Tech

A typical city: row upon row of houses built almost on top of each other, with asphalted roads between them and with very few green areas to be found. Urban areas built on this pattern warm up more strongly than their rural surroundings, creating islands of warmth. The waste heat emitted by vehicles and machinery (such as air conditioning equipment) causes yet more heating, and even during the night the city hardly cools down to any noticeable extent.

Applications on modern wireless devices make demands on data rate and connectivity far beyond anything experienced in the past. One way to meet these stringent requirements is to give the device multiple antennas or multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology. The problem of physically accommodating these additional antennas in the latest consumer products is investigated in new research from the University of Bristol.

Chevy Chase, MD— A recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM) found that higher levels of perfluorocarbons (PFCs) in the body are associated with increased odds of having experienced menopause in women between 42 and 64 years old. Women in this age group with high levels of PFCs also had significantly lower concentrations of estrogen when compared to women who had low levels of PFCs.

Clinicians have an ethical imperative to share important decisions with patients, and patients have a right to be equal participants in their care, say a group of experts today.

In December 2010, 58 people from 18 countries attended a Salzburg Global Seminar to consider the role patients can and should play in healthcare decisions. Today, they publish a statement urging patients and clinicians "to work together to be co-producers of health."

It comes as the government in England finalises plans to give people more say and more choice over their care than ever before.

The Health and Social Care Bill amounts to the abolition of the English NHS as a universal, comprehensive, publicly accountable, tax funded service, free at the point of delivery, warn experts today.

In a paper published on bmj.com, Professor Allyson Pollock and David Price examine the proposed changes and argue that the government's duty to provide a comprehensive health service in England is abolished.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Field tests by University of Missouri scientists have backed up laboratory research indicating that buffer strips of grass and other plants can reduce the amount of herbicide and veterinary antibiotics in surface runoff from farm plots.

Vegetative buffer strips have already proven effective in limiting erosion as well as reducing sediment and nutrients in runoff.

DETROIT – Ninety percent of cancer deaths resulted from metastasis, the spread of cancer to different areas in the body, yet scientific exploration of the possible mechanical factors that promote metastasis has been limited. A Wayne State University researcher, however, is expanding the scientific understanding of what makes malignant tumors spread, and the answer lies within the dense, fibrous matrix that surrounds cancer cells.

PITTSBURGH—Conventional rules of survival tend to favor the strongest, but University of Pittsburgh-based researchers recently found that in the emerging world of self-healing materials, it is the somewhat frail that survive.

Changes that occur in the airways of asthma patients are in part caused by the naturally occurring protein interleukin-13 (IL-13) which stimulates invasion of airway cells called fibroblasts, according to a study conducted by researchers at Duke University.

Catalysts made of carbon nanotubes dipped in a polymer solution equal the energy output and otherwise outperform platinum catalysts in fuel cells, a team of Case Western Reserve University engineers has found.

The researchers are certain that they'll be able to boost the power output and maintain the other advantages by matching the best nanotube layout and type of polymer.

But already they've proved the simple technique can knock down one of the major roadblocks to fuel cell use: cost.

As conventional accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider grow ever more vast and expensive, the best hope for the high-energy machines of the future may lie in "tabletop" accelerators like BELLA (the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator), now being built by the LOASIS program at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). BELLA, a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator, is remarkably compact.

People fluent in sign language may simultaneously keep words and signs in their minds as they read, according to an international team of researchers.

Alexandria, VA – If you ask someone involved in community remote sensing to define the emerging field, the most likely response will be a chuckle followed by "That's a hard question to answer…" At its core, the movement is about remote sensing - collecting data from afar. Remote sensing has revolutionized science and Earth monitoring, but it fails to collect data at the hyper-local level. And that's where the community comes in.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – There are 50 million family members providing care to older adults in the United States, according to the MetLife Foundation and national caregiving associations. When older adults are hospitalized and discharged, their families face numerous choices about where they will go and how they will receive care. A University of Missouri nursing expert says the complexity of this process will intensify with increasing demands for health care and workforce shortages.