Two ocean hot spots have been found to be the potential drivers of the hottest summers on record for the Central US in 1934 and 1936. The research may also help modern forecasters predict particularly hot summers over the central United States many months out. The unusually hot summers of 1934/36 broke heat records that still stand today. They were part of the devastating dust bowl decade in the US when massive dust storms travelled as far as New York, Boston and Atlanta and silt covered the decks of ships 450km off the east coast. Research by Dr Markus Donat from the ...

Doping is damaging the image of sport without benefitting athletes' results, according to University of Adelaide research. Researchers from the University's School of Medical Sciences collated sporting records (including Olympic and world records) of male and female athletes across 26 sports, between 1886 and 2012. Comparisons were made between pre-1932 records (when steroids became available) and post, and it was found that the times, distances and other results did not improve as expected in the doping era. The findings were published in the Journal of Human Sport ...

Australian scientists have shown that a specific gene determines the development and function of important cells that bridge the gap between our fast-acting 'innate', and slower-acting 'adaptive', immune systems. STAT3, as it's known, helps shield us against a variety of fungal and bacterial infections, and understanding its role may help in finding ways to boost our defenses. Most of us barely give our immune system a thought, unless we are struck down by disease, or are born with an immunodeficiency that leaves us susceptible to constant attack. 'Primary immunodeficiencies', ...

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the main component of our genetic material. It is formed by combining four parts: A, C, G and T (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine), called bases of DNA combine in thousands of possible sequences to provide the genetic variability that enables the wealth of aspects and functions of living beings. Two more bases: the Methyl- cytosine and Methyl-adenine In the early 80s, to these four "classic" bases of DNA was added a fifth: the methyl-cytosine (mC) derived from cytosine. And it was in the late 90's when mC was recognized as the main ...

Offshore the Svalbard archipelago, methane gas is seeping out of the seabed at the depths of several hundred meters. These cold seeps are a home to communities of microorganisms that survive in a chemosynthetic environment - where the fuel for life is not the sun, but the carbon rich greenhouse gas. There is a large, and relatively poorly understood, community of methane-consuming bacteria in this environment. They gorge on the gas, control its concentration in the ocean, and stop it from reaching the ocean surface and released into the atmosphere. In the atmosphere ...

A new study shows how pharmacies might collaborate with physicians and families to reduce asthma-related illness. The Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center study found that pharmacies in neighborhoods with high rates of asthma-related emergency-room use and hospitalization filled fewer asthma controller medications compared to asthma rescue medications. Asthma-related illness is particularly common among people living in poverty or with limited access to medical care. Previous studies have shown that disparities in asthma rates are perpetuated by underuse of ...

As the realities of legalized marijuana take hold in four states and the District of Columbia, legislators and regulators could learn a lot from the successes -- and failures -- of the tobacco and alcohol industries in keeping their harmful products out of the hands of children and adolescents. So say three Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers in a commentary published May 4 in the journal Pediatrics. "The early days of marijuana legalization present a unique window of opportunity to create a regulatory environment that minimizes youth access," ...

A group of Cambridge computer scientists have set a new gold standard for openness and reproducibility in research by sharing the more than 200GB of data and 20,000 lines of code behind their latest results - an unprecedented degree of openness in a peer-reviewed publication. The researchers hope that this new gold standard will be adopted by other fields, increasing the reliability of research results, especially for work which is publicly funded. The researchers are presenting their results at a talk today (4 May) at the 12th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design ...

PHILADELPHIA - Gene therapy for Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), an inherited disorder that causes loss of night- and day-vision starting in childhood, improved patients' eyesight within weeks of treatment in a clinical trial of 15 children and adults at the Scheie Eye Institute at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. New results involving a subset of patients from the ongoing trial show that these benefits peaked one to three years after treatment and then diminished. The findings are published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. In ...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (May 3, 2015) -- A Tufts University study sheds new light on the process by which DNA repair occurs within the cell. In research published in the May 15 edition of the journal Genes & Development and available May 4 online in advance of print, Tufts University biologist Catherine Freudenreich and her co-authors show that expanded repeats of the CAG/CTG trinucleotide (CAG) in yeast shift to the periphery of the cell nucleus for repair. This shift is important for preventing repeat instability and genetic disease. CAG expansions are significant ...

Young people are aware of the risks of cyberbullying but perceive others as being more at risk than themselves. Young women are more vulnerable to this perception than young men. This is the finding of a study by Dr Lucy Betts and Sondos Metwally from Nottingham Trent University (NTU) that will be presented as part of the poster presentation session at the British Psychological Society's Annual Conference next week (Thursday 7 May 2015) hosted in Liverpool. A survey, designed to measure how vulnerable young people felt to cyberbullying and how vulnerable they felt ...

PHOENIX and SAN FRANCISCO -- May 1, 2015 -- Led by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and UC San Francisco (UCSF), a comprehensive genetic review of treatment strategies for glioblastoma brain tumors was published today in the Oxford University Press journal Neuro-Oncology. The study, Towards Precision Medicine in Glioblastoma: The Promise and The Challenges, covers how these highly invasive and almost-always-deadly brain cancers may be treated, reviews the continuing challenges faced by researchers and clinicians, and presents the hope for better treatments ...

Young children with autism spectrum disorder, who also have serious behavioral problems, showed improved behavior when their parents were trained with specific, structured strategies to manage tantrums, aggression, self-injury, and non-compliance. The findings from this parent training study by Yale and Emory University researchers were published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a chronic condition beginning in early childhood and defined by impaired social communication and repetitive behavior. ...

