Earthquakes are one of the world's biggest enigmas — impossible to predict and able to wreak untold damage within seconds. Now, a new tool from Tel Aviv University may be able to learn from earthquakes of the ancient past to better predict earthquakes of the future. Prof. Shmuel Marco of Tel Aviv University's Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences in the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences and his colleagues have invented a new tool which he describes as a "fossil seismograph," to help geophysicists and other researchers understand patterns ...

New research shows that the Wnt receptor Frizzled-9 (Fzd9) promotes bone formation, providing a potential new target for the treatment of osteoporosis. The study appears online on March 14 in The Journal of Cell Biology (www.jcb.org). Adult bones are maintained by a balance of bone-forming osteoblasts and bone-resorbing osteoclasts. Although Wnt signaling affects this balance in mice and humans, the Wnt receptors involved remain unknown. A team of researchers led by Thorsten Schinke found that the Wnt receptor Fzd9 was upregulated during osteoblast differentiation and ...

Tiny magnets organize themselves in vortices in the researchers' mini disks. The individual magnets can twist either in a clockwise or a counterclockwise direction in the disk. These two different states can be used in data processing just like switching the electricity "on" and "off" in conventional computers. In contrast to conventional memory storage systems, these magnetic vortices can be switched by the electrons' intrinsic spin and with far less power consumption. In the exterior section of a vortex the magnetic particles align nearly parallel to one another while ...

CHICAGO (March 14, 2011) – Research has shown that playing a musical instrument can help nourish, cultivate, and increase intelligence in children, but playing a used instrument also can pose a potentially dangerous health risk. Used woodwind and brass instruments were found to be heavily contaminated with a variety of bacteria and fungi, many of which are associated with minor to serious infectious and allergic diseases, according to a study published in the March/April 2011 issue of General Dentistry, the peer-reviewed clinical journal of the Academy of General Dentistry ...

PITTSBURGH, March 14 – If all eligible patients filled their prescriptions through a $4 generic drug program, the societal savings could amount to nearly $6 billion, according to a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) study. Published in the March 14 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, the study is the first to evaluate the potential national savings from a broad use of discounted generic medication programs that are available at many retail stores' pharmacies. The study examined a large group of people who used generic medications or their ...

Toronto – Improved financial reporting at private firms benefits not only potential outside investors but will help the firm make better business decisions for itself too, says a new study. The study is authored by Ole-Kristian Hope, the Deloitte Professor of Accounting and an associate professor of accounting at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, uses World Bank data on small private firms in 21 emerging market countries – Thailand, Brazil and Pakistan having the largest samples. The data includes financing sources and information on tax environments. ...

A revolutionary type of personal power pack now in development could help our troops when they are engaged on the battlefield. With the aim of being up to fifty per cent lighter than conventional chemical battery packs used by British infantry, the solar and thermoelectric-powered system could make an important contribution to future military operations. The project is being developed by the University of Glasgow with Loughborough, Strathclyde, Leeds, Reading and Brunel Universities, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers have constructed a 226-year history of fire in southern Illinois by looking at fire scars in tree stumps. Their study, the most in-depth fire history reported for the upper Midwest, reveals that changes in the frequency of fires dating back to the time of early European settlement permanently altered the ecology of the region. The researchers took advantage of a 1996 timber harvest of old growth post oak trees in Hamilton County. "I was just amazed at the fire scars in these trees," said William McClain, a botanist with the Illinois State ...

The Hospital Clínic of Barcelona presented today the results of the telemedicine program "Hospital VIHrtual", coordinated by Dr. Felipe Garcia and Dr. Agata León, from the Hospital Clínic Service of Infectious Diseases directed by Dr. Josep M ª Gatell. The tool has been created by a team from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, led by Prof. Enrique J. Gómez and César Cáceres. Through a direct connection via a webcam, Dr. Garcia showed a virtual consultation and explained the benefits of the project, which does not replace the classic face to face visits but complements ...

New Rochelle, NY, March 14, 2011—The first human studies of an oral drug regimen to prevent HIV infection in high-risk individuals yielded a promising near 50% reduction in HIV incidence, but a number of issues require additional research before oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) can be implemented on a large scale, according to an article in AIDS Patient Care and STDs, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com). The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/apc After the success of a trial of PrEP in a high risk population ...

BETHLEHEM, PA—A team of electrical engineers and chemists at Lehigh University have experimentally verified the "rainbow" trapping effect, demonstrating that plasmonic structures can slow down light waves over a broad range of wavelengths. The idea that a rainbow of broadband light could be slowed down or stopped using plasmonic structures has only recently been predicted in theoretical studies of metamaterials. The Lehigh experiment employed focused ion beams to mill a series of increasingly deeper, nanosized grooves into a thin sheet of silver. By focusing light along ...

Boston, MA – With 180,000 men diagnosed with prostate cancer each year, it is one of the most common types of cancer in the country. For this reason, it has been cited as a good marker for health care spending in general, reflective of the greater trends across the United States. New research from the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center (DF/BWCC) shows that newer, more expensive treatment options for prostate cancer were adopted rapidly and widely during 2002 – 2005 without proof of their cost-effectiveness, and may offer explanations for why health care spending ...

