Administering the drug rituximab once weekly for one month provides the same benefits as 18 months of daily immunosuppressive therapy in people with severe forms of vasculitis, or inflammation of the blood vessels, a study has found. Researchers from the Immune Tolerance Network (ITN), an international clinical trials group funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), found that rituximab is as effective as the standard therapy at inducing and maintaining disease remission. The findings appear ...

Women who gave birth following fertility treatment had no long-term increased risk of death or major cardiovascular events compared to women who gave birth without fertility therapy, according to new research by the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) and Women's College Hospital. The findings, published today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, are the first to show fertility medications, which can cause short-term pregnancy complications, are not associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease later in life. "The speculated ...

Principal Investigator George Ricker likes to call it the "Goldilocks orbit" — it's not too close to Earth and her Moon, and it's not too far. In fact, it's just right. And as a result of this never-before-used orbit — advanced and fine-tuned by NASA engineers and other members of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) team — the Explorer mission led by Ricker will be perfectly positioned to map the locations of more than 500 transiting exoplanets, extrasolar planets that periodically eclipse each one's host star. When the two-year mission begins in the 2017-2018 ...

Traveling to remote locations sometimes involves navigating through stop-and-go traffic, traversing long stretches of highway and maneuvering sharp turns and steep hills. The same can be said for guiding spacecraft to far-flung destinations in space. It isn't always a straight shot. A NASA technologist has developed a fully automated tool that gives mission planners a preliminary set of detailed directions for efficiently steering a spacecraft to hard-to-reach interplanetary destinations, such as Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, and most comets and asteroids. The tool, the ...

No sooner had Tropical Storm Flossie dissipated then another tropical cyclone called Tropical Depression 7E formed yesterday, July 30, in the eastern Pacific Ocean. NASA's TRMM satellite saw "hot towers" in the storm's center early on July 31, that indicated it would likely strengthen, and it became Tropical Storm Gil hours later. NASA and the Japan Space Agency's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite traveled above intensifying tropical storm Gil on July 31, 2013 at 0455 UTC or 12:55 a.m. EDT. The TRMM satellite pass showed that Gil was already very well ...

Tropical Depression Flossie fizzled fast on July 30 in the Central Pacific Ocean. Satellite imagery on July 31 showed remnant clouds northwest of the Hawaiian Island chain. NOAA's Central Pacific Hurricane Center issued the final advisory on the remnants of Tropical Depression Flossie on July 30 at 1500 UTC/11 a.m. EDT. At that time Flossie's remnant low pressure area was centered near 22.3 north latitude and 159.8 west longitude, about 140 miles west-northwest of Honolulu, Hawaii. The low pressure area was still moving to the west-northwest at 16 knots and the maximum ...

Probing the preformation of the α-particle in the α-decay process is a very attractive subject in studies of nuclear structure. Recently, this crucial α-preformation probability was empirically deduced and exhibits a new feature that had been inferred to some extent by Professor REN Zhongzhou and his group from Department of Physics, Nanjing University. This work, titled "Model-independent trend of α-preformation probability", was published in SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy 2013, Vol. 56(8). Dating back to the end of the 19th century, ...

Partners of new mothers often experience shifts in sexuality, and these shifts are often unrelated to biological or medical factors pertaining to childbirth. The findings, which are published in a recent issue of The Journal of Sexual Medicine, expand current understanding of postpartum sexuality, and may help health professionals as they counsel new parents. Research on postpartum sexuality has typically focused on female reproductive biology in birth mothers—for example, how hormonal changes that accompany pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding affect sexual desire, or ...

The American Thoracic Society has released new clinical practice guidelines on the classification, evaluation and management of childhood interstitial lung disease (chILD) in infants. Childhood ILD includes a diverse group of rare lung diseases found in infants, children and teens that involve the interstitial tissues of the lung, which surround the air sacs (alveoli) in the lung and airways (breathing tubes). It is not known how many children have these disorders. Some types of chILD are caused by other diseases, while the cause is unclear in others, and prognosis varies ...

WASHINGTON, DC, July 30, 2013 — Neither the threat of arrest nor punishment may significantly deter Mexicans from trying to enter the United States illegally, according to a new study in the August issue of the American Sociological Review. The study examined a variety of factors — economic and non-economic — that may influence decisions to migrate illegally from Mexico to the U.S., and it found that people's perceptions of the certainty of arrest and the severity of punishment are not significant determinants of their intentions to migrate illegally, once other relevant ...

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, ILL. (August 1, 2013) – If you think summer insects are done setting their sights on ruining your outdoor gathering, think again. August's hot and dry climate is the perfect breeding ground for insects, especially yellow jackets. And for the millions of Americans allergic to insect stings, these late summer bugs can be deadly. According to a report released today in the August issue of Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, the scientific journal of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI), insect sting allergy is increasing, ...

Bladder cancer is a common condition – an estimated 10,000 people are diagnosed with the disease each year in the UK. It is the seventh most common cancer in the UK, affecting men more than women. Some people develop invasive bladder cancer, which is where the cancer has grown through the muscle layer of the bladder. When this occurs, there is a higher risk that the cancer will spread to other areas of the body and it is much more difficult to treat. Until now the signalling process that allows a benign, small polyp to develop into something that spreads and is invasive ...

