In a world first, new Australian medical research has given pregnant women with epilepsy new hope of reducing their chance of having a baby with physical birth defects. According to research published in the September 2013 issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, epilepsy experts at The Royal Melbourne Hospital have discovered a link between high doses of common epilepsy drug valproate and the increased risk of having a baby with spina bifida or hypospadias. Royal Melbourne Hospital epilepsy specialist and Head of the Department ...

Cloud top temperatures warmed up on NASA infrared imagery, indicating that the uplift in Tropical Storm Pewa was waning. By Aug. 23, Pewa was reduced to a tropical depression. Infrared imagery also showed that wind shear has pushed Pewa's precipitation away from the storm's center. On Aug. 22 at 01:35 UTC (2:53 p.m. EDT) NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite showed a limited area of cloud top temperatures in bands of thunderstorms east of the center of Tropical Depression Pewa were as cold as -63F/-52C, indicating ...

The ninth tropical depression of the Eastern Pacific Ocean hurricane season strengthened into Tropical Storm Ivo on Aug. 23 as NASA's TRMM satellite passed overhead. Ivo is expected to bring heavy surf and rainfall to southern Baja California over the next couple of days. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission/TRMM satellite captured the rainfall rates occurring in Tropical Storm Ivo on Aug. 23 at 0815 UTC/4:15 a.m. EDT. TRMM noticed some thunderstorms were reaching heights of 7.4 miles /12 km, and the heaviest rainfall was falling at a rate of 1.18 inches/30 mm per ...

New Rochelle, NY, August 15, 2013—Existing urban water systems are at the end of their design lifetimes. New, innovative solutions are needed, and these must combine technology and engineering with an understanding of social systems and institutions. The current issue of Environmental Engineering Science, the Official Journal of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors, focuses on Re-inventing Urban Water Systems. Of particular note is an insightful article that presents the challenges and opportunities facing urban water system innovation, available ...

One of two of NASA's Global Hawk unmanned aircraft flew over the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin and investigated the Saharan Air Layer in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean on Aug. 20 and 21. The instruments aboard the Global Hawk sampled the environment of ex-Erin and revealed an elevated dust layer overrunning the storm. "Our goal with this flight was to look at how the Saharan air would move around or into the former storm, but the circulation was so shallow and weak that, according to our instruments, the Saharan air simply moved westward right over what was left of Erin," ...

VIDEO: The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) provides many water-related products derived from data acquired by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) instrument aboard the Global Change Observation Mission 1st-Water... Click here for more information. The melting of sea ice in the Arctic is well on its way toward its annual "minimum," that time when the floating ice cap covers less of the Arctic Ocean than at any other period during the year. While the ...

Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), led by Dr. Lee Bulla, have demonstrated for the first time the selective cytotoxicity of Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. israelensis Cry4B toxin is mediated by BT-R3. The Cry toxins produced by Bacillus thuringiensis exert their insecticidal activity by binding with high-affinity to their cognate cadherin receptors located on the surface of epithelial cells that line the midgut of susceptible insects. In the case of Anopheles gambiae, binding of the Cry4B toxin by BT-R3, in turn, triggers an internal signaling event ...

Researchers at the Beihang University School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, led by Dr. Yubo Fan, have discovered that Biphasic Electrical stimulation (BES), a non-chemical procedure, may be used as a strategy for preventing cell apoptosis in stem cell-based transplantation therapy. The article describing their studies will be published in the August 2013 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine. The scientists believe that their technique will be used for spinal cord injury patients in the future. Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a serious disease of the central ...

Beer-Sheva, Israel, August 23, 2013 – Teens listening to their preferred music while driving commit a greater number of errors and miscalculations, according to a new study from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev researchers that will be published in the October issue of Accident Analysis and Prevention. Male novice drivers in particular make more frequent and serious mistakes listening to their preferred music than their less aggressive, female counterparts, the researchers noted. The BGU study evaluated 85 young novice drivers accompanied by a researcher/driving instructor. ...

A lightweight and field-portable device invented at UCLA that conducts kidney tests and transmits data through a smartphone attachment may significantly reduce the need for frequent office visits by people with diabetes and others with chronic kidney ailments. The smartphone-based device was developed in the research lab of Aydogan Ozcan, a professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, and associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute. Weighing about one-third of a pound, the ...

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found a way that corrupted, disease-causing proteins spread in the brain, potentially contributing to Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and other brain-damaging disorders. The research identifies a specific type of receptor and suggests that blocking it may aid treatment of theses illnesses. The receptors are called heparan sulfate proteoglycans (HSPGs). "Many of the enzymes that create HSPGs or otherwise help them function are good targets for drug treatments," said senior author Marc I. ...

HONOLULU, HI – University of Hawaii Cancer Center Researcher Song-Yi Park, PhD, along with her colleagues, recently discovered that a greater consumption of fruits and vegetables may lower the risk of invasive bladder cancer in women. The investigation was conducted as part of the Multiethnic Cohort (MEC) Study, established in 1993 to assess the relationships among dietary, lifestyle, genetic factors, and cancer risk. Park and her fellow researcher's analyzed data collected from 185,885 older adults over a period of 12.5 years, of which 581 invasive bladder cancer cases ...

