You can touch a functioning light bulb and know right away that it's hot. Ouch! But you can't touch a single molecule and get the same feedback. Rice University researchers say they have the next best thing -- a way to determine the temperature of a molecule or flowing electrons by using Raman spectroscopy combined with an optical antenna. A new paper from the lab of Douglas Natelson, a Rice professor of physics and astronomy, details a technique that measures the temperature of molecules set between two gold nanowires and heated either by current applied to the wires ...

For some years now, consumers have been making increasing use of wood as a fuel – and not only on account of the rising cost of heating oil and natural gas. "Comfort fireplaces" have become all the rage because open fires, tiled and wood-burning stoves give a room a snug and cozy feel. But using wood for heating has one distinct disadvantage. When pellets, logs or briquettes are burnt, fine dust particles that are hazardous to health are released into the atmosphere. These particles are known to cause coughs, place stress on the cardiovascular system, and are thought to ...

Every 15 months or so, an unfelt earthquake occurs in western Washington and travels northward to Canada's Vancouver Island. The episode typically releases as much energy as a magnitude 6.5 earthquake, but it does so gradually over a month. New technology is letting University of Washington researchers get a much better picture of how these episodic tremor events relate to potentially catastrophic earthquakes, perhaps as powerful as magnitude 9, that occur every 300 to 500 years in the Cascadia subduction zone in western Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. "Depending ...

Carsten Beier from the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT in Oberhausen, Germany does not believe that "anyone would burn a 50-dollar bill just to keep warm. It's obvious that it simply is too valuable for that." But, in contrast to dollar bills, most energy carriers are all too frequently burned for less than they are worth. Take wood, for example. Beier and his colleagues have analyzed the efficiency of heat supply systems and he explains that "wood is a high-quality fuel that can be compared to natural gas. With adequate technologies ...

Fog is a common feature along the West Coast during the summer, but a University of Washington scientist has found that summertime coastal fog has declined since 1950 while coastal temperatures have increased slightly. Fog formation appears to be controlled by a high-pressure system normally present off the West Coast throughout the summer, said James Johnstone, a postdoctoral researcher with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the UW. "The behavior of that high-pressure cell is responsible for a lot of the weather phenomena we see on ...

PITTSBURGH—How much is that new computer server contributing to your company's carbon footprint? What about the laptop you bought your child for Christmas? As it turns out, answering those questions may be more difficult than you might think. The results of a recent study by Carnegie Mellon's Christopher Weber found that the calculation of carbon footprints for products is often riddled with large uncertainties, particularly related to the use of electronic goods. Weber, an adjunct professor in the university's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A drug currently approved for osteoporosis treatment has been shown to reduce bone loss in a study of mice with oral cancer, suggesting it could serve as an important supplemental therapy in patients with head and neck cancers that erode bone. In this Ohio State University study, the drug treatment also was associated with smaller tumors – an unexpected result. The drug, zoledronic acid, is known by the brand name Zometa. It is designed to inhibit bone resorption, the breaking down of bone caused by the release of a specific kind of cell. Oral squamous ...

A remarkable discovery into how tumour cells invade normal tissue should lead to vital diagnostic tools and help develop strategies to stop the spread of cancer cells. A new study by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University reveals that the surface of aggressive tumour cells lack the strong molecular 'glue' responsible for binding normal cells together. This allows tumour cells to break away, detach from their neighbors, and spread to other regions of the body. Certain proteins, called cadherins, are located on the surface of ...

DURHAM, N.C. – A key focus of the health care debate has involved immigrants and their impact on the U.S. health care system. A new study shows that Mexican Americans most integrated into the culture -- including those born in the United States -- are more likely to require resources to manage their health conditions than more recent immigrants to the U.S., according to researchers at Duke University, Rice University and the University of Colorado Denver. "The implications of these findings run counter to the popular belief that recent immigrant arrivals are taxing ...

HOUSTON -- (Dec. 13, 2010) -- European and U.S. physicists this week are offering up the strongest evidence yet that magnetism is the driving force behind unconventional superconductivity. The findings by researchers from Rice University, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids (MPI-CPfS) in Dresden, Germany, and other institutions were published online today in Nature Physics. The findings follow more than three decades of research by the team that discovered unconventional superconductivity in 1979. That breakthrough, which was led by MPI-CPfS Director ...

Boston, Mass. - In a paper that suggests a new strategy to prevent asthma, scientists at Children's Hospital Boston and their colleagues report that the influenza virus infection in young mice protected the mice as adults against the development of allergic asthma. The same protective effect was achieved by treating young mice with compound isolated from the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), a bacterium that colonizes the stomach and is best known for causing ulcers and increasing the risk of gastric cancers. The findings, published online December 13 in the ...

BOZEMAN, Mont. -- New research indicates that the speed of early forest clearance following human colonisation of the South Island of New Zealand was much faster and more intense than previously thought. Charcoal recovered from lake-bed sediment cores show that just a few large fires within 200 years of initial colonization destroyed much of the South Island's lowland forest. Grasslands and shrubland replaced the burnt forest and smaller fires prevented forests from returning. The findings - by an international team led by Dave McWethy and Cathy Whitlock from Montana ...

