WASHINGTON - Fear of police, language barriers, lack of knowledge of cardiac arrest symptoms and financial concerns prevent Latinos - particularly those of lower socioeconomic status - from seeking emergency medical help and performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), according to a study published online yesterday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Barriers to Calling 911 and Learning and Performing Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) for Residents of Primarily Latino, High-Risk Neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado"). "Residents of low-income, minority neighborhoods ...

WHAT: Two medical imaging techniques, called positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT), could be used in combination as a biomarker to predict the effectiveness of antibiotic drug regimens being tested to treat tuberculosis (TB) patients, according to researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. With multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) on the rise worldwide, new biomarkers are needed to determine whether a particular TB ...

El Niño, the abnormal warming of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, is a well-studied tropical climate phenomenon that occurs every few years. It has major impacts on society and Earth's climate - inducing intense droughts and floods in multiple regions of the globe. Further, scientists have observed that El Niño greatly influences the yearly variations of tropical cyclones (a general term which includes hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones) in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. However, there is a mismatch in both timing and location between this climate ...

While Ebola has attracted much of the world's attention recently, a severe HIV epidemic rages on around the world and in sub-Saharan Africa in particular. Globally, more than 34 million people are infected with HIV; in sub-Saharan Africa alone, 3 million new infections occur annually. In an attempt to stop the spread of HIV, governments in the region are considering providing antiretroviral drugs to people who do not have the virus but are at risk for becoming infected. Such drugs are known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. Although the conventional strategy -- ...

Intracranial hypertension--increased blood pressure inside the head--can predict a child's risk of death from malaria. A study published on December 4th in PLOS Pathogens reports that accumulation of white blood cells impairs the blood flow out of the brain and causes blood pressure increases in mice with experimentally induced cerebral malaria. Ute Frevert, from New York University School of Medicine, USA, and colleagues compared the blood vessel architecture in the brain between two different mouse malaria models. Mice infected with one particular species of the malaria ...

The Social Cost of Carbon puts a dollar value on the climate damages per ton of CO2 released, and is used by - among others -policymakers to help determine the costs and benefits of climate policies. In the latest issue of the journal Science, a group of economists and lawyers urge several improvements to the government's Social Cost of Carbon figure that would impose a regular, transparent and peer-reviewed process to ensure the figure is reliable and well-supported by the latest facts. "By providing an estimate of the damages from an extra ton of CO2 emissions, the ...

People regularly engage in sophisticated 'mentalizing' (i.e. guessing the intentions or beliefs of others) whenever they convince, teach, deceive, and so on. Research published this week in PLOS Computational Biology demonstrates the laws that govern these intuitions and how efficient they are for anticipating the behaviour of other people. Jean Daunizeau and colleagues from INSERM and CNRS combine mathematical modelling, experimental psychology and behavioural economics to measure the sophistication of human 'mentalizing'. The authors asked 26 participants to play ...

The Antarctic ice sheet is a giant water reservoir. The ice cap on the southern continent is on average 2,100 meters thick and contains about 70 percent of the world's fresh water. If this ice mass were to melt completely, it could raise the global sea level by 60 meters. Therefore scientists carefully observe changes in the Antarctic. In the renowned international journal Science, researchers from Germany, the UK, the US and Japan are now publishing data according to which water temperatures, in particular on the shallow shelf seas of West Antarctica, are rising. "There ...

In a new study, published in Science, researchers at Uppsala University demonstrate an association between smoking and loss of the Y chromosome in blood cells. The researchers have previously shown that loss of the Y chromosome is linked to cancer. Since only men have the Y chromosome, these results might explain why smoking is a greater risk factor for cancer among men and, in the broader perspective, also why men in general have a shorter life expectancy. Smoking is a risk factor for various diseases, not only lung cancer. Epidemiological data show that male smokers ...

Cholera is caused when the bacterium Vibrio cholerae infects the small intestine, resulting in severe diarrhea and vomiting, which can result in dehydration and death. The main treatment involves oral rehydration therapy, where the patient drinks water mixed with salts and glucose. But although proven to be enormously effective, there are concerns that the glucose content might actually worsen the disease. EPFL scientists have now shown that this is indeed the case, as glucose increases the toxicity of the cholera bacterium, whereas replacing glucose with starch can reduce ...

A public summer jobs program for high school students from disadvantaged neighborhoods in Chicago reduced violent crime arrests by 43 percent over a 16-month period, according to a new study from the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the University of Pennsylvania. The randomized controlled trial is published in the journal Science. This research comes as youth employment in the summer months, when teenagers are most likely to work, is near a 60-year low. The challenges facing minority and low-income youth are particularly stark; the 2010 employment rate for low-income ...

Magnetite (or Fe3O4) is an elaborate kind of rust - a regular lattice of oxygen and iron atoms. But this material plays an increasingly important role as a catalyst, in electronic devices and in medical applications. Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology have now shown that the atomic structure of the magnetite surface, which everybody had assumed to be well-established, has in fact been wrong all along. The properties of magnetite are governed by missing iron atoms in the sub-surface layer. "It turns out that the surface of Fe3O4 is not Fe3O4 at all, but ...

Highly expressed in the testis, a gene named Ranbp9 has been found to play a critical role in male fertility by controlling the correct expression of thousands of genes required for successful sperm production. A group of researchers led by Professor Wei Yan, at the University of Nevada School of Medicine has discovered that a loss of function of Ranbp9 leads to severely reduced male fertility due to disruptions in sperm development. A paper reporting this finding was published in PLOS Genetics on December 4, 2014. Male infertility affects 1 out of 20 men of reproductive ...

