WASHINGTON, Dec. 8, 2014 -- There's probably a box of it in your fridge or cupboard, and it has a million uses: baking soda. Reactions is back with volume four of its popular Chemistry Life Hacks series, with tips on how to de-skunk your dog, clean your kitchen and supercharge your washing machine. Check out the latest in the series that's one-part MacGyver, one-part Mendeleev here: http://youtu.be/85diRmuk-ow. Subscribe to the series at Reactions YouTube, and follow us on Twitter @ACSreactions to be the first to see our latest videos. The American Chemical Society ...

Nearly half of all children in the United States are exposed to at least one social or family experience that can lead to traumatic stress and impact their healthy development - be it having their parents divorce, a parent die or living with someone who abuses alcohol or drugs - increasing the risk of negative long-term health consequences or of falling behind in school, suggests new research led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study reports on new data showing the magnitude of these adverse experiences in the child population in the U.S., ...

Voters are more willing to pay for a decreased risk of food-related illness than consumers, but female consumers are more willing to pay than male consumers, according to an international team of researchers. "The question is, what would consumers prefer?" said Amit Sharma, associate professor of hospitality management and finance, Penn State. "Would they prefer a market-driven, or a policy-driven approach? Either of those two approaches could lead to some price increase. Improving quality costs money, and food safety is no different." Sharma and colleagues wanted to ...

In the days shortly after giving birth, most mothers experience a period of increased calmness and decreased stress responses, but around 20% of mothers experience anxiety. Some women may become depressed, and around one in a thousand can develop psychosis. The latest evidence indicates that these distressing responses to motherhood are still poorly understood, but that animal research could provide valuable clues to their causes. Writing in the British Journal of Pharmacology, Dr David Slattery and Dr Clara Perani highlight that anxiety, depression and psychosis during ...

Wind turbine developments have no effect on property values of nearby homes and farms, according to new research from the University of Guelph. Published in a recent issue of the Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics, the study is believed the first peer-reviewed study on this issue in Canada. It was conducted by Richard Vyn, a professor in the Department of Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Ryan McCullough, a former U of G graduate student and now a policy analyst for Health Canada. They analyzed more than 7,000 home and farm sales in Melancthon ...

PORTICI, ITALY - As water becomes scarcer in arid and semiarid regions across the globe, the floriculture industry is looking for ways to reduce water usage and produce ornamental plants more efficiently. Chiara Cirillo and members of an Italian research team coordinated by Professor Stefania De Pascale, say that understanding flowering plants' response to water management is critical for optimizing the production of high-quality potted ornamentals. "Water-saving irrigation management strategies are among the options available to horticultural growers to reduce water consumption ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- By identifying the most efficient fishing practices and behaviors, a new model developed by economists at Duke University and the University of Connecticut could help fishermen land larger paychecks while reducing the risk of fishery depletion. "We're not talking about a trivial improvement. In some cases, we found that identifying the most efficient practices led to a 20 percent annual increase in total revenues if the fishery is managed differently," said Martin D. Smith, professor of environmental economics at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. "Under ...

The same research team that developed the first laser based on a living cell has shown that use of fluorescent proteins in a solid form rather than in solution greatly increases the intensity of light produced, an accomplishment that takes advantage of natural protein structures surrounding the light-emitting portions of the protein molecules. The findings from investigators Seok Hyun Yun, PhD, of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Malte Gather, PhD, of the University of St. Andrews in the U.K. appear in the online journal Nature ...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- The majority of streams in the Chesapeake Bay region are warming, and that increase appears to be driven largely by rising air temperatures. These findings are based on new U.S. Geological Survey research published in the journal Climatic Change. Researchers found an overall warming trend in air temperature of 0.023 C (0.041 F) per year, and in water temperature of 0.028 C (0.050 F) per year over 51 years. This means that air temperature has risen 1.1 C (1.98 F), and water temperature has risen 1.4 C (2.52 F) between 1960 and 2010 in the Chesapeake ...

You don't have to be a jerk to come up with fresh and original ideas, but sometimes being disagreeable is just what's needed to sell your brainchild successfully to others. However, difficult or irritating people should be aware of the social context in which they are presenting their ideas. A pushy strategy will not always be equally successful, warn Samuel Hunter of Pennsylvania State University and Lily Cushenbery of Stony Brook University in the US, in an article in Springer's Journal of Business and Psychology. People are often labelled as jerks if they are disagreeable ...

Washington, D.C.-- Natural gas power plants produce substantial amounts of gases that lead to global warming. Replacing old coal-fired power plants with new natural gas plants could cause climate damage to increase over the next decades, unless their methane leakage rates are very low and the new power plants are very efficient. These are the principal findings of new research from Carnegie's Ken Caldeira and Xiaochun Zhang, and Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures that compares the temperature increases caused by different kinds of coal and natural gas power plants. ...

Washington, DC (December 8, 2014) - Scrolling through the comments section on a news site is like seeing a verbal war before your eyes. Internet trolls flourish in an anonymous world, so much so that sites like Reuters and Popular Science have done away with the comment sections altogether. But there has to be a better way to let the audience engage in a civil manner. A recent study published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication by researchers at the University of Texas, Purdue University, and University of Wyoming, found that having a journalist engage with ...

