According to research on fatty acids conducted at the universities of Helsinki and Tampere, the consumption of canola-type rapeseed oil decreases the level of fibrinogen detrimental to health in the body. The increased fibrinogen level, caused by an imbalance in essential fats in one's diet, decreases when saturated fatty acids are replaced with rapeseed oil. The research results were published in the journal Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids. A complex state of balance, the haemostatic balance, prevails in the bloodstream. One player in this balancing ...

Geneva, 8 November 2010. Four days is all it took for the LHC operations team at CERN* to complete the transition from protons to lead ions in the LHC. After extracting the final proton beam of 2010 on 4 November, commissioning the lead-ion beam was underway by early afternoon. First collisions were recorded at 00:30 CET on 7 November, and stable running conditions marked the start of physics with heavy ions at 11:20 CET today. "The speed of the transition to lead ions is a sign of the maturity of the LHC," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "The machine is running ...

UPTON, NY In theory, plants could be the ultimate green factories, engineered to pump out the kinds of raw materials we now obtain from petroleum-based chemicals. But in reality, getting plants to accumulate high levels of desired products has been an elusive goal. Now, in a first step toward achieving industrial-scale green production, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energys (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at Dow AgroSciences report engineering a plant that produces industrially relevant levels of compounds that could potentially be used ...

The messenger interleukin-27 plays an important role when the human body blocks inflammations. This was discovered by an international research team, of which the Kiel Professors Joachim Grötzinger and Stefan Rose-John, as well as the doctoral candidate, Björn Spudy, are a part of. The research findings of the scientists from Kiel, the US and Great Britain were published yesterday, Sunday (7 November 2010), in the online advance edition of Nature Immunology. The human immune system reacts to bodily injuries and infections with inflammation. This is important for the healing ...

Cars and trucks race down the highway, turn off into town, wait at traffic lights and move slowly through side streets. Electricity flows in a similar way – from the power plant via high voltage lines to transformer substations. The flow is controlled as if by traffic lights. Cables then take the electricity into the city centre. Numerous switching points reduce the voltage, so that equipment can tap into the electricity at low voltage. Thanks to this highly complex infrastructure, the electricity customer can use all kinds of electrical devices just by switching them on. ...

BOSTON, November 8, 2010 – California pistachios took center stage at this year's American Dietetic Association's annual Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo (FNCE), the industry's premier conference where thousands of registered dietitians gather to learn about innovative nutrition research and emerging health trends. Pistachios led with a strong presence with new research on the importance of mindful eating and, for the first time ever, participating in a session on emerging green food issues and solutions designed to sustain the environment along with good health. The ...

Learning a hobby or other complex task in childhood with assistance from a trusted adult may help guard against the emergence of a personality disorder (PD) later on in life, reports a study in the current issue of the journal, Development and Psychopathology. Spending time with a child by reading with them, helping with homework or teaching them organizational skills helps to foster better psychological health in adulthood. "The strong interpersonal connectedness and social skills that children learn from having active, healthy engagements with adults fosters positive ...

What do diapers, wiping cloths, wall paneling, sticking plasters and Ultrasuede covers for upholstered furniture have in common? All these products are made of nonwovens. There is hardly any other fabric that is as versatile. Last summer the operators of the Zugspitze railroad even used sheets of nonwovens to prevent the snow melting away on Germany's highest mountain. The quality of this textile, however, varies considerably. It is generally true to say that the firmer, the smoother and the freer of marks the nonwoven is, the higher the quality. In the search for the perfect ...

A team of Italian scientists has fired a laser beam into a hunk of glass to create what they believe is an optical analogue of the Hawking radiation that many physicists expect is emitted by black holes. Although the laser experiment superficially bears little resemblance to ultra-dense black holes, the mathematical theories used to describe both are similar enough that confirmation of laser-induced Hawking radiation would bolster confidence that black holes also emit Hawking radiation. When Stephen Hawking first predicted the radiation bearing his name in 1974, he hypothesized ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Door-to-balloon time has dropped dramatically as hospitals rush heart attack patients into treatment, but a five-year study released Monday shows quicker hospital care has not saved more lives. Heart attacks are a medical emergency and hospitals race against the clock to open the clogged artery causing the attack in 90 minutes or less. Door-to-balloon time is the amount of time between a heart attack patient's arrival at the hospital to the time he or she receives an intervention, such as a balloon angioplasty, to open the artery. The study published ...

A new study shows how an amphibious fish stays alive for up to two months on land. It's all in the skin. Mangrove killifish are small fish—only about an inch or two long—that live in temporary pools in the coastal mangrove forests of Central and South America and Florida. During dry seasons when their pools disappear, the fish hole up in leaf litter or hollow logs. As long as they stay moist, they can survive for extended periods out of water by breathing air through their skin. But oxygen isn't the only thing a fish out of water needs to worry about, according to Professor ...

Chapel Hill - A new discovery by UNC scientists describes how cells infected by the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) produce small vesicles or sacs called exosomes, changing their cellular "cargo" of proteins and RNA. This altered exosome enters cells and can change the growth of recipient cells from benign to cancer-producing. In this way, virus-infected cells can have wide-ranging effects and potentially manipulate other cells throughout the body. The findings are reported in the November 8, 2010 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Nancy ...

