PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Advances in fuel-cell technology have been stymied by the inadequacy of metals studied as catalysts. The drawback to platinum, other than cost, is that it absorbs carbon monoxide in reactions involving fuel cells powered by organic materials like formic acid. A more recently tested metal, palladium, breaks down over time. Now chemists at Brown University have created a triple-headed metallic nanoparticle that they say outperforms and outlasts all others at the anode end in formic-acid fuel-cell reactions. In a paper published in the ...

Could parental exposure to solvents at work be linked to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in their children? According to an exploratory study by Erin McCanlies, a research epidemiologist from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), and colleagues, such exposures could play a role, but more research would be needed to confirm an association. Their pilot study is published online in Springer's Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. The experts' assessment indicated that exposures to lacquer, varnish and xylene occurred more often in the ...

A program that helps obese patients improve healthy behaviors is associated with modest weight loss and improved blood pressure control in a high-risk, low-income group, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Duke University, Harvard University and other institutions. The research is published March 12 in Archives of Internal Medicine. Obesity treatments are not widely available in the U.S. primary care setting, particularly for low-income patients who seek care at community health centers, according to the study's authors. ...

A study by the Children's Oncology Group (COG) reported that five-year survival for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL, the most common type of pediatric cancer) among children treated through COG clinical trials increased from 83.7 percent during the period 1990-1994 to 90.4 percent in the period 2000-2005. The improvements in survival were observed among all children over age 1 regardless of age, sex, ethnicity, or subtype of ALL. This analysis, which is the largest study to date of ALL survival, showed similar gains in 10-year survival. The findings are published March ...

Kandy Magazine announced today that it is now available as a FREE iPad App in Apple's Newsstand and in less than a week has attained a top 100 ranking. To commemorate the release of the Kandy Magazine iPad app in the App Store, the first 100,000 downloads of the newest iPad edition featuring the World's Sexiest DJ Colleen Shannon are complimentary. The Kandy App features in-app social media integration, in-app media libraries, notes, pinch-to-zoom, vertical scroll and easy navigation menus. "As an independent publisher we took a look at the different options ...

For children aged 14 and under, delaying reconstructive surgery for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries may raise their risk of further injury, according to a new study by pediatric orthopaedic surgeons. If surgery occurs later than 12 weeks after the injury, the injury may even be irreparable. "Treating ACL injuries in these children is controversial, because they are still growing and the surgery has a small risk of causing a growth disturbance," said study leader J. Todd Lawrence, M.D., Ph.D., an orthopaedic surgeon at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. ...

A wooden statue of a king, a private offering chapel, a monumental building and remains of over 80 animal mummies found by a University of Toronto-led team in Abydos, Egypt reveal intriguing information about ritual activity associated with the great gods. Professor Mary-Ann Pouls Wegner of the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations presented her team's findings at a recent meeting of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. The wooden statue is one of very few existing royal wooden statues, and may represent the female king Hatshepsut. She was ...

InfoChem GmbH - a market leader in structure and reaction handling and retrieval - and Eidogen-Sertanty, Inc. - a pioneer in chemical applications for mobile devices - have released SPRESImobile a new, jointly developed application for Apple iPod, iPhone and iPad devices. The application, featuring an innovative user interface, provides researchers and students worldwide access to InfoChem's ChemReact: a database containing over 410,000 chemical reactions and related information. ChemReact is a representative subset of SPRESI, InfoChem's structure and reaction database ...

The experienced Orlando auto accident lawyers of Jaspon & Armas, P.A. obtained a jury verdict of $116,000 for a client in a case against State Farm Insurance. Before filing a lawsuit, State's Farm's top offer was $3,5000 for our client. After being forced to file a lawsuit and just before trial, State Farm's top offer for our client was $25,000. State Farm turned down a counter settlement offer from the firm for $75,000.00, so the attorneys at Jaspon & Armas fought for their client in the Miami-Dade Court. The end result was an award by the jury for the client ...

PHILADELPHIA -- More than 90 percent of humans have antibodies to the Epstein Barr virus. Best known for causing mononucleosis, or "the kissing disease," the virus has also been implicated in more serious conditions, including Hodgkin's, non-Hodgkin's and Burkitt's lymphomas. Yet little is known about exactly how EBV triggers these diseases. Now a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine and Penn's Perelman School of Medicine has the first evidence that an Epstein Barr-like virus can infect and may also be responsible for ...

Although high levels of narcissism can impair ethical judgment regardless of one's religious orientation or orthodox beliefs, narcissism is more harmful in those who might be expected to be more ethical, according to a Baylor University study published online in the Journal of Business Ethics. Read the article using this link http://www.springerlink.com/content/u0k76hw8x37h7562/ "Devout people who are narcissistic and exercise poor ethical judgment would be committing acts that are, according to their own internalized value system, blatantly hypocritical," said Marjorie ...

TEMPE (March 12, 2012) - Maybe you've had a reoccurring sore throat or frequent headaches. Perhaps the pain in your leg won't go away. In the past, you might have gone to a doctor's office to diagnose symptoms. Today, people are more likely to go online to punch in their symptoms. Details of a new study examining how symptoms presented online influence people's reactions to possible medical conditions will be presented in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Researchers found that identifying symptoms in "streaks" - sequences ...