A technique that can identify causes of cancer invisible to genetic sequencing has uncovered large sets of previously unknown pancreatic cancer genes. It is hoped that this study will boost research into a disease that is still poorly understood and for which five-year survival rates have stood at around 5 per cent for the past four decades. The technique works by introducing sections of DNA called piggyBac transposons into the mouse genome. Transposons jump around within the genome, reinserting themselves at random and causing a different mutation in each cell of the ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - There is cloud hanging over climate science, but one Cornell University expert on communication and environmental issues says he knows how to help clear the air. In the December issue of Nature Climate Change, Jonathon Schuldt, assistant professor of communication, argues that only by creating a "science of climate diversity" can climate science and the larger climate change movement overcome a crippling lack of ethnic and racial diversity. "There is an invisible, but very real barrier to climate engagement," Schuldt said. "We need to engage with all ...

A genetic misfire called the 3q26.2 amplicon can cause real havoc. In fact, it is among the most frequent chromosomal aberrations seen in many cancers, including ovarian and breast cancers. Researchers behind a study at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center believe they may have found a molecule-based approach to halting 3q26.2's destructive nature. By manipulating a non-coding microRNA (miRNA) known as miR569 that is part of the amplicon, scientists were able to increase cell death in vitro and in vivo. MicroRNAs are short, non-coding RNA molecules that are ...

Alexandria, Va. -- Methane is often found naturally leaking from the seafloor, particularly in petroleum basins like the Gulf of Mexico or along tectonically active continental margins like the U.S. West Coast, but such plumes were not expected along passive margins, like the East Coast of North America. Now, however, the discovery of hundreds of methane seeps on the seafloor along the U.S. East Coast suggests that such reservoirs may be more common along passive margins than previously thought. The release of such methane globally may have a significant influence on climate, ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A new treatment for adult-onset diabetes and obesity developed by researchers at Indiana University and the German Research Center for Environmental Health has essentially cured lab animals of obesity, diabetes and associated lipid abnormalities through improved glucose sensitivity, reduced appetite and enhanced calorie burning. In preclinical trials, the new peptide -- a molecular integration of three gastrointestinal hormones -- lowered blood sugar levels and reduced body fat beyond all existing drugs, according to the work co-led by IU Distinguished ...

Scientists from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), led by Guillermo Montoya, have developed a method for producing biological crystals that has allowed scientists to observe --for the first time-- DNA double chain breaks. They have also developed a computer simulation that makes this process, which lasts in the order of millionths of a second, visible to the human eye. The study is published today by the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. "We knew that enzymes, or proteins, endonucleases, are responsible for these double strand breaks, but ...

Sexual behaviour of teenage girls does not appear to be impacted by the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine, according to Queen's researchers Drs. Leah Smith and Linda Lévesque. There are concerns the vaccine, which guards against four types of the HPV shown to cause cervical cancer and anogenital warts, may give girls a false sense of security about contracting sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and lead them to engage in riskier sexual activity. "These findings suggest fears of increased risky sexual behaviour following HPV vaccination are unwarranted and should ...

When cancer is diagnosed, the grade of its malignancy is a central concern for both patients and their physicians. This value is used to determine how intensively and how radically the cancer must be treated. Particularly in the case of prostate cancer, the disease can take widely varying courses in different patients. Therefore, cancer researchers have been looking for measurable, reliable biomarkers that give clues about the aggressiveness of a tumor in order to choose an appropriate therapy. In many types of cancer, alterations in a tumor's genetic material indicate ...

MIAMI - A new study on tropical shallow-water soft corals, known as gorgonians, found that the species were able to calcify and grow under elevated carbon dioxide concentrations. These results suggest that Caribbean gorgonian corals may be more resilient to the ocean acidification levels projected by the end of the 21st century than previously thought. An international team of scientists, including from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, tested the effects of elevated CO2 concentrations on the growth and calcification rates ...

Study results of CD19-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy using the Sleeping Beauty non-viral transduction system to modify T cells has demonstrated further promise in patients with advanced hematologic malignancies. Patients who had acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) or chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) were part of clinical trials at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, which used the Sleeping Beauty gene transfer system initially discovered at the University of Minnesota. Results from the study were presented ...

Low doses of fluoxetine - better known as the anti-depressant Prozac - could hold the key to preventing PMS symptoms, an international team of researchers has found. Up to 80 per cent of women are thought to suffer from premenstrual syndrome (PMS), which can be a debilitating condition with symptoms such as anxiety, irritability, fatigue, sleep deprivation and increased sensitivity to pain. PMS appears to be triggered by the fall in secretion of the ovarian sex steroid hormone progesterone that occurs towards the end of the menstrual cycle and leads to a decline in ...

In 2012 the Mars Science Laboratory landed in the fascinating Gale crater. The Gale crater is of such great interest because of the 5.5 km high mountain of layered materials in the middle. This material tells an intricate story of the history of Mars, perhaps spanning much of the existence of this mysterious planet. Once positioned, the Curiosity rover began field studies on its drive toward Aeolis Mons (also unofficially known as Mount Sharp), the central peak within the crater. Curiosity has travelled more than 9.4 km so far and during its trip up the mountain, Curiosity ...

A new advance in biomedical research at the University of Leicester could have potential in the future to assist with tackling diseases and conditions associated with ageing - as well as in treating cancer. The research, which has shown promise in clinical samples, has been published in the prestigious scientific journal, Cell Death and Disease. The group of scientists coordinated by Dr Salvador Macip from the Mechanisms of Cancer and Ageing Lab and the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Leicester carried out the study to find new ways of identifying old ...