Flame retardants in the polyurethane foam of millions of upholstered sofas, overstuffed chairs and other products have ignited a heated debate over safety, efficacy and fire-safety standards -- and a search for alternative materials. That's the topic of a cover story package in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of ACS, the world's largest scientific society. An overview of the package describes the controversy, fostered largely by a California chemist, who claims that flame retardants pose unacceptable toxic hazards and ...

The yeast used to make beer has yielded what may be the first gene for beer foam, scientists are reporting in a new study. Published in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the discovery opens the door to new possibilities for improving the frothy "head" so critical to the aroma and eye appeal of the world's favorite alcoholic beverage, they say. Tomás G. Villa and colleagues explain that proteins from the barley and yeast used to make beer contribute to the quality of its foam. The foamy head consists of bubbles containing carbon dioxide gas, which yeast ...

In an advance toward analyzing blood and urine instantly at a patient's bedside instead of waiting for results from a central laboratory, scientists are reporting development of a new micropump capable of producing pressures almost 500 times higher than the pressure in a car tire. Described in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry, the pumps are for futuristic "labs-on-a-chip," which reduce entire laboratories to the size of a postage stamp. Shaorong Liu and colleagues explain that powerful pumps are critical for high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), a mainstay laboratory ...

Using the legendary properties of heartwood from the black locust tree as their inspiration, scientists have discovered a way to improve the performance of softwoods widely used in construction. The method, reported in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, involves addition of similar kinds of flavonoid compounds that boost the health of humans. Ingo Burgert and colleagues explain that wood's position as a mainstay building material over the centuries results from a combination of desirable factors, including surprising strength for a material so light in weight. ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Hypertension is one of the greatest epidemics threatening the health of people in low and middle-income countries. For patients struggling with high blood pressure in countries with limited access to health care, the key to improving health may be as simple as a phone call. New University of Michigan research evaluated the impact of automated calls from a U.S.-based server to the mobile phones of patients with hypertension (high blood pressure) in Honduras and Mexico. The program was designed to be a low-cost way of providing long distance checkups ...

A new research discovery has the potential to revolutionize the biological understanding of some childhood psychiatric disorders. Specifically, scientists have found that when a single protein involved in brain development, called "SRGAP3," is malformed, it causes problems in the brain functioning of mice that cause symptoms that are similar to some mental health and neurological disorders in children. Because this protein has similar functions in humans, it may represent a "missing link" for several disorders that are part of an illness spectrum. In addition, it offers ...

This press release is available in German. In male songbirds of the temperate zone, the concentration of sex hormones is rising in spring, which leads to an increase in song activity during the breeding season. In the tropics, there has been little evidence so far about such a clear relationship between hormonal action and behaviour, which is partly due to a lower degree of seasonal changes of the environment. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen have now discovered that in duetting African white-browed sparrow weavers, the solo song of ...

New Rochelle, NY, October 31, 2012—In a paper published today by Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers, researchers found that New York Times readers who were led to believe the newspaper's paywall was motivated by financial need were generally supportive and willing to pay, while those who believed it was motivated by profit were generally unsupportive and unwilling to pay. The article "Paying for What Was Free: Lessons from the New York Times Paywall," written by Jonathan Cook, Associate Research ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Rhode Island Hospital researcher Mark Zimmerman, M.D., director of outpatient psychiatry, has found that patients suffering from major depressive disorder (MDD) define remission from depression differently than clinicians. While many psychiatrists and clinicians view remission from a symptom-based standpoint, the study found that patients put much more emphasis on life satisfaction and sense of well-being than on actual symptoms. The paper is published online in advance of print in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. "Current standards for treating ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Two Rhode Island Hospital researchers recently found that restoring near-complete blood flow to the brain is necessary to restore or preserve neurological function following stroke. Seems like a no-brainer, right? Yet until their research was complete, many physicians and researchers believed that partial blood-flow restoration was good enough. Not anymore. The study by Mahesh Jayaraman, M.D., director of interventional neuroradiology, and Brian Silver, M.D., director of the Comprehensive Stroke Center at Rhode Island Hospital, is published online ...

You push a button to call the elevator to your floor and you wait for what seems like forever, thinking it must be broken. When your friend pushes the button, the elevator appears within 10 seconds. "She must have the magic touch," you say to yourself. This episode reflects what philosophers and psychological scientists call "temporal binding": Events that occur close to one another in time and space are sometimes "bound" together and we perceive them as meaningful episodes. New research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological ...

A number of important questions and issues should be addressed before changes are made to the guidelines for the diagnosis of gestational diabetes, according to a new article by University of Maryland School of Medicine Dean E. Albert Reece, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., published online in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology on Oct. 31. The article publishes in advance of a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiative to reconsider diagnostic guidelines for the condition. The NIH Office of Disease Prevention has called a Consensus Development Conference in ...

LA JOLLA, CA – October 31, 2012 – Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered the first selective inhibitors of an important set of enzymes. The new inhibitors, and chemical probes based on them, now can be used to study the functions of enzymes known as diacylglycerol lipases (DAGL), their products, and the pathways they regulate. Early tests in mouse macrophages suggest that DAGL-inhibiting compounds might also have therapeutic uses, for they suppress the production of a pro-inflammatory molecule that has been implicated in rheumatoid arthritis ...

