WASHINGTON — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration should gather the information needed to develop a new regulatory framework to replace the 35-year-old 510(k) clearance process for medical devices, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. The 510(k) process lacks the legal basis to be a reliable premarket screen of the safety and effectiveness of moderate-risk Class II devices and cannot be transformed into one, concluded the committee that wrote the report. FDA's finite resources would be better invested in developing a new framework that uses both premarket ...

TORONTO, Ont., July 29, 2011—More than eight in 10 Ontarians say they would want to be taken directly to a trauma centre if they were seriously injured, even if another hospital were closer, a new poll has found. The poll, conducted for researchers at St. Michael's Hospital, also found that 40 per cent of respondents believe they can get access to a trauma centre within an hour of calling 911. Neither event is guaranteed, said Dr. Avery Nathens, the hospital's trauma director. Nearly two-thirds (62 per cent) of seriously injured adults in Ontario are taken to their ...

When people recognize voices, part of what helps make voice recognition accurate is noticing how people pronounce words differently. But individuals with dyslexia don't experience this familiar language advantage, say researchers. The likely reason: "phonological impairment." Tyler Perrachione with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains, "Even though all people who speak a language use the same words, they say those words just a little bit differently from one another--what is called 'phonetics' in linguistics." Phonetics is concerned with the physical ...

The first screening by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists of the American ancestors of soybeans for tolerance to ozone and other stresses had an eye-opening result: The world superstars of stress resistance hailed from a little village in far northern Sweden, called Fiskeby. The screeners, geneticist Tommy Carter and plant physiologist Kent Burkey, are with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Raleigh, NC. Carter works in the ARS Soybean and Nitrogen Fixation Research Unit, and Burkey is in the agency's Plant Science Research Unit. ARS is USDA's principal ...

Electronic memory devices, which store information, are increasingly expected to provide not only greater storage density, but also faster access to information. As storage density increases, however, power consumption and unwanted heat generation also increase, and the fidelity of accessing the memory is frequently diminished. Various platforms exist to overcome these hurdles, according to a team led by University of California at Los Angeles researchers, which they describe in detail in the AIP's Applied Physics Letters. A spin-transfer-torque device, for example, relies ...

By engineering alternating layers of nanometer and micrometer particles, a team of engineers from the University of Minnesota has improved the efficiency of a type of solar cell by as much as 26 percent. These cells, known as dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC), are made of titanium dioxide (TiO2), a photosensitive material that is less expensive than the more traditional silicon solar cells, which are rapidly approaching the theoretical limit of their efficiency. Current DSSC designs, however, are only about 10 percent efficient. One reason for this low efficiency is that ...

The distinctive roar of a Harley's engine is loud, but studies have revealed the biggest source of noise for motorcyclists is actually generated by air whooshing over the riders' helmets. Even at legal speeds, the sound can exceed safe levels. Now, scientists have identified a key source of the rushing din. Researchers from the University of Bath and Bath Spa University placed motorcycles helmets atop mannequin heads, mounted them in a wind tunnel, and turned on the fans. By placing microphones at different locations around the helmet and at the mannequin's ear, the researchers ...

Plastics are cheap, flexible, and relatively easy to manufacture, but they can also be more heat sensitive than other materials such as metals. The same goes for plastic (or organic) electronics, which offer the promise of foldable displays or thin, inexpensive devices, but react to temperature swings differently than traditional silicon-based electronics. So, researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University decided to explore this temperature-dependent behavior more closely. They took a non-volatile organic memory transistor, made from the plastic pentacene and a layer ...

The world at large runs on lithium ion batteries. New research at Rice University shows that tiny worlds may soon do the same. The Rice lab of Professor Pulickel Ajayan has packed an entire lithium ion energy storage device into a single nanowire, as reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. The researchers believe their creation is as small as such devices can possibly get, and could be valuable as a rechargeable power source for new generations of nanoelectronics. In their paper, researchers described testing two versions of their ...

CINCINNATI—New University of Cincinnati (UC) research on HIV testing at local emergency departments shows that hospitals miss opportunities to diagnose patients who do not know they are infected with HIV, even when a regular testing program is in place. The study is part of a special supplement to the July issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The supplement includes a series of studies on HIV testing in the nation's emergency departments, finding that while a growing number of emergency departments (EDs) ...

New Rochelle, NY, July 29, 2011–Intravenous delivery of cold fluids to reduce body temperature quickly after a heart attack and improve neurologic outcomes may not be as effective in children as it is in adults, according to a study reported in Therapeutic Hypothermia and Temperature Management, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/ther In adults, therapeutic hypothermia to minimize neurological complications caused by cardiac arrest can be achieved by rapidly infusing cold (4oC) intravenous ...

Los Angeles, CA (July 29th, 2011) – The city of Liverpool made a bold move in investing in exhibiting at the 2010 World Expo in its twin city of Shanghai, China. According to research in the journal Local Economy published by SAGE, the city is beginning to reap the benefits both of inward investment, and of a higher profile in, and strengthened relationships with China. Liverpool was the only city in the UK to take the decision to promote itself at the 2010 World Expo, in the economically dynamic city of Shanghai, in a country whose economy is growing faster than any ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Although high-temperature superconductors are widely used in technologies such as MRI machines, explaining the unusual properties of these materials remains an unsolved problem for theoretical physicists. Major progress in this important field has now been reported by physicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a pair of papers published back-to-back in the July 29 issue of Physical Review Letters. The first paper, by UCSC physicist Sriram Shastry, presents a new theory of "Extremely Correlated Fermi Liquids." The second paper compares calculations ...

