It's a quick process, generates almost no waste and is extremely precise: within a few seconds, a laser beam has welded the casing and speedometer cover together – without any screws, clamps or glues whatsoever. The result is a perfect weld seam scarcely visible to the naked eye. There are no sparks or particles flying through the air during welding. What's more: the resulting heat is confined to a minimal area. This protects the material. Many industries have now turned to welding plastics with a laser. Still, the technology has its limits; when it comes to fusing two ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - University of Maryland researchers have made a breakthrough in the use of visible light for making tiny integrated circuits. Though their advance is probably at least a decade from commercial use, they say it could one day make it possible for companies like Intel to continue their decades long tread of making ever smaller, faster, and cheaper computer chips. For some 50 years, the integrated circuits, or chips, that are at the heart of computers, smart phones, and other high-tech devices have been created through a technique known as photolithography, ...

MANHATTAN, KAN. -- When you sit down to watch a new flick, whether you enjoy the movie may depend on the person sitting next to you, according to research from a Kansas State University professor. It's especially true if you are awkwardly watching a movie's steamy love scene with your parents. "We know that most of the time people enjoy watching movies -- that's why they do it," said Richard Harris, K-State professor of psychology. "But sometimes we watch a movie that isn't what we describe as 'enjoyable.' For whatever reason, the experience is uncomfortable emotionally ...

A new study highlights inconsistencies in black box warnings - medication-related safety warnings on a drug's label - and argues for a more transparent and systematic approach to ensure these warnings are consistent across all drugs within a same category, and any additions to warnings, on the back of a drug withdrawal for example, are done within a reasonable and uniform time period. The work by Orestis Panagiotou and John Ioannidis and colleagues from the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Stanford University School of Medicine in the USA is published ...

Low doses of an inexpensive, FDA-approved hypertension medication may improve the results of nanotherapeutic approaches to cancer treatment. In a report in the early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators describe experiments showing that the generic drug losartan, by modifying the network of collagen fibers that characterizes most solid tumors, improved the effectiveness of two nanotherapeutics against several types of cancer. "By 'normalizing' the abnormal extracellular matrix of tumors, which ...

Biologists have discovered that primitive, predatory lampreys have structures within their gills that play the same role as the thymus, the organ where immune cells called T cells develop in mammals, birds and fish. The finding suggests that in vertebrate evolution, having two separate organs for immune cell development -- the bone marrow for B cells and the thymus for T cells -- may have preceded the appearance of the particular features that mark those cells, such as antibodies and T cell receptors. The results will be published Feb. 3 by the journal Nature. The ...

They are entirely too small to be seen even with the most powerful microscope. But now an international research team has managed to capture an image of an intact virus and a membrane structure from a photosynthetic bacterium with the aid of extremely intensive and ultra-short x-ray pulses from the world's first free electron laser. This new advance in structural biology is being published today in two articles in the journal Nature. The findings for the two studies pave the way for studies of biological structures at the molecular level, including viruses, individual ...

– Early, correct diagnosis is the best way to prevent the development of Lyme arthritis in individuals with the tick-borne illness, according to a paper published in the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (JAAOS). In patients who do develop the condition, most cases can be treated successfully with antibiotics, the review found. "Lyme arthritis occurs commonly in patients with Lyme disease and should be considered when evaluating patients with joint complaints and who live in areas where the disease occurs," said study author Aristides Cruz, MD, ...

Fifteen members of the Entomological Society of America (ESA) gave presentations at the "Second Annual National Bed Bug Summit: Advancing Towards Solutions to the Bed Bug Problem," held by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington, DC, February 2, 2011. The meeting focused on what is being done to combat bed bugs, the importance of educating consumers, improvements in prevention and control techniques, controlling bed bugs in schools and public housing, and on the state of bed bug knowledge and futue research needs. "Many health departments are overwhelmed ...

PHILADELPHIA – A simple test performed at the sideline of sporting events can accurately detect concussions in athletes, according to study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Current sideline tests can leave a wide amount a brain function untested following concussion. Penn researchers showed that this simple test was superior to current methods and accurately and reliably identified athletes with head trauma. The study appears online now in Neurology. The one-minute test involves the athlete reading single digit numbers displayed on index-sized ...

Food scientists at the University of British Columbia have been able to pinpoint more of the complex chemistry behind coffee's much touted antioxidant benefits, tracing valuable compounds to the roasting process. Lead author Yazheng Liu and co-author Prof. David Kitts found that the prevailing antioxidants present in dark roasted coffee brew extracts result from the green beans being browned under high temperatures. Their findings will appear in a forthcoming issue of Food Research International and can be previewed at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodres.2010.12.037 Liu ...

TORONTO, ON – Anthropologists at the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge have discovered the oldest cemetery in the Middle East at a site in northern Jordan. The cemetery includes graves containing human remains buried alongside those of a red fox, suggesting that the animal was possibly kept as a pet by humans long before dogs ever were. The 16,500-year-old site at 'Uyun al-Hammam was discovered in 2000 by an expedition led by University of Toronto professor Edward (Ted) Banning and Lisa Maher, an assistant professor of anthropology at U of T and research ...

