No one really knows how the High Plains got so high. About 70 million years ago, eastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming, western Kansas and western Nebraska were near sea level. Since then, the region has risen about 2 kilometers, leading to some head scratching at geology conferences. Now researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder have proposed a new way to explain the uplift: Water trapped deep below Earth's crust may have flooded the lower ...

This news release is available in German. The water content of soil has a great impact on the regional climate, but many of the connections are still not clear. Researchers at ETH Zurich's Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, together with colleagues from Belgium and the Netherlands, examined when and where it rains most frequently on summer afternoons. They wanted to clarify whether more rain fell on days when the soil was dry or moist. And where exactly it was most likely to rain on these days. The contradictory findings of other scientists was the reason ...

Good supervisors aren't easily duped by the motives of underlings who go the extra mile - they know when an employee is sucking up to them because of personal ambition, or when such actions truly have what's best for the organization at heart. This is one of the insights from a study in Springer's Journal of Business and Psychology, led by Magda Donia of the University of Ottawa in Canada. Supervisors play an important role in making decisions about rewards and promotions within an organization. They should therefore be able to effectively distinguish between so-called ...

About four billion years ago, the young planet would have had enough water to cover its entire surface in a liquid layer about 140 metres deep, but it is more likely that the liquid would have pooled to form an ocean occupying almost half of Mars's northern hemisphere, and in some regions reaching depths greater than 1.6 kilometres. "Our study provides a solid estimate of how much water Mars once had, by determining how much water was lost to space," said Geronimo Villanueva, a scientist working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, USA, and lead ...

PITTSBURGH--The ancient Mongols have a reputation for having been fierce warriors. A new study out of the University of Pittsburgh shows them to have been unmatched polluters. Graduate student Aubrey Hillman recently published a paper in the journal Environmental Science & Technology that shows copper and silver production in southwest China produced tremendous quantities of harmful heavy metals, such as lead, silver, zinc, and cadmium, starting in 1500 BC and continuing through the era of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368 AD). Hillman is near to earning her PhD from ...

(BOSTON and CAMBRIDGE) - In nature, pores can continuously control how a living organism absorbs or excretes fluids, vapors and solids in response to its environment; for example, tiny holes invisible to the naked eye called stomata cover a plant's leaves and stems as gated openings through which oxygen, carbon dioxide and water vapors are transported in and out during photosynthesis and respiration. And some scientists have proposed that micropores in the tissues of the air sacs of human lungs can open or close to modulate fluid flow based on changes in air pressure or ...

PITTSBURGH--"Why doesn't she just leave?" is a timeworn question about women trapped in relationships that are physically and/or emotionally abusive to them. Economic dependence is clearly part of the story--many women lack the financial means to leave and find themselves trapped by both poverty and abuse. Of the women who do attempt to escape the abuse, some opt to petition a judge for a civil restraining order, also called a Protection From Abuse (PFA) order, for protection from abuse, harassment, threats, or intimidation. Research shows that PFAs can promote women's ...

Fast food ads aimed at kids fail to de-emphasize toy premiums, making them deceptive by industry self-regulation standards. They also fail to emphasize healthy menu items, investigators at Dartmouth-Hitchcock's Norris Cotton Cancer Center have found. The research was published in the March 4 edition of the journal PLOS ONE. "Kids were just as likely to notice the toy premiums in the kid's ads as they were the food, when their own standards require a de-emphasis on premiums compared to foods," said James D. Sargent, MD, researcher at Dartmouth-Hitchcock's Norris Cotton ...

African American men at elevated risk for developing type 2 diabetes may have fewer beneficial and more harmful intestinal bacteria, according to research presented by University of Illinois at Chicago endocrinologist Dr. Irina Ciubotaru at the ENDO 2015 meeting in San Diego. "The 'signature' of the gut microbiota - the relative abundance of various bacteria and other microbes in the digestive system - could be another useful tool in assessing a person's risk for developing diabetes," said Ciubotaru. Ciubotaru and her colleagues, including principal investigator Dr. Elena ...

San Diego, CA--Losing as little as 30 minutes of sleep per day on weekdays can have long-term consequences for body weight and metabolism, a new study finds. The results will be presented Thursday, March 5, at ENDO 2015, the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in San Diego. "While previous studies have shown that short sleep duration is associated with obesity and diabetes, we found that as little as 30 minutes a day sleep debt can have significant effects on obesity and insulin resistance at follow up," said lead study author Professor Shahrad Taheri, MBBS, PhD, ...

San Diego, CA--Obesity is associated with substantial increases in older adults' hospitalizations, emergency room admissions and use of outpatient health care services, according to a new study of 172,866 Medicare Advantage members throughout the U.S. Results of the one-year study will be presented Thursday at the Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego. "There is an urgent need to control the obesity epidemic and its excessive health and economic burden on both individuals and the health care system," said lead investigator Brandon Suehs, PharmD, PhD, a ...

In a large study of middle-aged to elderly smokers, men were more likely than women to have osteoporosis and fractures of their vertebrae. Smoking history and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) were independent risk factors for low bone density among both men and women in the study, which has been published online in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society. Current guidelines do not recommend osteoporosis screening for men. While current smoking is a recognized risk factor for osteoporosis, neither smoking history nor COPD are among criteria for bone-density ...

