Spurred by increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, forests over the last two decades have become dramatically more efficient in how they use water. Scientists affiliated with the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site report the results in this week's issue of the journal Nature. Harvard Forest is one of 26 such NSF LTER sites in ecosystems from deserts to grasslands, coral reefs to coastal waters, around the world. Studies have long predicted that plants would begin to use water more efficiently, that ...

Community pharmacists in the United States have a unique opportunity to consult with customers about HIV treatment when selling over-the-counter HIV tests, according to a study by researchers at the Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington, the Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention and Butler University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. In a study lead by Beth Meyerson, co-director of the Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention, Indiana licensed community pharmacists reported that they wanted an active role of consultation when customers purchased over-the-counter ...

Adding foods rich in specific amino and fatty acids to the diets of youth with Type 1 diabetes kept them producing some of their own insulin for up to two years after diagnosis, said researchers at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The youth still required supplemental insulin, but they may have reduced risk of diabetes complications by continuing to produce some of their own insulin, said Elizabeth Mayer-Davis, professor of nutrition at Gillings and medicine at UNC's School of Medicine, who led the study ...

A new report by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Disease Ecology Laboratory of Instituto de Ciencias Veterinarias del Litoral, Argentina (ICIVET LITORAL, UNL-CONICET) shows that increases in precipitation and changes in vegetative structure in Argentine forests – factors driven by climate change and deforestation in the region – are leading to increased parasitism of young nesting birds by fly larvae (botflies) of the species Philornis torquans. In temperate and tropical areas of the Americas, wild bird chicks are the target of parasitic flies whose larvae ...

In the Yukon territory of Canada, several large wildfires continue to burn unabated. The fires on this image are located near Carmacks and also near Stewart Crossing. The Yukon Wildland Fire Management map dated July 15, 2013 shows quite a few fires in the Yukon territory with many currently uncontained. These MODIS image fires appear to be the uncontained fires noted on the map. During this year to date the Yukon territory has seen 133,166 hectares (329, 060 acres) of land burned by fires. NASA's Aqua satellite collected this natural-color image with the Moderate ...

It's a wonder we still put up with passwords. We forget our highly secretive combinations, so we frequently have them reset and sent to our cellphones and alternative email addresses. We come up with clever jumbles of letters and words, only to mess up the order. We sit there on the login screen, desperately punching in a code we should know by heart. Despite their inefficiencies, passwords are still the most common electronic authentication systems, protecting everything from our bank accounts, laptops and email to health information, utility bills and, of course, ...

A new study found that STD clinics could provide important access to cervical cancer screenings for women who traditionally have trouble receiving these screenings because of lack of insurance or other obstacles. Cervical cancer can be painful and deadly but can be effectively treated if caught soon enough. Yet in the U.S., reaching women who are underscreened for this cancer remains a public health challenge because insurance is the primary indicator for screening. "Women who are uninsured, as well as women of color, are at highest risk for being underscreened for ...

Infrared satellite data helps identify cloud top and sea-surface temperatures, and the AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured those when it flew over Tropical Depression 08W in the western North Pacific Ocean. Tropical Depression 08W formed east of the Philippines. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument took an image of 08W on July 16 at 04:35 UTC (12:35 a.m. EDT). The AIRS infrared image showed a large area of strong thunderstorms appeared mostly east of the center of 08W's circulation. Those thunderstorms had cloud top temperatures near 210 ...

A landmark single-cell genomic study of microorgansims from sites across the globe is highlighting British Columbia's role as an 'oasis' of biodiversity. The findings, to be published Sunday in Nature, could also prompt scientists to redefine how the tree of life represents relationships among and between life's three domains. "British Columbia has long been recognized for its biological diversity in flora and fauna," says University of British Columbia microbiologist Steven Hallam, Canada Research Chair in Environmental Genomics and one of the study's authors. "What ...

1. An aspirin every other day may keep colon cancer away for healthy women Long-term use of alternate-day, low-dose aspirin may reduce risk for colorectal cancer in healthy women. Evidence has recently emerged that daily aspirin may help to prevent several types of cancer, including colorectal, but there is little evidence for an alternate-day dosing strategy. Between 1994 and 1996 researchers randomly assigned 38,876 women aged 45 years or older to take either 100 mg of aspirin or placebo every other day. Participants were sent annual supplies of monthly calendar packs ...

MINNEAPOLIS – A new study suggests that Chinese people may be at higher risk for stroke than Caucasians. The research is published in the July 16, 2013, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "While stroke is the second most-common cause of death worldwide, in China it is the leading cause of death and adult disability," said study author Chung-Fen Tsai, MD, with the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. "The global impact of stroke in the decades ahead is predicted to be greatest in middle income countries, including China. ...

The vaccination programme against HPV infection began in 2008 in the UK, but only among girls, on the grounds that this would curb the spread of the infection to boys as well. But, say the authors, from the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, Homerton University Hospital, and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, gay men are more than 15 times as likely to develop genital cancer, particularly anal cancer, as a result of becoming infected with HPV, as are straight men. While rates of anal cancers are higher among men who are also HIV positive - despite antiretroviral treatment ...

