The rotten egg gas leaking from sewer pipes and costing billions of dollars worldwide in odour control may soon be far less of a problem thanks to new research discussed at the 2012 International Water Association (IWA) conference this week. Trials with a magic mix of chemicals, called Cloevis, on sewers in the Gold Coast region in Australia stopped 99 per cent of the rotten egg gas or hydrogen sulphide emitted from these pipes. Lead researcher, Professor Zhiguo Yuan from the University of Queensland, told IWA delegates that one week after dosing for a few hours, in ...

Fabricating precise biomolecular structures at extremely small scales is critical to the progress of nanotechnology and related fields. Traditionally, one of the ways this has been accomplished has been through the use of rubber stamps with tiny features — similar to those used by children in play, but detailed at the microscopic scale — which are covered with molecular "inks" and then stamped onto substrate surfaces, creating a molecular patterns. But when using this technique at the nanoscale, molecules tend to diffuse on the surface both during and after stamping, ...

With traumatic injuries claiming almost six million lives a year, improvements in care, including in the challenging areas of brain and bone injuries, and haemorrhage, are urgently needed. Leading medical journal The Lancet today published a series led by researchers and clinicians from the National Trauma Research Institute (NTRI), a collaboration between Monash University and Alfred Health, which notes the difficulties and charts the progress in improving three critical areas of trauma care. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the leading cause of trauma-related deaths ...

Adding a missing protein to infertile human sperm can 'kick-start' its ability to fertilise an egg and dramatically increase the chances of a successful pregnancy, a team of Cardiff University scientists have uncovered. The team from Cardiff University's School of Medicine first found that sperm transfers a vital protein, known as PLC-zeta (PLCz), to the egg upon fertilisation. This sperm protein initiates a process called 'egg activation' which sets off all the biological processes necessary for development of an embryo. Now, the team has found that eggs that don't ...

This press release is available in French.Global climate change means that recently discovered ancient forests in Canada's extreme north could one day return, according to Alexandre Guertin-Pasquier of the University of Montreal's Department of Geography, who is presenting his findings at the Canadian Paleontology Conference in Toronto today. "According to the data model, climate conditions on Bylot Island will be able to support the kinds of trees we find in the fossilized forest that currently exist there, such as willow, pine and spruce. I've also found evidence of ...

If approached in the right way, citizens are willing to change their behaviour and do more to help themselves and others, according to research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The project, carried out jointly at the universities of Manchester and Southampton, experimented with different interventions techniqueswhich encourage citizen participation and explored people's motivations for community involvement. The researchers focused on comparing the effectiveness of 'nudge' techniques, where people are offered incentives to change their behaviour, ...

Volcanic activity on and around La Réunion is driven by a localized upwelling of hot buoyant magma. Unlike most magma sources, this is not located on the boundary between two tectonic plates, and rises from much greater depths. It is a so-called hotspot, and has left behind on the overlying mobile crust a track of volcanic activity that stretches 5500 km northwards to the Deccan Plateau in India. Some 65 million years ago, in a process that had a massive impact on world climate, the Deccan area was covered with enormous amounts of lava as the Indian Plate passed over the ...

When elite-level athletes retire, they often struggle to adapt to their new lives. When finding that the characteristics that were valuable in sport are not equally useful in 'ordinary' life, they often start experiencing disorientation, depression, self-doubt or even illness. This is concluded in research from the University of Gothenburg. Successful athletes at the elite level develop characteristics that should generate success also later in life. However, this notion may be wrong, according to the new research. As part of a study, ex-Olympians from Sweden, Switzerland, ...

The tsunami in Japan in March 2011 unleashed a series of negligence related with the resulting nuclear disaster. A scientific study headed by Spanish researchers has for the first time identified those atomic power plants that are more prone to suffering the effects of a tsunami. In total, 23 plants are in dangerous areas, including Fukushima I, with 74 reactors located in the east and southeast of Asia. Tsunamis are synonymous with the destruction of cities and homes and since the Japanese coast was devastated in March 2011 we now know that they cause nuclear disaster, ...

An enzyme in the bacterium that causes potato scab could help create new, environmentally-benign biocatalysts with the potential to cut use of the highly corrosive chemical nitric acid. Chemists at the University of Warwick in the UK, in collaboration with researchers at Cornell University in the USA, have reported in the journal Nature Chemical Biology the discovery of an enzyme in the bacterium Streptomyces scabies that catalyses an aromatic nitration reaction. TxtE, a cytochrome P450 enzyme, is the first example of an enzyme that has specifically evolved to catalyse ...

On the political scale, Swedish journalists can be placed to the left of the Swedish public and their elected politicians. And the distance between the two sides has increased significantly in recent decades, although this is more due to the public and politicians having moved to the right than to journalists having moved to the left. These are the results of a study conducted at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. 'The transition of journalists farther and farther to the left on the political scale stagnated in the mid-1990s,' says Professor Kent Asp, who headed the ...

Primary care physicians are at the heart of health care in the United States, and are often the first to diagnose patients and ensure those patients receive the care they need. But researchers from North Carolina State University, East Carolina University (ECU) and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York have found that many students are choosing to pass up a career in primary care because those physicians make substantially less money than specialists, such as dermatologists or radiologists. "We found that students who placed a premium ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — President Barack Obama holds a substantial lead in Michigan over Republican challenger Mitt Romney, although many of the state's voters remain undecided, according to Michigan State University's latest State of the State Survey. In the quarterly survey, completed in August, the Democratic incumbent leads Romney 39 percent to 30 percent among likely voters, for a margin of 9 percentage points. The results come on the heels of an EPIC-MRA poll for the Detroit Free Press and a Detroit News/WDIV Local 4 survey that both show Obama with a commanding lead. The ...