HOUSTON (Feb. 2, 2011) -- For women seeking pregnancy by assisted reproductive technologies, such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF), a new study shows that the health of the uterus is more relevant than egg quality for a newborn to achieve normal birth weight and full gestation. This study, published in Fertility and Sterility, an international journal for obstetricians, offers new information for women with infertility diagnoses considering options for conceiving. The study was conducted by Dr. William Gibbons, director of The Family Fertility Program at Texas Children's ...

The same properties that make engineered nanoparticles attractive for numerous applications—small as a virus, biologically and environmentally stabile, and water-soluble—also cause concern about their long-term impacts on environmental health and safety (EHS). One particular characteristic, the tendency for nanoparticles to clump together in solution, is of great interest because the size of these clusters may be key to whether or not they are toxic to human cells. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated for the first time ...

Pasadena, Calif.—The brain—awake and sleeping—is awash in electrical activity, and not just from the individual pings of single neurons communicating with each other. In fact, the brain is enveloped in countless overlapping electric fields, generated by the neural circuits of scores of communicating neurons. The fields were once thought to be an "epiphenomenon, a 'bug' of sorts, occurring during neural communication," says neuroscientist Costas Anastassiou, a postdoctoral scholar in biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). New work by Anastassiou ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 2, 2011 – During the past two months, researchers launched weather balloons, drove instrument-laden cars and flew a glider to study winter inversions that often choke Salt Lake City in smog and trap dirty air in other urban basins worldwide. The field campaign – part of a three-year study by the University of Utah and other institutions – ends Monday, Feb. 7 as atmospheric scientists begin analyzing data they collected to learn how weather conditions contribute to inversions, which occur when warmer air aloft holds cold air ...

Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) must adjust and adapt to the new health care reform laws or risk marginalization in the new health care arena, according to a New England Journal of Medicine Perspective article published online February 2. The authors of the article, Scott A. Berkowitz, M.D., M.B.A., a fellow in cardiology and geriatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Edward D. Miller, M.D., dean and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, argue that AMCs can not only remain relevant in the face of sweeping change, but can lead the way by serving as examples ...

Neiker-Tecnalia (The Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development) has created an air-conditioned greenhouse using alternative energies that enable the reduction of energy costs, improvements in energy efficiency and an increase in crop yields. The novel system has a biomass boiler and thermodynamic solar panels, which reach an optimum temperature for the crop without using fuels derived from petroleum oil or gas. Neiker-Tecnalia has installed a biomass boiler (using wood and other organic waste as fuel), together with thermodynamic panels, with the goal ...

Older individuals, who constitute a rapidly growing population in the United States, account for a disproportionate share of health care utilization and cost. Yet more than half of clinical trials exclude people based on their age or age-related conditions, according to a new study by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Clinical Scholars® at the University of Michigan. "These findings are concerning because it means that doctors cannot be confident that clinical trial results apply to their older patients," says Donna Zulman, M.D., the study's lead author and a ...

Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is a significant and growing problem in hospitals and other health care facilities, but no new drugs to treat the condition have been developed in several decades. However, a large-scale, phase 3 trial conducted by Canadian and U.S. researchers shows that the new antibiotic Fidaxomicin is superior to existing treatments, demonstrating a 45 percent reduction in recurrences vs. the existing licensed treatment. Their results were published in February, 2011 in The New England Journal of Medicine. "There wasn't much interest in C. difficile ...

Elements heavier than iron come into being only in powerful stellar explosions, supernovae. During nuclear reactions all kinds of short-lived atomic nuclei are formed, including more stable combinations – the so-called magic numbers – predicted by theory. Yet here, too, there are exceptions: the islands of inversion. Headed by physicists from the Excellence Cluster Universe at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), an international team of scientists has now taken a closer look at the island that was first discovered. They have now published their results in Physical ...

For almost two decades, cardiologists have searched for ways to see dangerous blood clots before they cause heart attacks. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report that they have designed nanoparticles that find clots and make them visible to a new kind of X-ray technology. According to Gregory Lanza, MD, PhD, a Washington University cardiologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, these nanoparticles will take the guesswork out of deciding whether a person coming to the hospital with chest pain is actually having a heart attack. "Every ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A NASA team including three University of Florida astronomers has found six new planets in a distant solar system that in some ways resembles our own. The NASA team, including UF associate professor Eric Ford, postdoctoral associate Althea Moorhead and graduate student Robert Morehead, will announce its findings in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. "This is the new prototype for a system of rocky planets beyond our own," Ford said. "It changes our understanding of the frequency of solar systems like our own in deep space." The planets orbit ...

– Symptomatic lumbar disc disease, a condition caused by degeneration or herniation of the discs of the lower spine, may be inherited, according to a new study published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS). "Previous studies, including studies of twin siblings and subsequent genetic marker studies, have suggested a genetic predisposition for the development of symptomatic lumbar disc disease but have been limited by a small number of patients," noted study author Alpesh A. Patel, MD FACS, assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery at the University of Utah ...

PITTSBURGH—Writing can be a solitary, intellectual pursuit, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown that the task of writing an informational article also can be accomplished by dozens of people working independently online. Each person in the CMU experiments completed just a sliver of the work of preparing an article, such as preparing an outline, gathering facts or assembling facts into simple prose. The "authors" never even spoke with each other. But the research team led by Aniket Kittur, assistant professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute ...