RICHLAND, Wash. -- Anyone who owns an electronic device knows that lithium ion batteries could work better and last longer. Now, scientists examining battery materials on the nano-scale reveal how nickel forms a physical barrier that impedes the shuttling of lithium ions in the electrode, reducing how fast the materials charge and discharge. Published last week in Nano Letters, the research also suggests a way to improve the materials. The researchers, led by the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Chongmin Wang, created high-resolution 3D ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The point of no return: In astronomy, it's known as a black hole — a region in space where the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Black holes that can be billions of times more massive than our sun may reside at the heart of most galaxies. Such supermassive black holes are so powerful that activity at their boundaries can ripple throughout their host galaxies. Now, an international team, led by researchers at MIT's Haystack Observatory, has for the first time measured the radius of a black hole at the center of a distant ...

A strange thing about black holes: they shine. The current issue of Science Express features a paper by the Event Horizon telescope team – a collaboration that includes Avery Broderick, Associate Faculty at Perimeter Institute – that may shed light on the origin of the bright jets given off by some black holes. In a world first, the team has been able to look at a distant black hole and find out where its jets are launched from: the "launchpad". Many galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have a huge black hole lurking at their cores. In about 10 percent of such galaxies, ...

Los Angeles, CA (September 27, 2012) – Since the newspaper industry started to experience a major decrease in readership in recent years, many people have deemed the internet and other forms of new media as the culprits. However, a recent study published in the Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, a SAGE Journal, finds that sales are down because readers need more engaging and stimulating content. Study authors Rachel Davis Mersey, Edward C. Malthouse, and Bobby J. Calder suggested that it is crucial for journalists and practitioners to focus their efforts on creating ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Not all aggressive children are aggressive for the same reasons, according to Penn State researchers, who found that some kindergartners who are aggressive show low verbal abilities while others are more easily physiologically aroused. The findings suggest that different types of treatments may be needed to help kids with different underlying causes for problem behavior. "Aggressive responses to being frustrated are a normal part of early childhood, but children are increasingly expected to manage their emotions and control their behavior when ...

PITTSBURGH, Sept. 27, 2012 – Lymph nodes can provide a suitable home for a variety of cells and tissues from other organs, suggesting that a cell-based alternative to whole organ transplantation might one day be feasible, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and its McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine. In a report recently published online in Nature Biotechnology, the research team showed for the first time that liver cells, thymus tissue and insulin-producing pancreatic islet cells, in an animal model, can thrive in lymph ...

An isolated outbreak of a deadly disease known as acute hemorrhagic fever, which killed two people and left one gravely ill in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the summer of 2009, was probably caused by a novel virus scientists have never seen before. Described this week in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, the new microbe has been named Bas-Congo virus (BASV) after the province in the southwest corner of the Congo where the three people lived. It was discovered by an international research consortium that included the University of California, San Francisco ...

NASA's TRMM satellite noticed that the intensity of rainfall in Tropical Storm Nadine has diminished today, Sept. 27. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite passed over Tropical Storm Nadine on Sept. 27 at 0739 UTC (4:39 a.m. EDT) and at 0917 UTC (5:17 a.m. EDT). At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., several TRMM instruments were used to create a full picture of Nadine's weakened rainfall. The image was created with an enhanced infrared image from TRMM's Visible and InfraRed Scanner (VIRS) overlaid with rainfall data derived from ...

VIDEO: Supercomputer models of merging black holes reveal properties that are crucial to understanding future detections of gravitational waves. This movie follows two orbiting black holes and their accretion disk during... Click here for more information. According to Einstein, whenever massive objects interact, they produce gravitational waves -- distortions in the very fabric of space and time -- that ripple outward across the universe at the speed of light. While astronomers ...

Farmers are using maps created with free data from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey's Landsat satellites that show locations that are good and not good for growing crops. Farmer Gary Wagner walks into his field where the summer leaves on the sugar beet plants are a rich emerald hue -- not necessarily a good color when it comes to sugar beets, either for the environment or the farmer. That hue tells Wagner that he's leaving money in the field in unused nitrogen fertilizer, which if left in the soil can act as a pollutant when washed into waterways, and in unproduced ...

NASA infrared satellite imagery showed Tropical Storm Miriam had strong convection and thunderstorm activity in all quadrants of the storm on Sept. 26, except the western quadrant. That activity waned dramatically in 24 hours because of strong wind shear and cooler sea surface temperatures. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured infrared data on Tropical Storm Miriam on Sept. 26 at 2047 UTC, when it was off the coast of Baja California. Strongest thunderstorms with very cold cloud top temperatures appear to ...

One day ago, Super Typhoon Jelawat's eye was about 25 nautical miles in diameter, today, Sept. 27, NASA satellite data indicated that eye has grown to 36 nautical miles! The latest infrared image from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies on NASA's Aqua satellite shows a clear eye in Typhoon Jelawat on Sept. 25. The cloud top temperatures of the thunderstorms surrounding the eye exceed -63 Fahrenheit (-52 Celsius) indicating that they are very powerful and heavy rainmakers.. Jelawat also has a rounded shape indicating that circulation is strong ...

