Imagine two children, both with the exact same risk factors for joining a gang. As teenagers, one joins a gang, the other doesn't. Even though the first teen eventually leaves the gang, years later he or she is not only at significantly higher risk of being incarcerated and receiving illegal income, but is also less likely to have finished high school and more likely to be in poor health, receiving government assistance or struggling with drug abuse. University of Washington researchers have found that joining a gang in adolescence has significant consequences in adulthood ...

Every 15-minute delay in delivering a clot-busting drug after stroke robs survivors of about a month of disability-free life, according to a new study in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. On the other hand, speeding treatment by just one minute means another 1.8 days of healthy life, researchers said. "'Save a minute; save a day' is the message from our study, which examined how even small reductions in treatment delays might benefit patients measurably in the long run," said Atte Meretoja, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc., lead author of the study and associate professor ...

Mexican-Americans had worse neurologic, functional and cognitive outcomes 90 days after stroke compared to non-Hispanic whites, in a study reported in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. Mexican-Americans have increased stroke risk, but lower risk of death compared to non-Hispanic whites. The new research suggests that prolonged survival is at the expense of increased disability. The study's stroke participants were drawn from the Brain Attack Surveillance in Corpus Christi (BASIC) project conducted in a non-immigrant south Texas community. Researchers assessed ...

American Muslims who interpret negative events in life as punishment from God are less likely to believe that donating organs after death is ethical than those with a more positive outlook, according to a survey conducted by researchers from the University of Chicago's Program on Medicine and Religion. The study points to a complex relationship between attitudes toward organ donation and the Islamic faith. Previous research has shown that Muslims are less likely than other religious groups to believe organ donation is ethically justified, and suggests that religious values ...

PITTSBURGH, March 13, 2014 – A low-cost program reduced falls in the elderly by 17 percent statewide, illustrating the value and effectiveness of using existing aging services, such as senior centers, in preventing falls, a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health study determined. Pitt Public Health researchers followed nearly 2,000 older Pennsylvanians between 2010 and 2011 to determine the effectiveness of the state's Healthy Steps for Older Adults, a voluntary fall-prevention program. Results of the study, funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control ...

A study by researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) finds that electromyography (EMG) testing to determine the quality of donor nerves can improve the outcome of nerve transfer surgery to restore function in patients with a brachial plexus injury. EMG is a sophisticated test used to objectively measure muscle and nerve function. The paper, "Does Pre-operative Donor Nerve Electromyography Predict Nerve Transfer Outcomes?," will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons on March 13 in New Orleans. "Our study found that ...

A revolutionary University of Colorado Boulder toilet fueled by the sun that is being developed to help some of the 2.5 billion people around the world lacking safe and sustainable sanitation will be unveiled in India this month. The self-contained, waterless toilet, designed and built using a $777,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has the capability of heating human waste to a high enough temperature to sterilize human waste and create biochar, a highly porous charcoal, said project principal investigator Karl Linden, professor of environmental engineering. ...

A husband's agreeable personality and good health appear crucial to preventing conflict among older couples who have been together a long time, according to a study from University of Chicago researchers. The report found that such characteristics in wives play less of a role in limiting marital conflict, perhaps because of different expectations among women and men in durable relationships. "Wives report more conflict if their husband is in poor health," said the study's lead author, James Iveniuk, PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. "If the wife is in poor ...

An ultra-fast and ultra-small optical switch has been invented that could advance the day when photons replace electrons in the innards of consumer products ranging from cell phones to automobiles. The new optical device can turn on and off trillions of times per second. It consists of individual switches that are only one five-hundredths the width of a human hair (200 nanometers) in diameter. This size is much smaller than the current generation of optical switches and it easily breaks one of the major technical barriers to the spread of electronic devices that detect ...

If Galileo was still alive and kicking, he might want to take a selfie with some of the thousands of citizen scientists all around the world for their surprisingly accurate work of counting craters on the pock-marked moon. A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder showed that as a group, volunteer counters who examined a particular patch of lunar real estate using NASA images did just as well in identifying individual craters as professional crater counters with five to 50 years of experience. And Galileo, who was observing the craters some 400 years ago with ...

Researchers at Virginia Tech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have used a computer-aided design tool to create genetic languages to guide the design of biological systems. Known as GenoCAD, the open-source software was developed by researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech to help synthetic biologists capture biological rules to engineer organisms that produce useful products or health-care solutions from inexpensive, renewable materials. GenoCAD helps researchers in the design of protein expression vectors, artificial gene networks, ...

Deep coral reefs in Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (PMNM) may contain the highest percentage of fish species found nowhere else on Earth, according to a study by NOAA scientists published in the Bulletin of Marine Science. Part of the largest protected area in the United States, the islands, atolls and submerged habitats of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) harbor unprecedented levels of biological diversity, underscoring the value in protecting this area, scientists said. Hawaii is known for its high abundance of endemic species – that is, species ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Auxin, a small molecule, is a plant hormone discovered by Charles Darwin about 100 years ago. Over the years that followed it became understood to be the most important and versatile plant hormone controlling nearly all aspects of plant growth and development, such as bending of shoots toward the source of light (as discovered by Darwin), formation of new leaves, flowers, and roots, growth of roots, and gravity-oriented growth. Just how a small molecule like auxin could play such a pivotal role in plants baffled plant biologists for decades. Then, ...

