WASHINGTON, April 20—For more than 150 years, spark plugs have powered internal combustion engines. Automakers are now one step closer to being able to replace this long-standing technology with laser igniters, which will enable cleaner, more efficient, and more economical vehicles. In the past, lasers strong enough to ignite an engine's air-fuel mixtures were too large to fit under an automobile's hood. At this year's Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics (CLEO: 2011), to be held in Baltimore May 1 - 6, researchers from Japan will describe the first multibeam laser ...

WASHINGTON — To help alleviate the effects of severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), the U.S. Department of Defense should ensure that all military personnel with this type of injury receive adequate protein and calories immediately after the trauma and through the first two weeks of treatment, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. Evidence from several studies of severely brain-injured patients shows that providing energy and protein to patients early reduces inflammation and improves their outcomes, said the committee of experts who wrote the report. This ...

Queen's University professor Kate Harkness has found that a history of physical, sexual or emotional abuse in childhood substantially increases the risk of depression in adolescence by altering a person's neuroendocrine response to stress. Adolescents with a history of maltreatment and a mild level of depression were found to release much more of the stress hormone cortisol than is normal in response to psychological stressors such as giving a speech or solving a difficult arithmetic test. "This kind of reaction is a problem because cortisol kills cells in areas of ...

BUFFALO, NY -- Exposure to air pollution early in life and when a woman gives birth to her first child may alter her DNA and may be associated with premenopausal breast cancer later in life, researchers at the University at Buffalo have shown. The findings indicated that higher air pollution exposure at birth may alter DNA methylation, which may increase levels of E-cadherin, a protein important to the adhesion of cells, a function that plays an essential role in maintaining a stable cellular environment and assuring healthy tissues. Methylation is a chemical process ...

Scientists seeking to understand the origin of the human mind may want to look to honeybees -- not ancestral apes -- for at least some of the answers, according to a University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist. CU-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker said there is abundant fossil and archaeological evidence for the evolution of the human mind, including its unique power to create a potentially infinite variety of thoughts expressed in the form of sentences, art and technologies. He attributes the evolving power of the mind to the formation of what he calls the ...

Researchers at Rice University and Texas A&M have discovered a way to pattern active proteins into bio-friendly fibers. The "eureka" moment came about because somebody forgot to clean up the lab one night. The new work from the Rice lab of biochemist Kathleen Matthews, in collaboration with former Rice faculty fellow and current Texas A&M assistant professor Sarah Bondos, simplifies the process of making materials with fully functional proteins. Such materials could find extensive use as chemical catalysts and biosensors and in tissue engineering, for starters. Their ...

Despite economic anxiety and concern for the future of the country, most Houstonians perceive an improving quality of life locally and 90 percent believe that Houston is a better place to live than most other metropolitan areas, according to the 30th annual Kinder Houston Area Survey conducted by Rice University. The findings were released today during a luncheon hosted by the Greater Houston Partnership and Rice's Kinder Institute for Urban Research. The survey showed that Harris County residents have become a little more upbeat in their personal economic outlooks ...

(Baltimore, MD) – Today, the Interactive Autism Network (IAN), www.ianproject.org, the nation's largest online autism research project, reveals the preliminary results of the first major survey on wandering and elopement among individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and announces the launch of a new research survey on the association between pregnancy factors and ASD. The wandering and elopement survey found that approximately half of parents of children with autism report that their child elopes, with the behavior peaking at age four. Among these families, nearly ...

As partners in the international research consortium named MetaHit, scientists from the University of Copenhagen have contributed to show that an individual's intestinal bacteria flora, regardless of nationality, gender and age, organises itself in certain clusters. The cluster of intestinal bacteria flora is hypothesised to have an influence on how we react to both our diet and medicine absorbed through the gastro-intestinal tract. The results have recently been published in the journal Nature. Most people know about blood types, some also know about tissue types. However, ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Did the early universe have just one spatial dimension? That's the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that University at Buffalo physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues proposed in 2010. They suggested that the early universe -- which exploded from a single point and was very, very small at first -- was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three (like the world in which we live today). The theory, if valid, would address important problems in particle physics. Now, in ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Coastal residents and oil-rig workers may soon have longer warning when a storm headed in their direction is becoming a hurricane, thanks to a University of Illinois study demonstrating how to use existing satellites to monitor tropical storm dynamics and predict sudden surges in strength. "It's a really critical piece of information that's really going to help society in coastal areas, not only in the U.S., but also globally," said atmospheric sciences professor Stephen Nesbitt. Nesbitt and graduate student Daniel Harnos published their findings in ...

