Researchers at the University of Southampton have designed a new pricing mechanism that could change the way in which electric vehicles are charged. It is based on an online auction protocol that makes it possible to charge electric vehicles without overloading the local electricity network. The paper entitled Online Mechanism Design for Electric Vehicle Charging was presented this week at AAMAS 2011 – the Tenth Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, and outlines a system where electric vehicle owners use computerised agents to bid for the power to ...

Boulder, CO, USA – New research posted online in pre-issue publication on 4 May (corresponding to the June 2011 print issue) includes the first record of shelled amoeba living in association with seafloor seeps of methane; trilobites in North China and Spain; logjams and mountain streams in the Colorado Front Range; the discovery of micrometeorites in 240 million-year-old sediments; a revelation by Integrated Ocean Drilling Program of an extensive microbial community in the deep biosphere; and further study in relation to the L'Aquila (2009), Wenchuan (2008), Sumatra-Andaman ...

Reston, Va. (May 5, 2011) – Two articles in the June issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine make a case for maintaining current U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulations on the release of patients who undergo radioactive iodine treatments for thyroid cancer, known as I-131. Currently, the NRC recommends outpatient treatment for patients receiving radioactive iodine after total or near-total thyroidectomy; however, several groups have been urging NRC to mandate overnight hospital stays to protect others from a perceived risk of radiation exposure. The article, ...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have found a specific gene in corn that appears to be associated with resistance to three important plant leaf diseases. In a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, NC State plant pathologists and crop scientists pinpoint the gene – glutathione S-transferase – that seems to confer resistance to Southern leaf blight, gray leaf spot and Northern leaf blight, a trio of diseases that cripple corn plants worldwide. Finding out more about the mechanisms behind complex traits like ...

WASHINGTON — A draft plan to conserve habitat for endangered and threatened fishes in the California Bay-Delta while continuing to divert water for agricultural and personal use in central and southern California has critical missing components, including clearly defined goals and a scientific analysis of the proposed project's potential impacts on delta species, says a new report from the National Research Council. In addition, the scientific information in the plan is fragmented and presented in an unconnected manner, making its meaning difficult to understand. The ...

COLLEGE STATION, May 4, 2011 – The so-called "bad cholesterol" – low-density lipoprotein commonly called LDL – may not be so bad after all, shows a Texas A&M University study that casts new light on the cholesterol debate, particularly among adults who exercise. Steve Riechman, a researcher in the Department of Health and Kinesiology, says the study reveals that LDL is not the evil Darth Vader of health it has been made out to be in recent years and that new attitudes need to be adopted in regards to the substance. His work, with help from colleagues from the University ...

New Rochelle, NY, May 5, 2011—When children or adolescents with asthma and their parents become overly anxious about the disorder, it may impair their ability to manage the asthma effectively. A new, effective tool to assess asthma-related anxiety is described in an article in Pediatric Allergy, Immunology, and Pulmonology, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The article is available free online. A high level of disease-related anxiety among adults with asthma has been associated with an overreaction to asthma symptoms and overuse of medication. ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A new University of Florida study shows cats are the dominant predator to mockingbird eggs and nestlings in urban areas, prompting conservationists to urge pet owners to keep felines indoors at night. The findings challenge assumptions that urban areas are places of refuge for nesting mockingbirds, a species researchers say plays an important role in controlling insect pests and serving as environmental indicators for metropolitan areas. "I thought the cats probably really hammered them [birds] when they were fledglings, but when they were in the ...

Urban search and rescue (USAR) task forces are essential for locating, stabilizing, and extricating people who become trapped in confined spaces following a catastrophic event. Sometimes the search area is too unstable for a live rescue team, so rescuers have turned to robots wielding video cameras. Most recently, the USAR robots have been employed by rescuers following the devastating Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The rescuers control, or teleoperate, from a safe location. Teleoperation can be problematic, as robots frequently become stuck, which can destabilize the ...

PITTSBURGH—Learning how to program a computer to display the words "Hello World" once may have excited students, but that hoary chestnut of a lesson doesn't cut it in a world of videogames, smartphones and Twitter. One option to take its place and engage a new generation of students in computer programming is a Carnegie Mellon University-developed robot called Finch. A product of CMU's famed Robotics Institute, Finch was designed specifically to make introductory computer science classes an engaging experience once again. A white plastic, two-wheeled robot with bird-like ...

Short courses of antibiotics appear just as effective as longer ones - and a great deal safer - in treating respiratory infections that might cause pneumonia in children on temporary breathing devices, according to a Johns Hopkins Children's Center study published online May 3 in Clinical Infectious Diseases. In the study's analysis of 150 children treated with antibiotics for respiratory infections while on a ventilator, longer antibiotic courses did not only fail to confer extra protection against full-blown pneumonia when compared with shorter therapy, but also considerably ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A Purdue University-led sequencing of the Selaginella moellendorffii (spikemoss) genome - the first for a non-seed vascular plant - is expected to give scientists a better understanding of how plants of all kinds evolved over the past 500 million years and could open new doors for the identification of new pharmaceuticals. Jody Banks, a professor of botany and plant pathology, led a team of about 100 scientists from 11 countries to sequence the genome of Selaginella, a lycophyte. Lycophytes, which are the oldest living vascular plants, shed spores ...