University of Toronto scientists have found that chemicals used to line junk food wrappers and microwave popcorn bags are migrating into food and being ingested by people where they are contributing to chemical contamination observed in blood. Perfluorinated carboxylic acids or PFCAs are the breakdown products of chemicals used to make non-stick and water- and stain-repellant products ranging from kitchen pans to clothing to food packaging. PFCAs, the best known of which is perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), are found in humans all around the world. "We suspected that ...

The GOES-13 satellite is watching a flurry of activity in the Atlantic Ocean today as a cold front approaches the remnants of Hurricane Tomas and threatens to swallow it in the next couple of days. Tomas is now a remnant low pressure area is located in the Atlantic near 26 North and 68 West hundreds of miles south-southwest of Bermuda and has a minimum central pressure of 994 millibars today, Nov. 8. A cold front off the U.S. East Coast however, is stalking Tomas' remnants and moving east threatening to swallow the former hurricane. The Geostationary Operational Environmental ...

Jal was a tropical storm when it made landfall this weekend on the east coast of India and tracked across the country while weakening into a remnant low pressure area. NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of Jal's center as it was entering eastern India and NASA's Aqua satellite captured an infrared image as it was departing the country. This weekend, Tropical Cyclone Jal made landfall in east central India and crossed the northern coast of Tamil Nadu and southern coast of Andhra Pradesh, north of Chennai. It dropped heavy rainfall and created some flooding. Gusty ...

CHICAGO --- Northwestern Medicine researchers at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University have found that a new, nontoxic drug made from a chemical in soy could prevent the movement of cancer cells from the prostate to the rest of the body. These findings will be presented at the Ninth Annual American Association for Cancer Research Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference. Genistein, a natural chemical found in soy, is being used in the lab of Raymond Bergan, M.D., the director of experimental therapeutics at the Lurie Cancer ...

Saying goodbye to summer can be difficult for everybody. In some people the onset of winter triggers Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, a mood disorder in which sufferers experience symptoms of depression. Happily, a special kind of gerbil exhibits remarkably similar reactions to SAD treatments as humans, opening a promising new channel for study and treatment of the common complaint. With her work on the Israeli desert inhabitant gerbil called the Fat Sand Rat (Psammomys obesus), Prof. Noga Kronfeld-Schor of Tel Aviv University's Department of Zoology and her fellow ...

New techniques now being used at UCLA allow doctors to more precisely target certain areas of the heart to stop ventricular arrhythmias — serious abnormal rhythms in the heart's lower chambers — in high-risk patients. Generally, arrhythmias can be controlled by medications, and sometimes defibrillators. But a potentially life-threatening, recurrent arrhythmia known as a ventricular tachycardia, which originates in one of the heart's two ventricles, can produce a fast heart beat that requires other interventions, such as catheter ablation, in which the precise focus ...

Children with learning difficulties can benefit from being encouraged to find their own way to solve arithmetic problems, according to new research from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. A study by Dr Lio Moscardini, in Strathclyde's Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, found that children deal better with arithmetical problems if they can use their own intuitive strategies such as using number blocks, drawings or breaking an equation up into smaller, simpler parts- rather than being instructed in arithmetical facts and procedures. All the teachers ...

Irvine, Calif., Nov. 8, 2010 — A small amount of bleeding in the brain seems to be common among older individuals, according to a UC Irvine study. Neurologist Dr. Mark Fisher and neuropathologist Dr. Ronald Kim found that cerebral microbleeds are highly prevalent in the aging brain – and not primarily products of stroke-related injury, hypertension or neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, as had been thought. "Prior work relied on brain imaging to show cerebral microbleeds," Fisher said. "But in this study, deep regions of the brain were closely examined under ...

AUDIO: New research that reveals the activity of nerve cells in a songbird's brain as the bird sings a specific song is helping scientists to understand how birds string together sets... Click here for more information. A team of scientists has observed the activity of nerve cells in a songbird's brain as it is singing a particular song. Dezhe Jin, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Penn State University and one of the study's authors, explained that ...

Hoboken, NJ – Stevens Institute of Technology and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) have recently conducted joint experiments in the Dutch Navy Harbor of Den Helder, where passive acoustic systems from both parties were combined. Initial experimental results are presented at the Waterside Security (WSS) 2010 conference. This important experimental campaign was financed by the Netherlands Ministry of Defence. The collaboration between Stevens and TNO was initiated in early 2010 after recognizing a strategic opportunity to form a long-term ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the University of Leeds have linked hundreds of federally approved drugs to more than 1,000 proteins in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis (TB), opening new avenues to repurpose these drugs to treat TB. The study was published Nov. 4 in PLoS Computational Biology. "Tuberculosis is currently one of the most widely spread infectious diseases, with an estimated one-third of the world's population infected and between one and two million people dying each year from ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 8, 2010 — A study published in the November edition of Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association suggests that taking docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) may improve memory and learning in older adults with mild cognitive impairments. This is promising news for many aging Americans who are searching for options to maintain memory and support overall cognitive health. The "Memory Improvement with Docosahexaenoic Acid Study" (MIDAS) was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study to evaluate the effects of DHA—the principle ...

VIDEO: In the laboratory of Zhong Lin Wang at Georgia Tech, a blinking LCD signals the success of a five-year effort to power conventional electronic devices using nanoscale generators that harvest... Click here for more information. Blinking numbers on a liquid-crystal display (LCD) often indicate that a device's clock needs resetting. But in the laboratory of Zhong Lin Wang at Georgia Tech, the blinking number on a small LCD signals the success of a five-year effort ...