Mutations in three pathways important for suppressing tumors cooperate to launch glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor that strikes children and adults. But new research from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists shows those changes alone are not sufficient to cause cancer. Tumor formation requires additional mutations, some affecting different points in the same disrupted regulatory pathways. Researchers demonstrated that in mouse models of glioblastoma, tumors develop in several regions of the brain. The findings, as well as the technique investigators ...

Read the comments on any website and you may despair at Americans' inability to argue well. Thankfully, educators now name argumentive reasoning as one of the basics students should leave school with. But what are these skills and how do children acquire them? Deanna Kuhn and Amanda Crowell, of Columbia University's Teachers College, have designed an innovative curriculum to foster their development and measured the results. Among their findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, dialogue is a better path to developing ...

HOUSTON - Researchers discovered a new, key component in the spread of lung cancer as well as a likely way to block it with drugs now in clinical trial. The study was published today (Monday, March 14) in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. A team led by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center found a way to identify metastasis-prone lung cancer cells and then uncovered a mechanism that shifts primary tumor cells into a more deadly type of cell with the capacity to move elsewhere in the body. "We think tumors have to learn how to metastasize ...

DENVER – Those working for healthier humans around the globe are making headway in fighting communicable diseases such as AIDS, malaria and diarrheal illness, according to research from the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures in the University of Denver's (DU) Josef Korbel School of International Studies. The center recently released the third in a series of five volumes that focus on human progress in which researchers explore topics such as education, poverty, infrastructure and governance. The latest book is Improving Global Health: Forecasting the ...

VIDEO: When an external magnetic field is applied to the solution of nanorods, they align themselves parallel to one another like a set of tiny flashlights turned in one direction, and... Click here for more information. RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Chemists at the University of California, Riverside have developed tiny, nanoscale-size rods of iron oxide particles in the lab that respond to an external magnetic field in a way that could dramatically improve how visual information ...

A faster, better and cheaper desalination process enhanced by carbon nanotubes has been developed by NJIT Professor Somenath Mitra. The process creates a unique new architecture for the membrane distillation process by immobilizing carbon nanotubes in the membrane pores. Conventional approaches to desalination are thermal distillation and reverse osmosis. "Unfortunately the current membrane distillation method is too expensive for use in countries and municipalities that need potable water," said Mitra. "Generally only industry, where waste heat is freely available, ...

A new report shows that older people who receive Guided Care, a new form of primary care, use fewer expensive health services compared to older people who receive regular primary care. Research published in the March 2011 edition of Archives of Internal Medicine found that after 20 months of a randomized controlled trial, Guided Care patients experienced, on average, 30 percent fewer home health care episodes, 21 percent fewer hospital readmissions, 16 percent fewer skilled nursing facility days, and 8 percent fewer skilled nursing facility admissions. Only the reduction ...

New biological research may be relevant to the effects of a mother's high-fat diet during pregnancy on the development of obesity in her children. An animal study at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia suggests that a high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet causes oxidative stress -- an excess of deleterious free radicals -- during pregnancy, predisposing the offspring to obesity and diabetes. Feeding rats antioxidants before and during pregnancy completely prevented obesity and glucose intolerance in their offspring. If the results in animals prove to be similar ...

A new study has shown that a surgical technique called microdissection testicular sperm extraction (TESE) can effectively locate and extract viable sperm in more than one-third of adult male childhood cancer survivors who were previously considered sterile due to prior chemotherapy treatment. As a result, many of the men were subsequently able to father children with the help of in vitro fertilization. The findings offer a new option for many cancer survivors who want to have children but were thought infertile because of earlier cancer treatment. "It was previously ...

In the early stages of human embryogenesis, a transcription factor called Twist1 plays a key regulatory role in how the embryo assumes form and function. Much later in life, however, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, say Twist1 can re-emerge, taking a darker and more deadly turn. In a paper published in the March 15, 2011 issue of Cancer Cell, UCSD scientists led by Jing Yang, PhD, assistant professor of pharmacology and pediatrics, identify a unique function of Twist1 in later life: it promotes the formation of invadopodia in ...

TORONTO, Ont., March 14, 2011 -- Some physicians are prescribing opioids such as OxyContin 55 times as often as others, according to a new study led by St. Michael's Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). The study found most opioid-related deaths occur among patients treated by physicians who frequently prescribe opioids, suggesting doctors who prescribe a lot of opioids may not be doing so safely. "We found that the 20 per cent of family doctors who are frequent prescribers wrote 55 times as many prescriptions as the 20 per cent of family ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – New research reveals why people read fitness and fashion magazines featuring photos of impossibly thin or muscular models -- models whose appearance highlight the readers' own flaws. Many previous studies have found that people who are unhappy with their physical appearance feel even more dissatisfied when they are shown photos of models who have "ideal" bodies. "So you have to wonder: why do we still buy those magazines and watch those television programs when they should just make us more dissatisfied?" said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, associate professor ...

Providing clues into why the severity of a common parasitic infection can vary greatly from person to person, a new Johns Hopkins study shows that each one of three strains of the cat-borne parasite Toxoplasma gondii sets off a unique reaction in the nerve cells it invades. Past research suggests that the parasite, estimated to infect 25 percent of people worldwide, can trigger or exacerbate psychotic symptoms and schizophrenia in genetically predisposed people. The findings of the new study, published in the March issue of the journal Infection and Immunity, help explain ...