The debate about the potential severity of an outbreak of airborne H5N1 influenza in humans needs to move on from speculation and focus instead on how we can safely continue H5N1 research and share the results among researchers, according to a commentary to be published in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, on Friday, February 24. H5N1 influenza has been at the center of heated discussions in science and policy circles since the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) asked the authors of two recent H5N1 ...

The immune system protects from infections by detecting and eliminating invading pathogens. These two strategies form the basis of conventional clinical approaches in the fight against infectious diseases. In the latest issue of the journal Science, Miguel Soares from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (Portugal) together with Ruslan Medzhitov from Yale University School of Medicine and David Schneider from Stanford University propose that a third strategy needs to be considered: tolerance to infection, whereby the infected host protects itself from infection by reducing ...

A deadly school bus collision took the life of an 11-year-old girl and seriously injured 17 others, including both drivers. The girl who was fatally injured when a dump truck collided with the school bus in New Jersey was a triplet and her two sisters were both critically injured in the collision. It's unclear what caused the crash at the intersection of Bordentown-Chesterfield and Old York roads in Chesterfield Township. The intersection has been the site of 15 accidents since 2007. The Huffington Post reported than another minor accident occurred the day after the ...

Tragedy Strikes in an Illinois Park Last spring, a strange accident took the life of an Illinois man. Derek Posey and two coworkers were taking a break from their community service park work in a unique place: the bucket of an Illinois Department of Natural Resources construction tractor. Unbeknownst to Posey and his compatriots, disaster was about to strike. A car driven by 20-year-old Eduardo Lopez careened into the parking lot. Later found to be under the influence of cannabis and methamphetamine, Lopez slammed into the tractor containing the workers. All three ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on the nanoscale and the ever-elusive quantum computer are among the advancements edging closer toward the realm of possibility, and a new study co-authored by a UC Santa Barbara researcher may give both an extra nudge. The findings appear today in Science Express, an online version of the journal Science. Ania Bleszynski Jayich, an assistant professor of physics who joined the UCSB faculty in 2010, spent a year at Harvard working on an experiment that coupled nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond to nanomechanical ...

The funeral service of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham was held at a Bronx church on Saturday, reported WNYC (2/18/2012). The Bronx teen was gunned down by police inside his home in early February. New York civil rights violation lawyer David Perecman agrees with a number of mourners that the killing appeared to be unjustified. According to the New York Daily News (2/18/2012), Graham was killed by an officer from the NYPD's narcotics unit who believed he spotted a gun in Graham's waistband and followed him to his family's apartment. Graham was shot in the bathroom after ...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have discovered the means by which a polymer known as PVDF enables capacitors to store and release large amounts of energy quickly. Their findings could lead to much more powerful and efficient electric cars. Capacitors are like batteries in that they store and release energy. However, capacitors use separated electrical charges, rather than chemical reactions, to store energy. The charged particles enable energy to be stored and released very quickly. Imagine an electric vehicle that can accelerate from zero to 60 miles ...

A 6-year-old boy died in a two-car accident in upstate New York on Saturday night, reported The Wall Street Journal (2/19/2012). Tyler McIntyre was killed when a 2008 Mercury failed to yield the right of way to another vehicle at an intersection in the town of Milton, said the YNN Hudson Valley (2/19/2012). The boy died several hours after the upstate New York auto accident. The other people involved in the auto accident were treated for non-life threatening injuries and there was no indication alcohol was involved, according to the WSJ. "Having an experienced ...

PHILADELPHIA -- The technological world of the 21st century owes a tremendous amount to advances in electrical engineering, specifically, the ability to finely control the flow of electrical charges using increasingly small and complicated circuits. And while those electrical advances continue to race ahead, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are pushing circuitry forward in a different way, by replacing electricity with light. "Looking at the success of electronics over the last century, I have always wondered why we should be limited to electric current in ...

SEAT is revealing an expansion to the Mii city car line-up with the first glimpse of an even more versatile five-door version. The additional rear doors turn the super-compact SEAT into a unique combination of exceptional driving fun, sporty design and outstanding functionality. Of course the new five-door Mii remains true to core SEAT principles - meaning it's both a pleasure to drive, and a pleasure to own. In either three- or five-door form the Mii scores top marks for fuel consumption and emissions thanks to its lightweight design and efficient drivetrains. ...

Only 10 years ago, deciphering the genetic information from one individual in a matter of weeks to find a certain disease-causing genetic mutation would have been written off as science fiction. It was the time of the Human Genome Project, and it had taken armies of sequencing robots working around the clock for almost a decade to unravel the complete sequence of the human genetic code – referred to as the genome – by churning out the DNA alphabet letter by letter. Now a team headed by Michael Hammer from the University of Arizona applied Next Generation Genome Sequencing ...

Russian dating websites HotRussianBrides.com and RussianLoveMatch.com announced that both will live stream "Precious Pearl", a beauty pageant taking place in Odessa, Ukraine on February 25, 2012 at approximately 12:30pm Eastern Time. Complete with choreographed dance numbers, a talent segment, and a fashion segment, the pageant will feature single Ukrainian women from around the country, all vying to be crowned Miss Precious Pearl. The event is coordinated by a local dating agency affiliate based in Odessa with branches all over Ukraine. This is the second ...

