The drought that has the entire country in its grip is affecting more than the color of people's lawns. It may also be responsible for the proliferation of a heat-loving amoeba commonly found in warm freshwater bodies, such as lakes, rivers and hot springs, which the drought has made warmer than usual this year. A 9-year-old Kansas girl recently died of an infection caused by this parasite after swimming in several area lakes. The amoeba enters the body through the nose of an individual and travels to the brain. Nose plugs can lower the odds of this rare but fatal pathogen ...

Roughly 780 million people around the world have no access to clean drinking water. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 3.4 million people die from water-related diseases every year. ETH student Jeremy Nussbaumer set himself the goal of making a contribution to solving this problem. Working with researchers from a group led by Wendelin Stark, head of the Functional Materials Laboratory, the 23-year-old spent a year researching a membrane filter and developing a prototype. "What makes our DrinkPure filter unique is that you can screw it on to virtually any ...

WASHINGTON -- For critically ill patients arriving at the emergency department, the drug ketamine can safely provide analgesia, sedation and amnesia for rapid, life-saving intubation, despite decades-old studies that suggested it raised intracranial pressure. The results of a systematic review of 10 recent studies of what many emergency physicians regard as a "wonder drug" are published online in Annals of Emergency Medicine "The Effect of Ketamine on Intracranial and Cerebral Perfusion Pressure and Health Outcomes: A Systematic Review." "Apprehension for many years ...

Washington, DC -- The planet's soil releases about 60 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, which is far more than that released by burning fossil fuels. This happens through a process called soil respiration. This enormous release of carbon is balanced by carbon coming into the soil system from falling leaves and other plant matter, as well as by the underground activities of plant roots. Short-term warming studies have documented that rising temperatures increase the rate of soil respiration. As a result, scientists have worried that global warming ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In 2012, the Voyager mission team announced that the Voyager 1 spacecraft had passed into interstellar space, traveling further from Earth than any other manmade object. But, in the nearly two years since that historic announcement, and despite subsequent observations backing it up, uncertainty about whether Voyager 1 really crossed the threshold continues. There are some scientists who say that the spacecraft is still within the heliosphere – the region of space dominated by the Sun and its wind of energetic particles – and has not yet reached the ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Having a wider face helps men when they negotiate for themselves but hurts them when they are negotiating in a situation that requires compromise. Additionally, men who are more attractive are better collaborators compared to less attractive men. Those are among the findings outlined in a just published paper co-authored by Michael P. Haselhuhn and Elaine M. Wong, assistant professors of management at the University of California, Riverside's School of Business Administration. The paper describes four negotiation simulations set up by the authors ...

From AGU's blogs: Oso disaster had its roots in earlier landslides A research team tasked with being some of the first scientists and engineers to evaluate extreme events has issued its findings on disastrous Oso, Washington, landslide. The report studies the conditions and causes related to the March 22 mudslide that killed 43 people and destroyed the Steelhead Haven neighborhood in Oso, Washington. The team from the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association, funded by the National Science Foundation, determined that intense rainfall in the three ...

This news release is available in German. Proteins impart shape and stability to cells, drive metabolic processes and transmit signals. To perform these manifold tasks, they fold into complex three-dimensional shapes. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen have now discovered that proteins can be constructed of similar amino acid chains even when their three-dimensional shapes differ significantly. This suggests that the proteins that exist today arose from common precursors. Presumably, in the course of evolution they were ...

VIDEO: This image depicts Chrysomya megacephala larvae on decomposing fish. Click here for more information. Non-biting blow fly Chrysomya megacephala is commonly found in dead bodies and is used in forensic investigations to determine the time of death, referred to as the post mortem interval. A report of synanthropic derived form of C. megacephala from Tamil Nadu is provided for the first time based on morphological features and molecular characterization through generation ...

PASADENA, Calif., July 23, 2014 — More than 80 percent of hospitalized patients who tested positive for Clostridium difficile were tested outside the hospital or within the first 72 hours of hospitalization, suggesting that settings outside of the hospital may play key roles in the identification, onset and possible transmission of the disease, according to a new Kaiser Permanente study published today in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings. The study provides new insight into the contagious and potentially deadly infection also known as C. diff, a bacterium most often ...

Security forces worldwide rely on sophisticated equipment, trained personnel, and detection dogs to safeguard airports and other public areas against terrorist attacks. A revolutionary new electronic chip with nano-sized chemical sensors is about to make their job much easier. The groundbreaking nanotechnology-inspired sensor, devised by Prof. Fernando Patolsky of Tel Aviv University 's School of Chemistry and Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and developed by the Herzliya company Tracense, picks up the scent of explosives molecules better than a detection dog's ...

Bethesda, MD (July 23, 2014) — Statins, a class of drugs commonly used to lower cholesterol levels, significantly reduce a patient's risk of developing Barrett's esophagus, according to a new study in Gastroenterology1, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. Obese patients experienced the greatest level of risk reduction with statin use. "Patients who received statins had a 43 percent reduction in the odds of having Barrett's esophagus compared to non-users," said study author Hashem B. El-Serag, MD, MPH, from the Houston VA Medical Center ...

The popular culinary herbs oregano and rosemary are packed with healthful compounds, and now lab tests show they could work in much the same way as prescription anti-diabetic medication, scientists report. In their new study published in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, they found that how the herbs are grown makes a difference, and they also identified which compounds contribute the most to this promising trait. Elvira Gonzalez de Mejia and colleagues point out that in 2012, type-2 diabetes affected more than 8 percent of Americans and cost the country ...

