CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Some forms of technology — think, for example, of computer chips — are on a fast track to constant improvements, while others evolve much more slowly. Now, a new study by researchers at MIT and other institutions shows that it may be possible to predict which technologies are likeliest to advance rapidly, and therefore may be worth more investment in research and resources. In a nutshell, the researchers found that the greater a technology's complexity, the more slowly it changes and improves over time. They devised a way of mathematically modeling ...

In an effort to help children lead happier, healthier lives, Columbus Motor Speedway will unite on NASCAR Day, May 20, with Car Wash for Kids, a NASCAR Unites national fundraiser engaging motorsports tracks, charities and organizations with the goal of raising $1 million for children's charities. Columbus Motor Speedway is located at 1841 Williams Road, Columbus, OH, 43207. Complete information is available at ColumbusSpeedway.com, www.NASCAR.com/foundation or www.facebook.com/NASCARFoundation. "Columbus Motor Speedway is proud to be a part of this national effort ...

Philadelphia, PA – 17 May 2011 – There is a significant need for objective tests that could improve clinical prediction of future psychosis. One strategy has been to determine whether physiologic measures that are abnormal in people diagnosed with schizophrenia might also be useful in estimating the risk for developing this illness. This is the strategy taken by German and Swiss researchers in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry. They used electroencephalography (EEG), which measures the brain's electrical activity or "brain waves", to study the brain's response ...

This release is available in French. Montreal, May 17, 2010 – Country roadways can be hazardous for moose and men. According to estimates, millions of vehicles collide with moose, elk and caribou in North America and Europe each year. Moose, in particular, venture to roadsides to lick the salt pools that collect following pavement deicing. Because moose are the largest animal in the deer family, with males weighing up to 720 kilograms, their salt cravings can pose significant risks to human and vehicle safety. That's why a group of Canadian researchers has investigated ...

Pets Best Insurance believes that knowledge is power--especially when it comes to our pets' health care. While the pet insurance company always recommends taking a pet in for veterinary evaluation at the first sign of illness, it has also created a means for pet owners to ask a licensed veterinarian general pet health and behavioral questions on its Facebook page. Dr. Fiona Caldwell, of Idaho Veterinary Hospital in Nampa, Idaho responds to the questions on film each week. The clips are then posted to the Pets Best Insurance Facebook wall, http://www.facebook.com/PetsBestInsurance ...

The USDA Forest Service and the Southern Group of State Foresters released the first phase of the Southern Forest Futures Project report on Tuesday, May 17, which identifies areas forest managers will focus on to maintain southern forests in the coming years. According to the report, urbanization, bioenergy use, weather patterns, land ownership changes and invasive species will significantly alter the South's forests between the years 2010 and 2060. About 23 million acres of forest land are projected to decrease. People are also expected to influence water resources, ...

As public sector prisons move towards the thin staffing level model of profit-making institutions, with their high turnover of personnel who are less connected to their occupation, a study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) warns of a potentially detrimental impact on prison quality. "Until now, little has been known about the relative strengths and weaknesses of public and private prisons," says Professor Liebling of Cambridge University who led the research. "Today, when the privatisation of prisons is on the increase and the public sector staffing ...

Researchers at the University of Alberta have taken an important step in understanding an immune system of bacteria, a finding that could have implications for medical care and both the pharmaceutical and dairy industries. In research published in the high impact journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Andrew MacMillan and co-workers in his lab have described the first step of the immune response of bacterial cells. Scientists had previously found that a bacterial virus, called a bacteriophage, attacks a bacterial cell by injecting its DNA in to the cell. MacMillan's ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — New research by a University of Illinois law and labor expert shows that in labor disputes between professional athletes and owners, courts have consistently failed to maintain a clear separation between antitrust and labor law. While players in the three major sports – football, baseball and basketball – have pursued a two-pronged approach of collective bargaining and antitrust litigation to eliminate owner-imposed constraints on labor market competition, Michael LeRoy says that the institution of collective bargaining should not be subordinated to ...

Madisonians can all agree they are anxiously waiting for the first smells of summer and the moment they can fire up the grill. The good news is, they don't have to wait long! This year's biggest summer grilling kickoff will be at The World's Largest Brat Fest, now in its 29th year of record-breaking grilling! The 2011 World's Largest Brat Fest, sponsored by Johnsonville Sausage and produced by Metcalfe's Market, will be held rain or shine Memorial Day Weekend, May 27 through the 30 in Madison, WI. "This is the time of year we absolutely love; it's the time when ...

Whether sex education focuses only on abstinence or teaches students about contraception and other topics as well, it all shares one main message: Wait. In abstinence-only, students are exhorted to wait for sex until they're married. In "comprehensive" or "abstinence-plus," the idea is to delay sexual relations until . . . later. "The underlying assumption is that delay reduces sexual risk-taking"—and with it unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, says University of South Florida psychologist Marina A. Bornovalova. "If they just wait, then they'll be ...

Advancements over the last 10 years in understanding intellectual disability (ID, formerly mental retardation), have led to the once-unimaginable possibility that ID may be treatable, a review of more than 100 studies on the topic has concluded. It appears in ACS Chemical Neuroscience. Aileen Healy and colleagues explain that people long have viewed intellectual disability as permanent and untreatable, with medical care focusing on relieving some of the symptoms rather than correcting the underlying causes. That includes Fragile X syndrome (FXS), the most common inherited ...

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 ...