Could blind, buck-toothed, finger-sized naked mole-rats harbor in their brain cells a survival secret that might lead to better heart attack or stroke treatments? University of Illinois at Chicago biologist Thomas Park and colleagues at UIC and the University of Texas Heath Science Center at San Antonio think the subterranean lifestyle of the pasty-looking rodents may indeed hold clues to keeping brain cells alive and functioning when oxygen is scarce. The key may lie in how brain cells regulate their intake of calcium. "Normally, calcium in brain cells does wonderful ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- University at Buffalo engineers have developed a one-step, low-cost method to fabricate a polymer with extraordinary properties: When viewed from a single perspective, the polymer is rainbow-colored, reflecting many different wavelengths of light. Used as a filter for light, this material could form the basis of handheld multispectral imaging devices that identify the "true color" of objects examined. An image of the material is available here: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/13214. "Such portable technology could have applications in a wide range of fields, ...

Felix Sanchez (also known as El Super Sanchez) is one of the most decorated 400m Hurdlers in history. To his name, he already has an Olympic Gold Medal, 2 Outdoor World Championships, 2 Pan American Championships and numerous other accolades. This past week, the 34 year old Sanchez made history again by breaking the Indoor World Record in two consecutive races by nearly half a second in each race. The previous World Record of 49.73 seconds was set in 2010 by Sanchez as well. On February 4th, Sanchez competed in Mondeville, France, finishing his race in 49.25 seconds, ...

Cambridge, Mass. - February 23, 2012 – Engineers at Harvard have demonstrated a new kind of tunable color filter that uses optical nanoantennas to obtain precise control of color output. Whereas a conventional color filter can only produce one fixed color, a single active filter under exposure to different types of light can produce a range of colors. The advance has the potential for application in televisions and biological imaging, and could even be used to create invisible security tags to mark currency. The findings appear in the February issue of Nano Letters. Kenneth ...

The UK Tea Council expects more than 165 million cups of tea to be drunk in the UK this Mothering Sunday. As the annual homage to Mothers approaches, millions of sons and daughters around the country are planning to serve breakfast in bed including the ultimate 'cuppa' for the celebrated women in their lives. Tea and coffee specialists Whittard of Chelsea, who have already identified a pre-Mother's Day tea selling surge, have today released their expert guide to making the perfect cuppa. Every year, Whittard of Chelsea monitors the Mother's Day effect, estimated to be ...

You probably know your blood type: A, B, AB or O. You may even know if you're Rhesus positive or negative. But how about the Langereis blood type? Or the Junior blood type? Positive or negative? Most people have never even heard of these. Yet this knowledge could be "a matter of life and death," says University of Vermont biologist Bryan Ballif. While blood transfusion problems due to Langereis and Junior blood types are rare worldwide, several ethnic populations are at risk, Ballif notes. "More than 50,000 Japanese are thought to be Junior negative and may encounter ...

Athens, Ga. – Most convenience stores have a wide variety of chips, colorful candies and bottles of sugar-sweetened carbonated beverages. While shoppers can buy calorie-heavy foods wrapped in pretty packages in these locations, what they usually can't find are the fresh produce, whole grains and low-fat dairy products necessary for a healthy diet. These stores are the only nearby food source for millions of Americans living in what are called food deserts, because they are isolated from affordable healthy food. In recent studies, University of Georgia foods and nutrition ...

Preschools help children prepare for the rigors of grade school—especially children who come from a minority family, a poor family, or whose parents don't provide high-quality interactions. The results of a new study of over 1,000 identical and fraternal twins, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, confirm that preschool programs are a good idea. Of course, many children from poor families excel in school. But it's no secret that many do not. People used to think this had to do with the lower-quality schools in poor ...

Before our Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation devices can tell us where we are, the satellites that make up the GPS need to know exactly where they are. For that, they rely on a network of sites that serve as "you are here" signs planted throughout the world. The catch is, the sites don't sit still because they're on a planet that isn't at rest, yet modern measurements require more and more accuracy in pinpointing where "here" is. To meet this need, NASA is helping to lead an international effort to upgrade the four systems that supply this crucial location information. ...

Los Angeles, CA (February 23, 2012) Do strict underage drinking laws really have a positive impact on society? A recent study finds that strictly enforcing possession of alcohol under the legal age or PULA (also known as PAULA) laws on teenagers reduces the likelihood that they will engage in alcohol-related crime as adults. This study was documented in the article "The Relationship between Underage Alcohol Possession and Future Criminal Behavior: An Empirical Analysis Using Age-Period Cohort Characteristics Models," published in SAGE Open. Authors Chris Barnum, Nick Richardson, ...

The loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs is a topic that can provoke heated arguments about globalization. But what do the cold, hard numbers reveal? How has the rise in foreign manufacturing competition actually affected the U.S. economy and its workers? A new study co-authored by MIT economist David Autor shows that the rapid rise in low-wage manufacturing industries overseas has indeed had a significant impact on the United States. The disappearance of U.S. manufacturing jobs frequently leaves former manufacturing workers unemployed for years, if not permanently, while ...

New York City, February 23, 2012 – Voluminous research literature attests to the multiple negative consequences of maternal depression and depressive symptoms for the health and development of children. In contrast, there is a profound paucity of information about depressive symptoms in fathers according to a follow up study by NYU School of Medicine researchers in the February 23rd online edition of Maternal and Child Health Journal. In late 2011 lead investigator, Michael Weitzman, MD, professor of Pediatrics and Environmental Medicine and his co-authors identified, ...

Augusta, Ga. – Cells that die naturally generate a lot of internal debris that can trigger the immune system to attack the body, leading to diseases such as lupus. Now Georgia Health Sciences University researchers report that an enzyme known to help keep a woman's immune system from attacking a fetus also helps block development of these autoimmune diseases that target healthy tissues, such as DNA or joints. The findings point toward new treatment strategies for autoimmune diseases, which are on the rise in light of a germ-conscious society that regularly destroys ...