The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 6:34 p.m. EDT on March 12, 2014, and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, captured an image of it. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. To see how this event may impact Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's ...

MADISON — A new study in animals shows that using a compound to block the body's immune response greatly reduces disability after a stroke. The study by scientists from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health also showed that particular immune cells – CD4+ T-cells produce a mediator, called interleukin (IL) -21 that can cause further damage in stroke tissue. Moreover, normal mice, ordinarily killed or disabled by an ischemic stroke, were given a shot of a compound that blocks the action of IL-21. Brain scans and brain sections showed that the ...

A wasp's sting might explain it all. Marty Condon, professor of biology at Cornell College, has been studying flies in the tropics for years, and in a paper published in Science this week, she reports evidence that there is more to a fly's ecological niche than where it lives and what it eats—you have to look at what eats the fly, as well. In a previous Science paper, Condon and her co-researchers found that there were far more species of flies feeding on tropical flowers than expected. It was counter-intuitive, Condon said, to see so many species of flies filling what ...

JUPITER, FL – March 13, 2014 – As the United States continues to lead the world in the production of natural gas, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have devised a new and more efficient method with the potential to convert the major components found in natural gas into useable fuels and chemicals—opening the door to cheaper, more abundant energy and materials with much lower emissions. The research, which was led by TSRI Professor Roy Periana, uses clever chemistry and nontraditional materials to turn natural gas into liquid ...

LA JOLLA, CA—March 13, 2014—Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have devised a greatly improved technique for making amino acids not found in nature. These "unnatural" amino acids traditionally have been very difficult to synthesize, but are sought after by the pharmaceutical industry for their potential medical uses. "This new technique offers a very quick way to prepare unnatural amino acids, many of which are drug candidates or building blocks for peptide drugs," said Jin-Quan Yu, a professor in TSRI's Department of Chemistry. Yu's team has reported ...

America's current energy boom may take a new direction thanks to the discovery of a new way to turn raw natural gas into upgraded liquid alcohol fuel. In the March 14 issue of Science magazine, chemists from Brigham Young University and The Scripps Research Institute detail a process that could reduce dependence on petroleum. The most unexpected breakthrough in the paper was that ordinary "main group" metals like thallium and lead can trigger the conversion of natural gas to liquid alcohol. The research teams saw in experiments that natural gas to alcohol conversion ...

LA JOLLA, CA—March 13, 2014—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered an important mechanism underlying sensory feedback that guides balance and limb movements. The finding, which the TSRI team uncovered in fruit flies, centers on a gene and a type of nerve cell required for detection of leg-joint angles. "These cells resemble human nerve cells that innervate joints," said team leader Professor Boaz Cook, who is an assistant professor at TSRI, "and they encode joint-angle information in the same way." If the findings can be fully replicated ...

Scientists at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, with collaborators at Michigan State University and the University of Illinois, have unveiled a new way in which plants perceive pathogens to activate immunity. They also show how pathogens inhibit the mechanism to cause disease. It was previously only associated with other processes in mammalian cells. When plants detect microbial molecules, they trigger immune responses to prevent disease. Although several plant immune receptors for these microbial molecules are known, how they are activated once the microbe is recognised ...

Numbers and data can be critical tools in bringing complex issues into crisp focus. The understanding of diseases, for example, benefits from algorithms that help monitor their spread. But without context, a number may just be a number, or worse, misleading. "The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis" is published in the journal Science, funded, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Specifically, the authors examine Google's data-aggregating tool Google Flu Trend (GFT), which was designed to provide real-time monitoring of flu cases around ...

Most of us already imagine the tropics as a place of diversity—a lush region of the globe teeming with a wide variety of exotic plants and animals. But for researchers Andrew Forbes and Marty Condon, there's even more diversity than meets the eye. In a paper published in the March 14 issue of the journal Science, Forbes and Condon report the discovery of extraordinary diversity and specialization in the tropics. The paper builds upon previous research conducted by Condon, who discovered surprising diversity while researching plant species in South America. Later, she, ...

Carnivore management is not just a numbers game, Virginia Tech wildlife scientists assert in response to an article in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Science that urged "minimum population densities be maintained for persistence of large carnivores, biodiversity, and ecosystem structure." "This type of approach may fail in social carnivore species," said Kathleen Alexander, an associate professor of fisheries and wildlife conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment. "Predator management is incredibly complex and we need to be extremely cautious ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – Every cell in our body has exactly the same DNA, yet every cell is different. A cell's identity is determined by the subset of genes that it activates. But how does a cell know which genes to turn off and which to turn on? While the genetic code carried in our DNA provides instructions for cells to manufacture specific proteins, it is a second code that determines which genes are in fact activated in particular cell types. This second code is carried by proteins that attach to DNA. The code-carrying proteins are called histones. Today, researchers ...