Plastics are cheap, flexible, and relatively easy to manufacture, but they can also be more heat sensitive than other materials such as metals. The same goes for plastic (or organic) electronics, which offer the promise of foldable displays or thin, inexpensive devices, but react to temperature swings differently than traditional silicon-based electronics. So, researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University decided to explore this temperature-dependent behavior more closely. They took a non-volatile organic memory transistor, made from the plastic pentacene and a layer ...

The world at large runs on lithium ion batteries. New research at Rice University shows that tiny worlds may soon do the same. The Rice lab of Professor Pulickel Ajayan has packed an entire lithium ion energy storage device into a single nanowire, as reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. The researchers believe their creation is as small as such devices can possibly get, and could be valuable as a rechargeable power source for new generations of nanoelectronics. In their paper, researchers described testing two versions of their ...

CINCINNATI—New University of Cincinnati (UC) research on HIV testing at local emergency departments shows that hospitals miss opportunities to diagnose patients who do not know they are infected with HIV, even when a regular testing program is in place. The study is part of a special supplement to the July issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The supplement includes a series of studies on HIV testing in the nation's emergency departments, finding that while a growing number of emergency departments (EDs) ...

New Rochelle, NY, July 29, 2011–Intravenous delivery of cold fluids to reduce body temperature quickly after a heart attack and improve neurologic outcomes may not be as effective in children as it is in adults, according to a study reported in Therapeutic Hypothermia and Temperature Management, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/ther In adults, therapeutic hypothermia to minimize neurological complications caused by cardiac arrest can be achieved by rapidly infusing cold (4oC) intravenous ...

Los Angeles, CA (July 29th, 2011) – The city of Liverpool made a bold move in investing in exhibiting at the 2010 World Expo in its twin city of Shanghai, China. According to research in the journal Local Economy published by SAGE, the city is beginning to reap the benefits both of inward investment, and of a higher profile in, and strengthened relationships with China. Liverpool was the only city in the UK to take the decision to promote itself at the 2010 World Expo, in the economically dynamic city of Shanghai, in a country whose economy is growing faster than any ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Although high-temperature superconductors are widely used in technologies such as MRI machines, explaining the unusual properties of these materials remains an unsolved problem for theoretical physicists. Major progress in this important field has now been reported by physicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a pair of papers published back-to-back in the July 29 issue of Physical Review Letters. The first paper, by UCSC physicist Sriram Shastry, presents a new theory of "Extremely Correlated Fermi Liquids." The second paper compares calculations ...

Patients suffering REM sleep behaviour disorders dream nightmares in which they are attacked and pursued, with the particularity that they express them by screaming, crying, punching and kicking while sleeping. Lancet Neurology has published the third consecutive work in five years about the relationship between this disorder and Parkinson's disease. The first work showed in 2006 that 45% of patients who suffer this sleep disorder develop Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases caused by a lack of dopamine in the brain. The second article discovered that ...

PHILADELPHIA — Even in trace quantities, the radioactive gas radon is very dangerous; it is second only to cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer deaths in the United States. The expense and precautions necessary to study it safely have limited research into its properties. Now, University of Pennsylvania chemists have for the first time measured how well radon binds to a molecule, paving the way for future research on it and other noble gasses. The research was led by associate professor Ivan J. Dmochowski, along with undergraduate Vagelos Scholar David R. ...

The width of an image from the AIRS instrument that flies on NASA's Aqua satellite is about 1700 km (1056 miles), and the clouds and thunderstorms associate with Tropical Storm Muifa take up that entire distance on today's imagery. Tropical Storm Muifa is spinning through the western North Pacific Ocean today and has grown in size. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the storm on July 29, 2011 at 04:17 UTC (12:17 a.m. EDT) it measured the temperatures in the cloud tops. Those cloud top temperatures especially in the east and western sides of the tropical storm were ...

NASA is analyzing Tropical Storm Don from all angles, inside and out, using three different satellites. Don is expected to make landfall in southeastern Texas tonight or early Saturday. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Don at 8:17 UTC (4:17 a.m. EDT) on July 29. The instrument called the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) took the temperature of Don's clouds in an infrared image. AIRS data revealed a large area of powerful, high thunderstorms with cold cloud tops surrounding Don's center where cloud temperatures were colder than -63 Fahrenheit (-52 Celsius). ...

The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL); Space Weather; Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (G-Cubed); Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences (JGR-G); Journal of Geophysical Research-Earth Surface (JGR-F); Journal of Geophysical Research-Space Physics (JGR-A) and Water Resources Research (WRR). In this release: What do sea measurements reveal about Earth's temperature trend? Japan's big earthquake shook the ionosphere Miniature detector measures deep space radiation New ...

Replacing gasoline and diesel with plant-based bio fuels is crucial to curb climate change. But there are several ways to transform crops to fuel, and some of the methods result in bio fuels that are harmful to health as well as nature. Now a study from the University of Copenhagen shows that it is possible to predict just how toxic the fuel will become without producing a single drop. This promises cheaper, faster and above all safer development of alternatives to fossil fuel. Solvejg Jorgensen is a computational chemist at the Department of Chemistry in Copenhagen. ...

