A brief chat about firearm safety can sharply increase the willingness among gun owners to consider temporarily storing their firearms outside the home during times of crisis, a step that could help reduce suicide risk, according to a Rutgers-led study.

 

Researchers at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers found that Project Safe Guard more than doubled the proportion of participants who initially opposed out-of-home firearm storage but later became open to the practice after a roughly 15-minute intervention.

Over the past two decades, photonic-crystal surface-emitting lasers (PCSELs) have shown promise as a type of advanced semiconductor laser useful in defense and aerospace-related applications. Typically, these devices are made with photonic crystal patterns, which repeat across the area of the device. But new research from the lab of electrical and computer engineering professor Kent Choquette has reported the successful demonstration of a quasi-periodic photonic-crystal surface-emitting laser (QPCSEL). Fabricated with their buried dielectric platform, the group’s device highlights a new avenue for creating tunable and more reliable semiconductor lasers. Their findings appear in Applied Physics Letters.

Researchers at the University of Maryland and their collaborators have cloned a gene that makes wheat resistant to predation by Hessian fly larvae and demonstrated its direct interaction with a protein produced by the insect. The research breaks through a longstanding barrier to understanding and engineering pest resistance in wheat.

Biologic medicines have transformed the treatment of cancer, autoimmune diseases, migraine, inflammatory disorders and many other diseases. Yet, their growing use among women of reproductive age constitutes a major clinical challenge in that therapeutic IgG antibodies are actively transported across the placenta to the developing fetus. Evidence that supports safe use of such therapeutics during pregnancy remains limited.

Now, researchers from the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital, together with national and international collaborators, have uncovered that the placenta distinguishes between antibodies and albumin, a finding that may reshape the future design of biologic medicines with reduced fetal exposure.