More than two years after Washington legalized marijuana, parents and teens may be hazy on the specifics of the law, if the findings of a new study are any indication. University of Washington research, published recently in Substance Use & Misuse, found that only 57 percent of Washington parents surveyed knew the legal age for recreational marijuana use and just 63 percent knew that homegrown marijuana is illegal under the law. And while 71 percent of 10th-graders correctly identified the legal age, fewer than half (49 percent) knew how much marijuana can legally ...

MISSOULA - Researchers at the University of Montana, Princeton University, Stanford University and Rutgers University, among others, are collecting new measurements of tropical forests to gain a better understanding of how they respond to seasonal climate variations. The new information helps predict how the global tropics may react to future climate change. These findings are detailed in a paper titled "Photosynthetic seasonality of global tropical forests constrained by hydroclimate," which was published in Nature Geoscience this month. "A better understanding ...

The relationship between human disease and environmental management has been the subject of extensive research, especially given the recent outbreaks of Ebola, SARS and other zoonotic infectious diseases that transmit from animals to humans. The fieldwork of UC Santa Barbara community ecologist Hillary Young is a good example of researchers' continuing effort to understand exactly how environmental management affects disease emergence. In East Africa, Young examines the direct impacts of human disturbance on landscape and wildlife, as well as a variety of factors affecting ...

Tropical Cyclone Haliba formed east of the island nation of Madagascar in the Southern Indian Ocean and is now affecting the La Reunion and Mauritius islands. NASA's Terra satellite passed over Haliba on March 9 and captured an image of the storm that showed the eastern quadrant was affecting the two smaller islands. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Cyclone Haliba on March 9 at 06:35 UTC (2:35 a.m. EDT). The image showed both La Reunion and Mauritius islands were covered ...

Although many people value receiving information about incidental findings identified from genomic sequencing, not everyone wants to know about genetic conditions regardless of potential health implications, found a study of Canadian preferences in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). An incidental finding refers to discovery of a genetic condition that may cause a disease, but the finding is unrelated to why genomic testing was initially ordered by the physician. For example, a test to determine if there is a genetic cause of a patient's colon cancer may find ...

In a screen of more than 100,000 potential drugs, only one, harmine, drove human insulin-producing beta cells to multiply, according to a study led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, funded by JDRF and the National Institutes of Health, and published online today in Nature Medicine. Diabetes results from too few insulin-producing "beta cells" in the pancreas secreting too little insulin, the hormone required to keep blood sugar levels in the normal range. The disease affects 380 million people worldwide, and leads to major medical complications: ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- An analysis of changes to the climate that occur over several decades suggests that these changes are happening faster than historical levels and are starting to speed up. The Earth is now entering a period of changing climate that will likely be faster than what's occurred naturally over the last thousand years, according to a new paper in Nature Climate Change, committing people to live through and adapt to a warming world. In this study, interdisciplinary scientist Steve Smith and colleagues at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National ...

Activity in a brain area known as the dorsal posterior insula is directly related to the intensity of pain, a brain imaging study of 17 people has found. Researchers at the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain used a new brain imaging technique to look at people experiencing pain over many hours. Activity in only one brain area, the dorsal posterior insula, reflected the participants' ratings of how much the pain hurt. These results, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, could help detect pain in people with limited communication ...

Scientists have discovered another 15 genetic 'hot-spots' that can increase a woman's risk of developing breast cancer, according to research published today (Monday) in Nature Genetics. In a study funded by Cancer Research UK*, scientists compared tiny variations in the genetic make-up of more than 120,000 women of European ancestry, with and without breast cancer, and identified 15 new variations - called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) - that are linked to a higher risk of the disease. This new discovery means that a total of more than 90 SNPs associated with ...

Kansas City, MO. -- All the cells in an organism carry the same instruction manual, the DNA, but different cells read and express different portions of it in order fulfill specific functions in the body. For example, nerve cells express genes that help them send messages to other nerve cells, whereas immune cells express genes that help them make antibodies. In large part, this highly regulated process of gene expression is what makes us fully functioning, complex beings, rather than a blob of like-minded cells. Despite its importance, researchers still do not completely ...

PHILADELPHIA--Treating metastatic melanoma with a triple threat--including radiation therapy and two immunotherapies that target the CTLA4 and PD-1 pathways--could elicit an optimal response in more patients, one that will boost the immune system's attack on the disease, suggests a new study from a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Penn's Abramson Cancer Center published today in Nature. The study, led by senior authors Andy J. Minn, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Radiation Oncology, Robert Vonderheide, MD, DPhil, the Hanna Wise Professor in Cancer Research, ...

A collaborative effort between investigators at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University School of Medicine and Georgia Institute of Technology has led to the development of a non-invasive method to image simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) replication in real-time, in vivo. This approach, which is reported today in Nature Methods' Advance Online Publication, is based on immune positron-emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) and allows for the capture of viral dynamics of SIV, the animal model of human HIV infection. This novel approach ...

A new study of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a blood cancer that primarily affects young children, has revealed that the disease has two distinct subtypes, and provides preliminary evidence that about 13 percent of ALL cases may be successfully treated with targeted drugs that have proved highly effective in the treatment of lymphomas in adults. Usually emerging in children between 2 and 5 years of age, ALL occurs when the proliferation of white blood cells known as lymphocytes spirals out of control. The current standard of care for ALL employs high doses of chemotherapy ...

