The development and successful testing of a method for unreeling the strands of silk in wild silkworm cocoons could clear the way for establishment of new silk industries not only in Asia but also in vast areas of Africa and South America. The report appears in ACS' journal Biomacromolecules. Fritz Vollrath, Tom Gheysens and colleagues explain that silk is made by unraveling— or unreeling — the fine, soft thread from cocoons of silkmoths. The practice began as far back as 3500 BC in ancient China, where silk was the fabric of royalty. Today, most silk comes from cocoons ...

Government regulators and pharmaceutical companies are moving to address a major new risk for the global supply of medicines: The possibility that unsafe ingredients are entering the supply chain as pharmaceutical companies increasingly outsource the production of drug ingredients to third parties. That's the topic of the cover story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine. C&EN Senior Editor Rick Mullin explains that the jolt for action came from several incidents. One incident —a major 2008 recall of contaminated heparin ...

A tropical forest is easy to cut down, but getting it back is another story. In a special issue of the journal Forest Ecology and Management, leading researchers at the Smithsonian in Panama and across Latin America offer new insights on reforestation based on 20 years of research. "Twenty years ago, we had almost no information about how to build a forest," said Jefferson Hall, staff scientist at the Smithsonian and lead editor of the new special issue of Forest Ecology and Management. "People either planted one of four non-native species—teak, pine, eucalyptus or acacia—or ...

AUSTIN, Texas—An essential component of animal nervous systems—sodium channels—evolved prior to the evolution of those systems, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have discovered. "The first nervous systems appeared in jellyfish-like animals six hundred million years ago or so," says Harold Zakon, professor of neurobiology, "and it was thought that sodium channels evolved around that time. We have now discovered that sodium channels were around well before nervous systems evolved." Zakon and his coauthors, Professor David Hillis and graduate student ...

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- By combining high pressure with high temperature, Livermore researchers have created a nanocyrstalline diamond aerogel that could improve the optics something as big as a telescope or as small as the lenses in eyeglasses. Aerogels are a class of materials that exhibit the lowest density, thermal conductivity, refractive index and sound velocity of any bulk solid. Aerogels are among the most versatile materials available for technical applications due to their wide variety of exceptional properties. This material has chemists, physicists, astronomers, ...

A Toledo, Ohio, physicist has implemented a new mathematical approach that accelerates some complex computer calculations used to simulate the formation of micro-thin materials. Jacques Amar, Ph.D., professor of physics at the University of Toledo (UT), studies the modeling and growth of materials at the atomic level. He uses Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) resources and Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) methods to simulate the molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) process, where metals are heated until they transition into a gaseous state and then reform as thin films by condensing ...

Whorton Insurance Services, the parent company of mobilefoodvendorsinsurance.com and MFVInsurance.com, is pleased to announce the launch of the first national insurance program to serve the insurance needs of the mobile food vending industry, a new industry formed by the rapid expansion of mobile food trucks in metropolitan areas throughout the country. Because of this rapid growth, fueled by an ever-increasing appetite and demand for gourmet food and beverages from mobile vendors, city governments are amending their outdated ordinances to accommodate these operations. ...

This spring, Didriks - www.didriks.com - will expand its tableware collection to include Sabre flatware from Paris France.   Started 17 years ago by Francis Gelb, Sabre flatware has a style meant to cut ties with conformism, blending the chic with the offbeat.  Sabre flatware features high quality melamine handles and 18/10 stainless steel. Didriks will spotlight the elegant Natura, Bamboo, Basic, Nature, and Djembe Sabre flatware designs when introducing the line. Jonathan Henke of Didriks said, "Sabre flatware makes a summery and also quite elegant addition ...

Researchers at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences have adopted an innovative data collection method for their latest work in the area of computer vision—a music video created by the Dutch progressive-electro band C-Mon & Kypski. Individual frames from the band's recent video for its song "More is Less" served as a unique visual database for the Courant researchers' work to develop computer vision technology. Computer vision, a developing technology, aims to give eyesight to machines and is currently used in a range of applications. These ...

LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, May 17, 2011—The long-held, but unproven idea that helium-4 enters into an exotic phase of matter dubbed a "supersolid" when cooled to extremely low temperatures has been challenged in a new paper published recently in Science. Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers Alexander Balatsky and Matthias Graf joined Cornell University physicist J.C. Séamus Davis and others in describing an alternative explanation for behavior of helium-4 that led scientist to believe for nearly 40 years that the substance could hold properties of a liquid and solid ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have developed new methods for studying how environmental factors and climate affect giant kelp forest ecosystems at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales. The scientists merged data collected underwater by UCSB divers with satellite images of giant kelp canopies taken by the Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper. The findings are published in the feature article of the May 16 issue of Marine Ecology Progress Series. In this marriage of marine ecology and satellite mapping, the team of UCSB scientists tracked the dynamics ...

TUCSON, Ariz. – A study conducted at the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy found that only 28 percent of pharmacies' clinical decision support software systems – the computer programs that are in place to alert pharmacists to possible medication problems – correctly identified potentially dangerous drug-drug interactions. The study was conducted at 64 pharmacies across Arizona. Members of the research team tested the pharmacy software using a set of prescription orders for a standardized fictitious patient. The prescriptions consisted of 18 different medications ...

