Alexandria, VA - The American Geosciences Institute (AGI) has released two final reports on the results of an April 2012 workshop for a cohort made up of underrepresented minority individuals seeking careers in academia. The workshop was hosted by AGI and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to disseminate information about opportunities available to future geoscience faculty from member societies, the federal government and by developing campus leadership. Over a 13-month period participants were polled on questions related to how they engaged these entities and what ...

Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a distinguished professor of climate and atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, whose landmark research showed that cutting emissions of black carbon and other short lived climate pollutants can significantly lessen the impacts of regional and global climate change, improve the health of millions of rural poor, and avoid crop losses, will receive tonight a 2013 Champions of the Earth award, the United Nations's highest environmental accolade. The Champions of the Earth prize is awarded annually to leaders from ...

MINNEAPOLIS – New evidence suggests that taking vitamin B supplements may help reduce the risk of stroke. The research appears in the September 18, 2013, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "Previous studies have conflicting findings regarding the use of vitamin B supplements and stroke or heart attack," said author Xu Yuming, with Zhengzhou University in Zhengzhou, China. "Some studies have even suggested that the supplements may increase the risk of these events." For the research, scientists analyzed 14 randomized ...

A study in the Sept. 19 New England Journal of Medicine finds that colonoscopy appears to reduce the risk of developing or dying from colorectal cancer more powerfully than does sigmoidoscopy, a similar procedure that examines only a portion of the colon. The investigation, which analyzes data from two long-term studies, also identifies molecular features that may help explain tumors that are diagnosed despite an individual's having recently undergone colonoscopy. "This study provides some of the clearest evidence to date that colonoscopy has advantages over sigmoidoscopy ...

Boston, MA — Reducing hospital readmission rates is an important clinical and policy priority but whether those rates really measure the quality of hospital care isn't clear. In a new study, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) found strong evidence of a relationship between surgical readmission rates and quality of surgical care. The finding provides an opportunity for policymakers to improve surgical quality and decrease readmission costs and supports plans by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to expand its readmission penalty program to ...

BOSTON—A team of researchers, including those from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health, will be reporting study findings that lend powerful scientific backing to the recommendation that people receive a colonoscopy screening to prevent colorectal cancer. By analyzing medical data from nearly 90,000 people in two major health studies, the researchers found that participants who received either a colonoscopy or sigmoidoscopy exam – which allows doctors to look inside the large intestine through a thin tube ...

E-readers are more effective than reading on paper for some with dyslexia, according to results published September 18 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Mathew Schneps from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues from other institutions. Their results suggest it is the use of short lines on the display, and not the device itself, that leads to the benefits observed in this study. For the study, the authors compared reading comprehension and speed on paper versus that on e-readers in over 100 dyslexic high school students. They found that those ...

Providing employees with a bonus to spend on charities or co-workers may increase job satisfaction and team sales, according to results published September 18 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Lalin Anik from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and colleagues from other institutions. In the first of three studies, some employees at an Australian bank were given a 25-dollar or a 50-dollar voucher to donate to a charity of their choice on behalf of the company. Employees who donated the larger amount to charity reported enhanced happiness and job satisfaction, ...

Taste can be classified into five flavors that we sense, but how many odors can we smell? There are likely about 10 basic categories of odor, according to research published September 18th in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Jason Castro from Bates College, Chakra Chennubhotla from the University of Pittsburgh, and Arvind Ramanathan from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The researchers used advanced statistical techniques to develop an approach for systematically describing smells. Working with a standard set of data, Andrew Dravniek's 1985 Atlas of Odor Character Profiles, ...

Chronic infection with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii can make mice lose their innate, hard-wired fear of cats. This loss of their innate fear may persist after the parasite is no longer detectable in their brains, suggesting that initial infection may cause permanent changes in the mechanisms underlying their fear of predators. The results are published September 18 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Wendy Ingram and colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley. Even after infection with Toxoplasma has been removed from rodents' brains, they continue to ...

DURHAM, N.C. – A blood test developed by researchers at Duke Medicine showed more than 90-percent accuracy in distinguishing between viral and bacterial infections when tested in people with respiratory illnesses. The test, which detects a specific genetic "signature" that the sick person's immune system expresses as a response to the virus, demonstrates a potential new method for diagnosing the source of illnesses that have long been tough to pinpoint. Reported in the Sept. 18, 2013, issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine, the finding moves the technology ...

Embryonic stem cells have the enormous potential to treat and cure many medical problems. That is why the discovery that induced embryonic-like stem cells can be created from skin cells (iPS cells) was rewarded with a Nobel Prize in 2012. But the process has remained frustratingly slow and inefficient, and the resulting stem cells are not yet ready for medical use. Research in the lab of the Weizmann Institute's Dr. Yaqub Hanna, which appears today in Nature, dramatically changes that: He and his group revealed the "brake" that holds back the production of stem cells, and ...

A mystery in the ocean near Antarctica has been solved by researchers who have long puzzled over how deep and mid-depth ocean waters are mixed. They found that sea water mixes dramatically as it rushes over undersea mountains in Drake Passage - the channel between the southern tip of South America and the Antarctic continent. Mixing of water layers in the oceans is crucial in regulating the Earth's climate and ocean currents. The research provides insight for climate models which until now have lacked the detailed information on ocean mixing needed to provide accurate ...

