Sydney, Australia: Patterns of peak rainfall during storms will intensify as the climate changes and temperatures warm, leading to increased flash flood risks in Australia's urban catchments, new UNSW Australia research suggests. Civil engineers from the UNSW Water Research Centre have analysed close to 40,000 storms across Australia spanning 30 years and have found warming temperatures are dramatically disrupting rainfall patterns, even within storm events. Essentially, the most intense downpours are getting more extreme at warmer temperatures, dumping larger volumes ...

New York, NY, June 8, 2015 - Professional physician associations consider certain routine tests before elective surgery to be of low value and high cost, and have sought to discourage their utilization. Nonetheless, a new national study by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center finds that despite these peer-reviewed recommendations, no significant changes have occurred over a 14-year period in the rates of several kinds of these pre-operative tests. The results are to publish online on June 8, 2015 in JAMA Internal Medicine. "Our findings suggest that professional ...

Both statin and nonstatin cholesterol-lowering drugs were associated with memory loss in the first 30 days after patients started taking the medications when compared with nonusers, but researchers suggest the association may have resulted because patients using the medications may have more contact with their physicians and therefore be more likely to detect any memory loss, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. Acute memory loss associated with the use of statins has been described in case reports and case studies, as well as in some studies, ...

Researchers at University of Helsinki, Finland, and Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, discovered previously uncharacterized mutational patterns in the human regulatory genome, especially in gastrointestinal tract cancers. The study was published in Nature Genetics. The research led by Academy Professor Lauri Aaltonen and Professor Jussi Taipale, was based on study of more than two hundred whole genomes of colorectal cancer samples. The scientists detected a distinct accumulation of mutations specifically at sites where the proteins CTCF and cohesin bind the DNA. Both ...

It's a notion that might be pulled from the pages of science-fiction novel - electronic devices that can be injected directly into the brain, or other body parts, and treat everything from neurodegenerative disorders to paralysis. It sounds unlikely, until you visit Charles Lieber's lab. A team of international researchers, led by Lieber, the Mark Hyman, Jr. Professor of Chemistry, an international team of researchers developed a method for fabricating nano-scale electronic scaffolds that can be injected via syringe. Once connected to electronic devices, the scaffolds ...

Genes linked to creativity could increase the risk of developing schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, according to new research carried out by researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London. Previous studies have identified a link between creativity and psychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorder, but it has remained unclear whether this association is due to common genes. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, this new study lends support to the direct influence on creativity of genes found in people with schizophrenia ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - If you want people to choose healthier foods, emphasize the positive, says a new Cornell University study. Published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the Cornell Food and Brand Lab study showed that when it comes to nutrition education, dos work a lot better than don'ts. This is especially important when determining policies that encourage healthy eating. Media note: A short video explaining the research, as well as an informational graphic and additional details about this research can be found at, http://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/OP/Hidden_Costs ...

This news release is available in French. A new joint study by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, both at McGill University, has cast some light on the brain mechanisms that support people's voting decisions. Evidence in the study shows that a part of the brain called the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (LOFC) must function properly if voters are to make choices that combine different sources of information about the candidates. The study found that damage to the LOFC leads people to base their vote ...

A new study gives insight into the mental health of children and teens with Down syndrome and the behavioral medications that medical caregivers sometimes prescribe for them. The Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center study shows that teens and young adults between the ages of 12 and 21 were significantly more likely to be on psychotropic medications than children 5 to 11 years old. Among children less than 12, the odds of being on a psychotropic medication increased with age for all classes of medications studied. For 12 to 18 year olds, the odds of being on ...

NEW YORK, NY (June 8, 2015) - Columbia University scientists have developed a computational method to investigate the relationship between birth month and disease risk. The researchers used this algorithm to examine New York City medical databases and found 55 diseases that correlated with the season of birth. Overall, the study indicated people born in May had the lowest disease risk, and those born in October the highest. The study was published in the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association. "This data could help scientists uncover new disease risk factors," ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Researchers from Brown University are developing a new algorithm to help robots better plan their actions in complex environments. It's designed to help robots be more useful in the real world, but it's being developed with the help of a virtual world -- that of the video game Minecraft. Basic action planning, while easy for humans, is a frontier of robotics. Part of the problem is that robots don't intuitively ignore objects and actions that are irrelevant to the task at hand. For example, if someone asked you to empty the trashcan ...

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have uncovered physical mechanisms allowing the manipulation of magnetic information with heat. These new phenomena rely on the transport of thermal energy, in contrast to the conventional application of magnetic fields, providing a new, and highly desirable way to manipulate magnetization at the nanoscale. "In our study, we make use of the fact that a heat current passing through a magnetic material creates a separation of electron spins. This process creates a current of magnetic dipoles that we use to manipulate ...

DARIEN, IL - A new study suggests that increased restless legs syndrome (RLS) severity is associated with subsequent increased risk of stroke. Results show that increased RLS severity is associated with subsequent increased risk of stroke, after considering other known risk factors such as age, smoking, hypertension, and unhealthy diet. There were 161 incident stroke cases during the six-year follow-up. "We were surprised at the importance of taking into account RLS severity -- it was only severe RLS, not milder RLS, that was associated with increased risk of stroke," ...

