VIDEO: Khurshid R. Ghani, M.D., of Henry Ford's Vattikuti Urology Institute and lead author of the study, explains why the charges for emergency department visits for kidney stones rose to$5 billion... Click here for more information. DETROIT -- The risk of women developing kidney stones is rising, as is the number of cases being seen in U.S. emergency departments, while the rate of hospitalization for the disorder has remained stable. Those are among the findings of a ...

It is a lengthy process before a contaminant is identified as such and its harmful effects are highlighted with a worldwide ban. This is acknowledged by Norbert Heeb, chemist in Empa's Analytical Chemistry Lab. He was involved in uncovering the exact structures of HBCD (hexabromocyclododecane). On closer inspection, the substance turned out to be a whole group of compounds. Together with researchers from ETH Zurich, Eawag and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), he published several studies that show how HBCD is structured, which forms tend to accumulate in ...

Do violent video games such as 'Mortal Kombat,' 'Halo' and 'Grand Theft Auto' trigger teenagers with symptoms of depression or attention deficit disorder to become aggressive bullies or delinquents? No, according to Christopher Ferguson of Stetson University and independent researcher Cheryl Olson from the US in a study published in Springer's Journal of Youth and Adolescence. On the contrary, the researchers found that the playing of such games actually had a very slight calming effect on youths with attention deficit symptoms and helped to reduce their aggressive and ...

The northwestern Pacific has generated its fourteenth tropical cyclone and NASA's Aqua satellite flew over the eastern side of the storm early on Aug. 26. Tropical Storm Kong-Rey formed from low pressure System 91W. It is located east of the northeast Philippines and bringing the region gusty winds, rains and rough seas today, Aug 26. Aqua passed over Tropical Storm Kong-Rey on Aug. 26 at 0432 UTC/12:32 a.m. EDT as it was strengthening from a tropical depression into a tropical storm. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard Aqua ...

CHICAGO --- In a new study published in Nature Genetics, Northwestern Medicine and Tel Aviv University scientists have found that a structural defect in skin cells can contribute to allergy development, including skin and food allergies, traditionally thought primarily to be a dysfunction of the immune system. The finding is related to the team's identification of a new rare genetic disease, called "severe dermatitis, multiple allergies, and metabolic wasting," or SAM, caused by mutations in the molecule desmoglein 1. "Desmoglein 1 is best understood as the 'glue' ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- The recent factory collapse in Bangladesh has renewed attention to the global issue of workplace standards. In many countries, similar problems have arisen from a lack of enforcement for existing laws pertaining to safety, wages and overtime, or an absence of labor contracts for workers. These problems occur for a variety of reasons, including a lack of funding for regulators; difficulties acquiring solid information about potential problems in the first place; and corruption in the enforcement process. "We have a huge problem with enforcement," says ...

Approximately 60 percent of people experience epistaxis, commonly known as nosebleed, at least once in their lifetime. Of those who experience nosebleed, six percent require medical treatment. A study in the September 2013 issue of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery, explores which nosebleed treatment options demonstrate the best outcomes. "Although data exist on the efficacy of the different epistaxis management techniques, outcome comparisons between the modalities for both primary management as well as management of cases of recurrence are currently lacking," the ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- An analysis of enzymes that load amino acids onto transfer RNAs -- an operation at the heart of protein translation -- offers new insights into the evolutionary origins of the modern genetic code, researchers report. Their findings appear in the journal PLOS ONE. The researchers focused on aminoacyl tRNA synthetases, enzymes that "read" the genetic information embedded in transfer RNA molecules and attach the appropriate amino acids to those tRNAs. Once a tRNA is charged with its amino acid, it carries it to the ribosome, a cellular "workbench" on ...

Irvine, Calif., Aug. 26, 2013 — By discovering the role of key neurons that mediate an important part of vision development, UC Irvine and UCLA neurobiologists have revealed a new approach to correcting visual disorders in children who suffer from early cataracts or amblyopia, also known as lazy eye. Such youngsters can have permanent defects in vision, even after surgery to remove cataracts or correct lazy eye. These flaws are often a result of improper brain development due to visual deprivation during childhood. In contrast, when cataracts in adults are surgically ...

PHILADELPHIA (August 26, 2013) – New research has uncovered the reason why some people seem to dislike everything while others seem to like everything. Apparently, it's all part of our individual personality – a dimension that researchers have coined "dispositional attitude." People with a positive dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to like things, whereas people with a negative dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to dislike things, according to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The journal article, "Attitudes ...

The last glacial maximum was a time when Earth's far northern and far southern latitudes were largely covered in ice sheets and sea levels were low. Over much of the planet, glaciers were at their greatest extent roughly 20,000 years ago. But according to a study headed by University of Pennsylvania geologist Jane Willenbring, that wasn't true in at least one part of southern Europe. Due to local effects of temperature and precipitation, the local glacial maximum occurred considerably earlier, around 26,000 years ago. The finding sheds new light on how regional climate ...

CHICAGO – At first, Krista Easom figured the little red bump on her foot was nothing more than a blister. It didn't hurt, but after a couple months, it didn't go away either. She booked an appointment with a dermatologist to have it removed. She wasn't worried. Easom, a 24-year-old law school student from New Jersey, was healthy, had no family history of cancer and was getting ready to enjoy some time in her newly adopted city of Chicago. That's when she received the results from her dermatologist, who removed a part of the blister and had it tested. It turns out ...

Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) have developed a new bioinformatics software tool designed to more easily identify genetic mutations responsible for cancers. The tool, called DrGaP, is the subject of a new paper published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. Xing Hua, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow in biostatistics at the National Cancer Institute, and a former visiting scholar at MCW, is the first author of the paper. Yan Lu, Ph.D., assistant professor of physiology, is corresponding author; and Pengyuan Liu, Ph.D., associate professor of ...

Understanding what happens to a material as it undergoes phase transformations – changes from a solid to a liquid to a gas or a plasma – is of fundamental scientific interest and critical for optimizing commercial applications. For metal nanocrystals, assumptions about the size-dependence of phase transformations were made that now need to be re-evaluated. A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has demonstrated that as metal nanocrystals go through phase transformations, size can make a much bigger ...

SAN FRANCISCO -- A year-long experiment on tiny ocean organisms called coccolithophores suggests that the single-celled algae may still be able to grow their calcified shells even as oceans grow warmer and more acidic in Earth's near future. The study stands in contrast to earlier studies suggesting that coccolithophores would fail to build strong shells in acidic waters. The world's oceans are expected to become more acidic as human activities pump increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the Earth's atmosphere. But after the researchers raised one strain of the ...

A study into marine life around an underwater volcanic vent in the Mediterranean, might hold the key to understanding how some species will be able to survive in increasingly acidic sea water should anthropogenic climate change continue. Researchers have discovered that some species of polychaete worms are able to modify their metabolic rates to better cope with and thrive in waters high in carbon dioxide (CO2), which is otherwise poisonous to other, often closely-related species. The study sheds new light on the robustness of some marine species and the relative resilience ...

Researchers at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere have brought new clarity to the picture of what goes awry in the brain during Parkinson's disease and identified a compound that eases the disease's symptoms in mice. Their discoveries, described in a paper published online in Nature Neuroscience on August 25, also overturn established ideas about the role of a protein considered key to the disease's progress. "Not only were we able to identify the mechanism that could cause progressive cell death in both inherited and non-inherited forms of Parkinson's, we found there were already ...

Of the over 1,900 errors already reported in the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis (CF), it is unclear how many of them actually contribute to the inherited disease. Now a team of researchers reports significant headway in figuring out which mutations are benign and which are deleterious. In so doing, they have increased the number of known CF-causing mutations from 22 to 127, accounting for 95 percent of the variations found in patients with CF. In a summary of their research to be published online in Nature Genetics Aug. 25, the scientists say that characterizing ...

Cocaine can speedily rewire high-level brain circuits that support learning, memory and decision-making, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and UCSF. The findings shed new light on the frontal brain's role in drug-seeking behavior and may be key to tackling addiction. Looking into the frontal lobes of live mice at a cellular level, researchers found that, after just one dose of cocaine, the rodents showed fast and robust growth of dendritic spines, which are tiny, twig-like structures that connect neurons and form the nodes of the brain's ...

ANN ARBOR — University of Michigan researchers and their University of Hawaii colleagues say they've solved the longstanding mystery of how mercury gets into open-ocean fish, and their findings suggest that levels of the toxin in Pacific Ocean fish will likely rise in coming decades. Using isotopic measurement techniques developed at U-M, the researchers determined that up to 80 percent of the toxic form of mercury, called methylmercury, found in the tissues of deep-feeding North Pacific Ocean fish is produced deep in the ocean, most likely by bacteria clinging to sinking ...

Leicester geneticists have discovered a potential defence against Huntington's disease – a fatal neurodegenerative disorder which currently has no cure. The team of University of Leicester researchers identified that glutathione peroxidase activity – a key antioxidant in cells – protects against symptoms of the disease in model organisms. They hope that the enzyme activity – whose protective ability was initially observed in model organisms such as yeast - can be further developed and eventually used to treat people with the genetically-inherited disease. The disease ...

Mice given cocaine showed rapid growth in new brain structures associated with learning and memory, according to a research team from the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UC San Francisco. The findings suggest a way in which drug use may lead to drug-seeking behavior that fosters continued drug use, according to the scientists. The researchers used a microscope that allowed them to peer directly into nerve cells within the brains of living mice, and within two hours of giving a drug they found significant increases in the density of dendritic spines – structures ...

Mercury—a common industrial toxin—is carried through the atmosphere before settling on the ocean and entering the marine food web. Now, exciting new research from the University of Michigan and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) combines biogeochemistry and direct marine ecology observations to show how the global mercury cycle is colliding with ocean fish—and the human seafood supply—at different depths in the water. Mercury accumulation in the ocean fish we eat tends to take place at deeper depths, scientists ...

A new study published today in the journal Nature Materials has found a way to suppress the thermal conductivity in sodium cobaltate so that it can be used to harvest waste energy. Led by scientists at Royal Holloway University, the team conducted a series of experiments on crystals of sodium cobaltate grown in the University's Department of Physics. X-ray and neutron scattering experiments were carried out at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and in the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, using the UK's national supercomputer facility HECToR to make their ...

Bremerhaven, 22 August 2013. Ocean acidification could change the ecosystems of our seas even by the end of this century. Biologists at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have therefore assessed the extent of this ominous change for the first time. In a new study they compiled and analysed all available data on the reaction of marine animals to ocean acidification. The scientists found that whilst the majority of animal species investigated are affected by ocean acidification, the respective impacts are very specific. The ...