, he argues, is re-creating and strengthening the conditions that provoked the 2007 economic crisis. "The rapid movement along this ...

An international team of researchers from the USA and Europe including from the University of Bonn under the direction of Dr. Hugues Sana (University of Amsterdam) has discovered that the most massive stars in the universe don't spend their lives in space as singles as was previously thought. More than two-thirds orbit a partner star. "The orbit paths of the stars are very close together so that the region around these stars is turbulent and by far not as calm as previously thought," says Professor Norbert Langer from the University of Bonn. What happens is that one star ...

An ultimate goal in modern chemistry and materials science is the non-invasive chemical mapping of materials with nanometer scale resolution. A variety of high-resolution imaging techniques exist (e.g. electron microscopy or scanning probe microscopy), however, their chemical sensitivity cannot meet the demands of modern chemical nano-analytics. Optical spectroscopy, on the other hand, offers high chemical sensitivity but its resolution is limited by diffraction to about half the wavelength, thus preventing nanoscale resolved chemical mapping. Nanoscale chemical identification ...

On the night of July 20, 2012, the laser system of the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA), which is nearing completion at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), delivered a petawatt of power in a pulse just 40 femtoseconds long at a pulse rate of one hertz – one pulse every second. A petawatt is 1015 watts, a quadrillion watts, and a femtosecond is 10-15 second, a quadrillionth of a second. No other laser system has achieved this peak power at this rapid pulse rate. "This represents a new world record," said Wim Leemans ...

TORONTO, July 27,2012 –Heterosexual men make up a small but growing number of people infected with HIV in Canada. Yet a new study has found that many of them feel existing HIV-related programs and services don't meet their needs and are geared primarily or exclusively toward gay men and heterosexual women who are living with the virus. "Heterosexual men tend to go through HIV alone," said Tony Antoniou, a pharmacist and research scholar in the Department of Family Medicine at St. Michael's Hospital. "They feel very isolated." Antoniou said the study, published in the ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Group yoga can improve motor function and balance in stroke survivors, even if they don't begin yoga until six months or more after the stroke, according to "Post-Stroke Balance Improves With Yoga: A Pilot Study," published online July 26 in the journal Stroke. Forty-seven older adults, three-quarters of whom were male, participated in the study. They were divided into three sections: One section engaged in twice-weekly group yoga for eight weeks; the second section met twice weekly for group yoga and was provided with a relaxation audio recording to ...

Phase transitions between different states of matter can be associated with a specific type of excitation called the "Higgs excitation". This phenomenon has now been ob-served in a two-dimensional quantum gas at temperatures near absolute zero. In physics spontaneous symmetry breaking is a fundamental feature of transitions between different states of matter. An example of this phenomenon is the abrupt alignment of spin orientation in a ferromagnetic substance when the material is cooled below the so-called Curie temperature. Phase transitions introduce a new degree of ...

For theoretical physicist Dima Shepelyansky from the CNRS-University of Toulouse, France, devising models of chaos and turbulence is his bread and butter. In a recent study published in EPJ B¹, he presents an exception he found in a model of turbulence, indicating that there are energy flows from large to small scale in confined space. Indeed, under a specific energy threshold, there are no energy flows, similar to the way electron currents and energy spreading are stopped in disordered solids. The author relies on numerical simulations to study a kind of turbulence—known ...

PHILADELPHIA - A tiny vibrating cantilever sensor could soon help doctors and field clinicians quickly detect harmful toxins, bacteria and even indicators of certain types of cancer from small samples of blood or urine. Researchers from Drexel University are in the process of refining a sensor technology that they developed to measure samples at the cellular level into an accurate method for quickly detecting traces of DNA in liquid samples. According to lead researcher Dr. Raj Mutharasan, a professor in Drexel's College of Engineering, the group's unique application ...

Boston, MA – Anyone that has ever had trouble sleeping can attest to the difficulties at work the following day. Experts recommend eight hours of sleep per night for ideal health and productivity, but what if five to six hours of sleep is your norm? Is your work still negatively affected? A team of researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have discovered that regardless of how tired you perceive yourself to be, that lack of sleep can influence the way you perform certain tasks. This finding is published in the July 26, 2012 online edition of The Journal of ...

This press release is available in German. Which areas of the brain help us to perceive our world in a self-reflective manner is difficult to measure. During wakefulness, we are always conscious of ourselves. In sleep, however, we are not. But there are people, known as lucid dreamers, who can become aware of dreaming during sleep. Studies employing magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) have now been able to demonstrate that a specific cortical network consisting of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontopolar regions and the precuneus is activated when this ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – In a University of Missouri study, girls and boys started grade school with different approaches to solving arithmetic problems, with girls favoring a slow and accurate approach and boys a faster but more error prone approach. Girls' approach gave them an early advantage, but by the end of sixth grade boys had surpassed the girls. The MU study found that boys showed more preference for solving arithmetic problems by reciting an answer from memory, whereas girls were more likely to compute the answer by counting. Understanding these results may help teachers ...

CHESTNUT HILL, MA (July 27, 2012) – Matchmaking managers can improve customer relations and increase repeat business by pairing employees and customers with similar personalities, according to a report in the latest edition of the Journal of Service Research. The study by three German researchers suggests that managers use role-playing exercises, videotaped rehearsals and on-site evaluations to better determine the service experience from the customer's perspective. Then match the right employees with the right customers, report marketing professors Jan Wieseke, of Ruhr-University ...

Georgia contains the largest area of forest cover of any state in the South, with forests making up 67 percent of land cover or 24.8 million acres, according to a Forest Inventory Analysis (FIA) Factsheet just released by the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS). While this land area remains stable, timber inventory has increased. "Forest area in Georgia remained relatively stable over the last 50 years," says Richard Harper, SRS forester and author of the analysis. "While forest area stayed about the same, timber inventory more than doubled over the same ...