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have used vascular precursor cells derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to generate, in an animal model, functional blood vessels that lasted as long as nine months. In their report being published in PNAS Early Edition, the investigators describe using iPSCs – reprogrammed adult cells that have many of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells – from both healthy adults and from individuals with type 1 diabetes to generate blood vessels on the outer surface of the brain or under the skin of mice. ...

In children with fever but no other symptoms of illness, it is difficult to know whether a child has a viral infection that will resolve on its own or a potentially serious bacterial infection that requires antibiotics. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report that they can distinguish between viral and bacterial infections in children with fever by profiling the activity of genes in a blood sample. In a small study, analyzing genes in white blood cells was more than 90 percent accurate, far better than the standard diagnostic test, ...

The risk of elevated blood pressure among children and adolescents rose 27 percent during a thirteen-year period, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension. Higher body mass, larger waistlines and eating excess sodium may be the reasons for the elevated blood pressure readings, researchers said. High blood pressure is a risk factor for stroke, heart disease and kidney failure — accounting for about 350,000 preventable deaths a year in the United States. "High blood pressure is dangerous in part because many people don't know they ...

Prosthetic valve endocarditis (inflammation and infection involving the heart valves and lining of the heart chambers) remains associated with a high one-year mortality rate and early valve replacement does not appear to be associated with lower mortality compared with medical therapy according to a study by Tahaniyat Lalani, M.D., M.H.S., of the Naval Medical Center, Portsmouth, Virginia, and colleagues. PVE occurs in approximately 3 percent to 6 percent of patients within five years of valve implantation and is associated with significant morbidity and mortality, according ...

ANN ARBOR – Use of electronic health records can reduce the costs of outpatient care by roughly 3 percent, compared to relying on traditional paper records. That's according to a new study from the University of Michigan that examined more than four years of healthcare cost data in nine communities. The "outpatient care" category in the study included the costs of doctor's visits as well as services typically ordered during those visits in laboratory, pharmacy and radiology. The study is groundbreaking in its breadth. It compares the healthcare costs of 179,000 patients ...

Individual ethnic groups use psychiatric and mental health services in Scotland very differently, a study suggests. Researchers have found that there is a significant difference in the rates of hospitalisations for mental health problems according to ethnic group. The study also revealed that there are widely differing patterns of hospitalisation for mental health problems among non-White groups. It is the first study of its kind to be carried out in Scotland. Researchers say that psychiatric and mental health services should be reviewed and monitored to ensure ...

VIDEO: When choosing a potential mate, female túngara frogs listen to the sounds of the male calls, which are based on a pattern of "whines " and "chucks. " If visible, the sight... Click here for more information. With the help of a robotic frog, biologists at The University of Texas at Austin and Salisbury University have discovered that two wrong mating calls can make a right for female túngara frogs. The "rather bizarre" result may be evidence ...

A little bit of learned fear is a good thing, keeping us from making risky, stupid decisions or falling over and over again into the same trap. But new research from neuroscientists and molecular biologists at USC shows that a missing brain protein may be the culprit in cases of severe over-worry, where the fear perseveres even when there's nothing of which to be afraid. In a study appearing the week of July 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers examined mice without the enzymes monoamine oxidase A and B (MAO A/B), which sit next to ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 15, 2013 -- In a study released last week, education researchers found that personifying energy allowed students to grapple with difficult ideas about how energy works. Contrasted with more traditional lectures and graphs, this innovative instructional technique may be useful for teaching about other ideas in physical science, which commonly deals with things that change form over time. Energy is a very important concept across many fields of science, and is a key focus of the new national science standards. Energy is also a central player in several ...

Newly published findings by medical researchers at the University of Alberta provide more evidence that music decreases children's perceived sense of pain. Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry researcher Lisa Hartling led the research team that involved her colleagues from the Department of Pediatrics, as well as fellow researchers from the University of Manitoba and the United States. Their findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Pediatrics today. The team conducted a clinical research trial of 42 children between the ages of 3 and 11 who came to the pediatric ...

DAVIE, Fla.-- Threatened loggerhead sea turtles in the northern Gulf of Mexico can travel distances up to several hundred miles and visit offshore habitats between nesting events in a single season, taking them through waters impacted by oil and fishing industries. Evidence from a U.S. Geological Survey study challenges the widely-held view that sea turtles remain near one beach throughout the nesting season and suggests the threatened species may require broader habitat protection to recover. The findings also cast new uncertainties on current estimates of the size of ...

Much of biomedical science – both mystifying and awe-inspiring to the lay public – depends on an unwavering focus on things that can't be easily seen, like the inner-workings of cells, in order to determine how and why disease develops. New research authored by Thomas Sladewski, a University of Vermont graduate student working in the laboratory of Kathleen Trybus, Ph.D., and colleagues, provides a rare "picture" of the activity taking place at the single molecular level: visual evidence of the mechanisms involved when a cell transports mRNA (or messenger RNA) to where a ...

The University of Colorado Cancer Center along with Yale University and the Denver Crime Lab report in the journal PLOS ONE the first proof of cancer's ability to fuse with blood cells in a way that gives cancer the ability to travel, allowing previously stationary cancer cells to enter the bloodstream and seed sites of metastasis around the body. The work used DNA fingerprinting of a bone marrow transplant patient with cancer, along with DNA fingerprinting of the patient's bone marrow donor, to show that subsequent metastatic cancer cells in the patient's body carried ...