Research into how the brain transmits messages to other parts of the body could improve understanding of disorders such as epilepsy, dementia, multiple sclerosis and stroke. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have identified a protein crucial for maintaining the health and function of the segment of nerve fibres that controls transmission of messages within the brain. The study, published in the journal Neuron, could help direct research into neurodegenerative disorders, in which electrical impulses from the brain are disrupted. This can lead to inability to ...

Research commissioned by Cerebra, the charity that helps to improve the lives of children with brain conditions, and carried out by the Cerebra Research Unit (CRU) at the Peninsula College of Medicine & Dentistry, has found little evidence to suggest that cranial osteopathy is of benefit to children with cerebral palsy. The research is published on-line in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. Osteopathy has, over recent years, become a popular complementary treatment for children with cerebral palsy. Cerebra initially asked researchers at the CRU to investigate existing ...

The first major study of the wellbeing and inclusion of former politically motivated prisoners in Northern Ireland will be launched by Queen's University today (Monday 14 March). Ageing and Social Exclusion among Former Politically Motivated Prisoners in Northern Ireland and the border region of Ireland investigated the well being and social and economic inclusion of loyalist and republican former prisoners (aged 50 and over) as older people in Northern Ireland. The report will be launched at Parliament Buildings at Stormont this afternoon. The research was led by ...

International climate negotiations are deadlocked between the affluent global North and "developing" South, between political Left and Right, and between believers and deniers. Now, authors writing in the latest issue of the International Journal of Water argue that a more integrative analysis of climate should help resolve these conflicts. Land use changes and water management are highly relevant to climate change. To quote hydrologists Juraj Kohutiar and Michal Kravcik of the Slovak People and Water NGO: "Water evaporation is the most important agent of energy transformation ...

Potsdam/Bremerhaven, March 14th, 2011. Unusually low temperatures in the Arctic ozone layer have recently initiated massive ozone depletion. The Arctic appears to be heading for a record loss of this trace gas that protects the Earth's surface against ultraviolet radiation from the sun. This result has been found by measurements carried out by an international network of over 30 ozone sounding stations spread all over the Arctic and Subarctic and coordinated by the Potsdam Research Unit of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association ...

Calling it the "new periodic table for flies," researchers at North Carolina State University and collaborators across the globe have mapped the evolutionary history of flies, providing a framework for further comparative studies on the insects that comprise more than 10 percent of all life on Earth. The research, published today in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, plugs gaps in the 260-million-year history of the fly order Diptera, says Dr. Brian Wiegmann, NC State professor of entomology and primary investigator of the fly tree ...

Electric cars are the future – a view shared by government and the automotive industry alike. The German federal government aims to establish Germany as the lead market for electromobility. By 2020, a million passenger cars with an electric drive should be on the roads in Germany. The prospects of achieving that aim look good: As the ADAC, the German motoring organization, found out in a survey, 74 percent of those surveyed would buy an electric car if they did not have to compromise in terms of cost, comfort and safety. Consumers are not willing to compromise one iota ...

Endoscopy has gone through amazing advancements in recent years. Microcameras on the tip of endoscopes supply images from the inside of the human body in ever higher resolution, which often makes it possible to identify tumors at an early stage. Endoscopes to date have some downsides, since they are expensive and, because of their multiple usages, have to be put through time-consuming and exhaustive cleaning procedures every time they are used. This problem might be solved by a new microcamera that the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (IZM) in Berlin, ...

The study analyzes the actions adopted by a dozen countries after suffering disasters similar to that of the Prestige, the oil tanker which sank off the coast of Galicia towards the end of 2002, provoking a spill of fuel-oil which turned out to be one of the biggest ecological disasters in the history of Spain. "We have seen that our country has not adopted technical nor legal preventative measures, as opposed to what happened in Germany with the shipwreck of the Pallas, for example, which produced a movement of a centralizing nature, in detriment to the federal spirit ...

Scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, have shown how the O157:H7 strain of Escherichia coli causes infection and thrives by manipulating the host immune response. The bacterium secretes a protein called NleH1 that directs the host immune enzyme IKK-beta to alter specific immune responses. This process not only helps the bacterium evade elimination by the immune system, it also works to prolong the survival of the infected host, enabling the bacterium to persist and ultimately spread to ...

Earthquakes are one of the world's biggest enigmas — impossible to predict and able to wreak untold damage within seconds. Now, a new tool from Tel Aviv University may be able to learn from earthquakes of the ancient past to better predict earthquakes of the future. Prof. Shmuel Marco of Tel Aviv University's Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences in the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences and his colleagues have invented a new tool which he describes as a "fossil seismograph," to help geophysicists and other researchers understand patterns ...

New research shows that the Wnt receptor Frizzled-9 (Fzd9) promotes bone formation, providing a potential new target for the treatment of osteoporosis. The study appears online on March 14 in The Journal of Cell Biology (www.jcb.org). Adult bones are maintained by a balance of bone-forming osteoblasts and bone-resorbing osteoclasts. Although Wnt signaling affects this balance in mice and humans, the Wnt receptors involved remain unknown. A team of researchers led by Thorsten Schinke found that the Wnt receptor Fzd9 was upregulated during osteoblast differentiation and ...

