Centralized ventilation systems that exchange heat between the air inside and outside a building often come with a lot of pipes and shafts while compact, decentralized ventilation systems distributed throughout a building can provide a real added-value both in terms of design, comfort and energy efficiency.

The Green Ventilation system promise to balance inbound and outbound air flow in such a way that it reduces heating and cooling requirements—a principle called balanced heat recovery. The advantage of this system is that it can be added to building envelope components such as windows, walls, insulation materials, terminal heating and cooling units and lintels.

By Marsha Lewis, Inside Science – Each year, about 32 billion bottles of wine are bought and sold around the world.  Each bottle contains about two and a half pounds of grapes, and to transform those grapes into a beverage with the perfect aroma, color, and taste, winemakers carefully monitor the complex chemistry bubbling away in wineries’ fermentation tanks.

“I would say the trickiest part of making wine is getting the flavors right,” said Linda Bisson, a yeast geneticist at the University of California, Davis.

CRISPR/Cas systems for genome editing have revolutionized biological research over the past three years, and their ability to make targeted changes in DNA sequences in living cells with relative ease and affordability is now being applied to clinical medicine and will have a significant impact on advances in drug and other therapies, agriculture, and food products.

The power and promise of this innovation are presented in the Review article "The Bacterial Origins of the CRISPR Genome-Editing Revolution published in Human Gene Therapy. 

Researchers have completed a large-scale research project conducted over a five-year period on the African continent to compile the first greenhouse gas budget of African rivers.

Covering 12 rivers spread across the entire continent of Africa, the study shows that greenhouse gas emissions from the rivers are very significant. The researchers trawled the African continent in order to analyze the streams of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), the three main GHG.

A new study has found that long-term stimulant abuse had more significant effects on brain volume in women compared with men.

The researchers sought to determine how the brains of people previously dependent on stimulants were different from the brains of healthy people. 

The researchers analyzed structural brain magnetic resonance imaging exams in 127 men and women, including 59 people (28 women and 31 men) who were previously dependent on cocaine, amphetamines and/or methamphetamine for an average of 15.7 years, and 68 people (28 women and 40 men) who were similar in age and were not previously dependent on those drugs.

Healing times for skin ulcers and bedsores can be reduced by a third with the use of low-intensity ultrasound - ultrasound transmits a vibration through the skin and wakes up cells in wounds helping to stimulate and accelerate the healing process. 

More than 200,000 patients in the UK suffer with chronic wounds every year at a cost of over £3.1 billion to the NHS, according to background information in the article. The ultrasound treatment, which also reduces the chance of wounds getting infected, is particularly effective when treating diabetics and the elderly. 

According to the World Health Organization, clinical depression carries the second heaviest burden of disability among all medical conditions worldwide (around 350 million people) and accounts for more than 8 percent of all U.S. years lived with disability. 

The findings of a recent study could potentially lead to new ways to predict risk for depression and treatments for the disease, using genome-wide association studies. 

Surgeries related to overuse elbow injuries, i.e. Tommy John Surgery, are more common among youth athletes than previously believed, according to research presented last week at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Annual Meeting in Orlando.

"Our results showed that 15-19 year-olds accounted for 56.7 percent of the Ulnar Collateral Ligament Reconstruction (UCLR) or Tommy John surgeries performed in the U.S. between 2007-2011. This is a significant increase over time with an average increase of 9.12 percent per year," said lead author, Brandon Erickson, MD of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois.

By Charles Choi, Inside Science -- Bloodcurdling screams in horror movies often send tingles down people's spines, even though they know such shrieks are fake. Now scientists have discovered the key ingredient of screams that activates the brain's fear circuitry. Inventors may have unknowingly copied this hair-raising acoustic feature into alarms found in cars and houses.

A humble soil additive used by millions of amateur and professional gardeners alike is set to slash the cost of the most effective form of insulation for buildings.

Brunel University London academic Dr. Harjit Singh has proved in the laboratory that vacuum insulation panels can be made with a core of perlite - the volcanic ore “popcorn” used in horticulture to improve drainage and water retention.

This dramatically reduces the cost of the panels which are normally made by surrounding a core of fumed silica with metallised PET envelope. Initial cost savings are estimated to be at least 30 per cent.