People in the Louisville area can now have gorgeous smiles for less. Ideal Dentistry in Prospect, Kentucky recently began offering a unique rewards program to their customers. "I wanted to do something to show our customers how much we appreciate them," said Dr. Christian Hahn. "Our rewards program helps people save money while encouraging them to maintain great oral hygiene." The VIP program rewards good customers by giving them perks such as 10 percent back on services performed, lifetime warranties on porcelain and gold crowns, no-charge consultations, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- How much scientific evidence is there for and against the assertion that exposure to video game violence can harm teens? Three researchers have developed a novel method to consider that question: they analyzed the research output of experts who filed a brief in a U.S. Supreme Court case involving violent video games and teens. Their conclusion? Experts who say violent video games are harmful to teens have published much more evidence supporting their claims than have experts on the other side of the debate. "We took what I think is a very objective ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Women who choose among different breast cancer treatment options make smarter choices when getting the information and making decisions in small doses rather than all at once, as is customary, a University of Michigan study found. It's long been known that people who aren't good with numbers have a harder time understanding the risk information they need to make good medical decisions, says Brian Zikmund-Fisher, assistant professor at the U-M School of Public Health and a research assistant professor at the U-M Health System. Zikmund-Fisher and co-authors ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The debate over the constitutionality of regulating corporate speech took a significant turn in the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, but it's an issue that almost certainly won't die down in the aftermath of that highly publicized case, says a University of Illinois business law expert. Law professor Larry E. Ribstein says the court's 5-to-4 ruling in favor of corporate speech has sparked a furor among pundits and the public that shows little signs of ebbing. "The debate in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision has centered on ...

Hurricane season doesn't start in the Northern Atlantic Ocean until June 1, but a low pressure system in doesn't seem to want to follow the calendar. There's a low pressure area with a small chance for development north-northeast of Puerto Rico, and the GOES-13 satellite captured a visible image of the storm. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) issued a Special Tropical Weather Outlook today, April 20, that noted the low pressure area was located about 460 miles northeast of San Juan, Puerto Rico at 3:35 p.m. EDT. The NHC noted that slow development is possible over ...

Local Ohio-based companies who rely on IT and technical talent and tech savvy jobseekers alike are invited to attend the debut of TechConnect Ohio, a company sponsored "fast-pitch" networking event that aims to connect motivated jobseekers with employers. TechConnect Ohio will include six hours of sponsor pitches, informal networking and IT workshops in a low-pressure environment, and will be held on Thursday, May 12th 2011 from 12 noon to 6pm at the OCLC Conference Center at 6565 Kilgour Place in Dublin. "Ohio has exactly what it needs to become a world-class ...

Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine have found that exposure during pregnancy to a family of pesticides called organophosphates may impair child cognitive development. The findings are published online in Environmental Health Perspectives. From 1998 to 2002, the Mount Sinai Children's Environmental Health Study enrolled a multiethnic population of more than 400 women in their third trimester of pregnancy. The research team collected urine samples during pregnancy and analyzed them for the evidence of metabolized pesticides. The women were then invited to participate ...

Berkeley – In a new study suggesting pesticides may be associated with the health and development of children, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Public Health have found that prenatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides – widely used on food crops – is related to lower intelligence scores at age 7. The researchers found that every tenfold increase in measures of organophosphates detected during a mother's pregnancy corresponded to a 5.5 point drop in overall IQ scores in the 7-year-olds. Children in the study with the highest levels ...

A new study published in the journal Pediatric Dermatology reveals that routine, long-term use of topical corticosteroids (TCS) for treating children with eczema does not cause any significant, negative side effects. Parental phobia of TCS is widespread and leads to poorly managed eczema in children. The commonest fear is that TCS use will "thin the skin." Parents fears are also shared by many health care providers, including pharmacists. Led by Gayle Fischer, MBBS, FACD, of The University of Sydney, researchers studied 92 children, 70 of which were part of the study/dermatitis ...

Researchers from the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health at the Mailman School of Public Health report evidence of a link between prenatal exposure to the insecticide chlorpyrifos and deficits in IQ and working memory at age seven. This is the first study to evaluate the neurotoxicity of prenatal chlorpyrifos exposure on cognitive development at the time of school entry. Findings are online in Environmental Health Perspectives. Until banned for indoor residential use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2001, chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate ...

DALLAS – April 21, 2011 – Even people who show a clear treatment response with antidepressant medications continue to experience symptoms like insomnia, sadness and decreased concentration, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found after analyzing data from the largest study on the treatment of depression. "Widely used antidepressant medications, while working overall, missed these symptoms. If patients have persistent residual symptoms, these individuals have a high probability of incomplete recovery," said Dr. Shawn McClintock, assistant professor of ...

In the United Kingdom, spread betting is rapidly gaining popularity among traders and investors who are abandoning futures trading for duty free gains; financial spread trading being a tax-free alternative to conventional trading. With CGT having increased to 28% in 2010 for higher income tax payers, and spreadbetting being presently free of Capital Gains Tax and stamp duty, it shouldn't come as a surprise that financial betting is a rapidly-expanding area of financial trading. Spread betting is a method of trading the financial markets by betting on a particular stock ...

Malabar Farm is a shining example of a sustainable farm system where nothing goes to waste. Malabar Farm's staff is creating extraordinary visitor experiences, acting as natural resource teachers and supervisors. Their common-sense farming practices teach travelers new ways to reduce energy consumption and environmental impact, while producing healthier, tastier food. At Malabar Farm, every person, pig and plant serves a purpose -- even waste used to fuel the farm. Overripe vegetable scraps and leftovers are feed for the pigs. Manure from farm animals is composted and ...

This is the third of a six-part series on improving your writing style. Whether you write for business or academic purposes, there are a few golden rules that will help you sharpen up your prose. Part 3: Limit Use of the Passive Voice Students beware! Many professors, particularly in the humanities, have a strong dislike of the passive voice and some go so far as to insist that all essays are written in active voice. In this writer's humble opinion, the passive voice definitely has a place, but it's a good idea to avoid overuse or inappropriate use. When a sentence ...