Physicists at Forschungszentrum Jülich and the universities of Kiel and Hamburg are the first to discover a regular lattice of stable magnetic skyrmions – radial spiral structures made up of atomic-scale spins – on a surface instead of in bulk materials. Such tiny formations could one day form the basis of a new generation of smaller and more efficient data storage units in the field of information technology. The scientists discovered the magnetic spirals, each made up of just 15 atoms, in a one-atomic-layer of iron on iridium. They present their results in the current ...

A new national collaboration of asthma genetics researchers has revealed a novel gene associated with the disease in African-Americans, according to a new scientific report. By pooling data from nine independent research groups looking for genes associated with asthma, the newly-created EVE Consortium identified a novel gene association specific to populations of African descent. In addition, the new study confirmed the significance of four gene associations recently reported by a European asthma genetics study. The findings, published in Nature Genetics, are a promising ...

In this month's edition of Physics World, Richard Taylor, director of the Materials Science Institute at the University of Oregon, takes a serious, objective look at a topic that critics might claim is beyond scientific understanding – crop circles. As the global crop-circle phenomenon grows alongside advances in science and technology, Taylor notes how physics and the arts are coming together to produce more impressive and spectacular crop-circle patterns that still manage to maintain their mystery. Today's crop-circle designs are more complex than ever, with some ...

Scientists on the Norwich Research Park, working with colleagues in China, have developed new techniques that will aid the application of genomics to breeding the improved varieties of crop needed to ensure food security in the future. By dissecting the complicated genome of oilseed rape they have been able to produce maps of the genome that are needed for predictive breeding. Traditional breeding involves crossing two varieties and selecting the best performing among the progeny. Predictive breeding is a more advanced technique where specific parts of the genome most ...

New York, NY—July 31, 2011—Samuel K. Sia, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has developed an innovative strategy for an integrated microfluidic-based diagnostic device—in effect, a lab-on-a-chip—that can perform complex laboratory assays, and do so with such simplicity that these tests can be carried out in the most remote regions of the world. In a paper published in Nature Medicine online on July 31, Sia presents the first published field results on how microfluidics—the manipulation of small amounts of fluids—and nanoparticles can ...

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Genomic Medicine (CGM), together with colleagues at Kyoto University, Tsukuba University, Harvard University, and other medical institutions have identified three new loci associated with susceptibility to adult asthma in the Japanese population. The findings appear in Nature Genetics and derive from a genome-wide study of 4836 Japanese individuals. Around the world, hundreds of millions of people suffer from bronchial asthma, a chronic inflammatory disease characterized by symptoms of wheezing, shortness of breath and coughing. In ...

How do cells know where to position themselves and where to accumulate in order to carry out their functions correctly within each organ? Researchers with the Colorectal Cancer Lab at IRB Barcelona have revealed the molecular mechanisms responsible for organizing the intestinal epithelium into distinct comportments, defined by frontiers or territories. The study, headed by Eduard Batlle, coordinator of the Oncology Programme at IRB Barcelona and ICREA Research Professor, is published in today's online version of the Journal Nature Cell Biology, part of the prestigious editorial ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – A team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has laid bare the mechanism behind a phenomenon called oncogene addiction in mice suffering from a form of leukemia that mimics acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) in humans. Significantly, the team was able to mobilize their newly gained understanding to target "addiction" pathways in the model mice, resulting in rapid and complete eradication of the cancer, which is usually fatal and resistant to conventional chemotherapy. Oncogene addiction refers to the curious phenomenon that cancer ...

No-one likes a know-it-all but we expect to be able to catch them out: someone who acts like they know everything but doesn't can always be tripped up with a well-chosen question. Can't they? Not so. New research in quantum physics has shown that a quantum know-it-all could lack information about a subject as a whole, yet answer almost perfectly any question about the subject's parts. The work is published in Physical Review Letters. "This is something conceptually very weird," says Stephanie Wehner of the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of ...

Seventy per cent of eight-month-old babies have a salt (sodium chloride) intake higher than the recommended UK maximum level, due to being fed salty and processed foods like yeast extract, gravy, baked beans and tinned spaghetti. Many are also given cows' milk, which has higher levels of salt than breast or formula milk, as their main drink despite recommendations that it should not be used in this way until babies are at least one year old. High levels of salt can damage developing kidneys, give children a taste for salty foods and establish poor eating practices that ...

Alexandria, VA — Tobacco related disease is a primary source of mortality for African American men. Recent studies suggest that "alternative" tobacco products may have supplanted cigarettes as the most common products used by young African Americans, according to new research published in the August 2011 issue of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery. While the tobacco-related disease burden is higher in African American adults, prevalence rates of tobacco use among young African American teens are surprisingly lower than those reported for whites. This picture changes ...

Washington, D.C. – Colon cleansing - it's been described as a natural way to enhance well-being, but Georgetown University doctors say there's no evidence to back that claim. In fact, their review of scientific literature, published today in the August issue of The Journal of Family Practice, demonstrates that colon cleansing can cause side effects ranging from cramping to renal failure and death. The procedure, sometimes called colonic irrigation or colonic hydrotherapy, often involves use of chemicals followed by flushing the colon with water through a tube inserted ...

In an effort to reduce the radiation dose delivered by computed tomography (CT) scans, staff at a community-based hospital developed a comprehensive CT radiation dose reduction program which has allowed them to reduce the radiation dose delivered by CT scans at their facility, according to an article in the August issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology. CT is an essential tool for the accurate diagnosis of disease and injury but is associated with radiation doses higher than those of conventional X-ray imaging. Although high doses of radiation are ...