Tech

STANFORD, Calif. — It's established dogma that the immune system develops a "memory" of a microbial pathogen, with a correspondingly enhanced readiness to combat that microbe, only upon exposure to it — or to its components though a vaccine. But a discovery by Stanford University School of Medicine researchers casts doubt on that dogma.

The annual duck hunting season in the United States is traditionally big business, but while bird numbers are rising faster than they have for decades, the number of hunters continues to fall. Far from being good news for ducks a new study in the Wildlife Society Bulletin shows how the loss of revenue from 'duck stamps' could result in millions of lost dollars for vital conservation work.

(Jena) On their mission to the moon in 1969 the Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin created arguably the most famous footprints ever. Since the time the astronauts of the Apollo 11 Mission stepped onto the surface of our satellite their footprints remain almost unchanged. And as no breath of wind will ever be able to blow them away they will be visible forever.

X-ray microscopy requires radiation of extremely high quality. In order to obtain sharp images instrument and sample must stay absolutely immobile even at the nanometer scale during the recording. Researchers at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, have now developed a method that relaxes these hard restrictions. Even fluctuations in the material can be visualized. The renowned journal Nature now reports on their results.

Bad news about the economy could cause you to pack on the pounds. This according to a new study from the University of Miami School of Business Administration published in the February edition of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Science. The study shows that when there is a perception of tough times, people tend to seek higher-calorie foods that will keep them satisfied longer.

A new generation of the HTL process can convert all kinds of biomasses to crude bio-oil, which is sufficiently similar to fossil crude oil that a simple thermal upgrade and existing refinery technology can be employed to subsequently obtain all the liquid fuels we know today. What is more, the HTL process only consumes approximately 10-15 percent of the energy in the feedstock biomass, yielding an energy efficiency of 85-90 percent.

Two of the most widely used nanoparticles (NPs) accumulate in soybeans — second only to corn as a key food crop in the United States — in ways previously shown to have the potential to adversely affect the crop yields and nutritional quality, a new study has found. It appears in the journal ACS Nano.

Owing to the prevalence of multicore processors, more and more programs are written in a multi-threaded style to improve performance. However, associated concurrency errors have become an inconvenient cause of system faults. The research group from State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering, School of Computers, Wuhan University, focused on finding methods to improve the trustworthiness of concurrent programs. By analyzing shortcomings of existing methods, they developed a more efficient method for detecting concurrency errors in object-oriented programs.

Scientists have, for the first time, traced the nanoparticles taken up from the soil by crop plants and analysed the chemical states of their metallic elements. Zinc was shown to dissolve and accumulate throughout the plants, whereas the element cerium did not dissolve into plant tissue. The results contribute to the controversial debate on plant toxicity of nanoparticles and whether engineered nanoparticles can enter into the food chain. The study was published on 6 February 2013 in the journal ACS Nano.

A small, two-wheeled robot has been driven by a male silkmoth to track down the sex pheromone usually given off by a female mate.

The robot has been used to characterise the silkmoth's tracking behaviours and it is hoped that these can be applied to other autonomous robots so they can track down smells, and the subsequent sources, of environmental spills and leaks when fitted with highly sensitive sensors.

Dietary advice about fats and the risk of heart disease is called into question on bmj.com today as a clinical trial shows that replacing saturated animal fats with omega-6 polyunsaturated vegetable fats is linked to an increased risk of death among patients with heart disease.

The researchers say their findings could have important implications for worldwide dietary recommendations.

HOUSTON – (February 5, 2013) – American Indians are at much greater risk of suicide after acute alcohol intoxication, according to a study led by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

The study examined the prevalence and social demographic correlates of suicide involving acute alcohol intoxication among United States ethnic minorities. Results will be published in the May 2013 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

  • Suicide is ranked as the 10th leading overall cause of death in the United States.
  • A new study recently examined suicide and acute alcohol intoxication among U.S. ethnic minorities.
  • Findings show that American Indians are at much greater risk than other ethnic groups.

A pair of commentaries to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy highlight a debate within the public health community surrounding Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations for treatment of exposed individuals during last year's fungal meningitis outbreak. Manuscripts of the commentaries were published ahead of print today on the journal's webpage.

ARLINGTON, Va. —The Navy's fifth Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), Milwaukee, will be the first to benefit from new high-power density waterjets aimed at staving off rudder and propeller damage experienced on high-speed ships.

The product of an Office of Naval Research (ONR) Future Naval Capabilities (FNC) program, the waterjets arrived last month at the Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin, where Milwaukee (LCS 5) is under construction.