DENVER (Sept. 1, 2015) - While many planners focus on the threat of natural disasters to major metropolises around the world, a new study from the University of Colorado Denver shows smaller cities are often even less equipped to handle such catastrophes. "Small cities are often far away from where decisions get made and struggle to insert themselves into the agenda of decision-making bodies," said study author Andrew Rumbach, PhD, an assistant professor at the CU Denver College of Architecture and Planning, a major center of timely, topical and relevant research. "When ...

The unique properties found in the stunning iridescent wings of a tropical blue butterfly could hold the key to developing new highly selective gas detection sensors. Pioneering new research by a team of international scientists, including researchers from the University of Exeter, has replicated the surface chemistry found in the iridescent scales of the Morpho butterfly to create an innovative gas sensor. The ground-breaking findings could help inspire new designs for sensors that could be used in a range of sectors, including medical diagnostics, industry, and the ...

A team of researchers led by scientists at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency published a new map Sept. 1 that characterizes the Earth's radioactivity and offers new and potential future applications for basic science research and nonproliferation efforts. The Antineutrino Global Map 2015, or AGM2015, is an unprecedented experimentally-informed model of the Earth's natural and manmade antineutrino flux. The map uses open-source geophysical data sets and publicly available international antineutrino detection observational data to depict varying levels of radioactivity ...

London, UK - 1 Sept 2015: Most patients with a cardiac resynchronisation therapy (CRT) pacemaker would not benefit from the addition of a defibrillator, according to results from the CeRtiTuDe cohort study presented for the first time today at ESC Congress1 and published in European Heart Journal.2 "The choice between CRT with (CRT-D) or without (CRT-P) a defibrillator remains a contentious issue," said Professor Jean-Yves Le Heuzey, cardiologist at Georges Pompidou Hospital, René Descartes University in Paris, France. "No randomised clinical trial has been conducted ...

GREAT NECK, NY - A large, ambitious contrast of blood-thinning medications used during cardiac stent placement suggests that a very expensive drug offers no clear safety benefits over a much more affordable option, according to a prominent North Shore-LIJ researcher and cardiologist. An insightful editorial in the Online First New England Journal of Medicine on Sept. 1 by Peter Berger, M.D., Senior Vice President for Clinical Research at the North Shore-LIJ Health System, addresses the controversial comparison of the blood thinners heparin and bivalirudin (known commercially ...

London, UK (September 1, 2015) - Women leaving work to raise children have to redefine who they are, a study from the SAGE journal Human Relations finds. After exiting professional and managerial occupations, mothers are engaged in an ongoing mother/professional identity struggle, argue the researchers Shireen Kanji and Emma Cahusac. The process through which the mothers' choice is constructed as 'right' does not occur before their exit from work but manifests itself afterwards and intensifies over time, the study reveals. "Analysis of mothers' sense making reveals how ...

London, UK - 1 Sept 2015: Carbonated beverages are associated with out-of-hospital cardiac arrests of cardiac origin, according to results from the All-Japan Utstein Registry presented for the first time today at ESC Congress.1 The study in nearly 800 000 patients suggests that limiting consumption of carbonated beverages may be beneficial for health. "Some epidemiologic studies have shown a positive correlation between the consumption of soft drinks and the incidence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and stroke, while other reports have demonstrated that the intake of ...

More than half the world's population now lives in cities. As numbers continue to swell, decision-makers across the globe grapple with how best to accommodate growing resident numbers while maintaining healthy urban ecosystems. Previous research has demonstrated that urban green spaces and trees yield far-reaching benefits to humans, from increased happiness and health to absorbing surface water run-off and storing carbon. Researchers have long debated whether it is better to build compact developments with large parks or nature reserves, as often found in Europe and Japan, ...

A new development in engineering chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, called affinity tuning, can make the CAR T cells spare normal cells and better recognize and attack cancer cells, which may help lower the toxicity associated with this type of immunotherapy when used against solid tumors, according to a preclinical study. Many solid cancers have high levels of certain proteins such as ErbB2 and EGFR, which make them suitable targets for anticancer therapies. However, such proteins are also present at low levels in normal cells. Because of this, CAR T cells ...

Engineering chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells to lower their affinity for the protein epithelial growth factor receptor (EGFR) made the cells preferentially recognize and eliminate tumor cells that have high amounts of EGFR while sparing normal cells that have lower amounts of the protein, according to a preclinical study. CAR T cells that are currently being tested to treat B-cell malignancies target a specific protein present on leukemia and lymphoma, but these immune cells cannot distinguish cancer cells from normal cells, explained Cooper. Even though such ...

In recent years, an effort has been underway to redefine malnutrition in pediatric patients to include both the acute clinical population and the more traditional ambulatory populations. Identifying and treating malnutrition in pediatric patients is important from an acute standpoint and to ensure that children have enough nutrition to reach optimal final height and development. Pediatric malnutrition in the clinical setting was recently defined by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and A.S.P.E.N. as "an imbalance between nutrient requirements and intake that results ...

ANN ARBOR--Daily marijuana use among the nation's college students is on the rise, surpassing daily cigarette smoking for the first time in 2014. A series of national surveys of U.S. college students, as part of the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study, shows that marijuana use has been growing slowly on the nation's campuses since 2006. Daily or near-daily marijuana use was reported by 5.9 percent of college students in 2014--the highest rate since 1980, the first year that complete college data were available in the study. This rate of use is up ...

