Philadelphia, PA, November 5, 2012 – New findings led by Dr. Michael Lombardo, Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues at the University of Cambridge indicate that testosterone levels early in fetal development influence later sensitivity of brain regions related to reward processing and affect an individual's susceptibility to engage in behavior, that in extremes, are related to several neuropsychiatric conditions that asymmetrically affect one sex more than the other. Although present at low levels in females, testosterone is one of the primary sex hormones that exerts ...

Researchers at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) have led a study published in PLoS One showing that the inhibition of a family member of NADPH oxidase enzyme, NOX4, plays an important role in liver fibrosis. The researchers studied the function of a cytokine called transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-beta) in the pathophysiology of the liver, which is one of the main research lines of the Biological Clues of the Invasive and Metastatic Phenotype research group at the IDIBELL, leaded by Isabel Fabregat. This paper is related with the processes of ...

The largest volcanic eruption on Earth in the past millions of years took place in Indonesia 74,000 years ago and researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute can now link the colossal eruption with the global climate and the effects on early humans. The results are published in the scientific journal Climate of the Past. The volcano Toba is located in Indonesia on the island Sumatra, which lies close to the equator. The colossal eruption, which occurred 74,000 years ago, left a crater that is about 50 km wide. Expelled with the eruption was 2,500 cubic kilometers of lava ...

Washington, D.C.--Researchers at the Carnegie Institution have discovered a new efficient way to pump heat using crystals. The crystals can pump or extract heat, even on the nanoscale, so they could be used on computer chips to prevent overheating or even meltdown, which is currently a major limit to higher computer speeds. The research is published in the Physical Review Letters. Ronald Cohen, staff scientist at Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory and Maimon Rose, originally a high school intern now at the University of Chicago carried out the research. They performed ...

In the 'Journal of Neuroscience' (DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5912-11.2012) the researchers present the results of their study, showing how a local anesthetic can distinctly improve the motor skills of patients after a stroke. "Many stroke patients suffer from chronic impairment of the hand or of the complete arm," Professor Dr. Thomas Weiss explains. Together with expert colleagues the psychologist of the department of Biological and Clinical Psychology at Jena University has been working for a number of years on a specialized medical training therapy which clearly enhances ...

Oxide catalysts, typically formulated as powders, play an integral role in many chemical transformations, including cleaning wastewater, curbing tailpipe emissions, and synthesizing most consumer products. Greener, more efficient chemical processes would benefit greatly from solid oxide catalysts that are choosier about their reactants, but achieving this has proven a challenge. Now researchers from Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory have developed a straightforward and generalizable process for making reactant-selective oxide catalysts by encapsulating ...

Several substances inhibiting so-called HDAC enzymes have been studied in trials searching for new anti-cancer drugs in recent years. "Trials have shown that HDAC inhibitors are very effective in arresting growth of cultured cancer cells. But apart from a very rare type of lymphoma, these drugs unfortunately do not clinically affect malignant tumors," says Prof. Dr. Olaf Witt, who heads a research department at DKFZ and is pediatrician at the Center for Child and Adolescent Medicine of Heidelberg University Hospital. In the cell, histone deacetylases (HDAC) are responsible ...

The majority of patients on the liver transplant waitlist who died received offers of high-quality donated livers that were declined prior to their death, according to a new study in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. Therefore, efforts other than simply increasing the availability of donated livers or the number of offers are needed to substantially reduce the deaths among those waiting for a transplant. "Our findings suggest that waitlist deaths are not simply due to lack of donor organs, as many of us assume. Rather, ...

How women think their friends feel about their bodies influences their own body concerns, according to a new study by Dr. Louise Wasylkiw and Molly Williamson from Mount Alison University in Canada. Their work, which examines the role of friends in young women's body concerns, is published online in Springer's journal Sex Roles. Research shows that friends influence how girls and women view and judge their own body weight, shape and size. What Wasylkiw and Williamson's work sheds light on, is how much of a young woman's body concerns are shaped by her perceptions of ...

Daejeon, Republic of Korea, November 5th, 2012—Watching a 3 dimensional (3D) film at home can be just as real and fun as going to a movie theater. Professor Yang-Hann Kim and Research Professor Jung-Woo Choi from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, KAIST, have succeeded in building an audio rendering system that will considerably improve the current 3D audio effects technology. 3D audio effects can be produced by stereo speakers, surround-sound speakers, speaker-arrays, or headphones, which essentially give an illusion to listeners that sounds are being produced ...

Over the last decade there has been an increased interest in developing resonators for gravitmetric sensing; however, the sensors' response to variations in temperature has prevented them from being used outside the laboratory. New sensors developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge negate the effects of temperature so that they may be used in industries including health care, telecommunications and environmental monitoring. Sensors built from high frequency bulk acoustic wave (BAW) resonators consist of a piezoelectric layer sandwiched between two electrodes, ...

This press release is available in German. Nowadays, electron microscopes are an essential tool, especially in the field of materials science. At TU Vienna, electron beams are being created that possess an inner rotation, similarly to a tornado. These "vortex beams" cannot only be used to display objects, but to investigate material-specific properties - with precision on a nanometer scale. A new breakthrough in research now allows scientists to produce much more intense vortex beams than ever before. Quantum Tornado: the Electron as a Wave In a tornado, the individual ...