Patients suffering REM sleep behaviour disorders dream nightmares in which they are attacked and pursued, with the particularity that they express them by screaming, crying, punching and kicking while sleeping. Lancet Neurology has published the third consecutive work in five years about the relationship between this disorder and Parkinson's disease. The first work showed in 2006 that 45% of patients who suffer this sleep disorder develop Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases caused by a lack of dopamine in the brain. The second article discovered that ...

PHILADELPHIA — Even in trace quantities, the radioactive gas radon is very dangerous; it is second only to cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer deaths in the United States. The expense and precautions necessary to study it safely have limited research into its properties. Now, University of Pennsylvania chemists have for the first time measured how well radon binds to a molecule, paving the way for future research on it and other noble gasses. The research was led by associate professor Ivan J. Dmochowski, along with undergraduate Vagelos Scholar David R. ...

The width of an image from the AIRS instrument that flies on NASA's Aqua satellite is about 1700 km (1056 miles), and the clouds and thunderstorms associate with Tropical Storm Muifa take up that entire distance on today's imagery. Tropical Storm Muifa is spinning through the western North Pacific Ocean today and has grown in size. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the storm on July 29, 2011 at 04:17 UTC (12:17 a.m. EDT) it measured the temperatures in the cloud tops. Those cloud top temperatures especially in the east and western sides of the tropical storm were ...

NASA is analyzing Tropical Storm Don from all angles, inside and out, using three different satellites. Don is expected to make landfall in southeastern Texas tonight or early Saturday. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Don at 8:17 UTC (4:17 a.m. EDT) on July 29. The instrument called the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) took the temperature of Don's clouds in an infrared image. AIRS data revealed a large area of powerful, high thunderstorms with cold cloud tops surrounding Don's center where cloud temperatures were colder than -63 Fahrenheit (-52 Celsius). ...

The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL); Space Weather; Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (G-Cubed); Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences (JGR-G); Journal of Geophysical Research-Earth Surface (JGR-F); Journal of Geophysical Research-Space Physics (JGR-A) and Water Resources Research (WRR). In this release: What do sea measurements reveal about Earth's temperature trend? Japan's big earthquake shook the ionosphere Miniature detector measures deep space radiation New ...

Replacing gasoline and diesel with plant-based bio fuels is crucial to curb climate change. But there are several ways to transform crops to fuel, and some of the methods result in bio fuels that are harmful to health as well as nature. Now a study from the University of Copenhagen shows that it is possible to predict just how toxic the fuel will become without producing a single drop. This promises cheaper, faster and above all safer development of alternatives to fossil fuel. Solvejg Jorgensen is a computational chemist at the Department of Chemistry in Copenhagen. ...

Physicists at Forschungszentrum Jülich and the universities of Kiel and Hamburg are the first to discover a regular lattice of stable magnetic skyrmions – radial spiral structures made up of atomic-scale spins – on a surface instead of in bulk materials. Such tiny formations could one day form the basis of a new generation of smaller and more efficient data storage units in the field of information technology. The scientists discovered the magnetic spirals, each made up of just 15 atoms, in a one-atomic-layer of iron on iridium. They present their results in the current ...

A new national collaboration of asthma genetics researchers has revealed a novel gene associated with the disease in African-Americans, according to a new scientific report. By pooling data from nine independent research groups looking for genes associated with asthma, the newly-created EVE Consortium identified a novel gene association specific to populations of African descent. In addition, the new study confirmed the significance of four gene associations recently reported by a European asthma genetics study. The findings, published in Nature Genetics, are a promising ...

In this month's edition of Physics World, Richard Taylor, director of the Materials Science Institute at the University of Oregon, takes a serious, objective look at a topic that critics might claim is beyond scientific understanding – crop circles. As the global crop-circle phenomenon grows alongside advances in science and technology, Taylor notes how physics and the arts are coming together to produce more impressive and spectacular crop-circle patterns that still manage to maintain their mystery. Today's crop-circle designs are more complex than ever, with some ...

Scientists on the Norwich Research Park, working with colleagues in China, have developed new techniques that will aid the application of genomics to breeding the improved varieties of crop needed to ensure food security in the future. By dissecting the complicated genome of oilseed rape they have been able to produce maps of the genome that are needed for predictive breeding. Traditional breeding involves crossing two varieties and selecting the best performing among the progeny. Predictive breeding is a more advanced technique where specific parts of the genome most ...

New York, NY—July 31, 2011—Samuel K. Sia, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has developed an innovative strategy for an integrated microfluidic-based diagnostic device—in effect, a lab-on-a-chip—that can perform complex laboratory assays, and do so with such simplicity that these tests can be carried out in the most remote regions of the world. In a paper published in Nature Medicine online on July 31, Sia presents the first published field results on how microfluidics—the manipulation of small amounts of fluids—and nanoparticles can ...

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Genomic Medicine (CGM), together with colleagues at Kyoto University, Tsukuba University, Harvard University, and other medical institutions have identified three new loci associated with susceptibility to adult asthma in the Japanese population. The findings appear in Nature Genetics and derive from a genome-wide study of 4836 Japanese individuals. Around the world, hundreds of millions of people suffer from bronchial asthma, a chronic inflammatory disease characterized by symptoms of wheezing, shortness of breath and coughing. In ...