A process that is too fast to be measured and analysed. Yet a group of international scientists did not lose heart and conceived a sort of highly sophisticated moviola film-editing system, which allowed them to observe - for the first time in a direct manner - an effect underlying high-temperature conductivity. The results of their work have been published in Nature Physics on Monday 9 March 2015. Superconductors have properties that make them potentially very interesting for technology (examples of application include magnetic levitation trains). The road to a true application ...

Narcoleptics suffer from bouts of sleepiness and sleep attacks, which impair their ability to function in daily life. But the precise cause of narcolepsy has long eluded scientists, and the cure for the devastating neurological disorder afflicting an estimated three million people worldwide -- and one in 3,000 Americans -- remains at bay. A new study published in Pharmacological Research by the world's leading autoimmune disease expert, Tel Aviv University's Prof. Yehuda Shoenfeld, finds that narcolepsy bears the trademarks of a classic autoimmune disorder and should ...

BOSTON, MA - Healthcare spending is at an all-time high in the U.S., yet young African-American men see little benefit, according to Boston Medical Center (BMC) researchers' Viewpoint commentary published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The researchers note that black men have a life expectancy nearly five years less than white men. While heart disease and cancer contribute to this decreased life expectancy, homicide also plays a large role. From ages 1 to 14, homicide is either the second or third leading cause of death ...

The extraordinary promise of quantum information processing -- solving problems that classical computers can't, perfectly secure communication -- depends on a phenomenon called "entanglement," in which the physical states of different quantum particles become interrelated. But entanglement is very fragile, and the difficulty of preserving it is a major obstacle to developing practical quantum information systems. In a series of papers since 2008, members of the Optical and Quantum Communications Group at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics have argued that optical ...

LINCOLN, NE - Turfgrass professionals have created seed mixes specifically blended to ensure disease and insect resistance, water use efficiency, and tolerance to traffic. For example, a commonly used mixture of kentucky bluegrass (KBG) and perennial ryegrass (PRG) seed offers advantages such as rapid germination and establishment and provides turf cover that can compete with weeds. A new study shows how initial composition of KBG:PRG in the seed mixture affects species composition over multiple years in the Midwest, and offers recommendations about seeding ratios for optimal ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Inhaled Nitric Oxide (iNO) is a drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration that is commonly used in term and near-term neonates who have severe respiratory failure caused by pulmonary hypertension. Over the last decade there have been multiple large studies trying to determine a clinical use for iNO in preterm neonates, but despite evidence of short-term benefit, this drug has not been shown to improve long-term outcomes in preemies. Still, the drug is commonly being used in this population, Mayo Clinic Children's Center and co-authors say in ...

LAWRENCE -- Libya hasn't been terribly hospitable for scientific research lately. Since the 2011 toppling of Muammar Gaddafi, fighters tied to various tribes, regions and religious factions have sewn chaos across that nation. Most recently, ISIS militants in Libya committed mass beheadings that triggered retaliatory bombings by neighboring Egypt. "Currently, it is obviously very dangerous to be a Western scientist in Libya," said Christopher Beard, Distinguished Foundation Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas. "Even Libyan citizens ...

Lots of potentially useful medical information is getting lost. McGill researchers discovered this when they looked into the lack of reporting of information from "stalled drug" trials in cancer, cardiovascular and neurological diseases. "Stalled drugs" are drugs that fail to make it to the market either because they prove to be ineffective or unsafe or both. Because only one in ten of the drugs that goes into human testing actually gets licensed, most of the information collected in developing new drugs is currently being lost. This is despite the fact that this information ...

In a study published in the current online issue of JAMA Psychiatry, an international team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, report finding a highly accurate blood-based measure that could lead to development of a clinical test for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) risk in males as young as one to two years old. The test could be done in community pediatric settings. The degree of accuracy, they said, out performs other behavioral and genetic screens for infants and toddlers with ASD described in literature. The ...

Eating a vegetarian diet was associated with a lower risk of colorectal cancers compared with nonvegetarians in a study of Seventh-Day Adventist men and women, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Although great attention has been paid to screening, primary prevention through lowering risk factors remains an important objective. Dietary factors have been identified as a modifiable risk factor for colorectal cancer, including red meat which is linked to increased ...

Rural suicide rates were nearly double those of urban areas for both males and females in a study of suicide deaths in young people ages 10 to 24, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics. Suicide is a public health problem and in 2010 suicide was the third leading cause of death in young people behind only unintentional injuries and homicides, according to the study background. Cynthia A. Fontanella, Ph.D., of Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, and coauthors provide an updated comparison of rural and urban youth suicides by analyzing ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - The adolescent and young-adult suicide rate in the United States was almost twice as high in rural settings than in urban areas between 1996 and 2010, and new research suggests that the gap appears to be widening. Of the nearly 67,000 suicides analyzed, the rate of suicide for both males and females living in rural areas was about double the rate in cities. The research, published in JAMA Pediatrics, also showed that gun use has decreased and that hanging has become a more common method of youth suicide for both males and females. Suicide rates by ...