Scientists have discovered an unusual symbiosis between tiny single-celled algae and highly specialized bacteria in the ocean. The partnership plays an important role in fertilizing the oceans by taking nitrogen from the atmosphere and "fixing" it into a form that other organisms can use. Details of the finding, published in this week's issue of the journal Science, emerged from the investigation of a mysterious nitrogen-fixing microbe that has a very small genome. First detected in 1998 by Jonathan Zehr, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa ...

Lithium is a 'gold standard' drug for treating bipolar disorder, however not everyone responds in the same way. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Biology of Mood & Anxiety Disorders finds that this is true at the levels of gene activation, especially in the activation or repression of genes which alter the level the apoptosis (programmed cell death). Most notably BCL2, known to be important for the therapeutic effects of lithium, did not increase in non-responders. This can be tested in the blood of patients within four weeks of treatment. A ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 21, 2012 – Coronary heart disease is a major cause of death in women. A new study has found that a diet rich in antioxidants, mainly from fruits and vegetables, can significantly reduce the risk of myocardial infarction. The study is published in the October issue of The American Journal of Medicine. "Our study was the first to look at the effect of all dietary antioxidants in relation to myocardial infarction," says lead investigator Alicja Wolk, DrMedSci, Division of Nutritional Epidemiology, Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska ...

September 21, 2012 – (BRONX, NY) – Primary care physicians – America's front line healthcare practitioners – are usually the first to diagnose illness, refer patients to specialists and coordinate care. Yet, despite that critical role, primary care physicians remain among the lowest paid of all doctors at a time when there's an acute primary care shortage. A unique longitudinal study of medical students by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, and North Carolina State University ...

Several years ago researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) reported discovering a novel, evolutionary trait in a long-studied population of Escherichia coli, a rod-shaped bacterium commonly found in the lower intestine of mammals. The E. coli added a helping of citrate to its traditional diet of glucose, even though other E. coli can't consume citrate in the presence of oxygen. These same biologists have now analyzed this new trait's genetic origins and found that in multiple cases, the evolving E. coli population needed more than one mutational step before the ...

PHILADELPHIA — Treatment with denosumab, a drug targeted against a protein that helps promote bone destruction, decreased the number of tumor giant cells in patients with giant-cell tumor of the bone, and increased new bone formation, according to the results of a phase II study published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "Giant-cell tumor of the bone is a rare tumor that affects mostly young people," said Sant P. Chawla, M.D., director of the Santa Monica Oncology Center, Santa Monica, Calif. "Radical surgery is ...

It's a battleground down there — in the soil where plants and bacteria dwell. Even though beneficial root bacteria come to the rescue when a plant is being attacked by pathogens, there's a dark side to the relationship between the plant and its white knight. According to research reported by a University of Delaware scientific team in the September online edition of Plant Physiology, the most highly cited plant journal, a power struggle ensues as the plant and the "good" bacteria vie over who will control the plant's immune system. "For the brief period when the beneficial ...

NEW YORK - September 21, 2012 - Much of our daily lives are spent completing tasks that involve a degree of waiting, such as remaining on hold while scheduling a doctor's appointment or standing in line at an ATM. Faced with a wait, some people postpone, avoid, or abandon their task. Others endure the wait but feel dissatisfied and frustrated by the experience. Are there ways to improve our outlook and mindset while waiting? A new study shows that seemingly irrelevant environmental cues—such as queue guides, or barriers commonly used in banks and airports—can serve as ...

Three political essays by one of the greatest British statesmen of the last 250 years have been discovered by a historian at Queen Mary, University of London. The new finds constitute the earliest political writings by Edmund Burke (1729-97), dating from around 1757, when he was 27-years-old, a period often described as the 'missing years' of his biography. Professor Richard Bourke, from the School of History at Queen Mary, came across the early essays among a series of notebooks belonging to William Burke, a close friend and distant relation of parliamentarian, Edmund. ...

Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have identified reliable predictors of pain by surveying patients throughout their hospital stays about the severity of their pain and their levels of satisfaction with how their pain was managed by hospital staff. Using this data, interdisciplinary teams treating patients were able to identify patients at higher risk for pain prior to, or immediately upon, their admission to the hospital, and create and implement intervention plans resulting in patients reporting lower levels of pain and higher levels of satisfaction with ...

PHILADELPHIA – We often hear that "knowledge is power." But, that isn't always the case, especially when the knowledge pertains to the health of an unborn child, with murky implications, at best. A new study, led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, begins to document this exception to the general rule. Barbara Bernhardt, MS, CGC, a genetic counselor at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues contacted a small group of women who are participating in a larger Columbia University study investigating ...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A Florida State University researcher is on a mission to explore the gene-controlling effects of addictive drugs in pursuit of new HIV treatments. Working under the support of a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Florida State biologist Jonathan Dennis is studying a unique ability shared between a promising class of HIV treatments known as histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDIs) and psychostimulant drugs such as cocaine. "Current HIV treatments do just that — they treat the disease by preventing the spread of HIV in ...