WASHINGTON – Losing a job is a profoundly distressing experience, but the unemployed may be more resilient than previously believed – the vast majority eventually end up as satisfied with life as they were before they lost their jobs, according to a new analysis published by the American Psychological Association. "Unemployment rates continue to be historically high in the United States and other countries," said the study's lead author, Isaac Galatzer-Levy, PhD, who is now at New York University School of Medicine. "There's a real concern that this will have long-term ...

For the first time ever, scientists have found a difference in the way males and females of the same species of vertebrate see things – and that sexes likely use that difference to select their mates. Queen's PhD candidate Shai Sabbah, a Vanier Scholar, led a team of researchers who found that male and female cichlid fishes not only see things differently, but detect light in different ways as well. "It is difficult to say what colour attracts the female the most, but we know that if we manipulate the colour of the fish by changing the light in the environment, the ...

Increased life expectancy in the United States has not been accompanied by more years of perfect health, reveals new research published in the December issue of the Journal of Gerontology. Indeed, a 20-year-old today can expect to live one less healthy year over his or her lifespan than a 20-year-old a decade ago, even though life expectancy has grown. From 1970 to 2005, the probability of a 65-year-old surviving to age 85 doubled, from about a 20 percent chance to a 40 percent chance. Many researchers presumed that the same forces allowing people to live longer, including ...

UCSF researchers have identified an existing medication that restores key elements of the immune system that, when out of balance, lead to a steady decline in immunity and health as people age. The team found that extremely low doses of the drug lenalidomide can stimulate the body's immune-cell protein factories, which decrease production during aging, and rebalance the levels of several key cytokines – immune proteins that either attack viruses and bacteria or cause inflammation that leads to an overall decline in health. The initial study, which was designed to define ...

Early years initiatives for pre-school children are not delivering improvements in language and numeracy development, according to leading education experts. Experts, conducting one of the largest surveys to date of the development of 117,000 children starting primary school in England over eight years, found that despite a raft of early years' initiatives, such as 'Sure Start', basic levels of development in early reading, vocabulary and maths have remained largely unchanged. Researchers from the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM) at Durham University who ...

Ann Arbor, Mich.— Expression of a toxic RNA that leads to Fragile X Tremor Ataxia Syndrome is modifiable by genetic or pharmacologic means, according to new research from U-M Medical School scientists. In the study published online today in the journal Public Library Of Science Genetics, U-M's Peter K. Todd, M.D., Ph.D., led a team of researchers who examined the expression of a toxic messenger RNA (mRNA) seen in the brains of those afflicted with the syndrome. Fragile X Tremor Ataxia Syndrome (FXTAS) is usually found in older adults, who often have grandchildren afflicted ...

Mexican-Americans who are most integrated into the culture -- including those born in the United States, and not recent immigrants -- appear less healthy and more likely to require resources to manage their health conditions than more recent, less-integrated migrants, according to a new study from Rice University, Duke University and the University of Colorado Denver. In particular, the research reveals that this pattern of declining health among immigrants who are in the U.S. the longest holds more strongly for men than women. Conversely, the research indicates that, ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Face-to-face workplace interactions may be the best way to educate and encourage people to consider becoming organ donors, according to new research from Purdue University. "Workplaces are a key location for people to learn about health and wellness issues, but how information is distributed in this setting can make a difference for sensitive health topics such as organ donation," said Susan E. Morgan, a professor of communication. "There is an incredible amount of misinformation and medical mistrust surrounding the organ donation process, which ...

A one-year follow-up study on seniors who participated in a strength training exercise program shows sustained cognitive benefits as well as savings for the healthcare system. The research, conducted at the Centre for Hip Health and Mobility at Vancouver Coastal Health and the University of British Columbia, is published today in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The study is the first to examine whether both cognitive and economic benefits are sustained after formal cessation of a tailored exercise program. It builds on the Brain Power Study, published in the January ...

Results from a government-sponsored clinical trial of inactivated 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine in people with asthma indicate that a single dose of vaccine was safe and induced a strong immune response predictive of protection. The findings also suggest that individuals over the age of 60 who have severe asthma may require a larger dose of vaccine. The study was cosponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), two components of the National Institutes of Health, and appears online ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Changes in diet have been linked to a reduction of abnormal behaviors in mentally ill people or animals, but a Purdue University study shows that diet might also trigger the onset of mental illness in the first place. Joseph Garner, an associate professor of animal sciences, fed mice a diet high in sugar and tryptophan that was expected to reduce abnormal hair-pulling. Instead, mice that were already ill worsened their hair-pulling behaviors or started a new self-injurious scratching behavior, and the seemingly healthy mice developed the same abnormal ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The Obama administration's decision to maintain a ban on oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts is a mistake, according to a University of Illinois expert who wrote a six-volume book series on marine pollution. "It's a ridiculous decision on the part of the Interior Department," said John W. Kindt, a professor of business and legal policy at Illinois. "The previous 180-day moratorium really hurt a lot of businesses. Well, a seven-year ban is going to sting even more." Kindt says giving the oil companies a ...

From atomic crystals to spiral galaxies, self-assembly is ubiquitous in nature. In biological processes, self-assembly at the molecular level is particularly prevalent. Phospholipids, for example, will self-assemble into a bilayer to form a cell membrane, and actin, a protein that supports and shapes a cell's structure, continuously self-assembles and disassembles during cell movement. Bioengineers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have been exploring a unique phenomenon whereby randomly dispersed microparticles self-assemble into ...