Rice University senior engineering students are using the sun to power an autoclave that sterilizes medical instruments and help solve a long-standing health issue for developing countries. The student's used Capteur Soleil, a device created decades ago by French inventor Jean Boubour to capture the energy of the sun in places where electricity -- or fuel of any kind -- is hard to get. In attaching an insulated box containing the autoclave, the students transform the device into a potential lifesaver. The Capteur Soleil, which sits outside Rice's Oshman Engineering ...

URBANA – A Vietnam veteran who conducted early-morning mine sweeps on that country's roads, University of Illinois nutrition professor John Erdman knows the damage that a traumatic brain injury (TBI) can cause. That's why he was happy to chair a committee that gave the Department of Defense recommendations that will improve the odds of recovery for persons wounded by roadside bombs. "Within the first 24 hours after head trauma, patients need to receive at least 50 percent of their normal caloric intake, including a higher-than-normal amount of protein, to reduce inflammation ...

At the request of customers, software development firm Halfpricesoft has launched the new edition of check printing software to make it easier to print Quickbooks compatible checks. "We have a strong following of small business customers who love our other time-saving and money-saving software titles." said Dr. Ge, founder of Louisville, Ky.-based Halfpricesoft, "With ezCheckPrinting, check writing and printing software, user never need to re-order the expensive pre-printed checks. And new blank check printing feature makes it even easier to print pre-printed ...

HOUSTON (May 2, 2011) – Colorectal cancer screening rates increased for Medicare beneficiaries when coverage was expanded to average-risk individuals, but racial disparities still exist, according to researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). "Despite the expansion of Medicare coverage for colorectal cancer screening, disparities persisted among the ethnic groups we examined," said Arica White, Ph.D., M.P.H., former doctoral student at The University of Texas School of Public Health, part of UTHealth. In 1998, Medicare began covering ...

NEW YORK – May 3, 2011 –A study by Columbia Business School Professors Amit Khandelwal, a Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business senior scholar and assistant professor, Finance and Economics, and Shang-Jin Wei, director, Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business, and N.T. Wang Professor of Chinese Business and Economy, Finance and Economics, alongside JaeBin Ahn, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Columbia University, provides the first empirical evidence that quantifies the role of intermediary firms in developing and expanding international trade ...

WASHINGTON, DC (May 3, 2011) – A coalition of 30 leading global health organizations that work on vaccines, drugs, and other tools and technologies that save lives today released a list of recommendations for US policymakers and regulators, calling for acceleration of scientific innovations and streamlining the approval of safe and affordable inventions in order to save more lives around the world. The Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC), a group funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and designed to give a greater voice for those advancing technologies ...

PHILADELPHIA — Biophysicists at the University of Pennsylvania have helped develop a new technique for studying how proteins respond to physical stress and have applied it to better understand the stability-granting structures in normal and mutated red blood cells. The research was conducted by Dennis Discher and Christine Krieger in the Molecular and Cell Biophysics Lab in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science, along with researchers from the New York Blood Center and the Wistar Institute. Discher's research was published online in the journal Proceedings ...

HOUSTON -- (May 3, 2011) -- A Rice University-led team of physicists this week offered up one of the first theoretical explanations of how two dissimilar types of high-temperature superconductors behave in similar ways. The research appears online this week in the journal Physical Review Letters. It describes how the magnetic properties of electrons in two dissimilar families of iron-based materials called "pnictides" (pronounced: NICK-tides) could give rise to superconductivity. One of the parent families of pnictides is a metal and was discovered in 2008; the other ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT chemical engineers have designed a new type of drug-delivery nanoparticle that exploits a trait shared by almost all tumors: They are more acidic than healthy tissues. Such particles could target nearly any type of tumor, and can be designed to carry virtually any type of drug, says Paula Hammond, a member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the particles in the journal ACS Nano. Like most other drug-delivering nanoparticles, the new MIT particles are cloaked in a polymer ...

Ecstasy – the illegal "rave" drug that produces feelings of euphoria and emotional warmth – has been in the news recently as a potential therapeutic. Clinical trials are testing Ecstasy in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. But headlines like one in Time magazine's health section in February – "Ecstasy as therapy: have some of its negative effects been overblown?" – concern Ronald Cowan, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of Psychiatry. His team reports in the May issue of Neuropsychopharmacology that recreational Ecstasy use is associated with a chronic ...

Boston, MA – A common component in webcams may help drug makers and prescribers address a common side-effect of drugs called cardiotoxicity, an unhealthy change in the way the heart beats. Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have used the basic webcam technology to create a tool to look at the effects of medications in real time on heart cells, called cardiomyocytes. These findings were published in the journal, Lab on a Chip on April 11, 2011. Researchers developed a cost-effective, portable cell-based biosensor for real time cardiotoxicity detection using ...

An ancient, bipedal hominid needs a new nickname. Paranthropus boisei, a 2.3 million to 1.2 million-year-old primate, whom researchers say is an early human cousin, probably didn't crack nuts at all as his common handle suggests. "Nutcracker Man" most likely ate grass and possibly sedges, said geochemist Thure Cerling, lead author of a study published in the May 2 online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Cerling and colleagues determined P. boisei's diet by analyzing carbon isotope ratios in the tooth enamel of 24 teeth from 22 ...

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.—Fungi play significant ecological and economic roles. They can break down organic matter, cause devastating agricultural blights, enter into symbiotic relationships to protect and nourish plants, or offer a tasty repast. For industrial applications, fungi provide a source of enzymes to catalyze such processes as generating biofuels from plant biomass. One large fungal group with such enzymes are the rust plant pathogens which cannot survive on their own so they use crops as hosts, leading to reduced yields and potentially hindering efforts to grow biomass ...

