Films instead of walls. This is an idea that fascinates architects all over the world. The Eden Project in Southern England, the National Aquatics Center built for swimming events at the Olympics in Beijing and the Allianz Arena in Munich are only three examples of what you can make from plastic sheets. Ethylene tetraflourethylene (ETFE), a transparent membrane, is especially popular because it enables buildings that shine in all colors as in Munich and Peking. But, we are not just talking about colors. You can use this new foil for an intelligent improvement of existing ...

Through a complex analysis of protein interactions, researchers from IRB Barcelona and the Joint Programme IRB-BSC have discovered new molecular mechanisms that may be involved in the development of Alzheimer's disease. The study, a collaboration between bioinformaticians and cell biologists, was led by IRB Barcelona group leader and ICREA researcher Patrick Aloy and appears today in the Genome Research, a reference journal in the field of genomics. Alzheimer's disease is an age-related neurodegenerative disease. Despite the considerable efforts made in recent years to ...

INDIANAPOLIS –While many studies have looked at the treatment of chronic pain from the patient's perspective, there has been little research on those who provide care for chronic pain. In a study in the November 2010 issue of the journal Pain Medicine, researchers from the Regenstrief Institute, the Indiana University School of Medicine, the IU School of Liberal Arts and the Roudebush VA Medical Center report that chronic pain takes a toll on primary care providers as well as their patients. They conclude that providers' needs should not be ignored if pain care is to ...

WASHINGTON — The rapid advances in information technology that drive many sectors of the U.S. economy could stall unless the nation aggressively pursues fundamental research and development of parallel computing -- hardware and software that enable multiple computing activities to process simultaneously, says a new report by the National Research Council. Better options for managing power consumption in computers will also be essential for continued improvements in IT performance. For many decades, advances in single-processor, sequential computer microprocessors have ...

KINGSTON, R.I. – December 16, 2010 – Geologists from the University of Rhode Island and Princeton University, in collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, have taken an important step toward helping the United States government monitor nuclear explosions by improving a 3-dimensional model originally developed at Harvard University. The improvements make the model more accurate at detecting the location, source and depth of seismic activity. The results of their research were presented today at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The ...

The World Health Organization set a target for the influenza vaccination rate for 2006 of more than 50% of the elderly population and an increase to more than 75% by 2010. These rates have thus far not been achieved in the old German states. In the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2010; 107[48]: 845󈞞) the working group around Annicka M. Reuss presents rates from flu seasons past. Germany's Standing Vaccination Committee (STIKO) recommends annual vaccinations against seasonal influenza. The risk groups for the infection, which ...

Modesto, CA (Dec. 16, 2010) – With nearly 16 million Americans living today with prediabetes, a condition that is the precursor to type 2 diabetes, and half of all Americans expected to have either prediabetes or type 2 diabetes by the year 2020, nutritional approaches to maintaining healthy blood sugar levels are essential.1,2 The findings of a scientific study examining the health promotion and disease prevention benefits of almond consumption were published in the June, 2010 Journal of the American College of Nutrition. The study, one of the first of its kind to quantify ...

When children are exposed to head and neck radiation, whether due to cancer treatment or multiple diagnostic CT scans, the result is an increased risk of thyroid cancer for the next 58 years or longer, according to University of Rochester Medical Center research. The study is believed to be the longest of any group of children exposed to medical irradiation and followed for thyroid cancer incidence. It was published in the December 2010 edition of the journal, Radiation Research. The data also might provide some insight about why the rates of thyroid cancer continue ...

AMES, Iowa – Wind turbines in Midwestern farm fields may be doing more than churning out electricity. The giant turbine blades that generate renewable energy might also help corn and soybean crops stay cooler and dryer, help them fend off fungal infestations and improve their ability to extract growth-enhancing carbon dioxide [CO2] from the air and soil. Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a scientific society, in San Francisco today, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and his co-researcher from the University ...

Challenging students take up more of their teachers' time—and the difference between a tougher student and an easier one appears to be genetic, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study looked at young twins in the U.K. and asked their teachers how much of a handful they are. "Policy-wise, there's a lot going on, blaming teachers for what's going on in the classrooms," says Renate Houts of Duke University, who cowrote the study with Avshalom Caspi and Terrie E. Moffitt of Duke, Robert ...

AUDIO: People with a known risk for Alzheimer’s disease seem to develop abnormal brain function even before the appearance of amyloid plaques in the brain. A new study from Washington University... Click here for more information. People with a known, high risk for Alzheimer's disease develop abnormal brain function even before the appearance of telltale amyloid plaques that are characteristic of the disease, according to a new study. Researchers at Washington University ...

Results of a five-year monitoring effort to repair seagrass damaged in a boat grounding incident suggest that restoration techniques such as replanting seagrass can speed recovery time. The finding is included in a new report released today by NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. The National Marine Sanctuaries Conservation Series report, "N-Control Seagrass Restoration Monitoring Report Monitoring Events 2003-2008," presents results of efforts to repair a nearly 1,000-square-foot (92.8-square-meter) swath of seagrass that was damaged on May 29, 2001, when a ...

To answer the big questions, it often helps to look at the smallest details. That is the approach Stanford mineral physicist Wendy Mao is taking to understanding a major event in Earth's inner history. Using a new technique to scrutinize how minute amounts of iron and silicate minerals interact at ultra-high pressures and temperatures, she is gaining insight into the biggest transformation Earth has ever undergone – the separation of its rocky mantle from its iron-rich core approximately 4.5 billion years ago. The technique, called high-pressure nanoscale X-ray computed ...