A genetic variant which causes smokers to smoke more heavily has been shown to be associated with increased body mass index (BMI) - but only in those who have never smoked, according to new research led by the University of Bristol, UK and published today in PLOS Genetics. It is likely that this finding has not come to light before because it has been masked by the effect of smoking, which acts to reduce BMI. Professor Marcus Munafo from Bristol's School of Experimental Psychology and colleagues studied a variant in the CHRNA5-A3-B4 gene cluster which is known to increase ...

Researchers from the Medical Research Council Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit (MRC LEU), University of Southampton have shed new light on how grip strength changes across the lifespan. Previous work has shown that people with weaker grip strength in midlife and early old age are more likely to develop problems, such as loss of independence and to have shorter life expectancy. However, there is little information on what might be considered a normal grip strength at different ages. This latest research, which combined information from 12 British studies and is published in ...

An international team, including scientists from DESY, has caught a light sensitive biomolecule at work with an X-ray laser. The study proves that X-ray lasers can capture the fast dynamics of biomolecules in ultra slow-motion, as the scientists led by Prof. Marius Schmidt from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee write in the journal Science. "Our study paves the way for movies from the nano world with atomic spatial resolution and ultrafast temporal resolution", says Schmidt. The researchers used the photoactive yellow protein (PYP) as a model system. PYP is a receptor ...

The temperature of the seawater around Antarctica is rising according to new research from the University of East Anglia. New research published today in the journal Science shows how shallow shelf seas of West Antarctica have warmed over the last 50 years. The international research team say that this has accelerated the melting and sliding of glaciers in the area, and that there is no indication that this trend will reverse. It also reveals that other Antarctic areas, which have not yet started to melt, could experience melting for the first time with consequences ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Scientists may have solved a long-standing enigma known as the African Humid Period - an intense increase in cumulative rainfall in parts of Africa that began after a long dry spell following the end of the last ice age and lasting nearly 10,000 years. In a new study published this week in Science, an international research team linked the increase in rainfall in two regions of Africa thousands of years ago to an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. The ...

A long-held assumption about the Earth is discussed in today's edition of Science, as Don L. Anderson, an emeritus professor with the Seismological Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology, and Scott King, a professor of geophysics in the College of Science at Virginia Tech, look at how a layer beneath the Earth's crust may be responsible for volcanic eruptions. The discovery challenges conventional thought that volcanoes are caused when plates that make up the planet's crust shift and release heat. Instead of coming from deep within the interior of the ...

VIDEO: Vanderbilt biologist Kenneth Catania describes his discovery that the electroshock system used by the electric eel to detect and immobilize prey is uncannily similar to the Taser. Click here for more information. The electric eel - the scaleless Amazonian fish that can deliver an electrical jolt strong enough to knock down a full-grown horse - possesses an electroshock system uncannily similar to a Taser. That is the conclusion of a nine-month study of the way in which ...

The "survival of the fittest" principle applies to cells in a tissue - rapidly growing and dividing cells are the fit ones. A relatively less fit cell, even if healthy and viable, will be eliminated by its more fit neighbors. Importantly, this selection mechanism is only activated when cells with varying levels of fitness are present in the same tissue. If a tissue only consists of less fit cells, then no so-called cell competition occurs. Molecular biologists from the University of Zurich and Columbia University are the first researchers to demonstrate in a study published ...

Since 2010, detections of Asian Carp environmental DNA or "eDNA" have warned scientists, policymakers, and the public that these high-flying invaders are knocking on the Great Lakes' door. Scientists capture tiny DNA-containing bits from water and use genetic analysis to determine if any Asian Carp DNA is present. New research published by Notre Dame scientists shows that the tools currently used for Asian Carp eDNA monitoring often fail to detect the fish. By comparison, the new eDNA methods described in this study capture and detect Asian Carp eDNA more effectively. The ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Among the billions and billions of stars in the sky, where should astronomers look for infant Earths where life might develop? New research from Cornell University's Institute for Pale Blue Dots shows where - and when - infant Earths are most likely to be found. The paper by research associate Ramses M. Ramirez and director Lisa Kaltenegger, "The Habitable Zones of Pre-Main-Sequence Stars" will be published in the Jan. 1, 2015, issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. Images and study: https://cornell.box.com/infantearths "The search for new, habitable ...

For nearly 40 years, one of the cornerstones of the study of adaptation has been the examination of "whole-organism performance capacities"--essentially, measures of the dynamic things animals do: how fast they can run; how hard they can bite; how far, fast, and high they can jump; and so on. Together, these functional attributes determine the performance of a species' ecology: the types of food one can eat; the ability to capture or locate prey; the ability to avoid predation; the ability of males to intimidate or, in some cases, prevent rival males from invading a territory; ...

Insects can transmit viral diseases to humans. Therefore, understanding how insects cope with viral infection, and what immune mechanisms are triggered, can be important to stop diseases transmission. In a study published in this week's issue of the scientific journal PLOS Pathogens*, researchers from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia (IGC; Portugal) now show that the entry route of the virus changes how the insect host responds to it. Using the fruit flies as a model of study, they discovered an immune mechanism that is specifically effective when flies are infected ...