Better oral hygiene and regular dental visits may play a role in slowing cognitive decline as people age, although evidence is not definitive enough to suggest that one causes the other. The findings, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, come from the first systematic review of studies focused on oral health and cognition--two important areas of research as the older adult population continues to grow, with some 36% of people over age 70 already living with cognitive impairments.

New York, NY--March 31, 2016--In a new study recently published in Nature Nanotechnology, researchers from Columbia Engineering, Cornell, and Stanford have demonstrated heat transfer can be made 100 times stronger than has been predicted, simply by bringing two objects extremely close--at nanoscale distances--without touching. Led by Columbia Engineering's Michal Lipson and Stanford Engineering's Shanhui Fan, the team used custom-made ultra-high precision micro-mechanical displacement controllers to achieve heat transfer using light at the largest magnitude reported to date between two parallel objects.

A review article has been published in the journal Current Pharmaceutical Design which provides an overview of therecent literature discussing the different clinical forms of heart disease resulting from virus infections including the prognosis, and current therapies. Many common viruses causing respiratory illness, including enteroviruses and influenza viruses among others, have the potential to infect the heart and initiate an immune response to the infection. These viruses can also produce mild to lethal cardiac injury.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health contributed to a new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that finds the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) largely unchanged from two years ago, at one in 68 children (or 1.46 percent). Boys were 4.5 times more likely to be identified with ASD than girls, an established trend. The rate is one in 42 among boys and one in 189 among girls.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT researchers have developed a compact, portable pharmaceutical manufacturing system that can be reconfigured to produce a variety of drugs on demand.

Just as an emergency generator supplies electricity to handle a power outage, this system could be rapidly deployed to produce drugs needed to handle an unexpected disease outbreak, or to prevent a drug shortage caused by a manufacturing plant shutdown, the researchers say.

"Think of this as the emergency backup for pharmaceutical manufacturing," says Allan Myerson, an MIT professor of the practice in the Department of Chemical Engineering. "The purpose is not to replace traditional manufacturing; it's to provide an alternative for these special situations."

BOSTON - (March 31, 2016) - In obesity, the body's immune system can treat tissues as if they are suffering from a low-grade chronic infection. This obesity-induced inflammation is an important contributor to insulin resistance, a condition that can progress into type 2 diabetes. Researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center now have pinpointed a major inflammatory role for "natural killer" (NK) immune cells in abdominal fat--a type of tissue strongly implicated in insulin resistance.

Researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan have found that a deep-brain structure called the habenula contains two neural circuits that work in a complex interplay to influence whether a fight will be a win or loss.

In humans and other social animals, fighting is an important mode of maintaining a group's social structure. The question of how such aggression is regulated can now be answered, at least for a certain kind of fish, and the key is not brawn, but the brain. Researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan have found that a deep-brain structure called the habenula contains two neural circuits that work in a complex interplay to influence whether a fight will be a win or loss.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT biological engineers have created a programming language that allows them to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that give new functions to living cells.

Using this language, anyone can write a program for the function they want, such as detecting and responding to certain environmental conditions. They can then generate a DNA sequence that will achieve it.

"It is literally a programming language for bacteria," says Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering. "You use a text-based language, just like you're programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell."

A near-atomic level map of Zika virus shows its structure to be largely similar to that of dengue virus and other flaviviruses, but with a notable difference in one key surface protein, report scientists funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The variation in the Zika envelope (E) glycoproteins-- 180 of which are packed on the virus's outer shell-- may provide clues to better understand how Zika virus enters human cells and suggests ways to combat the virus with drugs or vaccines aimed at the newly detailed region.

HOUSTON - (March 31, 2016) - Rice University scientists have determined that two-dimensional boron is a natural low-temperature superconductor. In fact, it may be the only 2-D material with such potential.

Rice theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his co-workers published their calculations that show atomically flat boron is metallic and will transmit electrons with no resistance. The work appears this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.

The hitch, as with most superconducting materials, is that it loses its resistivity only when very cold, in this case between 10 and 20 kelvins (roughly, minus-430 degrees Fahrenheit). But for making very small superconducting circuits, it might be the only game in town.