Durham, NC – Most of us wouldn't consider slow-moving snails to be high-metabolism creatures. But at one point in the distant past, snail metabolism sped up, says a new study of marine snails in the journal Paleobiology. "Many of the marine snails we recognize today — such as abalone, conchs, periwinkles and whelks — require more than twice as much energy to survive as their ancestors did," said co-author Seth Finnegan of the California Institute of Technology. The findings come from a new analysis of snail fossils formed one to two hundred million years ago, during ...

LOS ANGELES, May 3, 2011 – When it comes to healthy snacking and weight management, a new study bolsters the long-held view that not all calories are created equal. According to nutrition researchers at UCLA, choosing to snack on pistachios rather than pretzels as part of a healthy diet not only supports your body mass index (BMI) goals, but can support heart health too. The study, recently published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition is especially significant in today's diet as snack foods account for more than a quarter of the total caloric intake ...

Rutgers researchers have developed an innovative new treatment that could help minimize nerve damage in spinal cord injuries, promote tissue healing and minimize pain. After a spinal cord injury there is an increased production of a protein (RhoA) that blocks regeneration of nerve cells that carry signals along the spinal cord and prevents the injured tissue from healing. Scientists at the W.M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience and Quark Pharmaceuticals Inc. have developed a chemically synthesized siRNA molecule that decreases the production of the RhoA protein ...

New Rochelle, NY, May 3, 2011—Researchers at last month's AACR conference in Orlando demonstrated that they are intensifying their efforts to identify and validate various types of biomarkers that are detectable in readily accessible bodily fluids such as blood and urine, reports Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN). The goal is to detect biosignatures that are more specific and sensitive than existing diagnostic modalities, according to the May 1 issue of GEN (http://www.genengnews.com/gen-articles/cancer-detection-improved-with-noninvasive-testing/3639/). "The ...

Texas Bill Would Raise Speed Limit on Some Texas Highways to 85 MPH A bill recently passed in the Texas House of Representatives would raise the speed limit on some Texas highways from 80 to 85 mph -- a move that highway safety advocates are already cautioning against. The Texas Senate is currently considering a similar measure. The Lone Star State already has over 500 miles of highways with speed limits set at 80 mph -- the highest in the nation, along with certain Utah highways. Critics say that the move would be tantamount to a license for motorists and truckers ...

Plants adapt to the local weather and soil conditions in which they grow, and these environmental adaptations are known to evolve over thousands of years as mutations slowly accumulate in plants' genetic code. But a University of Rochester biologist has found that at least some plant adaptations can occur almost instantaneously, not by a change in DNA sequence, but simply by duplication of existing genetic material. Justin Ramsey's findings are published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. While nearly all animals have two sets of chromosomes—one ...

Tallahassee, FL-- The most comprehensive study of 20th century children's books ever undertaken in the United States has found a bias towards tales that feature men and boys as lead characters. Surprisingly, researchers found that even when the characters are animals, they tend to be male. The findings, published in the April issue of Gender & Society, are based on a study of nearly 6,000 books published from 1900 to 2000. While previous studies have looked at the representation of male and female characters in children's books, they were often limited in scope. "We looked ...

Student Visas: F1 Visa Requirements The F1 visa allows students from around the world to study full time in the United States at accredited primary, secondary or postsecondary academic institutions. The F1 is a nonimmigrant visa, meaning it is intended for temporary visitors who do not intend to become permanent residents. However, F1 recipients are usually eligible for 12 months of practical training (employment authorization or permission to work) during and after completing their studies. Students who take advantage of this training or other similar opportunities ...

Alabama Dram Shop Act In Alabama it had long been the rule, with cases going back to 1876, that one cannot recover for negligence in the dispensing of alcohol. The legislature modified Alabama case law, which provided no remedy for the unlawful dispensing of alcohol, by the creation the Civil Damages Act and the Dram Shop Act. The Dram Shop Act The language of the Alabama Dram Shop Act states: -Every wife, child, parent, or other person who shall be injured in person, property, or means of support by any intoxicated person or in consequence of the intoxication ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT researchers and their collaborators have come up with an unusual, high performance and possibly less expensive way of turning the sun's heat into electricity. Their system, described in a paper published online in the journal Nature Materials on May 1, produces power with an efficiency roughly eight times higher than ever previously reported for a solar thermoelectric device — one that produces electricity from solar heat. It does so by generating and harnessing a temperature difference of about 200 degrees Celsius between the interior of the device ...

HOUSTON - A protein known as WWP2 appears to play a key role in tumor survival, a research team headed by a scientist at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center reports in an advance online publication of Nature Cell Biology. Their research suggests that the little-studied protein binds to the tumor-suppressing protein PTEN (phosphatase and tensin homologue deleted on chromosome 10), marking it for destruction by proteasomes, which degrade proteins and recycle their components. PTEN plays a role regulating the cellular reproduction cycle and prevents rapid ...

Safety Rule Requiring Backup Cameras Paused Two year old Cameron Gulbransen died in a tragic and preventable accident, a type of accident that occurs too often -- Cameron was accidentally backed over by his father while playing in the driveway. In response to Cameron's death, Congress passed the Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act of 2007. The act sets out to end backup accidents by trying to "eliminate" vehicles' blind spots. As part of the act, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) set out to implement a rule requiring ...