As local and national governments struggle to deal with ever-growing piles of electronic waste (or "e-waste"), scientists are now refining the picture of just how much there is and where it really ends up. Published in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, their study found that nearly a quarter of e-waste that developed countries discard floods into just seven developing countries — with major potential health risks for the people who live there. Knut Breivik and colleagues note that the export from developed to developing regions of e-waste — everything ...

By using brightly hued dyes, George Mason University researchers discovered an innovative way to reveal where proteins touch each other, possibly leading to new treatments for cancer, arthritis, heart disease and even lung disease. George Mason researchers unraveled the mystery of deciphering the contact points where proteins touch each other. "One protein interlocks with another protein like adjacent pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, and this sends a signal down the line to the next protein," says Lance Liotta, co-director of the Mason-based Center for Applied Proteomics and ...

Humanity is on the threshold of being able to detect signs of alien life on other worlds. By studying exoplanet atmospheres, we can look for gases like oxygen and methane that only coexist if replenished by life. But those gases come from simple life forms like microbes. What about advanced civilizations? Would they leave any detectable signs? They might, if they spew industrial pollution into the atmosphere. New research by theorists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) shows that we could spot the fingerprints of certain pollutants under ideal conditions. ...

A 2°C increase in temperature around the world by 2050, according to one of the scenarios predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), may be advantageous to the physiology and the biochemical and biophysical processes involved in the growth of forage plants such as Stylosanthes capitata Vogel, a legume utilized for livestock grazing in tropical countries such as Brazil. The conclusion is from a study carried out by researchers in the Department of Biology at the Ribeirão Preto Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Languages and Literature at the University ...

New Rochelle, NY -- The potential for clinical use of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology for transplant-based therapeutic strategies has previously been hindered by the risk of dysregulated cell growth, specifically the development of tumors. The ability to use etoposide treatment to halt teratoma formation in iPSCs for the treatment of heart disease, specifically acute myocardial infarction, is demonstrated in an article in Stem Cells and Development, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available on the Stem Cells ...

A sulfur-oxidizing bacterial group called SUP05 will play an increasingly important role in carbon and nutrient cycling in the world's oceans as oxygen minimum zones expand, according to research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. University of British Columbia researchers plumbed the depth of a seasonally anoxic fjord, Canada's Saanich Inlet, to chart how microbial community metabolism changes as oxygen minimum zones form. "Our study paints a very detailed picture of how SUP05 — a bacterial group related to gill symbionts of ...

WOODS HOLE, MA -- What do mollusks, starfish, and corals have in common? Aside from their shared marine habitat, they are all calcifiers—organisms that use calcium from their environment to create hard carbonate skeletons and shells for stability and protection. The July issue of The Biological Bulletin, published by the Marine Biological Laboratory, addresses the challenges faced by these species as ocean composition changes worldwide. As atmospheric carbon dioxide rises, the world's oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic. This impact of global climate change threatens ...

The hippocampal region of the brain is important for encoding environment inputs and memory formation. However, the underlying mechanisms are unclear. Dr. Zhouyan Feng and co-workers from Zhejiang University, China monitored the activity of hippocampal neurons in rats using microelectrode arrays, and explored the mechanisms underlying the neuronal responses. Somatosensory stimulation, in the form of tail clamping, changed local field potentials into theta rhythm-dominated waveforms, decreased the spike firing of pyramidal cells, and increased interneuron firing. In addition, ...

This news release is available in German. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden report how they managed to capture detailed three-dimensional images of cardiac dynamics in zebrafish. The novel approach: They combine high-speed Selective Plane Illumination Microscopy (SPIM) and clever image processing to reconstruct multi-view movie stacks of the beating heart. Furthermore, they have developed a method of generating high-resolution static reconstructions of the zebrafish's heart: the Dresden research team used optogenetics ...

A new home-grown instrument based on bundles of optical fibres is giving Australian astronomers the first 'Google street view' of the cosmos — incredibly detailed views of huge numbers of galaxies. Developed by researchers at the University of Sydney and the Australian Astronomical Observatory, the optical-fibre bundles can sample the light from up to 60 parts of a galaxy, for a dozen galaxies at a time. By analysing the light's spectrum astronomers can learn how gas and stars move within each galaxy, where the young stars are forming and where the old stars live. This ...

Ensemble forecasting is a key part of weather forecasting today. Computers typically run multiple simulations, called ensembles, using slightly different initial conditions or assumptions, and then analyze them together to try to improve forecasts. Now, using Japan's flagship 10-petaFLOPS K computer, researchers from the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) have succeeded in running 10,240 parallel simulations of global weather, the largest number ever performed, using data assimilation to reduce the range of uncertainties. The assimilation of the ...

Job satisfaction is an important predictor of registered nurses' (RNs) job turnover, patient satisfaction, and nurse-sensitive patient outcomes (including pressure ulcers and falls), which can result in higher health care costs and penalties for hospitals that receive Medicare and Medicaid payments. Numerous studies have been conducted to assess nurses' job satisfaction, asking about nurse-physician relationships, opportunities for promotion, autonomy, and similar issues, but very few have addressed the impact of the physical work environment on RNs' job satisfaction. Now, ...