Focus: Hidden - Tennessee

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Researchers spent four decades studying a group of mathematically talented adolescents, finding that by mid-life they were extraordinarily accomplished and enjoyed a high level of life satisfaction. Gender, however, played a significant role in how they pursued—and defined—career, family and success. Intellectually gifted women tracked for 40 years were found to earn less money, be less present in STEM fields, and work fewer hours than their male counterparts. Despite that, they expressed a high level of personal satisfaction and sense of achievement, defining success more broadly than men to include family and community service. These observations come from the most recent round of results from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), the largest longitudinal research project of its kind. The results were posted this week to Psychological Science.

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Generally considered a negative trait, entitlement, in small doses, can actually have the positive effect of boosting creativity

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Patients with this condition often have a history of acute pulmonary embolism, or blood clots in the lung. For reasons that are poorly understood a small percentage of them do not resolve the clots, and they form chronic blood clots that turn into scar tissue and obstruct the pulmonary arteries. This puts strain on the right heart, which can lead to heart failure without treatment. Nov. 18 is CTEPH Awareness Day.

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Using a code developed for GPU supercomputing architectures, including that of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Cray XK7 Titan, to simulate the evolution of the Milky Way galaxy, a team of researchers from the Netherlands and Japan is a Gordon Bell Prize finalist. The prize recognizes outstanding achievement in high-performance computing and will be present by the Association for Computing Machinery at SC14 on November 20.

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility has signed a contract with IBM to bring a next-generation supercomputer to Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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A team of researchers from Vanderbilt University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory reports that it has discovered an entirely new form of crystalline order that simultaneously exhibits both crystal and polycrystalline properties and holds promise for improving the efficiency of thermoelectric devices.

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Vanderbilt University Medical Center is among a handful of organizations engaged to provide expertise and data to the Sentinel System, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration program designed to monitor the safety of drugs and medical devices that have reached market.

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New research finds that no matter where you earn your graduate degree, the prestige of your undergraduate institution continues to affect earnings. In fact, college graduates who earn their undergraduate degree from a less prestigious university and a graduate degree from an elite university earn much less than those who attend both an elite undergraduate and graduate school. And it is unlikely their salary will ever catch up.

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An international collaboration has identified frequent mutations in two genes that often occur together in Ewing sarcoma (EWS) and that define a subtype of the cancer associated with reduced survival. The research, conducted by the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital-Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project and the Institut Curie-Inserm through the International Cancer Genome Consortium, appears in the current issue of the scientific journal Cancer Discovery.

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A team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has made an important advancement in understanding a classic transition-metal oxide, vanadium dioxide, by quantifying the thermodynamic forces driving the transformation. The results are published in the Nov. 10 advance online issue of Nature.

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Scientists have made the first direct observations of a one-dimensional boundary separating two different, atom-thin materials, enabling studies of long-theorized phenomena at these interfaces.

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For much the same reason LCD televisions offer eye-popping performance, a thermomagnetic processing method can advance the performance of polymers.

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In Tennessee, the introduction in 2010 of a new pneumococcal vaccine for infants and young children coincides with a 27 percent decline in pneumonia hospital admissions across the state among children under age 2.

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Alternative fuels researcher Cliff Ricketts is taking another cross-country journey using no gasoline, this time using a process to turn waste animal fat and waste vegetable oil into fuel. Ricketts and a small team, including students, will take his 1981 pickup truck across the U.S.

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Benefit of microgrids—small systems powered by renewables and energy storage devices.

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A University of Tennessee, Knoxville, study finds that nonprofit organizations aiming to protect biodiversity show little evidence of responding to economic signals, which could limit the effectiveness of future conservation efforts.

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Senior citizens are at no higher risk for complications from cosmetic surgery than younger patients, according to a recent study by plastic surgeons at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

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Supplementing written heart screening guidelines with telephone counseling from specially trained nurses more than doubled the likelihood that adult survivors of childhood cancer received recommended heart checks, according to results from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS). St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital investigators led the research, whose findings appear in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

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1) With the addition of a dash of a common solvent, researchers realized an efficiency gain of about 36 percent for organic solar cells. 2) An innovative computational tool could reduce uncertainties and the time required to decide where to drill for gas and oil. 3) The current source inverter takes direct current and converts it into alternating current, boosting the voltage by up to three times. 4) Batteries that boast higher energy for the same weight, lower cost and longer life.

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St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has named Richard Gilbertson, M.D., Ph.D., scientific director for the institution. The position is in addition to his current leadership responsibilities as St. Jude Comprehensive Cancer Center director and executive vice president. Gilbertson takes over the scientific director position from James R. Downing, M.D., who was appointed St. Jude president and chief executive officer earlier this year.

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Researchers studying iron-based superconductors are combining novel electronic structure algorithms with the high-performance computing power of the Titan supercomputer to predict spin dynamics, or the ways electrons orient and correlate their spins in a material.