Expanding what we know about college students mixing alcohol with energy drinks, investigators from Dartmouth's Norris Cotton Cancer Center found teens aged 15-17 years old who had ever mixed alcohol with energy drinks were four times more likely to meet the criteria for alcohol use disorder than a teen who has tried alcohol but never mixed it with an energy drink. The Dartmouth team, led by James D. Sargent, MD with first author Jennifer A. Emond, MSc, PhD published "Energy drink consumption and the risk of alcohol use disorder among a national sample of adolescents and ...

Procrastination is the thief of time that derails New Year's resolutions and delays saving for college or retirement, but researchers have found a way to collar it. The trick? Think of the future as now. "The simplified message that we learned in these studies is if the future doesn't feel imminent, then, even if it's important, people won't start working on their goals," said Daphna Oyserman, lead researcher and co-director of the USC Dornsife Mind and Society Center. Through a series of scenarios, Oyserman and co-author Neil Lewis Jr. of the University of Michigan ...

Shopping online or in catalogs is great for many reasons: to while away time on a snowy day; to avoid the holiday crush at the local mall; to do ultra-efficient comparison shopping; to enjoy a world of choice at your fingertips. But if you need a pair of shoes for the party tonight? Not so much. Online and catalog retailers pondering whether to add physical stores to their customers' buying options can look to recent research by marketing professors Koen Pauwels and Scott A. Neslin for valuable insights on the interplay among the various channels. In "Building with ...

With major funding from several groups, including NSERC, an SFU doctoral student has made a key discovery regarding Fraser River sockeye's vulnerability to sea lice. Recently published research indicates that juvenile Fraser River sockeye salmon that are highly infected with sea lice are 20 per cent less successful at consuming food than their lightly infected counterparts. Sean Godwin, a Simon Fraser University doctoral biology student is the lead author of a study, co-authored by SFU biologists John Reynolds and Larry Dill (emeritus), and University of Toronto researcher ...

Researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine conducted the first population-based study that characterizes the association and temporal relationship between gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) and other cancers. The results, published by Cancer on April 30, indicate that one in 5.8 patients with GIST will develop additional malignancies before and after their diagnosis. Specifically, patients with GIST are more likely to develop other sarcomas, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, carcinoid tumors, melanoma, colorectal, esophageal, pancreatic, hepatobiliary, non-small cell lung, ...

ALEXANDRIA, VA, MAY 1, 2015 -- A statistical analysis of data from 20 industrial countries covering the period 1970 to 2012 suggests housing market pricing cycles -- normal, boom and bust phases -- have become longer over the last four decades. The study also found that longer down phases can have dire consequences on national and international economies. While relatively short-lived housing booms tend to deflate, more prolonged booms are likely to spiral out of control. Similarly, compared to short housing busts, longer housing busts are more likely to turn into chronic ...

Most new patents are combinations of existing ideas and pretty much always have been, even as the stream of fundamentally new core technologies has slowed, according to a new paper in the Journal of the Roayl Society Interface by Santa Fe Institute researchers Hyejin Youn, Luis Bettencourt, Jose Lobo, and Deborah Strumsky. Youn and colleagues reached those conclusions sifting through the records of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Dating back to 1790, the records feature an elaborate system of technology codes -- a vocabulary of sorts, in which any new invention ...

NEW YORK, NY (May 1, 2015) -- Bats are masters of flight in the night sky, capable of steep nosedives and sharp turns that put our best aircrafts to shame. Although the role of echolocation in bats' impressive midair maneuvering has been extensively studied, the contribution of touch has been largely overlooked. A study published April 30 in Cell Reports shows, for the first time, that a unique array of sensory receptors in the wing provides feedback to a bat during flight. The findings also suggest that neurons in the bat brain respond to incoming airflow and touch signals, ...

In proof-of-concept experiments, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine demonstrate the ability to tune medically relevant cell behaviors by manipulating a key hub in cell communication networks. The manipulation of this communication node, reported in this week's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, makes it possible to reprogram large parts of a cell's signaling network instead of targeting only a single receptor or cell signaling pathway. The potential clinical value of the basic science discovery is the ability ...

Dispersal and adaptation are two fundamental evolutionary strategies available to species given an environment. Generalists, like dandelions, send their offspring far and wide. Specialists, like alpine flowers, adapt to the conditions of a particular place. Ecologists have typically modeled these two strategies, and the selective pressures that trigger them, by holding one strategy fixed and watching how the other evolves. New research published in the journal Evolution illustrates the dramatic interplay during the co-evolution of dispersal and adaptation strategies. "This ...

WASHINGTON --An intervention in the emergency department designed to encourage tobacco cessation in smokers appears to be effective. Two and a half times more patients in the intervention group were tobacco-free three months after receiving interventions than those who did not receive the interventions, according to a study published online Friday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ( END ...

(BOSTON) -- If you opt to wear soft contact lenses, chances are you are using hydrogels on a daily basis. Made up of polymer chains that are able to absorb water, hydrogels used in contacts are flexible and allow oxygen to pass through the lenses, keeping eyes healthy. Hydrogels can be up to 99 percent water and as a result are similar in composition to human tissues. They can take on a variety of forms and functions beyond that of contact lenses. By tuning their shape, physical properties and chemical composition and infusing them with cells, biomedical engineers have ...