New research from the University of Guelph, published Tuesday in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation, says that allowing industrial extraction in a northern Ontario old-growth red pine forest – the largest remaining in the world – would significantly threaten biodiversity in Canada. The study says that Wolf Lake Forest Reserve is a "scientifically irreplaceable system." "Wolf Lake Forest deserves intensive study, monitoring and full protection from future development," said Guelph environmental sciences professor Madhur Anand, the study's lead author. Old-growth ...

Patients in moderate to severe pain in emergency rooms across the U.S. are less likely to receive opioid pain medications if they are black, Hispanic, poor, or have less education, compared to more affluent patients, according to a University of Rochester Medical Center study reported in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. The study took place against the backdrop of a national epidemic of narcotics abuse, combined with a need to satisfy patients' legitimate complaints of pain. Racial and ethnic disparities are already well-documented in the scientific literature, ...

Bethesda, MD (June 26, 2013) — More people are being affected by drug-induced liver injury (DILI) than ever before, according to a new study in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. This type of liver injury results from the use of certain prescription and over-the-counter medications, as well as dietary supplements, and is among the more challenging forms of liver disease due to its difficulty to predict, diagnose and manage. Investigators conducted a population-based study in Iceland uncovering 19.1 cases of drug-induced ...

Contrary to popular belief, crabgrass does not thrive in lawns, gardens and farm fields by simply crowding out other plants. A new study in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has found that the much-despised weed actually produces its own herbicides that kill nearby plants. Chui-Hua Kong and colleagues point out that crabgrass is not only a headache for lawns and home gardens, but also a major cause of crop loss on farms. Scientists long suspected, but had a hard time proving, that the weed thrived by allelopathy. From the Greek "allelo-," meaning "other," ...

Distal radius fractures (often simply termed wrist or Colles' fractures) are the second most common fractures in the elderly. Beyond the immediate impact on the patient, wrist fractures in older adults often indicate underlying osteoporosis and high risk of subsequent fragility fractures. Despite their clinical significance, evidence-based practice and clinical research on wrist fractures are hampered by the lack of standardized methods of outcome measurement. A new publication* by the Distal Radius Working Group of the International Society for Fracture Repair (ISFR) ...

Scientists are reporting progress in the search for the first broad-spectrum drugs to combat human rhinoviruses (HRVs), which cause humanity's most common infectious diseases. Their study on these potential drugs for infections that include the common cold appears in the journal ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters. Angus MacLeod and colleagues note that although many HRV infections cause mild disease, they can lead to dangerous complications for millions of people with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Previous potential drugs for HRV either didn't work or ...

Energy conservation in a small number of households could go a long way to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, scientists are reporting. Their study, which measured differences in energy demands at the household level, appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology. Dominik Saner and colleagues point out that the energy people use to power their homes and to satisfy their mobility needs accounts for more than 70 percent of emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas involved in global climate change. To cope with that problem, policymakers and environmentalists ...

While the iPad® is being used for intraoperative procedure guidance, percutaneous procedure planning, and mobile interpretation of some imaging examinations, the majority of radiology residents are using it primarily as an educational tool, according to a study published online in the Journal of the American College of Radiology. "Some sectors of the medical community consider the iPad to be a revolutionary tool in health care delivery, with many use scenarios focused on medical imaging. The purpose of our study was to assess residents' use patterns and opinions of the ...

Someone finds that piece of chewing gum you pitched today, uses the saliva to sequence your DNA and surreptitiously reads your book of life — including genetic secrets like your susceptibility to diseases. If that scenario, posed in an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News, causes a little discomfort, consider this: That stranger also uses the DNA to reconstruct a copy of y-o-u. Linda Wang, a senior editor of C&EN, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, focuses on an unusual art exhibition ...

BOSTON (June 26, 2013)-- Community wide interventions hold promise as an effective approach to reducing childhood obesity rates according to new research from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and Tufts University School of Medicine. An analysis of data from the first two school years (20 calendar months) of the Shape Up Somerville: Eat Smart Play Hard™ intervention showed that schoolchildren in Somerville, Massachusetts gained less weight and were less likely to be obese or overweight than schoolchildren in two similar control communities. ...

UC Berkeley researchers have found that a lack of sleep, which is common in anxiety disorders, may play a key role in ramping up the brain regions that contribute to excessive worrying. Neuroscientists have found that sleep deprivation amplifies anticipatory anxiety by firing up the brain's amygdala and insular cortex, regions associated with emotional processing. The resulting pattern mimics the abnormal neural activity seen in anxiety disorders. Furthermore, their research suggests that innate worriers – those who are naturally more anxious and therefore more likely ...

Across sub-Saharan Africa, women and children play major roles as pedestrian load-transporters, in the widespread absence of basic sanitation services, electricity and affordable/reliable motorised transport. Professor Kim Buton of the University of Huddersfield, has coauthored an international study to look at the health impacts that this practice can have. The majority of loads, including water and firewood for domestic purposes, are carried on the head. Load-carrying has implications not only for school attendance and performance, women's time budgets and gender ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., and MARINA DEL REY, Calif., June 26, 2013 — Los Alamos National Laboratory and Tribogenics, the pioneer of innovative X-ray solutions, have partnered to create a unique, lightweight, compact, low-cost X-ray system that uses the MiniMAX (Miniature, Mobile, Agile, X-ray) camera to provide real-time inspection of sealed containers and facilities. The innovative technology will be featured at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) International Conference on Nuclear Security: Enhancing Global Efforts, July 1-5, in Vienna, Austria. "Cost and portability ...