Cambridge scientists have identified an 'on/off' switch in a type of cancer which typically occurs in the testes and ovaries called 'malignant germ cell tumours'. The research was published today, 01 August, in the journal Cancer Research. Malignant germ cell tumours arise in sperm- or egg-forming cells and usually occur in the reproductive organs, the testes or ovaries. The cancerous tumours are seen in patients of all ages, both in childhood and adulthood. Although many patients do well after treatment, current chemotherapy treatments can have severe long-term side ...

Transplant teams have long tried to match the size of donor lungs to the size of the recipient as closely as possible, concerned that lungs of the wrong size could lead to poor lung function and poor outcomes. But new Johns Hopkins-led research suggests that oversized donor lungs may instead be the best option for patients, finding they are associated with a 30 percent increased chance of survival one year after the operation. The issue of lung size was brought into the spotlight recently with the case of a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl in need of a lung transplant. Regulations ...

When it comes to lung transplants, bigger may be better. That's the main finding from a University of Iowa study, which found that oversized lungs lead to improved survival following lung transplants, particularly among patients receiving double-lung transplants. Currently, in the United States height is used as a surrogate for lung size for transplant candidates. But Michael Eberlein, clinical assistant professor in internal medicine at the UI, and colleagues came up with a new formula, called "predicted total lung capacity ratio," to find out which size lungs matched ...

Philadelphia, PA, July 30, 2013 – A new study published in the July/August 2013 issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior evaluated the motivational effects of Project WebHealth, a web-based health promotion intervention developed to prevent excessive weight gain in college students. Researchers found that specific procedures and components of Project WebHealth successfully motivated students to improve their weight-related health behaviors and that the level of motivation differed by gender. The college years are frequently associated with risky health ...

Portland, OR, and Cambridge, MA – July 30, 2013- The St. Laurent Institute, a non-profit medical research institute focused on the systems biology of disease, today announced in a study published in the July edition of Genome Biology, that genetic matter, previously ignored by the scientific community, may play an important role in cancer. The study, "VlincRNAs controlled by retroviral elements are a hallmark of pluripotency and cancer" found that novel non-coding parts of the human genome known as vlincRNAs (very long intergenic, non-coding RNAs) triggered by ancient ...

UCLA scientists, in collaboration with teams in China, have used the powerful technology of single-cell RNA sequencing to track the genetic development of a human and a mouse embryo at an unprecedented level of accuracy. The technique could lead to earlier and more accurate diagnoses of genetic diseases, even when the embryo consists of only eight cells. The study was led by Guoping Fan, professor of human genetics and molecular biology and member of both the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem ...

Slight changes in the timing of the annual loss of sea-ice in polar regions could have dire consequences for ecosystems, by allowing a lot more sunlight to reach the sea floor, a study from UNSW and the Australian Antarctic Division shows. The research predicts that biodiversity on some areas of the polar seabed could be reduced by as much as one third within decades, as the poles warm. The study, Light-driven tipping points in polar ecosystems, will be published in the journal Global Change Biology. Dr Graeme Clark, of the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental ...

Los Angeles, CA (July 31, 2013) In his January 2009 State of the Union address, President Obama announced his goal for the U.S. to lead the world in college graduates by 2020. While policymakers often blame university systems for low graduation among college students, according to new research, characteristics known about a student before he or she even enters a college classroom can accurately predict graduation rates. This new study, published in SAGE Open, finds that characteristics such as fulltime enrollment status, race, transfer credits, and expected family contribution ...

As the world starts feeling the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and consequent global temperature rise, researchers are looking for a Plan B to mitigate climate change. A group of German scientists has now come up with an environmentally friendly method that they say could do just that. The technique, dubbed carbon farming, consists in planting trees in arid regions on a large scale to capture CO2. They publish their study today in Earth System Dynamics, a journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). "Carbon farming addresses the root source of climate ...

Don't hire someone to wash your dirty solar panels. That's the conclusion of a study recently conducted by a team of engineers at the University of California, San Diego. Their findings were published in the July 25 online issue of Solar Energy. Researchers found panels that hadn't been cleaned, or rained on, for 145 days during a summer drought in California, lost only 7.4 percent of their efficiency. Overall, for a typical residential solar system of 5 kilowatts, washing panels halfway through the summer would translate into a mere $20 gain in electricity production ...

Boulder, Colo., USA - The complete August 2013 issue of Lithosphere is now available online. Papers covering the lithosphere of China and Tibet dominate the issue, with articles on the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan and the Idaho, USA, Snake River plain as well. The issue also features an article on diamond prospecting in India, a numerical modeling study, and an open access research focus article that asks, "Is it possible to predict the past?" Abstracts are online at http://lithosphere.gsapubs.org/content/early/recent. Representatives of the media may obtain complimentary ...

One size chart doesn't fit all when it comes to evaluating birth weight and health outcomes of newborns. A new study, recently published online by the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, shows ethnicity-specific birth weight charts are better at identifying newborns who are small for gestational age (SGA), a classification associated with hypothermia, hypoglycemia, infection and admission to the neonatal intensive care unit. "When we expect Chinese, South Asian and Caucasian babies to be the same size at birth, we risk misclassifying small but healthy Chinese ...

VIDEO: This video shows a giant water bug larva attacking and killing a small fish. Click here for more information. The giant water bug Lethocerus patruelis is the largest European true bug and the largest European water insect. The adult bugs reach an impressive 8 cm in length, and the largest representatives of the same family are even bigger - up to almost 12 cm. A new article published in the open access journal Zookeys provides detailed information on karyotype and ...