Treatment with the anticholesterol medicine rosuvastatin calcium did not reduce the risk of fracture among men and women who had elevated levels of an inflammatory biomarker, according to a report published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. Fractures resulting from the bone-weakening disease osteoporosis are a burden facing an aging population. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) and osteoporosis may share common biological pathways with inflammation key to the development of atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and possibly the development of osteoporosis. Several studies ...

Parents of children who fell at home were more likely not to use safety gates and not to have taught their children rules about climbing on things in the kitchen, according to a study published online by JAMA Pediatrics. Falls send more than 1 million children in the United States and more than 200,000 children in the United Kingdom to emergency departments (EDs) each year. Costs for falls in the U.S. were estimated at $439 million for hospitalized children and $643 million for ED visits in 2005. Most of the falls involve beds, chairs, baby walkers, bouncers, changing ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- If decades of effort to bring more underrepresented minority students into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields were considered a grand chemistry experiment, then the modest results would suggest that while the formula may not be wrong, it may well be incomplete, according to a new article in the journal CBE-Life Sciences Education. "I don't necessarily want to say that we've been doing it wrong all along, it's just that there are other ideas we can bring in," said lead author Andrew G.Campbell, a Brown ...

Turn on any local TV weather forecast and you can get a map of where skies are blue or cloudy. But for scientists trying to figure out how clouds affect the Earth's environment, what's happening inside that shifting cloud cover is critical and hard to see. To investigate the layers and composition of clouds and tiny airborne particles like dust, smoke and other atmospheric aerosols, , scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland have developed an instrument called the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System, or CATS. The instrument, which launches to ...

NASA's Hurricane and Severe Storms Sentinel, or HS3, mission investigated four tropical cyclones in the 2014 Atlantic Ocean hurricane season: Cristobal, Dolly, Edouard and Gonzalo. The storms affected land areas in the Atlantic Ocean Basin and were at different stages during the investigations. The HS3 mission pilots flew a remotely piloted Global Hawk aircraft over Cristobal, Dolly, and Edouard and flew a manned WB-57 aircraft over Gonzalo. During the flights, Cristobal transitioned from a hurricane into an extra-tropical storm. Edouard strengthened from a tropical storm ...

December 1, 2014 --Years after the end of the Great Recession, child poverty remains widespread in America's largest cities. A paper just released by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), a research center based at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, reports that nearly three children in five living in Detroit are poor, according to the most recent Census figures. This rate has grown by 10 percentage points since the onset of the Great Recession in 2007. Most children in Cleveland and Buffalo also live in poverty, as do nearly half ...

West Orange, NJ. December 1, 2014. Kessler Foundation researchers have authored a new article that provides insight into the variable impact of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on long-term memory. The article, "Working memory capacity links cognitive reserve with long-term memory in moderate to severe TBI: a translational approach," was epublished ahead of print on October 7 in the Journal of Neurology (10.1007/s00415-014-7523-4). The authors are Joshua Sandry, PhD, John DeLuca, PhD, and Nancy Chiaravalloti, PhD, of Kessler Foundation. This study was supported by grants ...

WASHINGTON (Dec. 1 2014) -- For patients in cardiac arrest, administering epinephrine helps to restart the heart but may increase the overall likelihood of death or debilitating brain damage, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The study offers new data in an ongoing debate over the risks and benefits of using epinephrine to treat cardiac arrest, an often-fatal condition in which the heart stops beating. Epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, is a hormone that stimulates the heart and promotes the flow of blood. ...

Give therapists and psychiatrists information about the biology of a mental disorder, and they have less -- not more -- empathy for the patient, a new Yale study shows. The findings released Dec. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge the notion that biological explanations for mental illness boost compassion for the tens of millions of Americans who suffer from mental-health problems. Conventional wisdom suggests that biological explanations for psychiatric symptoms should reduce the blame patients receive for their behavior by making ...

Existing age estimates of American mastodon fossils indicate that these extinct relatives of elephants lived in the Arctic and Subarctic when the area was covered by ice caps--a chronology that is at odds with what scientists know about the massive animals' preferred habitat: forests and wetlands abundant with leafy food. In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers is revising fossil age estimates based on new radiocarbon dates and suggesting that the Arctic and Subarctic were only temporary ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - Multiple sclerosis (MS), an autoimmune disease of the brain and spinal cord, affects about 2.3 million people worldwide (400,000 in the United States). Affecting more women than men, it can be seen at any age, although it is most commonly diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 40. An unpredictable disease that disrupts the flow of information within the brain and between the brain and the body, MS is triggered when the immune system attacks the myelin sheath, the protective covering around the axons of nerve fibers. The "demyelination" that follows ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The house mouse, stickleback fish and honey bee appear to have little in common, but at the genetic level these creatures respond in strikingly similar ways to danger, researchers report. When any of these animals confronts an intruder, the researchers found, many of the same genes and brain gene networks gear up or down in response. This discovery, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that distantly related organisms share some key genetic mechanisms that help them respond to threats, said University of Illinois ...

The rapid evolution of HIV, which has allowed the virus to develop resistance to patients' natural immunity, is at the same time slowing the virus's ability to cause AIDS, according to new research funded by the Wellcome Trust. The study also indicates that people infected by HIV are likely to progress to AIDS more slowly - in other words the virus becomes less 'virulent' - because of widespread access to antiretroviral therapy (ART). Both processes make an important contribution to the overall goal of the control and eradication of the HIV epidemic. In 2013, there ...