A mathematically driven evolutionary snapshot of woody plants in four similar climates around the world has given scientists a fresh perspective on genetic diversity and threats posed by both extinctions and loss of habitat. The message from the study, appearing online ahead of publication in Ecology Letters, says lead author Hélène Morlon, is that evolutionary diversity -- the millions of years of evolutionary innovations contained in present-day species -- is more sensitive to extinctions or loss of habitat than long thought. And that, she adds, means conservation efforts ...

Older people have a hard time keeping a lid on their feelings, especially when viewing heartbreaking or disgusting scenes in movies and reality shows, psychologists have found. But they're better than their younger counterparts at seeing the positive side of a stressful situation and empathizing with the less fortunate, according to research from the University of California, Berkeley. A team of researchers led by UC Berkeley psychologist Robert Levenson is tracking how our emotional strategies and responses change as we age. Their findings – published over the past ...

A University of California, Berkeley, geophysicist has made the first-ever measurement of the strength of the magnetic field inside Earth's core, 1,800 miles underground. The magnetic field strength is 25 Gauss, or 50 times stronger than the magnetic field at the surface that makes compass needles align north-south. Though this number is in the middle of the range geophysicists predict, it puts constraints on the identity of the heat sources in the core that keep the internal dynamo running to maintain this magnetic field. "This is the first really good number we've ...

The PSA screening test for prostate cancer is not perfect. It can indicate cancer when none is present and miss life-threatening tumors. But a new study suggests the test is more reliable in men taking dutasteride (Avodart®), a drug widely prescribed to shrink an enlarged prostate gland. Dutasteride lowers PSA levels by about half within six months. But the researchers found that even a slight rise in PSA levels among men taking the drug was a stronger indicator of prostate cancer, particularly aggressive tumors that require early diagnosis and treatment, than rising ...

(Boston) - Current diagnostic procedures for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) fail to adequately reflect research into the broad nature of a traumatic event, according to a study that will appear in the January print issue of Psychological Bulletin. The relevancy of an individual's subjective experience in determining what constitutes a traumatic event has been a source of debate among PTSD specialists for years. The study concludes that both objective and subjective factors are relevant and that current PTSD criteria are missing several reactions that many trauma ...

A new genetic biomarker that indicates an increased risk for developing breast cancer can be found in an individual's "junk" (non-coding) DNA, according to a new study featuring work from researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) at Virginia Tech and their colleagues. The multidisciplinary team found that longer DNA sequences of a repetitive microsatellite were much more likely to be present in breast cancer patients than healthy volunteers. The particular repeated DNA sequence in the control (promoter) region of the estrogen-related receptor gamma (ERR-γ) ...

New Rochelle, NY, December 16, 2010 – Former tennis champion Martina Navratilova was hospitalized for pulmonary edema—fluid build-up in the lungs—while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, drawing attention to the high risk of acute mountain sickness (AMS) and high altitude pulmonary edema among climbers of high peaks. A timely study in a recent issue of High Altitude Medicine & Biology, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com), warned of the risks and serious medical outcomes associated with climbing Kilimanjaro and demonstrated that prior ...

Long before Facebook introduced its hot new Social Graph app, researchers in the ADVANCE project at NJIT were pioneering the use of social network mapping to help women scientists and engineers supercharge their careers. "Universities are more than buildings and balance sheets. They're webs of human interaction," said Nancy Steffen-Fluhr, director of NJIT's Murray Center for Women in Technology and the ADVANCE project leader. "The complex structure of those webs is largely invisible to the people embedded in them, however -- especially women scientists and engineers. ...

Without Social Security, research indicates that about half of women age 65 and older would be living in poverty. With the program in place, the poverty rate for women falls to 12 percent. These facts — paired with recommended future courses of action — are presented in the latest installment of the Public Policy & Aging Research Brief series from the National Academy on an Aging Society, the public policy branch of The Gerontological Society of America (GSA). The new publication, "For Millions of Older Women, Social Security Is a Lifeline," was funded by grant support ...

UCSF researchers have shown for the first time that the human fetal immune system arises from an entirely different source than the adult immune system, and is more likely to tolerate than fight foreign substances in its environment. The finding could lead to a better understanding of how newborns respond to both infections and vaccines, and may explain such conundrums as why many infants of HIV-positive mothers are not infected with the disease before birth, the researchers said. It also could help scientists better understand how childhood allergies develop, as well ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---There's a whale of a new display at the University of Michigan Exhibit Museum of Natural History, a leviathan that represents a scientific saga of equally grand proportions. A complete, 50-foot-long skeleton of the extinct whale Basilosaurus isis, which lived 37 million years ago, now is suspended from the ceiling of the museum's second floor gallery and will reign over an updated whale evolution exhibit scheduled to open in April 2011. "It's a spectacular fossil," said Exhibit Museum director Amy Harris. "Basilosaurus looks ferocious with its big ...

Xlibris Publishing, a leader in the self publishing industry, recently announced the latest addition to their self publishing services, the Xlibris Audio Book Publishing Packages. Whatever type of published book the author has, he can now share it to the world as a first-class audio book. Available in five different services, Touchstone, Compact, Amplified, Storytale and Paramount, the Xlibris Audio Publishing Service produces a digital version of an audio book for the author while the high end packages involve digital availability of the author's books through Overdrive ...