Tiny magnets organize themselves in vortices in the researchers' mini disks. The individual magnets can twist either in a clockwise or a counterclockwise direction in the disk. These two different states can be used in data processing just like switching the electricity "on" and "off" in conventional computers. In contrast to conventional memory storage systems, these magnetic vortices can be switched by the electrons' intrinsic spin and with far less power consumption. In the exterior section of a vortex the magnetic particles align nearly parallel to one another while ...

CHICAGO (March 14, 2011) – Research has shown that playing a musical instrument can help nourish, cultivate, and increase intelligence in children, but playing a used instrument also can pose a potentially dangerous health risk. Used woodwind and brass instruments were found to be heavily contaminated with a variety of bacteria and fungi, many of which are associated with minor to serious infectious and allergic diseases, according to a study published in the March/April 2011 issue of General Dentistry, the peer-reviewed clinical journal of the Academy of General Dentistry ...

PITTSBURGH, March 14 – If all eligible patients filled their prescriptions through a $4 generic drug program, the societal savings could amount to nearly $6 billion, according to a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) study. Published in the March 14 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, the study is the first to evaluate the potential national savings from a broad use of discounted generic medication programs that are available at many retail stores' pharmacies. The study examined a large group of people who used generic medications or their ...

Toronto – Improved financial reporting at private firms benefits not only potential outside investors but will help the firm make better business decisions for itself too, says a new study. The study is authored by Ole-Kristian Hope, the Deloitte Professor of Accounting and an associate professor of accounting at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, uses World Bank data on small private firms in 21 emerging market countries – Thailand, Brazil and Pakistan having the largest samples. The data includes financing sources and information on tax environments. ...

A revolutionary type of personal power pack now in development could help our troops when they are engaged on the battlefield. With the aim of being up to fifty per cent lighter than conventional chemical battery packs used by British infantry, the solar and thermoelectric-powered system could make an important contribution to future military operations. The project is being developed by the University of Glasgow with Loughborough, Strathclyde, Leeds, Reading and Brunel Universities, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers have constructed a 226-year history of fire in southern Illinois by looking at fire scars in tree stumps. Their study, the most in-depth fire history reported for the upper Midwest, reveals that changes in the frequency of fires dating back to the time of early European settlement permanently altered the ecology of the region. The researchers took advantage of a 1996 timber harvest of old growth post oak trees in Hamilton County. "I was just amazed at the fire scars in these trees," said William McClain, a botanist with the Illinois State ...

The Hospital Clínic of Barcelona presented today the results of the telemedicine program "Hospital VIHrtual", coordinated by Dr. Felipe Garcia and Dr. Agata León, from the Hospital Clínic Service of Infectious Diseases directed by Dr. Josep M ª Gatell. The tool has been created by a team from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, led by Prof. Enrique J. Gómez and César Cáceres. Through a direct connection via a webcam, Dr. Garcia showed a virtual consultation and explained the benefits of the project, which does not replace the classic face to face visits but complements ...

New Rochelle, NY, March 14, 2011—The first human studies of an oral drug regimen to prevent HIV infection in high-risk individuals yielded a promising near 50% reduction in HIV incidence, but a number of issues require additional research before oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) can be implemented on a large scale, according to an article in AIDS Patient Care and STDs, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com). The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/apc After the success of a trial of PrEP in a high risk population ...

BETHLEHEM, PA—A team of electrical engineers and chemists at Lehigh University have experimentally verified the "rainbow" trapping effect, demonstrating that plasmonic structures can slow down light waves over a broad range of wavelengths. The idea that a rainbow of broadband light could be slowed down or stopped using plasmonic structures has only recently been predicted in theoretical studies of metamaterials. The Lehigh experiment employed focused ion beams to mill a series of increasingly deeper, nanosized grooves into a thin sheet of silver. By focusing light along ...

Boston, MA – With 180,000 men diagnosed with prostate cancer each year, it is one of the most common types of cancer in the country. For this reason, it has been cited as a good marker for health care spending in general, reflective of the greater trends across the United States. New research from the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center (DF/BWCC) shows that newer, more expensive treatment options for prostate cancer were adopted rapidly and widely during 2002 – 2005 without proof of their cost-effectiveness, and may offer explanations for why health care spending ...

Mutations in three pathways important for suppressing tumors cooperate to launch glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor that strikes children and adults. But new research from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists shows those changes alone are not sufficient to cause cancer. Tumor formation requires additional mutations, some affecting different points in the same disrupted regulatory pathways. Researchers demonstrated that in mouse models of glioblastoma, tumors develop in several regions of the brain. The findings, as well as the technique investigators ...

Read the comments on any website and you may despair at Americans' inability to argue well. Thankfully, educators now name argumentive reasoning as one of the basics students should leave school with. But what are these skills and how do children acquire them? Deanna Kuhn and Amanda Crowell, of Columbia University's Teachers College, have designed an innovative curriculum to foster their development and measured the results. Among their findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, dialogue is a better path to developing ...

HOUSTON - Researchers discovered a new, key component in the spread of lung cancer as well as a likely way to block it with drugs now in clinical trial. The study was published today (Monday, March 14) in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. A team led by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center found a way to identify metastasis-prone lung cancer cells and then uncovered a mechanism that shifts primary tumor cells into a more deadly type of cell with the capacity to move elsewhere in the body. "We think tumors have to learn how to metastasize ...