Tech

Philadelphia, December 2, 2013 – More than half of older adults in the United States – an estimated 18.7 million people – have experienced bothersome pain in the previous month, impairing their physical function and underscoring the need for public health action on pain. Many of those interviewed by investigators for a study published in the current issue of PAIN® reported pain in multiple areas.

Beaks are a typical hallmark of modern birds and can be found in a huge variety of forms and shapes. However, it is less well known that keratin-covered beaks had already evolved in different groups of dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Period.

Culling vampire bat colonies to stem the transmission of rabies in Latin America does little to slow the spread of the virus and could even have the reverse effect, according to University of Michigan researchers and their colleagues.

Vampire bats transmit rabies virus throughout Latin America, causing thousands of livestock deaths each year, as well as occasional human fatalities. Poison and even explosives have been used since the 1960s in attempts to control vampire bat populations, but those culling efforts have generally failed.

A modeling study by U.S. Forest Service researchers shows that reforesting the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley can significantly reduce runoff from agricultural lands and the amount of sediment entering the area's rivers and streams—and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. The journal Ecological Engineering recently published the results of the study by Forest Service Southern Research Station scientists Ying Ouyang, Ted Leininger, and Matt Moran.

Johns Hopkins heart researchers are unraveling the mystery of how a modified pacemaker used to treat many patients with heart failure, known as cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT), is able to strengthen the heart muscle while making it beat in a coordinated fashion. In a new study conducted on animal heart cells described in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the scientists show that CRT changes these cells so they can contract more forcefully. The researchers also identified an enzyme that mimics this effect of CRT without use of the device.

Advances in computer storage have created collections of data so huge that researchers often have trouble uncovering critical patterns in connections among individual items, making it difficult for them to realize fully the power of computing as a research tool.

EUGENE, Ore. -- With the help of a new method called "dual-electrode photoelectrochemistry," University of Oregon scientists have provided new insight into how solar water-splitting cells work. An important and overlooked parameter, they report, is the ion-permeability of electrocatalysts used in water-splitting devices.

TORONTO, ON – University of Toronto researchers have developed a series of techniques to create a variety of very active iron-based catalysts necessary to produce the alcohols and amines used in the drug and perfume industry. The new synthetic methods promise to be safer and more economical and environmentally friendly than traditional industrial processes.

Philadelphia, Pa. (November 27, 2013) – Current laser therapy approaches are effective for treating excessive scars resulting from abnormal wound healing, concludes a special topic paper in the December issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).

Major industries such as modern microelectronics are based on the interaction between matter and electromagnetism. Electromagnetic signals can be processed and stored in specially tailored materials. In materials science, electric and magnetic effects have usually been studied separately. There are, however, extraordinary materials called "multiferroics", in which electric and magnetic excitations are closely linked. Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) have now shown in an experiment that magnetic properties and excitations can be influenced by an electric voltage.

WASHINGTON D.C. Nov. 26, 2013 -- Mix together air, fuel, and heat and you get combustion, the chemical reaction that powers most engines in planes, trains and automobiles. And if you throw in some ionized gas (plasma), it turns out, you can sustain combustion even in conditions that would otherwise snuff out the reaction: at low air pressure, in high winds or when there's low fuel.

Creating a computer program to find relationships in networks, such as Google Plus and Facebook, may help users more easily set up and maintain privacy settings, according to researchers.

"We want to help users configure privacy to be better protected," said Anna Squicciarini, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, Penn State. "However not all users are interested or motivated to change their privacy settings,"

Humankind has a weight problem – and not only in the industrialised nations, either: the growing prosperity in many Asian or Latin American countries goes hand in hand with a way of life that quite literally has hefty consequences. Ac-cording to the WHO, over half the population in many industrialised nations is overweight, one in three people extremely so. Not only is high-calorie and fatty food a lifetime on the hips, backside and stomach; it also leaves traces in the blood, where various fats ingested via food circulate.

Halting deforestation in tropical regions requires verification of forest conditions. VTT has developed a new satellite image based method for accurate assessment of tropical forest cover. Part of the EU's seventh framework programme, the ReCover project has involved using satellite imaging to map forest cover in sites in Mexico, Guyana, Columbia, Congo and the Fiji Islands over a period of up to 20 years.

A surprisingly large percentage of very young children in California, including 70 percent of Latino children, eat fast food regularly, according to a new policy brief by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

The study found that 60 percent of all children between the ages of 2 and 5 had eaten fast food at least once in the previous week.

The majority of the state's young children also do not eat enough fruits and vegetables, with only 57 percent of parents reporting that their child ate at least five fruit and vegetable servings the previous day.