Tech

A new computer model of the Gulf of Mexico in the period after the oil spill provides insights into how underwater currents may have primed marine microorganisms to degrade the oil.

AMES, Iowa – Iowa State University's Hans van Leeuwen has moved his research team's award-winning idea for improving ethanol production from a laboratory to a pilot plant.

Now he knows the idea, which produces a new animal feed and cleans water that can be recycled back into ethanol production, works more efficiently in batches of up to 350 gallons than on a lab bench.

After a gradual decline from 1990 to 2004, a new study published online in Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care finds that United States births occurring at home increased by 20 percent between 2004 and 2008.

The 28,357 home births in 2008 represent 0.67 percent of the approximately 4.2 million births in the United States, the highest reported proportion since 1990. This change was largely driven by a 28 percent increase in home births for non-Hispanic white women, for whom more than 1 percent of all births now occur at home.

A dietary supplement containing an amino acid and antioxidant vitamins, given to pregnant women at high risk of pre-eclampsia, can reduce the occurrence of the disease, finds a study published on bmj.com today.

Pre-eclampsia is a serious condition where abnormally high blood pressure and other disturbances develop during pregnancy. It affects about 5% of all first-time pregnancies and is dangerous for both mother and child.

How you think about death affects how you behave in life.

That's the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Researchers had people either think about death in the abstract or in a specific, personal way and found that people who thought specifically about their own death were more likely to demonstrate concern for society by donating blood.

It's all about the money. To make solar electricity affordable on a large scale, scientists and engineers worldwide have long been trying to develop a low-cost solar cell, which is both highly efficient and easy to manufacture with high throughput. Now a team at Empa's Laboratory for Thin Film and Photovoltaics, led by Ayodhya N. Tiwari, has made a major step forward. "The new record value for flexible CIGS solar cells of 18.7% nearly closes the "efficiency gap" to solar cells based on polycrystalline silicon (Si) wafers or CIGS thin film cells on glass", says Tiwari.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — When you suffer a heart attack, a part of your heart dies. Nerve cells in the heart's wall and a special class of cells that spontaneously expand and contract – keeping the heart beating in perfect synchronicity – are lost forever. Surgeons can't repair the affected area. It's as if when confronted with a road riddled with potholes, you abandon what's there and build a new road instead.

A new gene expression technique adapted for single molecule sequencing has enabled researchers at the RIKEN Omics Science Center (OSC) to accurately and quantitatively measure gene expression levels using only 100 nanograms of total RNA. The technique, which pairs RIKEN's Cap Analysis of Gene Expression (CAGE) protocol with the Helicos® Genetic Analysis System developed by Helicos BioSciences Corporation, opens the door to the detailed analysis of gene expression networks and rare cell populations.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Can't find anyone to exercise with? Don't despair: New research from Michigan State University reveals working out with a virtual partner improves motivation during exercise.

The study led by Deborah Feltz, chairperson of MSU's Department of Kinesiology, is the first to investigate the Kohler effect on motivation in health video games; that phenomenon explains why inferior team members perform better in a group than they would by themselves.

Want a Nissan Leaf? Join the 20,000 people on the waiting list to get one. The Chevy Volt got your eye? General Motors ramped up availability earlier this year to try and meet demand. With the latest generation of electric vehicles gaining traction, new findings from University of Delaware (UD) researchers are informing automakers' and policymakers' decisions about the environmentally friendly cars.

CHESTNUT HILL, MA (5/18/2011) – Carbon found within ancient rocks has played a crucial role developing a time line for the emergence of biological life on the planet billions of years ago. But applying cutting-edge technology to samples of ancient rocks from northern Canada has revealed the carbon-based minerals may be much younger than the rock they inhabit, a team of researchers report in the latest edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.

"Seeing something invisible with your own eyes is an exciting experience," say Joachim Fischer and Tolga Ergin. For about one year, both physicists and members of the team of Professor Martin Wegener at KIT's Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN) have worked on refining the structure of the Karlsruhe invisibility cloak to such an extent that it is also effective in the visible spectral range.

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Riitta Luoto and colleagues from the UKK Institute for Health Promotion Research, and University of Tampere, Finland, evaluate whether lifestyle interventions can reduce the risk of high birthweight babies and gestational diabetes amongst pregnant women at high risk for these outcomes. They report the results of a cluster randomized trial in which groups of maternity clinics in 14 municipalities in Finland were randomized to an intervention.