Given that some climate change is already unavoidable--as just confirmed by the new IPCC report--investing in empowerment through universal education should be an essential element in climate change adaptation efforts, which so far focus mostly in engineering projects, according to a new study from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) published in the journal Science. The article draws upon extensive analysis of natural disaster data for 167 countries over the past four decades as well as a number of studies carried out in individual countries ...

Nora Besansky, O'Hara Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the University's Eck Institute for Global Health, has led an international team of scientists in sequencing the genomes of 16 Anopheles mosquito species from around the world. Anopheles mosquitoes are responsible for transmitting human malaria parasites that cause an estimated 200 million cases and more than 600 thousand deaths each year. However, of the almost 500 different Anopheles species, only a few dozen can carry the parasite and only a handful of species are responsible ...

Certain species of mosquitoes are genetically better at transmitting malaria than even some of their close cousins, according to a multi-institutional team of researchers including Virginia Tech scientists. Of about 450 different species of mosquitoes in the Anopheles genus, only about 60 can transmit the Plasmodium malaria parasite that is harmful to people. The team chose 16 mosquito species that are currently found in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, but evolved from the same ancestor approximately 100 million years ago. Today, the 16 species have varying ...

A growing number of academic researchers are mining social media data to learn about both online and offline human behavior. In recent years, studies have claimed the ability to predict everything from summer blockbusters to fluctuations in the stock market. But mounting evidence of flaws in many of these studies points to a need for researchers to be wary of serious pitfalls that arise when working with huge social media data sets, according to computer scientists at McGill University in Montreal and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Such erroneous results ...

American presidents spend their time in office trying to carve out a prominent place in the nation's collective memory, but most are destined to be forgotten within 50-to-100 years of their serving as president, suggests a study on presidential name recall released today by the journal Science. "By the year 2060, Americans will probably remember as much about the 39th and 40th presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, as they now remember about our 13th president, Millard Fillmore," predicts study co-author Henry L. Roediger III, PhD, a human memory expert at Washington ...

High-tech genomics and traditional Chinese medicine come together as researchers identify the genes responsible for the intense bitter taste of wild cucumbers. Taming this bitterness made cucumber, pumpkin and their relatives into popular foods, but the same compounds also have potential to treat cancer and diabetes. "You don't eat wild cucumber, unless you want to use it as a purgative," said William Lucas, professor of plant biology at the University of California, Davis and coauthor on the paper to be published Nov. 28 in the journal Science. That bitter flavor in ...

Human-induced changes to Earth's carbon cycle - for example, rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and ocean acidification - have been observed for decades. However, a study published this week in Science showed human activities, in particular industrial and agricultural processes, have also had significant impacts on the upper ocean nitrogen cycle. The rate of deposition of reactive nitrogen (i.e., nitrogen oxides from fossil fuel burning and ammonia compounds from fertilizer use) from the atmosphere to the open ocean has more than doubled globally over the last 100 years. ...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass.(November 27, 2014, 2 PM) -- New catalysts designed and investigated by Tufts University School of Engineering researchers and collaborators from other university and national laboratories have the potential to greatly reduce processing costs in future fuels, such as hydrogen. The catalysts are composed of a unique structure of single gold atoms bound by oxygen to several sodium or potassium atoms and supported on non-reactive silica materials. They demonstrate comparable activity and stability with catalysts comprising precious metal nanoparticles ...

People affected by a common inherited form of autism could be helped by a drug that is being tested as a treatment for cancer. Researchers who have identified a chemical pathway that goes awry in the brains of Fragile X patients say the drug could reverse their behavioural symptoms. The scientists have found that a known naturally occurring chemical called cercosporamide can block the pathway and improve sociability in mice with the condition. The team at the University of Edinburgh and McGill University in Canada identified a key molecule - eIF4E - that drives excess ...

Led by a University of Oklahoma professor, an international team of researchers has discovered the first evidence of milk consumption in the ancient dental calculus--a mineralized dental plaque--of humans in Europe and western Asia. The team found direct evidence of milk consumption preserved in human dental plaque from the Bronze Age to the present day. "The study has far-reaching implications for understanding the relationship between human diet and evolution," said Christina Warinner, professor in the OU Department of Anthropology. "Dairy products are a very recent, ...

Researchers have discovered a mechanism linked to the brain damage often suffered by stroke victims--and are now searching for drugs to block it. Strokes happen when the blood supply to part of the brain is cut off but much of the harm to survivors' memory and other cognitive function is often actually caused by "oxidative stress" in the hours and days after the blood supply resumes. A team from the University of Leeds and Zhejiang University in China studied this second phase of damage in laboratory mice and found a mechanism in neurons that, if removed, reduced the ...

A large-scale study led by the University of Exeter has found that boys are more likely to be stillborn than girls. Published in the journal BMC Medicine, the study reviewed more than 30 million births globally, and found that the risk of stillbirth is about ten percent higher in boys. This equates to a loss of around 100 000 additional male babies per year. The results could help to explain why some pregnancies go wrong. Around a quarter of stillbirths have no known cause. Of the remainder, many are linked to placental abnormalities but it is often unclear why the abnormalities ...

