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.