Fairbanks, Alaska— Sea ice decline and warming trends are changing the vegetation in nearby arctic coastal areas, according to two University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists. Uma Bhatt, an associate professor with UAF's Geophysical Institute, and Skip Walker, a professor at UAF's Institute of Arctic Biology, contributed to a recent review of research on the response of plants, marine life and animals to declining sea ice in the Arctic. "Our thought was to see if sea ice decline contributed to greening of the tundra along the coastal areas," Bhatt said. "It's a relatively ...

VIDEO: This shows confidence regions (grey contours) for the location of a fish at Palmyra Atoll, along with home range (green line) estimated by the state-space model. Click here for more information. There's no "Google Maps" for finding fish. The radio signals that are the backbone of traditional GPS cannot pass through seawater. But sound travels remarkably well, so scientists often use acoustic telemetry to estimate an individual fish's location. That means attaching ...

In a pioneer study published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Nature Communications*, a research team at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC; Portugal), led by Miguel Godinho Ferreira in collaboration with Isabel Gordo, show for the first time that chromosomes rearrangements (such as inversions or translocations) can provide advantages to the cells that harbor them depending on the environment they are exposed. This study contributes to better understand different biological problems such as: how cancer cells that have chromosomal rearrangements can outgrow ...

African mountain bamboos are something of a mystery, as nearly all bamboos are found in Asia or South America. Hidden away up mountains in the tropics where they provide food for gorillas, just as China's bamboos provide food for the Giant Panda, there are apparently only 2 species, and they had not been examined in very great detail, except by the gorillas, Fig. 1. It had been thought that they were very closely related to the hundreds of similar bamboos in Asia, but their respective ranges are separated by thousands of miles. As flowering in bamboos is such a rare ...

A new scanning technique developed by Danish and US researchers reveals how susceptible patients with aggressive brain cancer are to the drugs they receive. The research behind the ground-breaking technique has just been published in Nature Medicine. Each year sees 260 new cases of the most aggressive type of brain cancer in Denmark. Some patients survive only a few months, while others survive for 18 months. Only very few, 3.5%, are alive five years after their diagnosis. A new scanning technique can now reveal how the brain tumour responds to the drug administered: "We ...

Researchers at the University of Adelaide have discovered that the way the gut "tastes" sweet food may be defective in sufferers of type 2 diabetes, leading to problems with glucose uptake. This is the first time that abnormal control of so-called "sweet taste receptors" in the human intestine has been described by researchers. The work could have implications for a range of health and nutrition problems experienced by diabetes patients. Dr Richard Young, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher in the University of Adelaide's Nerve-Gut Research Laboratory, says taste buds aren't ...

New Orleans, LA – Mei-Chin Hsieh, MSPH, CTR, of LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Public Health's Louisiana Tumor Registry, is the lead author of a study that reports racial and ethnic differences in the incidence of soft tissue sarcomas in adolescents and young adults. The research, conducted at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Public Health, is published online in the Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/jayao.2012.0031. The LSUHSC research team, which also included Xiao-Cheng Wu, ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (August 22, 2013) – A statistical model accounting for dozens of different genes in combination—and the interactions between them—is an important step forward in understanding the genetic factors affecting the risk of Crohn's disease (CD), reports a study in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, official journal of the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA). The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. It's not just how many risk genes are present but how those genes interact with each other that determines ...

MADISON — In an era of widespread genetic sequencing, the ability to edit and alter an organism's DNA is a powerful way to explore the information within and how it guides biological function. A paper from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the August issue of the journal GENETICS takes genome editing to a new level in fruit flies, demonstrating a remarkable level of fine control and, importantly, the transmission of those engineered genetic changes across generations. Both features are key for driving the utility and spread of an approach that promises to give ...

New Rochelle, NY -- With the widespread popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, it is increasingly common for people to use interpersonal electronic surveillance to monitor the activities of current and former romantic partners. They can gather information on partners anonymously, view past and current photos and audio and video clips, and look for clues to explain any "suspicious" behaviors. Why some individuals engage in this type of behavior more than others is the subject of an article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed ...

BOSTON –– A new study has revealed marked differences in the genomic terrain of the two most common types of cervical cancer, suggesting that patients might benefit from therapies geared to each type's molecular idiosyncrasies. The study, published August 23, 2013 in the online version of the journal Cancer by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), is the first to compare the spectrum of cancer-related gene mutations in the two main subtypes of cervical cancer – adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. In tests on 80 cervical ...

Hostile sexism hurts intimate relationships Men who generally believe that women who challenge men's power are manipulative and subversive — so-called hostile sexism — carry over those antagonistic attitudes into their intimate relationships. In two studies, researchers gathered behavior data from committed heterosexual couples either five times across a year or daily for three weeks. They found that men who endorse hostile sexism perceived their female partners to behave more negatively than they actually did. These biased perceptions led the men to behave more negatively ...

This news release is available in French, Spanish and German. This news release is also available in Chinese. AUDIO: In this podcast, researcher Luis Rodriguez-Lado is interviewed about his work to build a model used to predict the risk of groundwater contamination by arsenic in China. Click here for more information. A new model to predict the risk of contaminants in groundwater will save those ...