KINGSTON, R.I. – March 12, 2012 – University of Rhode Island marine biologist Jacqueline Webb gets an occasional strange look when she brings fish to the Orthopedics Research Lab at Rhode Island Hospital. While the facility's microCT scanner is typically used to study bone density and diseases like osteoporosis, it is also providing new insights into the skull structure and sensory systems of fish. A professor of biological sciences and director of the marine biology program at URI, Webb studies the lateral line system, a sensory system in all fishes that enables them ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A team of scientists has documented for the first time that animals can and do consume Archaea – a type of single-celled microorganism thought to be among the most abundant life forms on Earth. Archaea that consume the greenhouse gas methane were in turn eaten by worms living at deep-sea cold seeps off Costa Rica and the West Coast of the United States. Archaea perform many key ecosystem services including being involved with nitrogen cycling, and they are known to be the main mechanism by which marine methane is kept out of the atmosphere. The finding ...

The earth's structure can be compared to an orange: its crust is the peel supported by the earth's heavy mantle. That peel is made up of a continental crust 30 to 40 kilometers thick. It is much lighter than the thinner oceanic crust and protrudes from the earth's mantle because of its lower density, like an iceberg in the sea. "According to the current theory, the first continental crusts were formed when tectonic plates would collide, submerging oceanic crusts into the earth's mantle, where they would partially melt at a depth of approximately 100 kilometers. That molten ...

A new study by researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital found that from 1999 through 2008, more than 93,000 children younger than 5 years of age were treated in U.S. emergency departments for stair-related injuries. On average, this equates to a child younger than 5 years of age being rushed to an emergency department for a stair-related injury every six minutes in the U.S. The study, which is being released online March 12, 2012 and appearing in the April 2012 print issue of Pediatrics, noted ...

Many premature infants throughout the United States continue to receive inhaled nitric oxide (iNO) during their NICU stay, despite the lack of evidence to support its use. Whether or not a preemie will receive iNO treatment, when and for how long, varies greatly throughout the country, as its use in premature infants appears to be unstandardized. These are the findings of a Nationwide Children's Hospital study appearing in the journal Pediatrics. Inhaled nitric oxide (iNO) is a selective pulmonary vasodilator approved for use in term and near-term infants with hypoxic ...

Many children with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis who received treatment through ImproveCareNow, a national quality improvement and research network, ceased to have symptoms and no longer needed to take steroids for disease management. These are the findings from a study appearing in Pediatrics that examined the ImproveCareNow network's quality improvement efforts and their impact on outcomes. In this study, the proportion of children with Crohn's disease who were in remission increased from 55 percent to 68 percent, with a similar improvement in ulcerative colitis ...

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Forest Service scientists today released an assessment that shows forest land has expanded in northern states during the past century despite a 130-percent population jump and relentless environmental threats. At the same time, Forest Service researchers caution that threats to forests in the coming decades could undermine these gains. According to the Forests of the Northern United States report, forest coverage in the United States has increased by 28 percent across the region that includes Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, ...

Saranac Lake, N.Y. – New research from the Trudeau Institute addresses how the human body controls gamma-herpesviruses, a class of viruses thought to cause a variety of cancers. The study, carried out in the laboratory of Dr. Marcia Blackman, awaits publication in The Journal of Immunology. Led by postdoctoral fellow Mike Freeman, with assistance from other laboratory colleagues, the study describes the role of white blood cells in controlling gamma-herpesvirus infections and has implications for the treatment and prevention of certain cancers. One of the many factors ...

Montreal -- When it comes to prevention of substance use in our tween population, turning our kids on to thought control may just be the answer to getting them to say no. New research published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, co-led by professors Roisin O'Connor of Concordia University and Craig Colder of State University of New York at Buffalo, has found that around the tween-age years kids are decidedly ambivalent toward cigarettes and alcohol. It seems that the youngsters have both positive and negative associations with these harmful substances and ...

When oil started gushing into the Gulf of Mexico in late April 2010, friends asked George Haller whether he was tracking its movement. That's because the McGill engineering professor has been working for years on ways to better understand patterns in the seemingly chaotic motion of oceans and air. Meanwhile, colleagues of Josefina Olascoaga in Miami were asking the geophysicist a similar question. Fortunately, she was. For those involved in managing the fallout from environmental disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, it is essential to have tools that predict ...

LOUISVILLE, Ky.— Some patients with advanced heart failure caused by cardiomyopathy, the deterioration of function of the heart muscle, are benefitting from a new recovery protocol at the University of Louisville and Jewish Hospital, a part of KentuckyOne Health. Led by Emma Birks, M.D., Ph.D., FRCP, director of the Jewish Hospital Heart Failure, Transplant and Mechanical Support Program, the program treats advanced heart failure patients who have left ventricular assist devices (LVADs), also known as heart pumps, that help the heart function. Using a specific combination ...

Millions of Facebook users will be able to enjoy this year's NCAA March Madness LIVE coverage via FreeCast.com's Facebook app. The online coverage, provided by CBS Sports, TBS, TNT and TruTV, will cover all 67 games of NCAA March Madness, including games with such high profile teams as Kentucky, Syracuse, Michigan State and North Carolina, and based on the conference tournament upsets we saw last week, this year's tournament should be full of surprises. The FreeCast app for Facebook will totally change the way sports fans experience March Madness. Not only will it provide ...

An article released by Social Forces indicates that voter identification requirements have a substantially negative impact on the voting of all groups except for Asians. Particularly strong negative effects are seen for Blacks and Hispanics: a decrease in voting by 18 percent and 22 percent respectively. Even Whites show dampened turnout associated with voter ID policies. Yet for Asians, strikingly, voter ID has the opposite effect, boosting turnout by nearly 30 percent. This is an intriguing instance in which Asian participation patterns markedly differ from that of other ...