Boulder, CO, USA - It's not hard to argue in favor of alternatives to fossil fuels these days, but one popular argument – domestic energy security – may be standing on very shaky legs. A lot of rare metals are needed to make photovoltaic panels, rare earth magnets for wind generators, fuel cells and high-capacity batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles. But most industrialized nations, including the United States, are almost entirely dependent on foreign sources for those metals. The only way this is going to change is if there is more domestic exploration and mining. ...

The November 2010 issue of "Environmental Pollution" details successful experiments at the University of Cincinnati wherein rabbit's food resulted in the abiotic (non-biological) transformation and absorption of four different types of estrogen, reducing the levels of these estrogen hormones by more than 80 percent in wastewater. The research has practical implications since it could point to inexpensive treatment technologies and materials for reducing estrogens in wastewater. Currently, estrogen in wastewater represents a major conduit for the entry of the hormone, ...

Short courses of antibiotics can leave normal gut bacteria harbouring antibiotic resistance genes for up to two years after treatment, say scientists writing in the latest issue of Microbiology, published on 3 November. The researchers believe that this reservoir increases the chances of resistance genes being surrendered to pathogenic bacteria, aiding their survival and suggesting that the long-term effects of antibiotic therapy are more significant than previously thought. Antibiotics that are prescribed to treat pathogenic bacteria also have an impact on the normal ...

Researchers are calling for clear guidelines on childhood stroke after a study, published in the November issue of Acta Paediatrica, found wide variations in time lag to diagnosis, investigation and treatment. They are also keen to see the development of appropriate rehabilitation services, after a follow-up study found that 85% of the children who survived a stroke had neurological dysfunction or limitations. Dr Sten Christerson studied the records of all children who had experienced their first stroke over a seven-year period in the Uppsala-Orebro Health Care Region, ...

Anti-inflammatory drugs currently used to treat diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis may also help prevent cognitive problems after surgery, according to a new study by researchers at Imperial College London and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The research also reveals for the first time that a specific inflammatory response in the brain may explain why many patients experience memory loss or other forms of cognitive dysfunction after surgery or critical illness. The findings, from research in mouse models, could lead to human clinical trials within ...

When confined to a 2-dimensional sheet, some exotic particle-like structures known as anyons appear to entwine in ways that could lead to robust quantum computing schemes, according to research appearing in the November 1 issue of the journal Physical Review B. The physicists at Bell Laboratories who performed the research are hopeful the anyons can be induced to follow paths that twist into braids that would be much more resistant to disturbances that corrupt data and calculations in quantum computers relying on individual particles. The anyons the researchers believe ...

One of the serious threats to a user's computer is a software program that might cause unwanted keystroke sequences to occur in order to hack someone's identity. This form of an attack is increasing, infecting enterprise and personal computers, and caused by "organized malicious botnets," said Daphne Yao, assistant professor of computer science at Virginia Tech (http://www.cs.vt.edu/user/115). To combat the "spoofing attacks," Yao and her former student, Deian Stefan, now a graduate student in the computer science department at Stanford University, developed an authentication ...

New research published today in the journal Science says people think about things they think they don't think about. Vanderbilt University psychologists Gordon Logan and Matthew Crump say when highly skilled people such as surgeons, carpenters, or pilots perform actions without thinking, those actions are highly controlled. The finding adds key information to a debate on whether people consciously perform actions in which they are highly skilled. Previous research suggests conscious control of driving a car for an experienced driver, for example, is an illusion. These ...

DETROIT – African Americans are more likely to have a recurrence of uterine cancer despite undergoing a total hysterectomy or a hysterectomy followed by radiation therapy, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. "The African American patients in our study had similar surgeries and radiation therapy as the Caucasian patients in the study. So access to care certainly wasn't a factor in race being identified as a negative predictor for outcome," says lead author Mohamed Elshaikh, M.D., senior staff physician in the Department of Radiation Oncology at ...

The UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has developed a new portable radiation detector that can assess the safety of potentially contaminated areas far quicker than current methods. The prototype was inspired by the aftermath of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London 2006. Litvinenko's death was due to radiation poisoning from polonium-210. It prompted wide-scale work to assess radiation levels at almost 50 premises in London that he had been prior to his death before opening them up again to the public, costing the Health Protection Agency £2 million. The ...

The single layer material Graphene was the subject of a Nobel prize this year but research led by a team of researchers at the University of Warwick has found molecular hooks on the surface of its close chemical cousin, Graphene Oxide, that will potentially provide massive benefits to researchers using transmission electron microscopes. They could even be used in building molecular scale mechanisms. The research team, which includes Drs. Jeremy Sloan, Neil Wilson and PhD student Priyanka Pandey from the Department of Physics and Dr. Jon Rourke from the Department of Chemistry ...

Everybody knows that if you're physically fit, you're less likely to get a wide range of diseases. What most people don't know is that some people are "naturally" in better shape than others, and this variation in conditioning makes it difficult to test for disease risk and drug effectiveness in animal models. A new research paper published in the November 2010 print issue of The FASEB Journal (http://www.faseb.org) started out as a study to explain the strong statistical link between low aerobic exercise capacity and common diseases, but ultimately led to an animal model ...