DETROIT— There has been great advancements in the development of the high-strength steel and the need for additional enhancements continue to grow. Various industries have a need for structural components that are lighter and stronger, improve energy efficiencies, reduce emissions and pollution increase safety and cost less to produce, particularly in the automotive industry. A group of researchers in Wayne State University's College of Engineering have been working to create advanced materials with high-yield strength, fracture toughness and ductility. Their efforts ...

DURHAM, N.C. – The cause of heart attacks or strokes among some patients treated with anti-platelet drugs may be different than for patients who have undergone surgical procedures to restore blood flow, according to researchers at Duke Medicine. The finding -- reported Nov. 4, 2012, at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions annual meeting and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association – provides new insights into a subset of heart patients with acute coronary syndromes (ACS) whose risk for cardiovascular events remained unchanged despite ...

A cockatoo from a species not known to use tools in the wild has been observed spontaneously making and using tools for reaching food and other objects. A Goffin's cockatoo called 'Figaro', that has been reared in captivity and lives near Vienna, used his powerful beak to cut long splinters out of wooden beams in its aviary, or twigs out of a branch, to reach and rake in objects out of its reach. Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Vienna filmed Figaro making and using these tools. How the bird discovered how to make and use tools is unclear but shows how ...

Clinicians should take caution when diagnosing a child who has a high fever and whose tests show evidence of adenovirus, and not assume the virus is responsible for Kawasaki-like symptoms. According to a new study from Nationwide Children's Hospital appearing in Clinical Infectious Diseases, adenovirus detection is not uncommon among children with Kawasaki disease. Kawasaki disease is a rare but serious condition in children that involves inflammation of the blood vessels, specifically the heart vessels that supply the heart tissue or coronary arteries. It is the most ...

This press release is available in Spanish. A tip about a folk remedy plant used in India and Africa to ward off bugs has led to the discovery of insect-repelling compounds. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists have identified components of Jatropha curcas seed oil that are responsible for mosquito repellency. Researchers at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Natural Products Utilization Research Unit (NPURU) in Oxford, Miss., often find effective plant-derived compounds to deter insects by gathering plants in the wild and investigating those used ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Adopting a loser-pays-all rule for criminal litigation would likely be feasible only if the rule applied to defendants who are wealthy, says a study from a University of Illinois law professor. Nuno Garoupa, the H. Ross and Helen Workman Research Scholar in the College of Law, says a loser-pays-all rule could deter some crime when it's applied to either a corporation or an individual with deep pockets. But when defendants are not wealthy, such cost-shifting would be "wholly inappropriate," he says. "On the defendant's side, the problem is that a significant ...

The use of the World Health Organization's Surgical Safety Checklist in the operating room considerably lowers the risks of surgery. This is the conclusion of Axel Fudickar and co-authors in their article in Issue 42 of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2012; 109(42): 695). The most common errors in safety-related behavior in the operating room are attributable to inadequate communication and teamwork. The Surgical Safety Checklist, which was introduced by the World Health Organization in 2007, has the main effect of improving commmunication of the ...

A new University of Colorado Boulder study shows for the first time that episodes of reduced precipitation in the southern Rocky Mountains, especially during the 2001-02 drought, greatly accelerated development of the mountain pine beetle epidemic. The study, the first ever to chart the evolution of the current pine beetle epidemic in the southern Rocky Mountains, compared patterns of beetle outbreak in the two primary host species, the ponderosa pine and lodgepole pine, said CU-Boulder doctoral student Teresa Chapman. The current mountain pine beetle outbreak in the ...

New Rochelle, NY, November 5, 2012—Spinal cord injury (SCI) can disrupt the body's sensitive signaling mechanisms that control blood pressure, breathing, and oxygen delivery to the heart and other organs during changes in body position. Cardiovascular (CV) disease is a leading cause of illness and death following SCI, and changes in baroreflex sensitivity—the body's ability to detect and respond to changes in blood pressure—may be predictive of a CV event. A comprehensive review article on baroreflex sensitivity after SCI is published in Journal of Neurotrauma, a peer-reviewed ...

Alexandria, VA — Genetic testing for a certain mutation in pediatric patients is valuable in determining a cause for unexplained hearing loss, according to a study in the November 2012 issue of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery. The study's authors state that testing for some of the most common mutations that cause sensorineural hearing loss in a targeted way, rather than through generalized screening of hearing loss patients, yields the best results. University of Miami NIH-funded researchers led by Dr. Xue Zhong Liu, a physician-scientist, conducted a nine-year ...

Many animal species transmit information via chemical signals, but the extent to which these chemosignals play a role in human communication is unclear. In a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researcher Gün Semin and colleagues from Utrecht University in the Netherlands investigate whether we humans might actually be able to communicate our emotional states to each other through chemical signals. Existing research suggests that emotional expressions are multi-taskers, serving more than one function. Fear ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — A new study analyzing the previous math standards of each state provides strong support for adoption of common standards, which U.S. students desperately need to keep pace with their counterparts around the globe, a Michigan State University scholar argues. Forty-six states are implementing the Common Core math and reading standards, which nonetheless have come under fire recently by some researchers and would-be politicians. But William Schmidt, MSU Distinguished Professor of statistics and education, said the Common Core is a world-class set ...

This press release is available in Spanish. Spanish legislation on waste management changed in July last year. Until then, the consumer was responsible for the disposal of products. According to Mr Unai Tamayo, economist at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), the new laws "foment the construction of closed systems, such as in taverns: the container being taken out and subsequently returned. Moreover, when a manufacturer launches a product on to the market, once consumed, the packaging is considered waste, and the responsibility for this now falls on the manufacturer ...