CORAL GABLES, FL (JULY 23, 2013) — Purple bacteria contain pigments that allow them to use sunlight as their source of energy, hence their color. Small as they are, these microbes can teach us a lot about life on Earth, because they have been around longer than most other organisms on the planet. University of Miami (UM) physicist Neil Johnson, who studies purple bacteria, recently found that these organisms can also survive in the presence of extreme alien light. The findings show that the way in which light is received by the bacteria can dictate the difference between ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- A research team from the University of Missouri and Kansas State University has been working to find a cure for a specific virus that affects pigs and costs the hog industry $800 million annually. In their latest study, the team disproved one way the virus spreads, which will help scientists narrow the search for an ultimate cure. Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome Virus (PRRSV) can inhibit pigs from reproducing and slow the growth of young pigs. Once pigs are infected, the only remedy is for hog farmers to cull their herds, which has cost ...

DEERFIELD, IL. (JULY 22, 2013)— Scientists have for the first time traced a novel virus that infected two men from northwestern Missouri in 2009 to populations of ticks in the region, providing confirmation that lone star ticks are carrying the recently discovered virus and humans in the area are likely at risk of infection. The findings were published online today in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Dubbed Heartland virus or HRTV, the infection causes fever, headaches, and low white blood cell and platelet counts. The two men infected in 2009, who ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A 2,000-square-kilometer zone in the Yukon Flats of interior Alaska – one of the most flammable high-latitude regions of the world, according to scientists – has seen a dramatic increase in both the frequency and severity of fires in recent decades. Wildfire activity in this area is higher than at any other time in the past 10,000 years, the researchers report. The new findings add to the evidence that relatively frequent and powerful fires are converting the conifer-rich boreal forests of Alaska into deciduous woodlands. Deciduous trees, which shed ...

Remove even one bumblebee species from an ecosystem and the impact is swift and clear: Their floral "sweethearts" produce significantly fewer seeds, a new study finds. The study, to be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on the interactions between bumblebees and larkspur wildflowers in Colorado's Rocky Mountains. The results show how reduced competition among pollinators disrupts floral fidelity, or specialization, among the remaining bees in the system, leading to less successful plant reproduction. "We found that these wildflowers ...

Plain packaging for cigarettes seems to make tobacco less appealing and increase the urgency to quit smoking, suggest early findings from Australia, published in the online journal BMJ Open. Australia formally introduced plain brown packaging, accompanied by graphic health warnings taking up three quarters of the front of the pack, for all tobacco products on December 1 2012. So far, it is the only country in the world to have done so. The researchers wanted to find out what effects the policy was having in the early stages, and whether it helped curb the appeal of ...

Here's more evidence why breakfast may be the most important meal of the day: Men who reported that they regularly skipped breakfast had a higher risk of a heart attack or fatal coronary heart disease in a study reported in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. Researchers analyzed food frequency questionnaire data and tracked health outcomes for 16 years (1992-2008) on 26,902 male health professionals ages 45-82. They found: Men who reported they skipped breakfast had a 27 percent higher risk of heart attack or death from coronary heart disease than those ...

A study in Norway suggests echocardiographic screening in the general public for structural and valvular heart disease was not associated with benefit for reducing the risk of death, myocardial infarction (heart attack) or stroke, according to a report published by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Because of the low prevalence of structural heart disease in the general population, echocardiography has traditionally not been considered justified in low-risk individuals, although echocardiography is recommended for screening asymptomatic individuals with ...

A study of the use of transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) at an academic medical center suggests that although 9 in 10 of the procedures were appropriate under 2011 appropriate use criteria, less than 1 in 3 of the TTEs resulted in an active change in care, according to a report of the research by Susan Matulevicius, M.D., and colleagues at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. The researchers, who studied 535 patients undergoing TTE, found that, overall, 31.8 percent of TTEs resulted in an active change in care; 46.9 percent resulted in a continuation ...

Parents who had established relationships with pediatricians still accessed care for their children at retail clinics (RCs), typically located in large chain drugstores, mostly because the clinics were convenient, according to a study published by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication. Most RCs are staffed by nonpediatric nurse practitioners and physician assistants who care for patients 18 months and older with minor illnesses such as ear and throat infections. However, the literature regarding RCs is limited and little is known about the use of RCs for pediatric ...

A case series by researchers at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., examined three patients with ischemic stroke who later received a diagnosis of fungal meningitis attributed to epidural injections of contaminated methylprednisolone for low back pain. The recent identification of injections of contaminated methylprednisolone acetate has highlighted the different clinical presentations of fungal meningitis, which can have an incubation period of one to four weeks between the last spinal injection and when a patient seeks medical care. "Fungal meningitis due to ...

No computer works as efficiently as the human brain – so much so that building an artificial brain is the goal of many scientists. Neuroinformatics researchers from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich have now made a breakthrough in this direction by understanding how to configure so-called neuromorphic chips to imitate the brain's information processing abilities in real-time. They demonstrated this by building an artificial sensory processing system that exhibits cognitive abilities. New approach: simulating biological neurons Most approaches in neuroinformatics ...

For the first time scientists have identified how a pathway in the brain which is unique to humans allows us to learn new words. The average adult's vocabulary consists of about 30,000 words. This ability seems unique to humans as even the species closest to us -- chimps -- manage to learn no more than 100. It has long been believed that language learning depends on the integration of hearing and repeating words but the neural mechanisms behind learning new words remained unclear. Previous studies have shown that this may be related to a pathway in the brain only ...