When looking for new ways to treat aggressive brain cancers, an international team of scientists turned a new leaf and "discovered" the lowly daffodil. A new research study published in the November 2010 print issue of The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) offers hope that a natural compound found in daffodil bulbs, called narciclasine, may be a powerful therapeutic against biologically aggressive forms of human brain cancers. "We are planning to move a narciclasine derivative toward clinical trials in oncology within a three to four year period in order to help patients ...

Scientists are keeping their eye on a new discovery published in the November 2011 print issue of the FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) that explains what causes some genes to go out of control. Scientists have identified a "cellular switch," called eye transformer, that controls the flow of information from chemical signals outside of the cell to genes in the cell nucleus. This study demonstrates that when eye transformer is turned off, the information pathway it controls (the "JAK/STAT pathway") hyper-activates. Because this pathway exists in humans and is involved ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (http://www.cdc.gov/) rank mortality related to chronic liver disease and cirrhosis as the 12th most common cause of death in adults in the U.S. Using a modified definition that includes diseases such as viral hepatitis, liver cancer (http://www.mayoclinic.org/liver-cancer/) and obesity-related fatty liver disease (liver diseases)(http://www.mayoclinic.org/liver-disease/), Mayo Clinic-led researchers have found that liver-related mortality is as high as fourth for some age groups, and ...

Tampa, Fla. (Nov. 01, 2010) – When researchers tested three different labeling agents on three different stem cell populations to determine what effect the labeling agents had on stem cell phenotype, biological behavior and migration abilities, they found changes in stem cell proliferation depending on the type of contrast agent used. The team of researchers from Belgium and Spain tested USPIO (ultra small superparamagnetic iron oxide) contrast agents Resovist ®, Endorem ® and Sinerem ® on mouse embryonic stem cells (mESC), rat multipotent adult progenitor cells (rMAPC) ...

While wind energy has shown strong potential as a large-scale, emission-free energy source, bat and bird collisions at wind turbines result in thousands of fatalities annually. Migratory bats, such as the hoary bat, are especially at risk for collision with wind turbines as they fly their routes in the forested ridges of the eastern U.S. This loss not only impacts the immediate area, but is also detrimental to ecosystem health nationwide—that is, bats help with pest management, pollination and the dispersal of numerous plant seeds. Since turbine towers and non-spinning ...

With a lifelong interest in politics, University of Cincinnati researcher Muer Yang spent the last two years developing a quantitative method for allocating voting machines that could significantly reduce the average wait time of voters. During the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, some voters waited in lines for more than 10 hours to cast their ballots, and in Ohio, the last vote was cast at 4 a.m., noted Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner in a public report. Ohio lines in the '06 and '08 elections were still so lengthy that they essentially "disenfranchised" voters ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 1, 2010 -- Race may not be as important as previously thought in determining who befriends whom, suggests a new study of American college students' habits on Facebook. The findings, by a pair of sociologists from Harvard University and UCLA, appear in the current issue of the American Journal of Sociology. The strongest attraction, the researchers found, turned out to be old-fashioned social pressure. For the average student, the tendency to reciprocate a friendly overture is seven times stronger than the attraction of a shared racial background. "We ...

Invasions of voracious predatory crabs due to global warming could threaten the unique continental-shelf ecosystems of Antarctica, according to newly published findings. "King crabs are ecologically important predators and form the basis of economically significant commercial fisheries," said Dr Sven Thatje, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science (SOES), which is based at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. Thatje and graduate student Sally Hall studied how water temperature influences the distributions ...

THE HAGUE (2 November 2010)—A unique acacia known as a "fertilizer tree" has typically led to a doubling or tripling of maize yields in smallholder agriculture in Zambia and Malawi, according to evidence presented at a conference in the Hague today. The findings were central to the arguments of agroforestry experts at the conference, who urged decision makers to spread this technology more widely throughout the African nations most vulnerable to climate change and food shortages, and to think differently about more practical ways to solve the problems that are most pressing ...

CHAMPAIGN, lll.— Ignoring topography, efficiency, expense and even their own surveyors' recommendations, regional railroad officials in the mid-19th century diverted a new rail line around New Philadelphia, Ill., "the first town in the United States planned, platted and legally registered by an African American," a University of Illinois researcher reports. The bypass pushed what would have been a fairly straight, even run of railroad tracks from Griggsville, Ill. to Hannibal, Mo., in a wide, hilly arc around New Philadelphia. The findings, reported in Historical Archaeology, ...

While simple falls, such as slipping while walking off a curb, may seem relatively harmless, they can actually lead to severe injury and death in elderly individuals, according to a new study published in The Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection, and Critical Care. As the population continues to age, it is important for physicians and caregivers to be aware of and prepared to deal with this issue, which could significantly impact the overall health and wellbeing of older adults. In contrast to falls from greater heights, ground-level falls – essentially falls from a ...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1, 2010 — Generations of Moms and Grandmas have preached the virtues of not wasting food. Now scientists are reporting a compelling new reason to follow this advice: It could save enormous amounts of energy, according to the latest episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS) award-winning podcast series, "Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions." They say that the United States could immediately save the energy equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil a year — without spending a penny or putting a ding in the quality of life: Just stop wasting ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Engineers at Oregon State University have discovered a new method to speed the production rate of nanoparticles by 500 times, an advance that could play an important role in making nanotechnology products more commercially practical. The approach uses an arrayed microchannel reactor and a "laminated architecture" in which many sheets, each with thousands of microchannels in them, are stacked in parallel to provide a high volume of production and excellent control of the processes involved. Applications could be possible in improved sensors, medical ...