Similar to humans, the bacteria and tiny plants living in the ocean need iron for energy and growth. But their situation is quite different than ours — for one, they can't exactly turn to natural iron sources like leafy greens or red meat for a pick-me-up. So where does their iron come from? New research published by "Nature Geoscience" points to a source on the seafloor: minute particles (called nanoparticles) of pyrite, or fool's gold, from hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean. Scientists already knew the vents' cloudy plumes emitted from the earth's interior ...

This release is available in French and German. Capsule systems for making coffee are convenient and practical and therefore very popular. In terms of their environmental friendliness, however, a large question mark hangs over them. Roland Hischier, Empa's ecobalance expert, has just finished investigating various capsule systems as well as fully automatic machines, filter and soluble coffee making techniques, and has prepared a simplified life cycle analysis. This shows that it is the content which matters most. "A well-informed choice of coffee is in any case the ...

The antibody 5750 recognises a specific sugar residue on the cell surface, which is called LewisX. The research group lead by Prof. Dr. Andreas Faissner has now been able to use LewisX for the first time to separate different types of stem cells. The researchers report on their results in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Unexpected sugar diversity Antibodies that recognise the LewisX sugar residue are used routinely to identify so-called neural stem cells from which the various cells of the nervous system originate. Prof. Faissner's team has now shown that the designation ...

The process to expunge criminal record in California is a legal relief for many people with a criminal charge in their record. More people are learning that the mistakes they have made in the past are now coming back to haunt them due to public background checks. The law firm of Matian and Moaddel is now extending their legal services to expunge criminal charges from permanent criminal records to help people live a normal and peaceful life. People can make poor decisions in life and go through an arrest and get charged for a criminal offense. The convicted person may ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Boys and girls have put many of the trappings of teenagerhood behind them by the age of 18 or 19, but at least some of the brain resculpting that characterizes the decade of adolescence may still be going as strong as ever, according to findings in a new study that measured brainwaves of subjects in their midteens and again in their late teens. One of the kinds of neurological changes underway in a teen brain is a pruning of unneeded connections forged earlier in life — the brain invests in developing some connections but sheds a ...

Until now, the scientific community had assumed that wild animals died before they got old. Now, a Spanish-Mexican research team has for the first time demonstrated ageing in a population of wild birds (Sula nebouxii) in terms of their ability to live and reproduce. "It was always thought that senescence was something particular to humans and domestic animals, because we have an extended life expectancy", Alberto Velando, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Ecology and Animal Biology Department of the University of Vigo, tells SINC. However, the idea that ...

Salmonella enterica, one of the main causes of gastrointestinal infections, modulates its virulence gene expression, adapting it to each stage of the infection process, depending on the free iron concentration found in the intestinal epithelium of its host. Researchers at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) have demonstrated for the first time that the pathogen activates these genes through the Fur protein, which acts as a sensor of iron levels in its surroundings. The research, published online in the journal PLoS ONE and entitled "Fur activates the expression of ...

A new study published in the journal Respirology reveals that adult patients admitted to the hospital with pneumonia are more likely to die if they have Vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D is known to be involved in the innate immune response to infection. The team of researchers at Waikato Hospital and the Universities of Waikato and Otago, measured vitamin D in the blood samples of 112 adult patients admitted with community acquired pneumonia during the winter at the only acute-care hospital in Hamilton, New Zealand. The researchers found that Vitamin D deficiency was ...

(WASHINGTON) -- The European Space Agency (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory, home to the largest single mirror telescope in space, has detected massive amounts of molecular gas gusting at high velocities — in some cases in excess of 1000 kilometers per second — from the centers of a sample of merging galaxies. Herschel was built by a European-led, multi-national team, including U.S. contributions from researchers at NASA's JPL, Caltech, and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). It opens a new terahertz window on the cold and dusty Universe, enabling its scientific objective: ...

Munster Eye Care Associates has been an integral part of the ophthalmology community in Munster, Indiana for 30 years. Munster Eye Care Associates specializes in providing patients with the personalized care that everyone deserves. MECA offers complete eye healthcare by using the latest techniques, refractive surgery, and general ophthalmology treatments to obtain the optimal visual health. MECA has one of the best equipped eye care facilities in Northwest Indiana. Munster Eye Care Associates exists for the purpose of providing patients with the highest quality eye ...

The first study into the prevalence of overall cardiovascular risk in the Spanish working population (ICARIA) shows that 6% of workers have a high risk (8% on men and 2% in women). This prevalence increases with age in both sexes, and is highest in the farming sector, followed by construction, industry and services. "In Spain, approximately one million workers have a high level of cardiovascular risk, but only a minority of these people classify themselves as at risk", Miguel Ángel Sánchez Chaparro, coordinator of the ICARIA study and a researcher at the University of ...

Montreal, May 10, 2010 – As people face a terminal illness and are confined to a hospital bed or hospice room, music can provide a great source of solace. North American healthcare professionals have increasingly recognized the benefits of music therapy in palliative care, since end-of-life treatment is designed to meet the psychosocial, physical and spiritual needs of patients. Sandi Curtis, a music therapy professor in the Concordia University Department of Creative Arts Therapies, has published a new study on the topic in the journal Music and Medicine. Her findings ...