Drinking 3-5 cups of coffee per day may help to protect against Alzheimer's Disease, according to research highlighted in an Alzheimer Europe session report published by the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC), a not-for-profit organisation devoted to the study and disclosure of science related to coffee and health. The number of people in Europe aged over 65 is predicted to rise from 15.4% of the population to 22.4% by 20251 and, with an aging population, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease are of increasing concern. Alzheimer's Disease ...

Using world-leading research methods, the team of Dr David Wright and Prof Paul Holmes, working with Dr Jacqueline Williams from the Victoria University in Melbourne, studied activity in an area of the brain responsible for controlling movements when healthy participants observed a video showing simple hand movements and simultaneously imagined that they were performing the observed movement. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation - a technique where a coil placed over the scalp delivers a stimulation to the brain, activates neurons in the underlying area, and causes ...

TORONTO, Nov. 26, 2014 - Ontario students between Grades 9 and 12 who said they had a traumatic brain injury in their lifetime, also reported drug use rates two to four times higher than peers with no history of TBI, according to research published today in The Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation. "Overall, a teen with a history of TBI is at least twice as likely as a classmate who hasn't suffered a brain injury to drink alcohol, use cannabis or abuse other drugs," said Dr. Michael Cusimano, co-principal investigator of the study and a neurosurgeon at St. Michael's ...

This news release is available in French. The world's first clinical trial comparing three alternative treatments for type 1 diabetes was conducted in Montréal by researchers at the IRCM and the University of Montreal, led by endocrinologist Dr. Rémi Rabasa-Lhoret. The study confirms that the external artificial pancreas improves glucose control and reduces the risk of hypoglycemia compared to conventional diabetes treatment. The results, published today in the scientific journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, could have a significant impact on the ...

Leading medical experts today [Thursday 27 November] warn that rising numbers of deaths from liver disease - already the UK's third commonest cause of premature death - will be unavoidable without radical improvements in treatment and detection services, and tougher government policies to control the excessive alcohol use and obesity responsible for much of the national burden of liver disease. In a major new Lancet Commission, led by Professor Roger Williams, Director of the Institute of Hepatology, London, UK, doctors and medical scientists from across the UK call ...

Boston, MA. Wednesday, November 26, 2014 -- Researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard-affiliated hospitals have uncovered an easily detectable, "pre-malignant" state in the blood that significantly increases the likelihood that an individual will go on to develop blood cancers such as leukemia, lymphoma, or myelodysplastic syndrome. The discovery, which was made independently by two research teams affiliated with the Broad and partner institutions, opens new avenues for research aimed at early detection and prevention of ...

TORONTO, Nov. 26, 2014--The nervous system may play a bigger role in infections and autoimmune diseases than previously known. If researchers can learn more about that role, it could provide insight into diagnosing and treating everything from the stomach flu to rheumatoid arthritis. Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, in conjunction with the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y., reviewed the latest, most vigorous pre-clinical trials on this topic in a commentary published Wednesday (Nov. 26) in the New England Journal of Medicine. ...

An experimental vaccine to prevent Ebola virus disease was well-tolerated and produced immune system responses in all 20 healthy adults who received it in a Phase 1 clinical trial conducted by researchers from the National Institutes of Health. The candidate vaccine, which was co-developed by the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), was tested at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The interim results are reported online in advance of print in the New England Journal of Medicine. "The unprecedented scale ...

ANN ARBOR--The spaghetti-like internal structure of most plastics makes it hard for them to cast away heat, but a University of Michigan research team has made a plastic blend that does so 10 times better than its conventional counterparts. Plastics are inexpensive, lightweight and flexible, but because they restrict the flow of heat, their use is limited in technologies like computers, smartphones, cars or airplanes--places that could benefit from their properties but where heat dissipation is important. The new U-M work could lead to light, versatile, metal-replacement ...

MINNEAPOLIS - The majority of people with dementia have never seen a doctor about their memory and thinking problems, according to a new study published in the November 26, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. In the study, 55 percent of the people with dementia had never had an evaluation of their thinking and memory skills with a doctor. "These results suggest that approximately 1.8 million Americans over the age of 70 with dementia have never had an evaluation of their cognitive abilities," said study author ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Despite clear signs that their memory and thinking abilities have gone downhill, more than half of seniors with these symptoms haven't seen a doctor about them, a new study finds. University of Michigan researchers and their colleagues say their findings suggest that as many as 1.8 million Americans over the age of 70 with dementia are not evaluated for cognitive symptoms by a medical provider, which in some patients can lead to a failure to uncover modifiable causes of thinking or memory impairment. The study, published online in Neurology, the ...

Juvenile offenders with multiple psychiatric disorders when they are incarcerated in detention centers appear to be at high risk for disorders five years after detention, according to a report published online by JAMA Psychiatry. Psychiatric disorders are prevalent among juvenile detainees. However, far less is known about the young people after they leave detention. Karen M. Abram, Ph.D., of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, and co-authors looked at patterns of comorbidity (the presence of two or more disorders), how they change over ...

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. -- Nov. 26, 2014 -- An international team of scientists from the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and The Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) have completed a first-of-its-kind microbial analysis of a biological wastewater treatment plant that has broad implications for protecting the environment, energy recovery and human health. The study, published Nov. 26 in the scientific journal Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/ncomm6603), describes in unprecedented detail the complex relationships within a model ecosystem. The ...