PHILADELPHIA, PA, March 6, 2015 - Researchers at Dartmouth College examined a database of television advertisements broadcast between March 2012 and February 2013 on 139 network and cable channels and found that more than 608 hours of advertisements for energy drinks were aired. Nearly half of those advertisements, 46.5%, appeared on networks with content themes likely to appeal to adolescents. "Although our results do not support the idea that manufacturers intentionally target adolescents with their advertising, ads for energy drinks were primarily aired on channels ...

San Diego, CA-- In obese females, a close relationship may exist between their disinhibition (detrimental eating and behavioral characteristics) that limits successful weight loss, and impaired metabolism, new research shows. The results will be presented Thursday, March 5, at ENDO 2015, the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in San Diego. "Obese females those who are particularly unlikely to lose weight are also those who need to lose weight the most," said lead study author Julia Passyn Dunn, MD, instructor in the Department of Medicine of Vanderbilt University ...

The popular dietary supplement ubiquinone, also known as Coenzyme Q10, is widely believed to function as an antioxidant, protecting cells against damage from free radicals. But a new study by scientists at McGill University finds that ubiquinone is not a crucial antioxidant -- and that consuming it is unlikely to provide any benefit. The findings, by a team led by Professor Siegfried Hekimi in McGill's Department of Biology, are published today (March 6) in Nature Communications. Ubiquinone is a lipid-like substance found naturally in all cells of the body. Cells need ...

PITTSBURGH, March 6, 2015 - A healthy lifestyle intervention program administered at the workplace and developed by the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health significantly reduces risk factors for diabetes and heart disease, according to a study reported in the March issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. The program was well-received by participants at Bayer Corp., who lost weight and increased the amount of physical activity they got each day, when compared with a control group in the study, which was funded by the National ...

Alongside Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, disc-shaped galaxies, or the cochlea of the human ear, scientists can now count sap-feeding butterfly proboscises as aligned with the Golden Ratio. The mysterious Golden Ratio (also known as Phi (φ), the Golden Mean, or the Divine Number) is an incommensurable number - a relationship between two irrational numbers - which occurs organically throughout the universe. Beginning as 1.61803, the Golden Ratio continues forever without repeating, similar to Pi (π). Artists and architects have employed the number to guide ...

San Diego, CA-- People who quit smoking have improved metabolic effects, a new study finds. The results will be presented in a poster Thursday, March 5, at ENDO 2015, the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in San Diego. "In general, people think that when they stop smoking, they are going to gain weight and their diabetes and insulin resistance are going to get worse, but we didn't find that," said principal investigator Theodore C. Friedman, MS, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Internal Medicine of Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, ...

San Diego, CA-- The skeletons of obese adolescents are usually more dense than those of normal weight teens, but after gastric bypass surgery, most return to normal density within two years, a new study finds. The results will be presented Thursday, March 5, at ENDO 2015, the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society, in San Diego. "In the short term, the participants' bone density decreased proportionally to the successful weight reduction resulting from surgery. After two years, though, their average bone density was back in the normal range," said lead study author Eva ...

San Diego, CA-- A letrozole pill once a week restored fertility in obese, infertile men and led to their partners giving birth to two full-term, healthy babies, according to a new study from Canada. The results will be presented Thursday at the Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego. "To our knowledge, this is the first report of successful pregnancies with the use of letrozole at this low dose in men," said the study's lead investigator, Lena Salgado, MD, an endocrinology fellow at the Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM). Letrozole ...

San Diego, CA-- A new study finds that after weight loss surgery, people whose breath has high concentrations of both hydrogen and methane gases have a lower percentage weight loss than other bariatric surgery patients do. The study results will be presented Thursday at the Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego. "Our new study suggests that gastrointestinal colonization with methanogens makes it harder to lose weight after bariatric surgery," said lead investigator Ruchi Mathur, MD, director of the Diabetes Outpatient Treatment and Education Center at Cedars-Sinai, ...

San Diego, CA-- The extract of onion bulb, Allium cepa, strongly lowered high blood glucose (sugar) and total cholesterol levels in diabetic rats when given with the antidiabetic drug metformin, according to a new study. The study results will be presented Thursday at The Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego. "Onion is cheap and available and has been used as a nutritional supplement," said lead investigator Anthony Ojieh, MBBS (MD), MSc, of Delta State University in Abraka, Nigeria. "It has the potential for use in treating patients with diabetes." To ...

A new study finds that not only low but also high maternal thyroid hormone levels during early pregnancy may significantly lower the infant's IQ later in childhood. The study results, which will be presented Thursday at the Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego, suggest that the common practice of treating pregnant women who have mild thyroid hormone deficiency may pose unexpected risks to the developing baby's brain. Doctors already know that low thyroid hormone levels in pregnant women are linked to lower child IQ scores as well as other risks to the ...

San Diego, CA-- Abaloparatide-SC, an injectable drug being studied for the treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis, reduces the rate of new spinal fractures by a statistically significant 86 percent and as well as statistically significant reductions in the fracture rate at other parts of the body, a phase 3 clinical trial finds. Results of the ACTIVE fracture prevention trial will be described in a late-breaking oral presentation Thursday at the Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego. "The investigational drug abaloparatide-SC, if approved, may offer patients ...

The ability of some breathalyzers widely sold to the UK public to detect potentially unsafe levels of breath alcohol for driving, varies considerably, reveals research published in the online journal BMJ Open. The findings call into question the regulatory process for approving these sorts of devices for personal use, say the researchers, particularly as false reassurance about a person's safety to drive could have potentially catastrophic consequences. The researchers compared the diagnostic accuracy (sensitivity) of three personal use breathalysers to detect alcohol ...