Gliomas are malignant brain tumors that arise from glial cells called astrocytes, found in the central nervous system. "In treating malignant gliomas, we currently combine radiotherapy with the anticancer drug temozolomide. However, in some patients, tumors rapidly become resistant to both treatment methods," says neurooncologist Professor Dr. Michael Platten, who leads a cooperation unit of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) and the Department of Neurooncology of Heidelberg University Hospital. "We therefore urgently need new methods ...

NEW YORK-- A newly transferred associate from the Shanghai office nails his presentation to Mr. Smith from Chicago but stumbles in his pitch to Mr. Chen from San Francisco. A visiting professor from Taiwan lectures fluently about a slide of a Grecian urn, but falters and struggles to recall the word "translucent" when discussing a Ming vase. What is it about seeing a Chinese face or even a Chinese vase that can disrupt a Chinese immigrant's fluency in English? Research on how cultural knowledge operates in the mind increasingly focuses on the dynamics through which ...

In 2011 and 2012, research from China's Nanjing University made international headlines with reports that after mice ate, bits of genetic material from the plants they'd ingested could make it into their bloodstreams intact and turn the animals' own genes off. The surprising results from Chen-Yu Zhang's group led to speculation that genetic illness might one day be treated with medicinal food, but also to worry that genetically modified foods might in turn modify consumers in unanticipated ways. Now, though, a research team at Johns Hopkins reports that Zhang's results ...

DETROIT — A Wayne State University researcher has found that sleep apnea severity is higher among African-American men in certain age ranges, even after controlling for body mass index (BMI). A study by James A. Rowley, M.D., professor of internal medicine in WSU's School of Medicine, showed that being an African-American man younger than 40 years old increased the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) by 3.21 breathing pauses per hour of sleep compared to a white man in the same age range with the same BMI. Obstructive sleep apnea affects at least 4 percent of men and 2 percent ...

June 26, 2013—One in five adolescents surveyed in Ontario, Canada said they have suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) that left them unconscious for five minutes or required them to be hospitalized overnight, a statistic researchers in Toronto say is much higher than previously thought. Sports such as ice hockey and soccer accounted for more than half the injuries, said Dr. Gabreila Ilie, lead author of the study and a post-doctoral fellow at St. Michael's Hospital. Traumatic brain injuries, such as concussions, were reported more often by males than females, by ...

Washington, DC — Using a novel technique to promote the regeneration of nerve cells across the site of severe spinal cord injury, researchers have restored bladder function in paralyzed adult rats, according to a study in the June 26 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings may guide future efforts to restore other functions lost after spinal cord injury. It also raises hope that similar strategies could one day be used to restore bladder function in people with severe spinal cord injuries. For decades, scientists have experimented with using nerve grafts ...

Patients who have experienced a stroke spend a substantial amount of time and effort seeking out, processing, and reflecting on information about the management of their condition because the information provided by health services worldwide is currently inadequate, according to a study by UK and US researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine. Fragmented care and poor communication between stroke patients and clinicians, as well as between health-care providers, can mean that patients are ill-equipped to organize their care and develop coping strategies, which ...

New evidence supports a causal relationship between adiposity and heart failure, and between adiposity and increased liver enzymes, according to a study published this week in PLOS Medicine. The study, conducted by Inga Prokopenko, Erik Ingelsson, and colleagues from the ENGAGE (European Network for Genetic and Genomic Epidemiology) Consortium, also provides additional support for several previously shown causal associations such as those between adiposity and type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, dyslipidemia, and hypertension. The authors investigated whether adiposity ...

A drug developed to treat genetic diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis may need a radical rethink. In a new study published on 25 June in the open access journal PLOS Biology, researchers question the mechanistic basis of the drug called PTC124 (also known as Ataluren), casting doubt as to whether it has the molecular effects that are claimed for it. This may have implications for its effectiveness in treating genetic diseases. An estimated 10% of all human genetic diseases are caused by nonsense mutations. These cause ribosomes to stop dead ...

Use of advanced treatment technologies for prostate cancer, such as intensity-modulated radiotherapy and robotic prostatectomy, has increased among men with low-risk disease, high risk of noncancer mortality, or both, a population of patients who are unlikely to benefit from these treatments, according to a study in the June 26 issue of JAMA. "Prostate cancer is a common and expensive disease in the United States. In part because of the untoward morbidity of traditional radiation and surgical therapies, advances in the treatment of localized disease have evolved over ...

In 2 large studies, the association between aspirin use and risk of colorectal cancer was affected by mutation of the gene BRAF, with regular aspirin use associated with a lower risk of BRAF-wild-type colorectal cancer but not with risk of BRAF-mutated cancer, findings that suggest that BRAF-mutant colon tumor cells may be less sensitive to the effect of aspirin, according to a study in the June 26 issue of JAMA. Colorectal cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Randomized controlled trials have demonstrated that aspirin use reduces the risk of colorectal ...

"Traumatic brain injury (TBI) among adolescents has been identified as an important health priority. However, studies of TBI among adolescents in large representative samples are lacking. This information is important to the planning and evaluation of injury prevention efforts, particularly because even minor TBI may have important adverse consequences," write Gabriela Ilie, Ph.D., of St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, Canada, and colleagues, who examined the prevalence of TBI, mechanisms of injury, and adverse correlates in a large representative sample of adolescents living ...