The most commonly used medications for osteoporosis worldwide, bisphosphonates, may also prevent certain kinds of lung, breast and colon cancers, according to two studies led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Bisphosphonates had been associated by past studies with slowed tumor growth in some patients but not others, and the mechanism behind these patterns was unknown. In the studies published today, an international research team showed that bisphosphonates ...

Any science textbook will tell you we can't see infrared light. Like X-rays and radio waves, infrared light waves are outside the visual spectrum. But an international team of researchers co-led by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found that under certain conditions, the retina can sense infrared light after all. Using cells from the retinas of mice and people, and powerful lasers that emit pulses of infrared light, the researchers found that when laser light pulses rapidly, light-sensing cells in the retina sometimes get a double ...

INDIANAPOLIS and NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. -- Imperceptible variations in movement patterns among individuals with autism spectrum disorder are important indicators of the severity of the disorder in children and adults, according to a report presented at the 2014 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in November. For the first time, researchers at Indiana University and Rutgers University report developing a quantitative way to assess these otherwise ignored variations in movement and link those variations to a diagnosis. "This is the first time we have been able to explicitly ...

Two years ago, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) engineered Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to convert glucose into significant quantities of methyl ketones, a class of chemical compounds primarily used for fragrances and flavors, but highly promising as clean, green and renewable blending agents for diesel fuel. Now, after further genetic modifications, they have managed to dramatically boost the E.coli's methyl ketone production 160-fold. "We're encouraged that we could make such a large improvement in methyl ketone ...

In a remarkable collaborative effort between human and veterinary clinicians, a 29-year-old bottlenose dolphin recently underwent therapeutic bronchoscopy to treat airway narrowing, or stenosis, that was interfering with her breathing. The dolphin, a therapy animal for mentally and physically challenged children at Island Dolphin Care in Key Largo, Florida, is doing well one year after the procedure. "Many of the medical treatments and procedures used in humans were developed and tested in animals, and many are used in the care of both," said lead author Andrew R. Haas, ...

MADISON, Wis. -- In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue computer beat chess wizard Garry Kasparov. This year, a computer system developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison equaled or bested scientists at the complex task of extracting data from scientific publications and placing it in a database that catalogs the results of tens of thousands of individual studies. "We demonstrated that the system was no worse than people on all the things we measured, and it was better in some categories," says Christopher Ré, who guided the software development for a project while a UW ...

MADISON, Wis. -- If Brad Singer knew for sure what was happening three miles under an odd-shaped lake in the Andes, he might be less eager to spend a good part of his career investigating a volcanic field that has erupted 36 times during the last 25,000 years. As he leads a large scientific team exploring a region in the Andes called Laguna del Maule, Singer hopes the area remains quiet. But the primary reason to expend so much effort on this area boils down to one fact: The rate of uplift is among the highest ever observed by satellite measurement for a volcano that ...

ANN ARBOR--As much as two-thirds of Earth's carbon may be hidden in the inner core, making it the planet's largest carbon reservoir, according to a new model that even its backers acknowledge is "provocative and speculative." In a paper scheduled for online publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, University of Michigan researchers and their colleagues suggest that iron carbide, Fe7C3, provides a good match for the density and sound velocities of Earth's inner core under the relevant conditions. The model, if correct, could help ...

LA JOLLA, CA - December 1, 2014 - Researchers can now explore viruses, bacteria and components of the human body in more detail than ever before with software developed at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI). In a study published December 1 in the journal Nature Methods, the researchers demonstrated how the software, called cellPACK, can be used to model viruses such as HIV. "We hope to ultimately increase scientists' ability to target any disease," said Art Olson, professor and Anderson Research Chair at TSRI who is senior author of the new study. Putting cellPACK ...

MADISON, Wis. - In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue computer beat chess wizard Gary Kasparov. This year, a computer system developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison achieved something far more complex. It equaled or bested scientists at the complex task of extracting data from scientific publications and placing it in a database that catalogs the results of tens of thousands of individual studies. "We demonstrated that the system was no worse than people on all the things we measured, and it was better in some categories," says Christopher Ré, who guided the software ...

LEXINGTON, KY. (Dec. 1, 2014) -- A group of physiologists led by University of Kentucky's Tim McClintock have identified the receptors activated by two odors using a new method that tracks responses to smells in live mice. Their research was published in the latest edition of The Journal of Neuroscience. Using a fluorescent protein to mark nerve cells activated by odors, McClintock and his coworkers identified the receptors that allow mouse nerve cells to respond to two odors: eugenol, which is a component of several spices, most notably cloves, and muscone, known ...

When people hear about the dangers of the ozone hole, they often think of sunburns and associated health risks, but new research shows that ozone depletion changes atmospheric and oceanic circulation with potentially devastating effects on weather in the Southern Hemisphere weather. These could include increased incidence of extreme events, resulting in costly floods, drought, wildfires, and serious environmental damage. The ecosystem impacts documented so far include changes to growth rates of South American and New Zealand trees, decreased growth of Antarctic mosses, ...