DARIEN, IL - A new study suggests that lower life satisfaction is linked to sleep problems during midlife. Respondents with higher life satisfaction reported shorter sleep onset latency (SOL). Sleep onset delay among those with low life satisfaction could be the result of worry and anxiety, as reported elsewhere. These findings support the idea that life satisfaction is interlinked with many measures of sleep and sleep quality, suggesting that improving one of these variables might result in improving the other. "These findings support the idea that life satisfaction ...

URBANA, Ill. - Emerging adults aged 18 to 25 are often criticized for their poor interpersonal skills, sense of entitlement, and casual work ethic. But a new University of Illinois study suggests that fault-finding adult co-workers could make a big difference in young workers' leadership development by developing relationships with them, modeling the behaviors they wish to see, and providing leadership growth opportunities. "Young adults in our study had learned a lot from mentors who modeled initiative, drive, and persistence; demonstrated how to communicate with confidence ...

DARIEN, IL - A new study suggests that children with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) have poorer sleep and more daytime sleepiness in comparison to healthy children. Results show that children with TBI were more likely to experience greater daytime sleepiness, sleep disturbances and a poorer overall sleep quality. The children with TBI also had impaired emotional, physical and social functioning when compared to healthy children. "We were surprised that children with a TBI experienced persistent increases in daytime sleepiness and decreases in sleep quality compared ...

A nuclear physicist and an archaeologist at the University of York have joined forces to produce a unique appraisal of the cultural significance of one of the world's most important locations for scientific inquiry. In a paper published in the journal, Landscapes, Professor David Jenkins, of the Department of Physics at York, and Dr John Schofield, Head of the University's Department of Archaeology, have investigated CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider on the Franco-Swiss border. Situated between the Jura Mountains and the Alps, CERN was established in 1954 to ...

This news release is available in German. Material scientists at ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam have developed a new type of sensor that can measure carbon dioxide (CO2). Compared with existing sensors, it is much smaller, has a simpler construction, requires considerably less energy and has an entirely different functional principle. The new sensor consists of a recently developed composite material that interacts with CO2 molecules and changes its conductivity depending on the concentration of CO2 in the environment. ...

Jackson Laboratory researchers have shown that using an electric current to deliver the CRISPR/Cas9 system, in order to engineer genetic changes in laboratory mice, is highly efficient and significantly improves the system's throughput. CRISPR/Cas9 has significantly enhanced the precision, speed and ease with which experimental organisms can be genetically modified in order to create models of human diseases. Mice carrying mutations in single or multiple genes or other modifications can be created in one step by injecting the CRISPR/Cas9 system into zygotes (the cells ...

Metabolism experts are increasingly convinced that obesity and many of the pathogenic changes it entails, such as Metabolic Syndrome and type 2 diabetes, are a result of chronic inflammatory processes in fatty (adipose) tissue. The adipose tissue of obese people exhibits higher-than-normal quantities of almost all types of immune and inflammatory cells. "We are quite convinced that immune cells play a role in the pathogenic consequences of obesity," says Professor Hans-Reimer Rodewald of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ). "But ...

Scientists have discovered a trigger that allows breast cancer cells to spread to the lungs. They have found that blocking the signals in mice with breast cancer greatly reduces the number of secondary tumours found in the lungs. The findings could lead to new therapies that stop the progression of breast cancer, the researchers at the University of Edinburgh say. The majority of deaths from breast cancer are caused by the tumour spreading to other parts of the body. The lung is often one of the first organs to be affected. Researchers at the University's MRC Centre ...

NEW YORK (June 8, 2015) - Whole genome sequencing can quickly isolate the specific strain of bacteria causing an outbreak, identify the source of contamination, and enable rapid infection prevention to stop the spread of infection, according to a study published today. The findings, based on the examination of an outbreak of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in an Australian neonatal unit, appear in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. "Bacteria, such as P. aeruginosa, have evolved into many strains and frequently ...

WASHINGTON, June 8, 2015 -- With Caitlyn Jenner's recent transition in the news, more attention is being paid to the transgender community. A big part of gender transition is hormone replacement therapy (HRT). This week, Reactions talks about the chemistry of HRT and what happens when the body undergoes major shifts in estrogen and testosterone -- two very powerful hormones. Check it out here: http://youtu.be/l5knvmy1Z3s. Subscribe to the series at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions, and follow us on Twitter @ACSreactions to be the first to see our latest videos. INFORMATION: The ...

WASHINGTON -- A new way of rapidly identifying bacteria, which requires a slight modification to a simple microscope, may change the way doctors approach treatment for patients who develop potentially deadly infections and may also help the food industry screen against contamination with harmful pathogens, according to researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South Korea. Described this week in The Optical Society (OSA) journal, Optics Express, the new approach involves bouncing laser light off individual bacteria under ...

SAN FRANCISCO (June 8, 2015) -- Scientists from the California Academy of Sciences are celebrating World Ocean's Day with a slew of brand new marine discoveries--more than 100 species that are likely new to science. The Philippines is home to the most biologically diverse waters on Earth, and remains the centerpiece of the Academy's multi-year exploration of the Coral Triangle's biological treasures. Over the course of this seven-week undertaking, funded by the National Science Foundation, scientists collected countless marine specimens, including rare and new species of ...