A team of scientists from Canada and Australia have discovered that the decline in shark populations is detrimental to coral reefs. "Where shark numbers are reduced due to commercial fishing, there is also a decrease in the herbivorous fishes which play a key role in promoting reef health," said Jonathan Ruppert, a recent University of Toronto PhD graduate. Ruppert was part of a team engaged in long-term monitoring of reefs off Australians northwest coast. Team leader Mark Meekan of the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), said that the results might, at first ...

BOULDER, Colo.- Physicists at JILA have created a crystal-like arrangement of ultracold gas molecules that can swap quantum "spin" properties with nearby and distant partners. The novel structure might be used to simulate or even invent new materials that derive exotic properties from quantum spin behavior, for electronics or other practical applications. Described in a Nature paper* posted online on Sept. 18, 2013, the JILA experiment is the first to record ultracold gas molecules exchanging spins at a distance, a behavior that may be similar to that of intriguing solids ...

Furthermore, demand is set to rise as the population's age and girth increase, both of which are risk factors for the disorder, known as obstructive sleep apnoea or OSA for short. OSA is a condition that disrupts breathing during sleep, usually as a result of the relaxation of the muscles and soft tissues in the throat which relax and collapse to block the airway for 10 or more seconds. It affects an estimated 4% of middle aged men and 2% of middle aged women, and is associated with obesity and increasing age. But it is thought that 80% of cases remain undiagnosed. Because ...

The analysis shows that in 2007, in Cardiff, where this collaborative approach was pioneered, the scheme lopped off almost £7 million from health, societal, and criminal justice costs caused by violence. The estimated individual and societal costs of violence recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2003-4 came to £14 billion. The Cardiff Violence Prevention Programme, which was set up in 2003, entails the capture of anonymised information on violent incidents treated in hospital emergency departments. This information includes exactly where the incident took ...

Boston, MA -- According to a large, long-term study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), 40% of all colorectal cancers might be prevented if people underwent regular colonoscopy screening. The new research also supports existing guidelines that recommend that people with an average risk of colorectal cancer should have a colonoscopy every 10 years. The new study helps address previous uncertainty about the effectiveness of colonoscopy in reducing colorectal cancer incidence and mortality -- particularly among people with cancer that originates in the proximal, ...

Two thirds of these occur in low and middle income countries, the figures suggest. The authors base their findings on 4000 articles written in English and published from 1976 onwards, which looked at substandard medical care given to hospital patients around the globe. The researchers focused on seven key markers for substandard care: harm from prescribed medications; urinary tract infections associated with catheters; bloodstream infections associated with catheters; pneumonia acquired in hospital; blood clots (VTEs);falls; and bed sores. They used an approach similar ...

It is common for parents to influence mate choice — from arranged marriages to more subtle forms of persuasion — but they often disagree with their children about what makes a suitable partner. A new study has found an evolutionary explanation for why some parents try to control who their children pair up with. The study, involving a University of Bristol researcher and published today in the journal Evolution & Human Behavior, shows that this conflict over mate choice may be rooted in an evolutionary conflict over resources. Dr Tim Fawcett, a research fellow in Bristol's ...

Habitable conditions on Earth will be possible for at least another 1.75 billion years – according to astrobiologists at the University of East Anglia. Findings published today in the journal Astrobiology reveal the habitable lifetime of planet Earth – based on our distance from the sun and temperatures at which it is possible for the planet to have liquid water. The research team looked to the stars for inspiration. Using recently discovered planets outside our solar system (exoplanets) as examples, they investigated the potential for these planets to host life. The ...

Boston, MA – More than 43 million people are injured worldwide each year due to unsafe medical care, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). These injuries result in the loss of nearly 23 million years of "healthy" life. The findings represent a major new effort to calculate the global burden of unsafe medical care across a range of adverse health events. The study appears online September 18, 2013 in BMJ Quality & Safety. "This is the first attempt to quantify the human suffering that results from unsafe care," said lead author Ashish ...

Researchers from the University of Montreal and their colleagues have found brain activity beyond a flat line EEG, which they have called Nu-complexes (from the Greek letter Νν). According to existing scientific data, researchers and doctors had established that beyond the so-called "flat line" (flat electroencephalogram or EEG), there is nothing at all, no brain activity, no possibility of life. This major discovery suggests that there is a whole new frontier in animal and human brain functioning. The researchers observed a human patient in an extreme deep hypoxic ...

Cardiologists are increasingly accessing coronary arteries by way of the wrist rather than the groin to insert life-saving stents into patients with blocked arteries, according to the first broad report of the American College of Cardiology's clinical data registries published online today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The report, "Cardiovascular Care Facts: A Report from the National Cardiovascular Data Registry - 2011," includes data about stents from the CathPCI Registry, the ACC's national database of hospital records on stenting and angioplasty, ...

A duo of scientists at Penn State University has achieved a major milestone in understanding how genomic "dark matter" originates. This "dark matter" -- called non-coding RNA -- does not contain the blueprint for making proteins and yet it comprises more than 95 percent of the human genome. The researchers have discovered that essentially all coding and non-coding RNA originates at the same types of locations along the human genome. The team's findings eventually may help to pinpoint exactly where complex-disease traits reside, since the genetic origins of many diseases ...