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that almost 18% of US teens are obese. Although most experts agree that our growing obesity "epidemic" is driven by both inadequate physical activity and excessive caloric intake, implementing solutions is extraordinarily difficult. One area that has caught the attention of health researchers is the observation that trends in video game playing parallel obesity rates on a population basis. Furthermore, several studies have documented a positive association between how much time a child plays video games and his ...

(Boston) - Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have discovered new details about the underlying mechanisms of skin hardening syndromes. The team connected pharmacological properties of the Novartis Pharma AG drug called balicatib to the skin disorder for the first time after investigating adverse reactions suffered by patients participating in a clinical trial for the treatment of osteoporosis. These findings appear online in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. Balicatib was developed recently as an osteoporosis drug that can inhibit ...

EVANSTON, Ill. --- It doesn't matter if you're black or white. If you're interested in celebrity and entertainment news, you're more likely to start using Twitter, according to a new Northwestern University study. But, African Americans in general report more interest in celebrity and entertainment news and were found to be more likely than whites to start using Twitter. The research, which focused on first-year college students attending the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), found 37 percent of black students were using Twitter in 2010 compared to 21 percent ...

May 17, 2011 -- In New York City, the prevalence of asthma among children entering school varies by neighborhood anywhere from 3% to 19%, and children growing up within walking distance of each other can have 2-3 fold differences in risk for having asthma. In the first comprehensive effort to understand what drives these localized differences, researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health compared the household presence of cockroach, mouse, cat, dust mite and other allergens in neighborhoods with a high prevalence of asthma to that in low-prevalence ...

New findings show that treatment with a specific alpha blocker helps reduce symptoms and improve quality of life for men with chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS). The alpha-blocker, known as silodosin, works by selectively relaxing the muscles in the bladder neck and prostate. The treatment is already approved in Canada, the United States, the EU and Japan to treat painful symptoms of another prostate gland condition, benign prostatic hyperplasia, commonly referred to as an enlarged prostate. Despite being the most common form of prostatitis, ...

Such highly coveted technical capabilities as the observation of single catalytic processes in nanoreactors, or the optical detection of low concentrations of biochemical agents and gases are an important step closer to fruition. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with researchers at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, report the first experimental demonstration of antenna-enhanced gas sensing at the single particle level. By placing a palladium nanoparticle on the focusing tip ...

The mass extinction of marine life in our oceans during prehistoric times is a warning that the Earth will see such an extinction again because of high levels of greenhouse gases, according to new research by geologists. Professor Martin Kennedy from the University of Adelaide (School of Earth & Environmental Sciences) and Professor Thomas Wagner from Newcastle University (Civil Engineering and Geosciences) have been studying 'greenhouse oceans' – oceans that have been depleted of oxygen and suffered from increases in carbon dioxide and temperature. Using core samples ...

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine have published a study that offers a new understanding of a protein critical to physiological processes involved in major diseases such as diabetes and cancer. This work could help scientists design drugs to battle these disorders. The article was deemed a "Paper of the Week" by and will be on the cover of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. It is scheduled for publication May 20 and now available online. "This study applied a powerful protein ...

PHILADELPHIA — From high-school students to surgeons, anyone who has pulled an all-nighter knows there is a price to be paid the next day: trouble focusing, a fuzzy memory and other cognitive impairments. Now, researchers at Penn have found the part of the brain and the neurochemical basis for sleep deprivation's effects on memory. Ted Abel, a professor of biology in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences and director of the University's interdisciplinary Biological Basis of Behavior program, led the research team. His partners included Cédrick Florian, a postdoctoral fellow ...

With so many online drugstores launched every day, it may seem like a customer looking to buy Viagra online has nothing else to wish for. The new online drugstore Lelamed.org was launched to prove that there is always room for improvement when it comes to providing high level of service to customers trying to solve their erectile dysfunction problem in an affordable way. Unlike many other pharmacies that offer the same prices and discount programs, Lelamed.org is determined to make shopping for high quality medications cheaper, while still allowing the customer to enjoy ...

Scientists are reporting detection of potentially toxic flame retardants in car seats, bassinet mattresses, nursing pillows, high chairs, strollers, and other products that contain polyurethane foam and are designed for newborns, infants and toddlers. In a study in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology, they describe hints that one flame retardant, banned years ago in some areas, actually remains in use. "To the authors knowledge, this is the first study to report on flame retardants in baby products," the report states. Heather M. Stapleton and colleagues point ...

McCusker & Company, a leading nationwide provider of help desk and extended warranty protection services, is celebrating its tenth anniversary of protecting consumer purchases this year. "For the last ten years, retailers and manufacturers have trusted McCusker & Company to provide valuable extended warranty protection on their products," said McCusker & Company President Will L. McCusker. "Consumers have also provided their faith in us to be there in their time of need. We are truly honored by that." McCusker founded McCusker Consulting ...

Napa Technology, developer of the WineStation, surveyed top sommeliers wine directors, and hotel and restaurant operators to find wine by the glass consumption is increasing and consumers are willing to pay more for an expensive glass that would otherwise be cost prohibitive by the bottle. Consumers are demanding more wines by the glass when dining out, are savvier, willing to pay more for better quality, and accept that wine preservation is a beneficial, if not, necessary system. More than 85 percent of industry professionals believe consumers are ordering more ...