Tech

WASHINGTON – Proposed updates to federal regulations that protect human research subjects need additional clarification when applied to the social and behavioral sciences, says a new report from the National Research Council. The report reviews an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) from the U.S.

This news release is available in German.

Scientists at The University of Nottingham are leading the world in exploiting MRI technology to assist in the treatment and diagnosis of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), a condition that causes serious inconvenience and discomfort to sufferers.

In three separate studies, researchers examined the condition in detail and uncovered a novel way of investigating the illness, which could have major implications in how it is both diagnosed and treated in the future.

Research led by Queen Mary University of London has discovered a specific mechanism that is crucial to effective tendon function, which could reveal why older people are more prone to tendon injury.

Tendons, such as the Achilles, connect muscle to bone, and are loaded repeatedly during movement. When exposed to particularly high loads, this can cause injury in some individuals. The risk of injury increases with age, but scientists have never fully understood why.

Soil erosion and vegetation change indicate approximately 400 years of intensive land use around the city of Mahendraparvata in the Phnom Kulen region beginning in the mid 9th century, with marked change in water management practices from the 12th century, according to results published January 8, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Dan Penny from the University of Sydney and colleagues from other institutions.

The frequency of words expressing misery and unhappiness in books reflects the economic conditions in the 10 years prior to the work's composition, according to researchers in Bristol and London.

A team of researchers led by scientists from the American Museum of Natural History has released the first report of widespread biofluorescence in the tree of life of fishes, identifying more than 180 species that glow in a wide range of colors and patterns. Published today in PLOS ONE, the research shows that biofluorescence—a phenomenon by which organisms absorb light, transform it, and eject it as a different color—is common and variable among marine fish species, indicating its potential use in communication and mating.

AUSTIN, Texas — Microscopic fungi that live in plants' roots play a major role in the storage and release of carbon from the soil into the atmosphere, according to a University of Texas at Austin researcher and his colleagues at Boston University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The role of these fungi is currently unaccounted for in global climate models.

Some types of symbiotic fungi can lead to 70 percent more carbon stored in the soil.

Cambridge, Mass. – January 8, 2014 – A team of Harvard scientists and engineers has demonstrated a new type of battery that could fundamentally transform the way electricity is stored on the grid, making power from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar far more economical and reliable.

When scientists discuss global change, they often focus on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and vegetation. But soil contains more carbon than air and plants combined. This means that even a minor change in soil carbon could have major implications for the Earth's atmosphere and climate. New research by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientist Benjamin Turner and colleagues points to an unexpected driver of soil carbon content: fungi.

Doctors may soon be able to diagnose stomach ulcers without taking tissue samples from the stomach. Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark now report to have developed a new, safer and noninvasive diagnostic technique for ulcers. The trick is to make the ulcer-causing bacteria in the gut light up in fluorescent green.

Scientists are reporting the development of a novel metal ink made of small sheets of copper that can be used to write a functioning, flexible electric circuit on regular printer paper. Their report on the conductive ink, which could pave the way for a wide range of new bendable gadgets, such as electronic books that look and feel more like traditional paperbacks, appears in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Previous studies have established that carbon binds to tiny mineral particles. In this latest study, published in Nature Communications, researchers have shown that the surface of the minerals plays just as important a role as their size. "The carbon binds to minerals that are just a few thousandths of a millimeter in size – and it accumulates there almost exclusively on rough and angular surfaces," explains Prof. Ingrid Kögel-Knabner, TUM Chair of Soil Science.

The role of microorganisms in sequestering carbon

A sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) tax could help mitigate the rise in obesity and type 2 diabetes rates in India among both urban and rural populations, according to a study published this week in PLOS Medicine. Sanjay Basu and colleagues, from Stanford University, USA, estimated that a 20% SSB tax across India could avert 11.2 million cases of overweight/obesity and 400,000 cases of type 2 diabetes between 2014 and 2023, based on the current rate of increases in SSB sales.

Finding the most efficient way to transport items across a network like the U.S. highway system or the Internet is a problem that has taxed mathematicians and computer scientists for decades.

To tackle the problem, researchers have traditionally used a maximum-flow algorithm, also known as "max flow," in which a network is represented as a graph with a series of nodes, known as vertices, and connecting lines between them, called edges.