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Ewiniar and noticed strong convection still persists in the storm, despite now being embedded in a subtropical area of low pressure off the coast of Japan. As Tropical Storm Ewiniar continues to move northward it wound up in an elongated area of low pressure (called a trough) off Japan's east coast. The trough is bringing a strong westerly flow of air into Ewiniar. Despite being battered by those winds, infrared data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite is showing ...

Washington, D.C. - A study presented at the American Academy of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery Foundation Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. shows that the MD Hearing Aid line offers a reasonable low-cost solution to those who are not using hearing aids or other amplification devices because of cost concerns. In the study, researchers at the Michigan Ear Institute sought to evaluate a novel, inexpensive (under $200.) over- the-counter hearing aid regarding to its acoustic properties and also to test the hearing aid on patients with varying levels of hearing loss ...

This press release is available in French and German.MONTREAL, Canada, September 28, 2012 - Researchers at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center and University of Montreal have identified genetic origins in 10% of an important form of congenital heart diseases by studying the genetic variability within families. "This is more than the sum of the genes found to date in all previous studies, which explained only 1% of the disease, says Dr. Marc-Phillip Hitz, lead author of the study published in PLOS Genetics, under the direction of Dr. Gregor Andelfinger, pediatric ...

Boston, MA—Over 20 million people in the United States take beta-blockers, a medication commonly prescribed for cardiovascular issues, anxiety, hypertension and more. Many of these same people also have trouble sleeping, a side effect possibly related to the fact that these medications suppress night-time melatonin production. Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have found that melatonin supplementation significantly improved sleep in hypertensive patients taking beta-blockers. The study will be electronically published on September 28, 2012 and will be ...

Improved treatment options, a multi-pronged treatment model, and federal funding from the Ryan White Program have helped an inner city Baltimore clinic improve outcomes for HIV patients across all groups, including those most often hardest hit by the disease. Published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, the results from the 15-year analysis of patients at a clinic serving a primarily poor, African-American patient population with high rates of injection drug use demonstrate what state-of-the-art HIV care can achieve, given appropriate support. Current antiretroviral therapy ...

Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center and colleagues at the University of South Florida and The Ohio State University have published a paper in the September issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention that provides an overview on preventing invasive cervical cancer. "The good news is that over the past several decades, the incidence of invasive cervical cancer has declined dramatically," said senior author Anna R. Giuliano, Ph.D., director of Moffitt's Center for Infection Research in Cancer and senior member of the Cancer Epidemiology Department. "The bad ...

Gout is one of the most common forms of inflammatory arthritis, affecting nearly 4% of adult Americans. Newly approved guidelines that educate patients in effective methods to prevent gout attacks and provide physicians with recommended therapies for long-term management of this painful disease are published in Arthritis Care & Research, a peer-reviewed journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR). Uric acid is produced by the metabolism of purines, which are found in foods and human tissue. When uric acid levels increase, crystals can form and deposit in joints, ...

A new study found that patients with gout who consumed cherries over a two-day period showed a 35% lower risk of gout attacks compared to those who did not eat the fruit. Findings from this case-crossover study published in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), also suggest that risk of gout flares was 75% lower when cherry intake was combined with the uric-acid reducing drug, allopurinol, than in periods without exposure to cherries or treatment. Previous research reports that 8.3 million adults in the U.S. suffer with gout, ...

Boston, MA—Since the beginning of August, NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, has been roaming all over the distant planet learning as much as it can about the Martian terrain. The mission control team back on Earth has also learned what it may be like on Mars by trying to live and work on a Martian day, which is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. This 'day' length causes havoc with the internal 24-hour body clock but researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have developed and tested a fatigue management program which is successful at controlling this space-age ...

Mike Rutherford is a business process and project management consultant who specializes in developing strategies to help companies deal with the transitions and climate change policies relative to the energy sector; and he has done so since 1999. "Mike Rutherford will analyze Baumann Group's business process and how they integrate their key systems into every project" stated a source close to the management team at Baumann Group. "Mike has an extensive background in successfully combining his experience and skills honed over 25 years. He will revamp ...

In an effort to better serve clients, copywriting and content marketing firm Sumèr, LLC, launches a new brand image and website to better reflect the company's personality and to attract and connect with new and ideal clients. Over the years, Sumèr has catered to overwhelmed companies who want to grow fast, and are in need of a big picture strategy that is executed quickly. And in order to streamline these measures, the new website will feature two new core services in addition to the current copywriting offerings. When asked about these new services, CEO Michelle ...

Turzain, the family-run expert in luxury long- and short-term accommodation in Portugal, is pleased to announce the launch of its new-look website. The modified website has a clean design and invites visitors to learn more about Portugal with plenty of new features. http://www.turzain.com. In addition to offering luxurious apartment rentals in the areas of Cascais, the Algarve, and Lisbon, the new Turzain website also expertly informs visitors about Portuguese culture. The website's professional and user-friendly design complements Turzain's ethos for a friendly and ...

Two Chicagoans are producing a musical version of the cult-classic movie, Showgirls, this October at Chicago's Stage 773. Having raised funding for the project this summer on Kickstarter—a digital fundraising program for artists and dreamers—Showgirls the Musical more-than hit it's fundraising goal on July 29: essentially giving the "green light" to A Touch Too Much productions as they build their musical—the answer to every middle-aged gay man's prayers. With rehearsals currently underway, an enthusiastic cast of 8 works day and night to bring the pieces of ...