Tech

Kazan Federal University partnered up with Justus Liebig University Giessen, Russian Academy of Sciences, and Georg August University Gottingen to reveal both structural and functional changes of the microbial community resistant to and able to decompose oily wastes in soil.

A major new study has found a significant reduction in diabetes-related amputations since the mid-1990s, credited to improvements in diabetes care over this period. The research is published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) and is by Dr Benjamin Rasmussen and Professor Henning Beck-Nielsen, Odense University Hospital Denmark, and colleagues.

For more than 150 years, physicians have examined patients’ eyes with a lighted, hand-held instrument called an ophthalmoscope.

In addition to eye problems, the exam can detect indications of many other problems, including neurological conditions that can cause headaches or altered mental status. The exam is called direct funduscopy.

New Rochelle, NY, November 19, 2015--The sugar obtained after enzymatic hydrolysis of empty fruit bunches (EFBs increased from 17% to 24% when supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) pretreatment of the EFBs was used, according to a new study. SC-CO2 pretreatment plus premixing of the EFBs with alkali further increased the glucose yield to almost 37%, as reported in the study published in Industrial Biotechnology.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- As the export of wood pellets from the U.S. to the European Union has increased six-fold since 2008, questions have been raised about the environmental impact of the practice. According to a new paper from a University of Illinois expert in environmental economics, even after accounting for factors ranging from harvesting to transportation across the Atlantic Ocean, wood pellets still trump coal by a wide margin in carbon emissions savings.

Although today's pacemakers are lifesaving electronic devices, they are limited by their artificial nature. For example, their parts can fail or they can become infected. In addition, the devices require regular maintenance, must be replaced periodically, and can only approximate the natural regulation of a heartbeat. A Review article published on November 20 in Trends in Molecular Medicine highlights the promise and limitations of new methods based on stem cell and reprogramming technologies to generate biological pacemakers that might one day replace electronic pacemakers.

An international team of physicists has published ground-breaking research on the decay of subatomic particles called kaons - which could change how scientists understand the formation of the universe.

Professor Christopher Sachrajda, from the Southampton Theory Astrophysics and Gravity Research Centre at the University of Southampton, has helped to devise the first calculation of how the behaviour of kaons differs when matter is swapped out for antimatter, known as direct "CP" symmetry violation.

Some argue the transportation sector constitutes a major roadblock on the path to avoiding dangerous climate change. Yet, the sector has the capacity to nearly halve its CO2 emissions by 2050, and may therefore be easier to decarbonize than previously thought. Realizing such a major emissions cut would require further efficiency improvements in fuel consumption and, especially, the promotion of public transport in cities, alongside a large-scale shift to electric cars. These are key findings of the new article published in the journal Science.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - A team of researchers from the University of Maryland (UMD) and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) have devised a groundbreaking "Water-in-Salt" aqueous Lithium ion battery technology that could provide power, efficiency and longevity comparable to today's Lithium-ion batteries, but without the fire risk, poisonous chemicals and environmental hazards of current Lithium batteries.

Ants, when walking around in cluttered environments, are known to follow a limited number of common routes. Research published in PLOS Computational Biology and led by Olivier Bertrand (Bielefeld University, Germany) shows that similar routes emerge when an algorithm for collision avoidance, based on the apparent motion of obstacles, is combined with a target direction.

The concentration of the euphoriant THC in cannabis has tripled in the space of twenty years. The reason may be a systematic processing of the cannabis plants, some of which are being grown in skunk farms in Denmark.

Ever wonder why that diet didn't work? An Israeli study tracking the blood sugar levels of 800 people over a week suggests that even if we all ate the same meal, how it's metabolized would differ from one person to another. The findings, published November 19 in Cell, demonstrate the power of personalized nutrition in helping people identify which foods can help or hinder their health goals.

Scientists from Kumamoto University and The University of Tokyo, Japan have elucidated the control of cellular movement during blood vessel formation. Their findings show that cellular motion occurs not in only the direction toward the tip of the blood vessels, but in a dynamically changing manner!

Blood vessels form a large network with countless branches to supply sufficient oxygen and nutrients efficiently to all tissues within the body. Yet, both blood vessel growth and the formation of blood vessels from a collection of cells remains largely unknown.

Email security helps protect some of our most sensitive data: password recovery confirmations, financial data, confidential correspondences, and more. According to a new report, published by Michael Bailey, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Michigan and Google, email security is significantly better than it was two years ago, but still has widespread issues.

Inspired by amphibians like salamanders, researchers from the University of Southampton are developing a new type of drug that may help bones heal faster and better.

Using bone samples from people undergoing hip replacement surgery, the researchers were able to show that the drug -- a protein that activates a molecular pathway called the 'Wnt' pathway -- causes stem cells found within bones to divide and to turn into more bone cells.