National support for marijuana ("cannabis") legalization is increasing in the United States (US). Recreational use was recently legalized in the states of Colorado and Washington; other states across the country are expected to follow suit. To date, an additional 15 states have decriminalized marijuana use, and 19 states and the District of Columbia now allow medical marijuana to be prescribed. Now, a study published in the International Journal of Drug Policy by researchers affiliated with New York University's Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR), finds large ...

Redevelopment of the London King's Cross station and the nearby neighborhood was announced in 2005 and completed with a grand opening in 2012. The internationally well-recognized engineering services firm Arup, famous among other things for their work on the Opera House in Sydney, Australia, and the Allianz Arena in Munich, worked on this 400 million pound construction project. In the process, the area to the north of the station including 50 new buildings, 2,000 new apartments, 20 new streets and ten new public squares was being renewed. Thus, a great challenge was to ...

RALEIGH, NC--Growers and retailers of perennial greenhouse and landscape plants are often challenged by the sheer height of some consumer favorites. While plant height can enhance a plant's versatility and appeal in gardens and landscapes, transporting taller plants from growers to retail or wholesale outlets, and then on to their ultimate destinations can be a challenge. Colorful, summer-flowering, bulbous perennials such as lilies are commonly used as ornamental landscape plants, cut flowers, and potted plants, but their structure makes them top heavy and limits their ...

Wits University scientists have debunked two big myths around climate change by proving firstly, that despite predictions, tropical storms are not increasing in number. However, they are shifting, and South Africa could be at increased risk of being directly impacted by tropical cyclones within the next 40 years. Secondly, while global warming is causing frost to be less severe, late season frost is not receding as quickly as flowering is advancing, resulting in increased frost risk which will likely begin to threaten food security. According to Jennifer Fitchett, a PhD ...

Can babies learn to read? While parents use DVDs and other media in an attempt to teach their infants to read, these tools don't instill reading skills in babies, a study by researchers at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development has found. "While we cannot say with full assurance that infants at this age cannot learn printed words, our results make clear they did not learn printed words from the baby media product that was tested," says Susan Neuman, a professor in NYU Steinhardt's Department of Teaching and Learning and the ...

Choosing the right physical technique to analyse paintings can make all the difference when it comes to ascertaining their authenticity. Now, a painting initially attributed as belonging to a series called 'Contraste de formes' by French Cubist painter Fernand Léger has definitely been identified as a forgery. This is the first time it has been possible to identify a fake painting by relying on the anomalous behaviour of the concentration of the radioactive form of carbon (14C) in the atmosphere after 1955 to date the canvas. These findings were recently published in EPJ ...

MOUNT VERNON, WA--Polyethylene plastic mulch offers a range of benefits and has become standard for growers of a variety of agricultural and horticultural crops. Despite the recognized benefits, the plastic mulches have serious drawbacks. For example, plastic mulches can typically be used for only one cropping season, after which they must be removed and disposed of, creating expensive and time-consuming processes for growers. The challenges and costs associated with recycling mean that plastic mulches often end up in landfills, buried, or burned on-site--practices that ...

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have shown for the first time that WiFi networks can be infected with a virus that can move through densely populated areas as efficiently as the common cold spreads between humans. The team designed and simulated an attack by a virus, called "Chameleon", and found that not only could it spread quickly between homes and businesses, but it was able to avoid detection and identify the points at which WiFi access is least protected by encryption and passwords. Researchers from the University's School of Computer Science and Electrical ...

A new study led by the University of Exeter and Swansea University has pinpointed the changes in the brain that lead gamblers to react in the same way to near-misses as they do to winning. The research shows that near-misses are underpinned by increases in the brain's electrical activity, particularly in the theta frequency range - known to be involved in processing win and loss outcomes. They found that these increases in theta are linked to both how severe someone's gambling history is and how susceptible they might be to developing a future gambling problem. Popular ...

An estimated three-quarters of camels recently surveyed in Saudi Arabia have evidence of infection with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), the virus responsible for human cases of MERS. Results of the new study establish for the first time that direct camel-to-human transmission is possible and provide a pathway to control the spread of the disease. Results in the journal mBio are reported by scientists at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health; Mammals Research Chair, King Saud University, ...

MILWAUKEE – After having recently discovered a new way to propagate multiple beams of light through a single strand of optical fiber, engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) now have found that their novel fiber architecture can transmit images with a quality that is comparable or better than the current commercial endoscopy imaging fibers. Because of this, the work has potential not only in next-generation high-speed communication, but also biomedical imaging. The work is published today in the journal Nature Communications. In conventional optical ...

Previous research has found that emotions affect eating, and that negative moods and positive moods may actually lead to preferences for different kinds of foods. For example, if given the choice between grapes or chocolate candies, someone in a good mood may choose the former while someone in a bad mood may choose the latter. The research reported in this article looks at the "why:" Why, when someone is in a bad mood, will they choose to eat junk food and why, when someone is in a good mood, will they make healthier food choices? To get at the "why," we married the ...