For much of the time our T cells—the white blood cells that act as the police of the immune system—are in what immunologists call a "quiescent state," a sort of standby mode. For years, scientists have wondered if quiescence occurred by default or whether T cells need to work at remaining silent. Now, researchers at The Wistar Institute provide the first direct proof that a protein, called Foxp1, actively maintains this state of quiescence in T cells until the cells are called upon by other parts of the immune system. Their findings, which appear online through Nature ...

Those vegetables you had for dinner may have once been protected by an immune system akin to the one that helps you fight disease. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Netherland's Wageningen University found that plants rely on a complex community of soil microbes to defend themselves against pathogens, much the way mammals harbor a raft of microbes to avoid infections. The scientists deciphered, for the first time, the group of microbes that enables a patch of soil to suppress a plant-killing pathogen. ...

WHAT: Using a monkey model of AIDS, scientists have identified a vaccine-generated immune-system response that correlates with protection against infection by the monkey version of HIV, called simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV). The researchers found that neutralizing antibodies generated by immunization were associated with protection against SIV infection. This finding marks an important step toward understanding how an effective HIV vaccine could work, according to scientists who led the study at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part ...

GALVESTON, Texas — What causes a virus to suddenly begin infecting large numbers of people? Scientists have long known that the process they call "viral emergence" involves a wide variety of factors. Some are changes in the environment, either generated by natural causes or human activity. Others are internal, arising from accidental changes — mutations —in the virus' genetic code. Studying such mutations in different strains of the chikungunya virus has helped University of Texas Medical Branch researchers solve one of the most puzzling mysteries of chikungunya's ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- University of Oregon researcher Richard Taylor is on a quest to grow flowers that will help people who've lost their sight, such as those suffering from macular degeneration, to see again. These flowers are not roses, tulips or columbines. They will be nanoflowers seeded from nano-sized particles of metals that grow, or self assemble, in a natural process -- diffusion limited aggregation. They will be fractals that mimic and communicate efficiently with neurons. Fractals are "a trademark building block of nature," Taylor says. Fractals are objects with ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — DNA from Helicobacter pylori, a common stomach bacteria, minimizes the effects of colitis in mice, according to a new study by University of Michigan Medical School scientists. The study published in Gut this month was performed by a team of investigators assembled by senior author John Y. Kao, M.D. of the University of Michigan's Division of Gastroenterology and assistant professor in U-M's Department of Internal Medicine. The findings indicate that DNA from H. pylori significantly ameliorates the severity of colitis, say lead authors Jay Luther, M.D. ...

Los Angeles, CA - People shop for high status items when they're feeling low, and they're more likely to make those expensive purchases on credit, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE). When a person's ego is threatened—by doing poorly on a task, by being told they're not as good as they hoped—people sometimes repair their self-worth by purchasing luxury goods. Because actually parting with cash can be psychologically painful, researchers Niro Sivanathan of the London Business School and Nathan Pettit of Cornell ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – When a new tobacco-free policy was instituted at an Ohio women's substance abuse treatment center, both smokers and non-smokers were more likely to leave treatment early in the first few months after the policy change, a new study found. The results don't mean treatment centers shouldn't try smoking bans, according to the researchers, but they do highlight the challenges involved with implementing a new policy that goes against years of conventional thinking. Researchers found that the number of patients who completed a program at the women's treatment ...

MADISON, WI MAY 5, 2011 – In their eagerness to cut nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico, people have often sought simple explanations for the problem: too many large animal operations, for instance, or farmers who apply too much fertilizer, which then flows into waterways. But according to new modeling research that examined phosphorus loading from all 1768 counties in the Mississippi River Basin (MRB), the true causes aren't nearly so straightforward. Livestock manure is widespread in many MRB counties, for example, but it shows ...

DALLAS – May 6, 2011 – Cancer researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center are helping unlock the cellular-level function of the telomerase enzyme, which is linked to the disease's growth. Their latest findings, published today in Molecular Cell, demonstrate that telomerase repairs chromosomes in one of two ways – depending on whether a cell is dividing normally or if the cell is under stress from enzyme inhibition – and could lead to new or improved cancer-fighting therapies that promote inhibition of this enzyme. "It's a significant advance in our understanding of ...

A panel of some of the world's leading climate and glacier scientists co-chaired by a Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego researcher issued a report today commissioned by the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences citing the moral imperative before society to properly address climate change. The co-authors of "Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene" list numerous examples of glacial decline around the world and the evidence linking that decline to human-caused changes in climate and air pollution. The threat to the ways of life of people dependent ...

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.— It's not quite Christmas, but the DNA sequence of a small plant that resembles the seasonal conifers is providing biofuels researchers with information that could influence the development of candidate biofuel feedstock plants and offering botanists long-awaited insights into plant evolution. "When you burn coal, you're burning Selaginella's ancestors," said Purdue University botanist Jody Banks, who originally proposed that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) sequence the plant more commonly known as spikemoss as part ...

San Diego, CA, May 5, 2011 – A study published in the June 2011 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine examined the association between patient–physician gender concordance and weight-related counseling in obese individuals. Investigators from the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University found that obese male patients seeing male physicians had higher odds of receiving weight-related counseling than obese women seeing a female physician. Commenting on the study, Octavia Pickett-Blakely, MD, MHS, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, ...