Troy, N.Y. – Steel walls are no match for Tristan Lawry. The doctoral student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has developed and demonstrated an innovative new system that uses ultrasound to simultaneously transmit large quantities of data and power wirelessly through thick metal walls, like the hulls of ships and submarines. Lawry, a student in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer, is one of three finalists for the 2011 $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Rensselaer Student Prize. A public ceremony announcing this year's winner will be held ...

For the past few years, one of the most common questions facing the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) hasn't been over contentious water rights or proposed water projects; it's been from homeowners wanting to know what type of roofing material is most suitable for collecting rainwater for indoor domestic use. "Rainwater harvesting is becoming fairly widespread, at least in Central Texas. There's interest born out of necessity because people are simply running out of water in rural areas or they're interested in conserving water supplies and it's good for the environment," ...

Boston, Ma – Fainting, or syncope, is quite common. About 50% of people will experience fainting at some point during their lifetime. The most common type of fainting is vasovagal syncope (VVS) that is caused by a sudden drop in blood pressure resulting in reduced blood flow to the brain. VVS can occur in healthy people due to inappropriate cardiovascular responses to certain behavioral or emotional triggers such as fear, needle prick or even standing up. VVS has a daily pattern with more occurrences during the morning. This daily pattern is possibly due to the daily distribution ...

AURORA, Colo. (March 7, 2011) - A discovery at University of Colorado Cancer Center shows testing lung cancer on a molecular level can produce new insights into this deadly disease. Cancer Center member D. Ross Camidge, MD, PhD, director of the thoracic oncology clinical program at University of Colorado Hospital (UCH), turned a chance clinical observation into a new field of discovery in lung cancer. In October 2010, Camidge and colleagues published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showing more than half of patients with a specific kind of lung cancer ...

New research reveals vast tracts of wetlands along the upper Gulf Coast are more hydrologically connected to Galveston Bay and other waters of the U.S. than previously thought, suggesting immediate implications for how they are preserved, managed and regulated, according to Texas AgriLife scientists. "Loss of wetlands closer to traditional navigable waters must be mitigated under the Clean Water Act by creating new wetlands, or preferably by protecting and restoring similar existing wetlands," said Dr. John Jacob, Texas AgriLife Extension Service environmental quality ...

A hurricane-like superstorm expected to hit California once every 200 years would cause devastation to the state's businesses unheard of even in the Great Recession, a USC economist warns. Researchers estimate the total property damage and business interruption costs of the massive rainstorm would be nearly $1 trillion. USC research professor Adam Rose calculated that the lost production of goods and services alone would be $627 billion of the total over five years. Rose, a professor with the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development, also is the coordinator for ...

HOUSTON-(March 7, 2011)- Children without previous iron deficiencies or anemia who remained infected with Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) had significantly lower levels of iron compared to children who had the infection eradicated, according to researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). "Half of the world's population is infected with H. pylori and most of the individuals are asymptomatically infected, according to several surveys," said Victor Cardenas, M.D., Ph.D., lead investigator of the study and associate professor of epidemiology ...

Durham, NC —For the vast majority of plants and animals, the 'bigger is better' view of evolution may not be far off the mark, says a new broad-scale study of natural selection. Organisms with bigger bodies or faster growth rates tend to live longer, mate more and produce more offspring, whether they are deer or damselflies, the authors report. Researchers working at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center compiled and reviewed nearly 150 published estimates of natural selection, representing more than 100 species of birds, lizards, snakes, insects and plants. The ...

People are more comfortable committing sins of omission than commission—letting bad things happen rather than actively causing something bad. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that this is because they know other people will think worse of them if they do something bad than if they let something bad happen. "Omissions and commissions come up relatively frequently in everyday life, and we sometimes puzzle over them," says moral psychologist Peter DeScioli of Brandeis University, who conducted ...

A new study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine reveals that, for the first time, 5a-reductase inhibitors commonly used to treat urinary problems in patients with benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and found in popular medications to treat hair loss, can produce, persistent erectile dysfunction (ED), depression and loss of libido, even after the medication has been discontinued. Researchers led by Abdulmaged M. Traish, MBA, PhD, of Boston University School of Medicine, examined data reported in various clinical studies from the available literature concerning ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Cardiologists may soon be able to place sensitive electronics inside their patients' hearts with minimal invasiveness, enabling more sophisticated and efficient diagnosis and treatment of arrhythmias. A team of materials scientists, mechanical and electrical engineers, and physicians has successfully integrated stretchable electronics technology with standard endocardial balloon catheters. Led by John A. Rogers, the Lee J. Flory-Founder Chair in Engineering at Illinois, the team published its work in the March 6 online edition of Nature Materials. The ...

MADISON — Years of research show black patients getting less treatment in the American health care system than their white counterparts, but a new study suggests that a quick dose of empathy helps close racial gaps in pain treatment. College students and nurses went to greater lengths to ease the pain of members of their own race in a study led by Brian Drwecki, a psychology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "I want to be very clear about this: We're not saying health care professionals are racist," Drwecki says. "This is not racism. Racism is ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Using genetic methods to count endangered eagles, a group of scientists showed that traditional counting methods can lead to significantly incorrect totals that they believe could adversely affect conservation efforts. Andrew DeWoody, a professor of genetics at Purdue University; Jamie Ivy, population manager at the San Diego Zoo; and Todd Katzner, a research assistant professor at the University of West Virginia, found that visual counts of imperial and white-tailed sea eagles in the Narzum National Nature Reserve of Kazakhstan significantly underestimated ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Despite the fears of some, a new study suggests that use of the internet in general does not make people more likely to believe political rumors. However, one form of internet communication – e-mail – does seem to have troubling consequences for the spread and belief of rumors. "I think a lot of people will be surprised to learn that using the internet doesn't necessarily promote belief in rumors. Many people seem to think that's self-evident," said R. Kelly Garrett, author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University. "The ...

