WASHINGTON – Praying about health issues dramatically increased among American adults over the past three decades, rising 36 percent between 1999 and 2007, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association. Researchers analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 1999, 2002 and 2007 National Health Interview Surveys for an article in the May issue of the APA journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. The study primarily focused on comparisons of results between the 2002 and 2007 surveys, which included, respectively, ...

A new study published in the American Journal of Transplantation reveals that HIV-infected deceased donors represent a potentially novel source of organs for HIV-infected transplant candidates that could decrease waitlist deaths and even shorten the national waitlist. For patients with HIV, there is an increased chance of dying while awaiting transplantation, as the HIV itself causes the risk of dying on the waiting list to be higher. The option of deceased donors who were also infected with HIV could shorten this wait time. However, this is now illegal due to a 1988 ...

Chemical Engineering students at Stevens Institute of Technology are transforming the way that American soldiers power their battery-operated devices by making a small change: a really small change. Capitalizing on the unique properties of microscale systems, the students have invented a microreactor that converts everyday fossil fuels like propane and butane into pure hydrogen for fuel cell batteries. These batteries are not only highly efficient, but also can be replenished with hydrogen again and again for years of resilient performance in the field. With batteries ...

A Biomedical Engineering Senior Design team at Stevens Institute of Technology is working with the U.S. Army and New Jersey physicians to develop a new device to combat hypothermia among wounded soldiers. Team "Heat Wave" is composed of seniors Walter Galvez, Amanda Mendez, Geoffrey Ng, and Dalia Shendi, in addition to Biomedical Engineering graduate student Maia Hadidi. The team's faculty advisor is Dr. Vikki Hazelwood and consulting physician is Dr. Herman Morchel from Hackensack University Medical Center. Additional expert support from industry and military was provided ...

Every year, the world consumes 15 Terrawatts of power. Since the amount of annual harvestable solar energy has been estimated at 50 Terrawatts, students at Stevens Institute of Technology are working on a supercapacitor that will allow us to harness more of this renewable energy through biochar electrodes for supercapacitors, resulting in a cleaner, greener planet. Supercapacitors are common today in solar panels and hydrogen fuel cell car batteries, but the material they use to store energy, activated carbon, is unsustainable and expensive. Biochar, on the other hand, ...

High-temperature superconductivity can be looked at as a fight for survival at the atomic scale. In an effort to reach that point where electrons pair up and resistance is reduced to zero, superconductivity must compete with numerous, seemingly rival phases of matter. Understanding those phases and whether or not they are rivals or complementary phenomena has consumed the attention of theoreticians and experimentalists in the quest to find superconducting materials capable of functioning at close-to-room temperature, a potential that has gone unrealized for nearly three ...

When taxpayers underreport income, whether intentionally or accidentally, the IRS always catches up. And when they do, they want to get paid - and now. Sandra (Delevan, NY) found herself in just this predicament when she came into the Blue Tax offices with an IRS tax liability of $3,636 due to a 2006 tax return filed with underreported income. The goal of the team at Blue Tax was getting this client on a payment arrangement that accurately reflected her income, resolving all of this in a timely manner. First, Blue Tax met with the client and submitted their personal ...

Mummies from along the Nile are revealing how age-old irrigation techniques may have boosted the plague of schistosomiasis, a water-borne parasitic disease that infects an estimated 200 million people today. An analysis of the mummies from Nubia, a former kingdom that was located in present-day Sudan, provides details for the first time about the prevalence of the disease across populations in ancient times, and how human alteration of the environment during that era may have contributed to its spread. The American Journal of Physical Anthropology is publishing the ...

Boston, MA - Charles J. Dimitroff, MS, PhD and colleagues in the Dimitroff Lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital, have developed a fluorinated analog of glucosamine, which, in a recent study, has been shown to block the synthesis of key carbohydrate structures linked to skin inflammation and cancer progression. These findings appear in the April 14, 2011, issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Dr. Dimitroff and colleagues show for the first time that the fluorinated glucosamine therapeutic works not through direct incorporation into growing sugar chains as previously ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – A team of researchers, including a number from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, have pinpointed regions of the genome that contribute to the debilitating lung disease that is the hallmark of cystic fibrosis. Their findings provide insight into the causes of the wide variation in lung disease severity experienced by CF patients. It also points the way to new diagnostic markers and therapeutic approaches for this and more common lung diseases such as COPD. This study, which appears online Sunday, May 22, 2011 in ...

Quit Tea, the natural stop smoking aid, has received an official professional endorsement. "This is a good product I will continue to tell my clients about," says Leeanne Taylor, a licensed drug and alcohol counselor with a private practice in Bangor, Maine, who specializes in smoking cessation. Ms. Taylor received free samples of Quit Tea as part of the Quit Tea LLC's local Maine smoking cessation professional detailing program. She said "since that time I have given clients a tea bag and the website so they could get some of their own. The majority of ...

How unique is the Milky Way? To find out, a group of researchers led by Stanford University astrophysicist Risa Wechsler compared the Milky Way to similar galaxies and found that just four percent are like the galaxy Earth calls home. "We are interested in how the Milky Way fits into the broader context of the universe", said Wechsler. "This research helps us understand whether our galaxy is typical or not, and may provide clues to its formation history." The research team compared the Milky Way to similar galaxies in terms of luminosity--a measure of how much light ...