UPTON, NY - In a step toward engineering ever-smaller electronic devices, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have assembled nanoscale pairings of particles that show promise as miniaturized power sources. Composed of light-absorbing, colloidal quantum dots linked to carbon-based fullerene nanoparticles, these tiny two-particle systems can convert light to electricity in a precisely controlled way. "This is the first demonstration of a hybrid inorganic/organic, dimeric (two-particle) material that acts as an electron donor-bridge-acceptor ...

On September 11, 2001, the air was sizzling with anger—and the anger got hotter as the hours passed. That, anyway, was one finding of a 2010 analysis by Mitja Back, Albrecht Küfner, and Boris Egloff of 85,000 pager messages sent that day. The researchers employed a commonly used tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC, which teases out information from the frequency of word usages in texts. But were Americans really so angry? Clemson University psychologist Cynthia L. S. Pury wasn't out to answer that question when she made the discovery that was just published ...

While the disturbing act of self-injury is nothing new to adolescents, researchers and physicians at Nationwide Children's Hospital have identified a more severe type of behavior that is raising some concern among medical professionals. Often misdiagnosed, ignored and under-reported, Self-Embedding Behavior (SEB) is a form of self-injurious behavior that involves inserting foreign objects into soft tissue – either under the skin or into muscle. A recent study, published in the June issue of Pediatrics, stresses the importance of quickly identifying this dangerous behavior ...

WASHINGTON, May 10, 2011 — A two-in-one material that can both detect and neutralize explosives of the type favored by Richard Reid, the notorious shoe bomber who tried to blow-up a commercial airliner in 2001, is the topic of the latest episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS) award-winning "Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions" podcast. The podcast explains that the detector/neutralizer is a material made of metal oxide nanoparticles so small that 50,000 could fit across the width of a single human hair. It changes color in the presence of certain explosives, ...

While many 16-year-olds are content with PlayStation, Toronto-area student Marshall Zhang used the Canadian SCINET supercomputing network to invent a new drug cocktail which could one day help treat cystic fibrosis. The Grade 11 student at Bayview Secondary School in Richmond Hill so impressed eight eminent scientists at the National Research Council of Canada laboratories in Ottawa they awarded him first prize today in the 2011 Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge. Jonathan Khouzam, Simon Leclerc, Francis Marcogliese, all 19, of Montreal's CÉGEP Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, ...

WASHINGTON -- People who have a good peer support system at work may live longer than people who don't have such a support system, according research published by the American Psychological Association. This effect of peer social support on the risk of mortality was most pronounced among those between the ages of 38 and 43. Yet similar support from workers' supervisors had no effect on mortality, the researchers found. In addition, men who felt like they had control and decision authority at work also experienced this "protective effect," according to the study, published ...

HOUSTON — A new genomic test combining multiple signatures – a patient's estrogen receptor status, endocrine therapy response, chemotherapy resistance and sensitivity – shows promise as a predictor of chemotherapy response and survival benefit in women with invasive breast cancer, according to research led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The findings, published in the May 11 issue of JAMA, also may determine those for whom standard therapy alone might not offer enough, and/or for whom an appropriate clinical trial in the adjuvant setting could provide ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers have defined a new class of software, calling it "surrogate interaction," which enables designers and video gamers to more easily change features of complex objects like automotive drawings or animated characters. The new interactive approach is being used commercially and in research but until now has not been formally defined, and doing so could boost its development and number of applications, said Ji Soo Yi, an assistant professor of industrial engineering at Purdue University. Conventional computer-aided design programs often ...

Sudden cardiac death is always a shocking, tragic event, especially when it occurs at a young age. But, for the first time, scientists are unraveling how genetic defects can help predict the risk of dying suddenly in individuals with one of the leading causes of this unfortunate phenomenon. This knowledge could guide treatment and potentially lessen the occurrence of sudden cardiac death in patients with Long QT syndrome, a rare, inherited heart rhythm disorder. It could also provide insight into the assessment and treatment of the millions of people who experience cardiac ...

DETROIT — A landmark study by scientists at Wayne State University published in the May 6, 2011, issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, the most prestigious journal in the field, has revealed a new way to distinguish children with major depressive disorder (MDD) from not only normal children, but also from children with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). MDD is a common, debilitating disease prevalent in childhood and adolescence. Examination of cortical thickness in patients with MDD has not been widely studied, and WSU's team of researchers set out to determine ...

Two decades after Brazil's constitution recognized health as a citizen's right and a duty of the state, the country has vastly expanded health care coverage, improved the population's health, and reduced many health inequalities, but universal and equitable coverage remains elusive, experts from four major Brazilian universities and New York University have concluded. According to their analysis—one of six articles published in the medical journal The Lancet as a special series on health in Brazil—while federal expenditures have nearly quadrupled over the past 10 years, ...

This release is available in Spanish. High-tech tactics to carefully examine apples and other fresh produce items as they travel along packinghouse conveyor belts will help ensure the quality and safety of these good-for-you foods. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists in Beltsville, Md., have developed and patented an experimental, cutting-edge optical scanning system that would use two different kinds of lighting, a sophisticated camera and other pieces of equipment to scrutinize produce-section favorites while they are still at the packinghouse. The ...

This release is available in German. Marianne has constant pain in her right knee at the moment – she hurt it when she took a tumble skiing in the Swiss Alps. Everything happened so quickly: The searing pain, the helicopter ride to hospital, the operation the following day, and then a week later the return home with crutches to rest in a reclining chair. Her aim now is to mobilize the operated knee and regain full mobility of the joint – something she'll achieve by following a targeted machine-based training plan drawn up by a physiotherapist. In order to be able ...