Circulating tumor cells, which play a crucial role in cancer metastasis, have been known to science for more than 100 years, and researchers have long endeavored to track and capture them. Now, a UCLA research team has developed an innovative device based on Velcro-like nanoscale technology to efficiently identify and "grab" these circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, in the blood. Metastasis is the most common cause of cancer-related death in patients with solid tumors and occurs when these marauding tumor cells leave the primary tumor site and travel through the blood ...

CYBERSECURITY -- Software agents on assignment . . . Tracking and protecting information stored on an organization's network could be more secure with a system developed by a team led by Justin Beaver of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. The challenge arises when an organization has documents that are being copied, excerpted, changed and stored in various forms across the organization's network. Host Information Value Engine, dubbed HIVE, solves the problem by dispatching software agents that automatically and quickly review ...

1. California rapidly depleting Central Valley groundwater Groundwater is being depleted in California's Central Valley at a rapid rate, according to data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite. Famiglietti et al. analyze 78 months of GRACE data covering October 2003 to March 2010 to estimate water storage changes in California's Sacramento and San Joaquin River basins. They find that the basins are losing water at a rate of about 30 millimeters (1.2 inches) per year equivalent water height, or a total of about 30 cubic kilometers (7.2 cubic ...

AMES, Iowa – L. Keith Woo is searching for cleaner, greener chemical reactions. Woo, an Iowa State University professor of chemistry and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, has studied catalysts and the chemical reactions they affect for more than 25 years. And these days, his focus is on green catalysis. That, he said, is the search for catalysts that lead to more efficient chemical reactions. That could mean they promote reactions at lower pressures and temperatures. Or it could mean they promote reactions that create less waste. Or it ...

Two types of raw materials are currently used for biorefining and biofuel production: carbohydrates and lipids. Biofuels like ethanol are derived from carbohydrate raw materials such as sugars and lignocellulose, while biodiesels are derived from another raw material, lipid-rich vegetable oil. In a study published online March 6 in the journal Nature Biotechnology, researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science demonstrate for the first time the feasibility of using proteins — one of the most abundant biomolecules on earth — as a significant ...

Biologists tend to look at cells in bulk, observing them as a group and taking the average behavior as the norm — the assumption is that genetically identical cells all behave the same way. In a paper to be published in the online Early Edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 7, 2011, Sam Sia, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, presents the results of his four-year tissue-engineering study that show a surprising range of variation in how individual cells behave during formation of a blood vessel. Sia ...

St. Louis, MO, March 8, 2011 – Most of us have heard of Phoenix, no, not the mystical bird or the capital of Arizona, but the online university. According to the Babson Survey Research Group, enrollment in online courses is growing faster than overall higher education offerings due to various reasons like the economic downturn. With the increase in demand for online education, a study in the March/April 2011 issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior explores nine online nutrition courses. Since nutrition courses meet general education science requirements ...

The percentage of personal bankruptcies linked to medical bills or illness changed little, and the absolute number actually increased in Massachusetts after the implementation of its landmark 2006 law requiring people to buy health insurance, a Harvard study says. The new study, which appears in today's American Journal of Medicine, found that between early 2007 and mid-2009, the share of all Massachusetts bankruptcies with a medical cause went from 59.3 percent to 52.9 percent, a non-significant decrease of 6.4 percentage points. Because there was a sharp rise in total ...

New York, NY, March 8, 2011 – As the debate about healthcare in the United States rages, four insightful articles in the March 2011 issue of The American Journal of Medicine strive to add reasoned arguments and empirical research findings to the dialog. The issue leads off with the editorial, "The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Healthcare Living Room," by Journal Editor-in-Chief Dr. Joseph Alpert, Professor of Medicine, Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson. As a practicing physician and medical educator, Dr. Alpert has first-hand experience with the current environment of medical ...

Xpress Money, the leading global instant money transfer brand, in association with Pokhareli Sisters Group in Nepal and Nepal Cancer Prevention Society, organised a health camp, which offered free Uterus Cancer Test (PAP Smear Test) for the Nepali community on Saturday, 5th March, 2011 in Bhaktapur Cancer Hospital, Kathmandu. Xpress Money Foundation, the CSR arm of Xpress Money, took up this cause for the underprivileged women, in line with the brand's vision to create health awareness for the benefit of various communities, for whom it provides value-laden service through ...

Blue Coat Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BCSI), a leading provider of Web security and WAN optimization solutions, today introduced the Blue Coat Cloud Service, a scalable Internet-delivered service that leverages proven Blue Coat technology and the company's collaborative WebPulse community of more than 70 million users. The first subscription module for the Blue Coat Cloud Service, the Web Security Module, brings Blue Coat enterprise-class technology to a broader group of organizations and provides comprehensive, real-time Web protection that can be managed and deployed from ...