News Articles

A study done by Stanford University School of Medicine and Stanford Hospital&Clinics suggests that the use of a dietary supplement after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery can help obese patients to more quickly lose weight and to avoid deficiency of a critical B vitamin.

The cluster of stars surrounding a supermassive black hole after it has been ejected from a galaxy are a new kind of astronomical object, according to a paper published in Astrophysical Journal.More importantly, the stars contain a 'fossil record' from the 'kicking' galaxy.

The phrase 'like herding cats' resonates with people for a reason; it's difficult to get them to do anything they don't already want to do.But they have no problem getting humans to do their bidding, according to a report published in Current Biology, which shows that even biologists are concerned about future feline-human relations.It seems crafty felines accelerate the filling of food dishes by sending a mixed signal: an urgent meowing coupled with an otherwise pleasant purr.  Humans find it annoying and difficult to ignore.   It's not April 1st or December so calibrate your belief accordingly. 

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley say they have demonstrated a way to fabricate efficient solar cells from low-cost, flexible materials; optically active semiconductors in arrays of nanoscale pillars, each a single crystal, with dimensions measured in billionths of a meter. 

Want to live forever but starving is not for you?   A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may be more to your liking.

Sulfate gets all the attention but iron and manganese compounds may be important role in converting methane to carbon dioxide and eventually carbonates in the Earth's oceans, according to a team of researchers looking at anaerobic sediments. Those same compounds may also have been key to methane reduction in the early, oxygenless days of the planet's atmosphere.  On the early Earth, where oxygen was absent from the atmosphere, sulfates were scarce.

Stirling Energy Systems (SES) and Tessera Solar recently unveiled four newly designed solar power collection dishes at Sandia National Laboratories’ National Solar Thermal Test Facility (NSTTF).Sandia’s concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) team has been working closely with SES over the past five years to improve the system design and operation.

Stars and galaxies formed back in the early days of the universe,  some 13 billion years ago, were not nearly as massive as originally thought.Population III stars were not only smaller than believed, they actually formed in binary systems, that is, pairs of stars that orbit a common center, say the results of a new simulation."For a long time the common wisdom was that these Population III stars formed alone," said Brian O'Shea, a Michigan State University assistant professor of physics and astronomy  who did the research with two colleagues. "Researchers also have believed that these stars were incredibly massive – up to 300 times the size of our own sun. Unfortunately, the observations just didn't jibe with the simulations we created."

For a baseball pitcher, control is critical but shoulder strength remains vital to remaining healthy during a long season. A new study presented at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Annual Meeting in Keystone, Colorado, suggested that testing a pitcher's shoulder strength through a series of exercises during the preseason may help prevent serious injury during the season.The study measured the preseason shoulder strength for all pitchers in a professional baseball organization over a five-year period (2001-2005). Over the course of the five-year period, 144 major and minor league baseball pitchers were analyzed using a specific protocol by a single athletic trainer.

The National Children's Study is an ideal opportunity to get valuable information about pregnant women's health, the most underrepresented population in clinical research, say ethicists at Duke University Medical Center, Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities. The new national study aims to follow children from conception to adulthood.Although the Institute of Medicine began recommending that pregnant women be included in clinical trials 15 years ago, pregnant women remain excluded from trials for many reasons, primarily ethical concerns raised in the balance between mothers, a consenting group, and babies who have no choice.

Researchers have developed an environmentally-friendly lubricating grease based on ricin oil and cellulose derivatives, according to the journal Green Chemistry. Bonus: the new formula does not include any of the contaminating components used to manufacture traditional industrial lubricants.Lubricants used in industry are made from non-biodegradable components, such as synthetic oils or petroleum derivatives, and thickeners made with metallic soaps or polyurea derivatives (a family of synthetic polymers). These are currently the best performers, but they also imply more problems from an environmental perspective. 

In an article that makes us want to review the "Studies you won't need to read" section,  UC  San Diego School of Medicine researchers examined HIV infection among male clients of female prostitutes - in Tijuana, of all places - and decided and found that over half of male clients had recently had other risky sexual behavior, like unprotected sex.Unprotected sex with a tijuana prostitute  is what poker players would call a 'tell' when it comes to risky behavior.   They also reported a high prevalence of drug use.