Acetaminophen, found in over-the-counter products such as Excedrin and Tylenol, provides many people with relief from headaches and sore muscles. When used appropriately, it is considered mostly harmless. Over recent decades, the drug, which has been marketed since the 1950s, has become the medication most commonly used by pregnant women for fevers and pain. Now, a long-term study by UCLA, in collaboration with the University of Aarhus in Denmark, has raised concerns about the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy. In a report in the current online edition of ...

(SALT LAKE CITY)—Cancer of the pancreas is usually not detected until it's too late to cure. But precursor lesions that form in the pancreas and its ducts can signal the disease before it strikes, and when caught early enough, they can be prevented from progressing to become cancer. In a new study, researchers led by a molecular biologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), report two breakthroughs in understanding those lesions and their role in pancreatic cancer: the development of the first mouse model that simulates a precursor lesion called intraductal ...

Water has been detected in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system with a new technique that could help researchers to learn how many planets with water, like Earth, exist throughout the universe. The team of scientists that made the discovery includes astronomers at Penn State University and other institutions. The astronomers detected the water in the atmosphere of a planet as massive as Jupiter that is orbiting the nearby star tau Boötis. The discovery is described in a scientific paper published in the 24 February 2014 online version of The Astrophysical ...

MAYWOOD, Ill. – A new blood test can detect heart attacks hours faster than the current gold-standard blood test, according to a study led by Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine researchers. The new test measures a protein that is released to the bloodstream by dying heart muscle. The protein is called cardiac myosin binding protein-C (cMyBP-C). The study found that cMyBP-C is released to the blood within just 15 minutes of cardiac damage, and rises to significant levels in three hours. "This is a potential ultra-early biomarker that could confirm whether ...

MAYWOOD, IL – A vascular disease called fibromuscular dysplasia, which can cause high blood pressure, kidney failure, stroke and other symptoms -- mostly in women -- is "poorly understood by many healthcare providers," according to a Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association. Neurologist Jose Biller, MD, of Loyola University Medical Center, is a co-author of the statement, published online ahead of print in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. First author is Jeffrey W. Olin, DO of Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Biller said FMD "is a ...

A team of computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, has taken an unprecedented, in-depth look at how malware operators use the computers they infect to mine Bitcoin, a virtual currency whose value is highly volatile. Researchers examined more than 2,000 pieces of malware used by Bitcoin mining operations in 2012 and 2013. They were able to estimate how much money operators made off their operations and which countries were most affected. The computer scientists report that the revenue of 10 of the mining operations they studied reached at least 4,500 ...

A team of volunteers ate half a kilo of strawberries a day for a month to see whether it altered their blood parameters in any way. At the end of this unusual treatment, their levels of bad cholesterol and triglycerides reduced significantly, according to the analyses conducted by Italian and Spanish scientists. Several studies had already demonstrated the antioxidant capacity of strawberries, but now researchers from the Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM, Italy), together with colleagues from the Universities of Salamanca, Granada and Seville (Spain), conducted ...

There are clear advantages to living in cities: safety, ready availability of infrastructure, plenty of company etc. Nevertheless, a large number of people eschew them for the benefits of country life, such as clean air and lots of space. Many species of animals, and particularly birds, face the same choice between living in large groups or remaining in smaller ones, thereby avoiding disadvantages of larger colonies such as the increased risk of disease and increased aggression from neighbours. What causes different individuals of a particular species to take the decisions ...

New Rochelle, NY, February 25, 2014—Repeated concussions and mild brain trauma can result in reduced levels of growth hormone, gonadotropin, and thyroid hormones, causing disorders such as metabolic syndrome and erectile dysfunction and overall poor quality of life. The results of a new study of retired professional football players that compares number of concussions sustained during their careers and health problems associated with hormonal deficiency is published in Journal of Neurotrauma, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is ...

The rate of mother to child HIV transmission is at an all-time low in the UK, according to a paper published today in the journal AIDS. The study examined over 12 000 pregnancies in women diagnosed with HIV before or during pregnancy and delivered in 2000-2011; there was a four-fold drop in the rate of mother to child transmissions, from 2.1% in 2000-2001 to 0.46% in 2010-2011. Dr Claire Townsend (UCL Institute of Child Health) said: "Mother to child HIV transmission is now at the lowest level ever in the UK & Ireland, and as far as we're aware such low levels have ...

Since he was a graduate student, Armando Solar-Lezama, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been working on a programming language called Sketch, which allows programmers to simply omit some of the computational details of their code. Sketch then automatically fills in the gaps. If it's fleshed out and made more user-friendly, Sketch could ultimately make life easier for software developers. But in the meantime, it's proving its worth as the basis for other tools that exploit the mechanics of "program synthesis," ...

The sun emitted a significant solar flare, peaking at 7:49 p.m. EST on Feb. 24, 2014. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which keeps a constant watch on the sun, captured images of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation, appearing as giant flashes of light in the SDO images. 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 ...

A study led by Manchester scientists has shown promising results for a new treatment approach in follicular lymphoma. Follicular lymphoma is a type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma– a blood cancer - that usually develops slowly. The majority of patients are diagnosed when their disease is at an advanced stage. Recent improvements in treatment have included the use of antibodies to specifically target the tumour cells and to stimulate the patient's own immune system to attack their tumour. The use of such antibodies has improved treatment response, but unfortunately most patients ...