Freelance writer Robert Brault offers a metaphor for the night sky, "A trillion asterisks and no explanations." By supporting astronomers, the National Science Foundation (NSF) helps to provide explanations. A recent NSF- and NASA-funded study provides one more explanation. Astronomers have discovered a new population of Jupiter-size planets floating alone in the dark of space, away from the light of a star. According to the scientists, these lone worlds were probably ejected from developing planetary systems. The discovery is based on a joint Japan-New Zealand survey, ...

Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have discovered a protein signaling pathway that becomes hyperactivated in human sarcoma cells, suggesting that medications to inhibit this pathway may be effective in the treatment of human sarcomas. The research is published in the current issue of the journal Cancer Cell. A team of researchers led by Stuart Aaronson, MD, Jack and Jane B. Aron Professor and Chairman of the Department of Oncological Sciences at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, compared normal human mesenchymal stem cells to human sarcoma cells and found ...

American Community Television (ACT) sent letters last Thursday to Randall Stephenson, the President of AT&T, and to Jacquelyn Brand, the chair of the AT&T Advisory Panel on Access & Aging, asking that AT&T deliver Public, Educational and Government (PEG) access channels the same as all other channels on the U-Verse system. "AT&T's U-Verse platform discriminates against persons who are blind or visually impaired," said John Rocco, President of ACT. "We cannot access PEG channels through the Channel 99 on-screen menu." Mr. Rocco, ...

The Food and Drug Administration requires every drug they certify to be tested for certain poisons that damage patient health. The current gold standard for this is the limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL) assay that involves using the blood of horseshoe crabs, which strangely enough is blue, to test for endotoxin, a substance commonly associated with many symptoms caused by bacterial infections. But researchers at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found what may be a more effective way to test for endotoxin that ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Electrical engineers at Duke University have determined that unique man-made materials should theoretically make it possible to improve the power transfer to small devices, such as laptops or cell phones, or ultimately to larger ones, such as cars or elevators, without wires. This advance is made possible by the recent ability to fabricate exotic composite materials known as metamaterials, which are not so much a single substance, but an entire man-made structure that can be engineered to exhibit properties not readily found in nature. In fact, the metamaterial ...

Just in time for summer, Whataburger today announced the Honey Mustard Chicken Club, its newest menu item available for a limited time only. The new chicken sandwich - with a choice of grilled or crispy chicken -- is available Monday, May 23 at 3 p.m. through Monday, June 27 at Whataburger's 700-plus locations across 10 states. The made-to-order Honey Mustard Chicken Club sandwich features a choice of Grilled Chicken or Whatachick'n filet, freshly chopped lettuce, tomato, bacon, Swiss American cheese and Honey Mustard sauce on a wheat bun. It is the newest addition to ...

This release is available in Spanish. WASHINGTON - Total losses from managed honey bee colonies nationwide were 30 percent from all causes for the 2010/2011 winter, according to the annual survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA). This is roughly similar to total losses reported in similar surveys done in the four previous years: 34 percent for the 2009/2010 winter, 29 percent for 2008/2009; 36 percent for 2007/2008, and 32 percent for 2006/2007. "The lack of increase in losses is marginally encouraging ...

This release is available in German. Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have suc-ceeded in encoding data at a rate of 26 terabits per second on a single laser beam, transmitting them over a distance of 50 km, and decoding them successfully. This is the largest data volume ever transported on a laser beam. The process developed by KIT allows to transmit the contents of 700 DVDs in one second only. The renowned journal "Nature Photonics" reports about this success in its latest issue (DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2011.74). With this experiment, the KIT scientists ...

This release is available in Spanish. This project, known as e-Moto, was created and developed by LGN Tech Design, a spin-off company that has its origins in a line of research begun in the Laboratorio de Máquinas (MAQLAB – Machine Laboratory) of UC3M and receives support from the University's Vice-Chancellor's Office of Research through the Business Incubator UC3M Science Park. "The technology that we have developed is a result of the design of a platform for the modeling, analysis and evolution of racing motorcycles, which was then applied to the development of the ...

Today Bruegger's announced the addition of a new line of "Cafe Salads" to its lunch menu. Part of its summer-long healthy menu initiative, the salads are available in five chef-created options at all of Bruegger's 300 plus bakeries. According to the National Restaurant Association, nutrition and health continue to be in high demand from consumers, along with a focus on value. Bruegger's Cafe Salads meet this growing trend, offering guests fresh, great tasting options in a lunch portion size with fewer calories and all the taste. And, at just $4.99 (prices ...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. -- Whites believe that they are replacing blacks as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America, according to a new study from researchers at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School. The findings, say the authors, show that America has not achieved the "post-racial" society that some predicted in the wake of Barack Obama's election. Both whites and blacks agree that anti-black racism has decreased over the last 60 years, according to the study. However, whites believe that anti-white ...

GARY, Ind. – A group of proteins that act as the body's built-in line of defense against invading bacteria use a molecular trick to induce bacteria to destroy themselves, researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine have determined. The research could point the way toward new anti-bacterial treatments that could take on bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. The proteins, called Peptidoglycan Recognition Proteins (PGRPs), are able to detect and target bacteria because bacteria are unique in having peptidoglycan polymers in their cellular walls. However, ...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – University of Louisville researchers have replicated the inflammatory gene changes of a human kidney as it progresses from mild to severe diabetic nephropathy, using a mouse model developed by a UofL researcher, according to an article published today in the journal Experimental Nephrology. Diabetic nephropathy is the foremost cause of kidney failure. "In 2004 we published an article that showed that our diabetic mouse model, OVE26, excreted high levels of protein in the urine, as humans with diabetes do. We continue to see resemblance to human diabetes ...