Language is a uniquely human ability. The average person's vocabulary consists of about thirty thousand words, although there are individual differences in the ability to learn a new language. It has long been believed that language acquisition depends on the integration of the information between motor and auditory representation of words in the brain, but the neural mechanisms that lie behind learning new words remained unclear. Now, a study made by researchers from the group of Cognition and Brain Plasticity at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) ...

(Boston) - In a Special Report in the current issue of Circulation, Boston Medical Center cardiothoracic surgeon Harold Lazar, MD, has found that off-pump coronary artery bypass graft (OPCAB) surgery has failed to show any significant improvement in short-term morbidity or mortality as compared to the traditional on-pump coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. He recommends that the technique be abandoned, unless surgeons who perform off-pump surgery can show that their own results are as good as results reported with the traditional on-pump surgery. During off-pump ...

The Yarlung-Tsangpo River in southern Asia drops rapidly through the Himalaya Mountains on its way to the Bay of Bengal, losing about 7,000 feet of elevation through the precipitously steep Tsangpo Gorge. For the first time, scientists have direct geochemical evidence that the 150-mile long gorge, possibly the world's deepest, was the conduit by which megafloods from glacial lakes, perhaps half the volume of Lake Erie, drained suddenly and catastrophically through the Himalayas when their ice dams failed at times during the last 2 million years. "You would expect that ...

HOUSTON – (July 22, 2013) – Rice University nanotechnology researchers have unveiled a solar-powered sterilization system that could be a boon for more than 2.5 billion people who lack adequate sanitation. The "solar steam" sterilization system uses nanomaterials to convert as much as 80 percent of the energy in sunlight into germ-killing heat. The technology is described online in a July 8 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition. In the paper, researchers from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) show two ways that solar steam ...

Forest fires are burning north and east of Russia's Irkutsk Oblast. The Irkutsk Oblast is located in southeastern Siberia in the basins of Angara, Lena, and Nizhnyaya Tunguska Rivers. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the area and captured an image showing multiple forest fires and smoke plumes. Some of the places affected by the smoke include Cokhchuolu, Ust'ye-Chony, Skysykatakh, and Chernyshevskiy along the Vilyuy River. These appear to be recreational areas. South of the Vilyuy River is the town of Mirny. It is known for having the world's largest diamond mine. ...

Forest fires continue to plague the hot, dry western part of the United States this summer. In Idaho, several fires were spotted by NASA's Aqua satellite on July 20, 2013. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS's thermal bands, are outlined in red. The Lodgepole Fire was detected at noon on Saturday, July 20. Local fire resources were dispatched to the scene where aggressive fire suppression efforts were put into place. The fire is currently burning in lodge pole pine and dispersed Douglas fir. Currently 650 acres have burned and the cause of this fire is under investigation. The ...

In Indonesia, land-clearing blazes dot the countryside. Fires for clearing land have been outlowed for all but the smallest landowners, but the "slash-and-burn" practice still persists despite cloaking Southeast Asia in toxic pollution for weeks. Better and more available satellite technology is helping identify culprits behind land-clearing blazes in Indonesia. Unprecedented levels of air pollution in Singapore and Malaysia in June led to respiratory illnesses, school closings, and grounded aircraft. This year it was so bad that in some affected areas there was a 100 ...

Hamilton, ON (July 22, 2013) – Financial incentives for Ontario surgeons are likely a key factor driving greater use of laparoscopic colon cancer surgery, says a study led by a McMaster University surgeon. The research, published online by the Annals of Surgical Oncology, found that between 2002 and 2009 there was an increase in laparoscopic versus traditional open techniques for colon and rectal cancer surgery. These increases were associated with only minimal decreases in how long patients stayed in hospital after surgery and no changes in the survival of patients. ...

We know that breastfeeding has a positive impact on child development and health —including protection against illness. Now researchers from Tel Aviv University have shown that breastfeeding could also help protect against Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the most commonly diagnosed neurobehavioral disorder in children and adolescents. Seeking to determine if the development of ADHD was associated with lower rates of breastfeeding, Dr. Aviva Mimouni-Bloch, of Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and Head of the Child Neurodevelopmental ...

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered a new chemical reaction that has the potential to lower the cost and streamline the manufacture of compounds ranging from agricultural chemicals to pharmaceutical drugs. The reaction resolves a long-standing challenge in organic chemistry in creating phenolic compounds from aromatic hydrocarbons quickly and cheaply. Phenolic compounds, or phenols, are broadly used as disinfectants, fungicides and drugs to treat many ailments such as Parkinson's disease. Creating a phenol seems deceptively simple. All it ...

A recent study published in the July issue of the Journal of Immunology helps explain why some humans contract bacterial super-infections like pneumonia with influenza. The research was led by Le Bonheur Pediatrician-in-Chief Jon McCullers, MD – an infectious disease specialist who is also chair of the Department of Pediatrics for the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and adjunct faculty at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. "It's been known that the influenza virus does something to suppress host immune function, which can facilitate development of deadly ...

The Rancho Fire started 2 miles north of Lebec, CA on July 19, 2013 at approximately noon. While the fire originally started on Kern County jurisdiction, by the evening, it had burned into Los Padres National Forest. The fire has burned 722 acres and is 92% contained. Containment of the fire is expected on July 24, 2013. There are currently 337 resources assigned to the Rancho Fire, including 14 crews, 10 engines, 1 water tender and 2 helicopters. The cause of the fire is still under investigation. This natural-color satellite image was collected by the Moderate Resolution ...