The fossil of a previously unknown species of 'sea scorpion', measuring over 1.5 meters long, has been discovered in Iowa, USA, and described in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. Dating back 460 million years, it is the oldest known species of eurypterid (sea scorpion) - extinct monster-like predators that swam the seas in ancient times and are related to modern arachnids. The authors named the new species Pentecopterus decorahensis after the 'penteconter' - an ancient Greek warship that the species resembles in outline and parallels in its predatory ...

Many of the most memorable stories in the history of science revolve around the conscious realization of an idea - the "Eureka!" moment. But what triggers these moments? Is there always some serendipitous event preceding a sudden epiphany, such as when Isaac Newton famously figured out gravity when he saw a falling apple? Writing in September's Physics World, Vitor Cardoso talks about how these questions led him on a quest of discovery through the web-based project The Birth of an Idea, which he co-founded with artist Ana Souse Carvalho. "Ana and I had been talking ...

Women living in poor areas in the UK are almost twice as likely to develop clinical anxiety as women in richer areas. However, whether men lived in poorer or richer areas made no difference to their levels of generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). These are amongst the main findings of a major survey on how socio-economic factors affect mental health in the UK. Generalised anxiety disorder is one of the most common mental health conditions in modern society, but little objective work has taken place to show the factors in society which can lead to the development of anxiety. ...

How do you convince someone with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders that they are ill if they don't want to believe it? If you don't recognize that you are ill, you may resist treatment, but is there something which causes this lack of awareness? Awareness of illness, also known as 'insight', is a serious problem in the treatment of psychotic patients. Now work being presented at the ECNP Congress in Amsterdam investigates whether concentrations of a marker of brain cell dysfunction are associated with impaired insight. Past studies have indicated that an area ...

Men with relatively unaggressive prostate tumors and whose disease is carefully monitored by urologists are unlikely to develop metastatic prostate cancer or die of their cancers, according to results of a study by researchers at the Brady Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins, who analyzed survival statistics up to 15 years. Specifically, the researchers report, just two of 1,298 men enrolled over the past 20 years in a so-called active surveillance program at Johns Hopkins died of prostate cancer, and three developed metastatic disease. "Our study should reassure ...

Lincoln, Neb., Aug. 31, 2015 -- Using an enormous X-ray laser -- one of only two such machines on Earth -- University of Nebraska-Lincoln physicist Matthias Fuchs and scientists from around the world beat formidable odds to observe one of the most fundamental interactions between X-rays and matter. The findings can aid future studies and may lead to novel new ways to diagnose matter in the future. Fuchs and his colleagues induced two X-ray photons to simultaneously collide with a single atom, which converts them into a single higher-energetic X-ray photon. It's a phenomenon ...

New York, NY--August 31, 2015--With the rise of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere, understanding the climate of tropical forests--the Amazon in particular--has become a critical research area. A recent NASA study showed that these regions are the biggest terrestrial carbon dioxide sinks on our planet, absorbing 1.4 billion metric tons of CO2 out of a total global terrestrial absorption of 2.5 billion. To simulate the tropical climate to learn more about its processes, climate scientists have typically been relying on general circulation models (GCMs) to simulate the tropical climate. ...

Longer, less frequent climate fluctuations may be contributing to abrupt and unexplained ecosystem shifts in the North Pacific, according to a study by the University of Exeter. Researchers have long been puzzled by two rapid and widespread changes in the abundance and distribution of North Pacific plankton and fish species that impacted the region's economically important salmon fisheries. In 1977, and again in 1989, the number of salmon in some areas plummeted, while it increased in other areas. These events have been dubbed regime shifts by researchers. Now, in ...

A new study led by a UC San Francisco sleep researcher supports what parents have been saying for centuries: to avoid getting sick, be sure to get enough sleep. The team, which included researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, found that people who sleep six hours a night or less are four times more likely to catch a cold when exposed to the virus, compared to those who spend more than seven hours a night in slumber land. This is the first study to use objective sleep measures to connect people's natural sleep habits and ...

Multiple System Atrophy (MSA), a neurodegenerative disorder with similarities to Parkinson's disease, is caused by a newly discovered type of prion, akin to the misfolded proteins involved in incurable progressive brain diseases such Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), according to two new research papers led by scientists at UC San Francisco. The findings suggest new approaches to developing treatments for MSA, which currently has no cure, but also raise a potential concern for clinicians or scientists who come in contact with MSA tissue. The new findings mark the first ...

Scientists have long associated sufficient sleep with good health. Now they've confirmed it. In 2009, Carnegie Mellon University's Sheldon Cohen found for the first time that insufficient sleep is associated with a greater likelihood of catching a cold. To do this, Cohen, who has spent years exploring psychological factors contributing to illness, assessed participants self-reported sleep duration and efficiency levels and then exposed them to a common cold virus. Now, Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty University Professor of Psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities ...

Researchers from CSIRO and Imperial College London have assessed how widespread the threat of plastic is for the world's seabirds, including albatrosses, shearwaters and penguins, and found the majority of seabird species have plastic in their gut. The study, led by Dr Chris Wilcox with co-authors Dr Denise Hardesty and Dr Erik van Sebille and published today in the journal PNAS, found that nearly 60 per cent of all seabird species have plastic in their gut. Based on analysis of published studies since the early 1960s, the researchers found that plastic is increasingly ...

URBANA, Ill. - Single mothers earn significantly less than single fathers, and they're penalized for each additional child they have even though the income of single fathers remains the same or increases with each added child in their family. Men also make more for every additional year they invest in education, further widening the gender gap, reports a University of Illinois study. "Single mothers earn about two-thirds of what single fathers earn. Even when we control for such variables as occupation, numbers of hours worked, education, and social capital, the income ...