A new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Chronic Kidney Disease Prognosis Consortium found that chronic kidney disease and its complications were associated with a higher risk of death regardless of age. The findings were presented October 30 at the American Society of Nephrology conference in San Diego, Ca. and published in latest issue of JAMA. Chronic kidney disease prevalence increases dramatically with age from 4 percent at age 20-39 to 54 percent of adults over age 75 in the populations studied. This led some groups to question ...

Eat a breakfast sandwich and your body will be feeling the ill effects well before lunch – now that's fast food! High-fat diets are associated with developing atherosclerosis (narrowing of the arteries) over a lifetime. But how quickly can damage start? Just one day of eating a fat-laden breakfast sandwich – processed cheese and meat on a bun – and "your blood vessels become unhappy," says Heart and Stroke Foundation researcher Dr. Todd Anderson, director of the Libin Cardiovascular Institute of Alberta and head of cardiac science at the University of Calgary. Atherosclerosis ...

Researchers at the University of Minnesota's Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR) have found a small population of neurons that is involved in measuring time, which is a process that has traditionally been difficult to study in the lab. In the study, which is published October 30 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, the researchers developed a task in which monkeys could only rely on their internal sense of the passage of time. Their task design eliminated all external cues which could have served as "clocks". The monkeys were trained to move their eyes ...

New research has found that the transport of proteins into chloroplasts in plants is differentially regulated by the age of the chloroplast; upturning the previously accepted notion that this process is age-independent or only globally up- or down- regulated for all proteins. The research, led by Dr. Hsou-min Li, a Research Fellow from the Institute of Molecular Biology, Academia Sinica of Taiwan, is published October 30 in the open access journal PLOS Biology. It's long been known that gene expression changes with age, for example, some genes are expressed in young ...

COPENHAGEN (31 October, 2012)—Feeding the world releases up to 17,000 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, according to a new analysis released today by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). But while the emissions "footprint" of food production needs to be reduced, a companion policy brief by CCAFS lays out how climate change will require a complete recalibration of where specific crops are grown and livestock are raised. Together, Climate Change and Food Systems (published in the 2012 Annual Review ...

Low calorie foods may help people lose weight but there is often a problem that people using them do not feel full. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Flavour shows that subtle manipulations of texture and creamy flavour can increase the expectation that a fruit yoghurt drink will be filling and suppress hunger regardless of actual calorific content. There is a currently a debate about satiety, how full low calorie foods and drinks make people feel and for how long, and whether or not they actually make people eat or drink more because the ...

The biomass stored in forests is thought to play a critical role in mitigating the catastrophic effects of global climate change. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Carbon Balance and Management has used Lidar data collected by the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) aboard the Ice Cloud and Elevation Satellite (ICESat) to accurately measure the biomass of California. When the ICESat2 is launched in 2016 this method will be able to monitor biomass and other global data changes. As part of the global carbon cycle it is thought that global ...

Eating at least two servings of oily fish a week is moderately but significantly associated with a reduced risk of stroke, finds a study published on bmj.com today. But taking fish oil supplements doesn't seem to have the same effect, say the researchers. Regular consumption of fish and long chain omega 3 fatty acids has been linked with a reduced risk of coronary heart disease and current guidelines recommend eating at least two portions of fish a week, preferably oily fish like mackerel and sardines.  But evidence supporting a similar benefit for stroke remains unclear. So ...

A study from the University of Calgary's Hotchkiss Brain Institute shows there is evidence to support a new drug therapy called nabilone to treat diabetic neuropathy, or nerve pain. Researchers enrolled 60 patients with diabetic neuropathy in a 12-week placebo controlled clinical study. At the end of the study, patients reported less pain and an improvement in sleep and anxiety when taking nabilone as compared to the placebo. "This is a good option to help treat nerve pain due to diabetes, with very few side effects," says Dr. Cory Toth, a neurologist and the study's ...

Arboreal tarantulas are known from a few tropical places in Asia, Africa, South and Central America and the Caribbean. These tarantulas generally have a lighter build, thinner bodies and longer legs, better suited for their habitat. They have increased surface area at the ends of their legs, allowing them to better climb different surfaces, while their light build makes them more agile. Their core area is the Amazon, from where most of the species are known and normally very common, living in the jungle or even in house's surroundings. Now, nine new species were described ...

In 1987, a domestic cat rescued from a shelter in Montana, USA surprisingly gave birth to a curly-haired kitten. The kitten ended up mating with a Persian male and giving birth to a mixture of curly-haired and normal-haired kittens, which strongly suggested that the mutation in the rescued cat was dominant in nature: its presence on one of the two copies of the gene involved is sufficient to cause cats to have curly hair. The curly-haired kittens were attractive and were soon recognized as a new breed: the Selkirk Rex. There are currently registered Selkirk Rex ...

PHILADELPHIA--Implementing measures to ensure radiation therapy protocols are followed not only decreases deviations, but it can also improve overall survival in cancer patients, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital researchers suggest in a first-of-its kind study presented during a plenary session at the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) 54th Annual Meeting in Boston. Researchers from the Department of Radiation Oncology at Jefferson analyzed radiation therapy protocols, quality assurance (QA) measures and patient outcomes in eight, large clinical trials ...