The sooner a person smokes a cigarette upon waking in the morning, the more likely he or she is to acquire lung or oral cancer, according to Penn State researchers. "We found that smokers who consume cigarettes immediately after waking have higher levels of NNAL -- a metabolite of the tobacco-specific carcinogen NNK -- in their blood than smokers who refrain from smoking a half hour or more after waking, regardless of how many cigarettes they smoke per day," said Steven Branstetter, assistant professor of biobehavioral health. According to Branstetter, other research ...

Canola oil and high-oleic canola oils can lower abdominal fat when used in place of other selected oil blends, according to a team of American and Canadian researchers. The researchers also found that consuming certain vegetable oils may be a simple way of reducing the risk of metabolic syndrome, which affects about one in three U.S. adults and one in five Canadian adults. "The monounsaturated fats in these vegetable oils appear to reduce abdominal fat, which in turn may decrease metabolic syndrome risk factors," said Penny Kris-Etherton, Distinguished Professor of Nutrition, ...

VIDEO: Comet ISON is now approaching the inner solar system. Discovered last year, the comet remains unusually active for its distance from the sun. If current trends continue, ISON could rank... Click here for more information. Astronomers from the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) and Lowell Observatory have used NASA's Swift satellite to check out comet C/2012 S1 (ISON), which may become one of the most dazzling in decades when it rounds the sun later this ...

Performing surgery on a pregnant patient is a delicate matter. Risks to both mother and baby must be carefully weighed in every decision a surgeon makes. Recently, at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, a surgeon performed a groundbreaking robotic laparoscopic procedure on a 35-year-old pregnant patient whose cervix was too short to sustain a pregnancy. VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtvVARBoxFw. PATIENT FEATURE STORY: http://www.utmb.edu/newsroom/article8400.aspx. Dr. Sami Kilic, chief of minimally invasive gynecology and research at UTMB, ...

Boulder, Colo., USA - The April 2013 issue of Lithosphere is now available. Four classic research papers cover the Saint Elias Mountains of Yukon and British Columbia, Canada; the Nacimiento fault near San Simeon, California, USA; the western Alps; and the Caledonides in Scandinavia. An invited review relays the significance of dynamic topography to long-term sea level change. This month's research focus article, which is open access online, discusses the revolution in remote sensing-LiDAR-laser altimetry swath mapping. Abstracts are online at http://lithosphere.gsapubs.org/content/current. ...

When blessed with a resource in overwhelming abundance it's generally a good idea to make valuable use of that resource. Lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant organic material on Earth. For thousands of years it has been used as animal feed, and for the past two centuries has been a staple of the paper industry. This abundant resource, however, could also supply the sugars needed to produce advanced biofuels that can supplement or replace fossil fuels, providing several key technical challenges are met. One of these challenges is finding ways to more cost-effectively ...

Athens, Ga. – While pearl millet is a major food staple in some of the fastest growing regions on Earth, relatively little is known about the drought-hardy grain. Recently, plant geneticists at the University of Georgia successfully isolated the gene that creates dwarfed varieties of pearl millet. It is the first time a gene controlling an important agronomic trait has been isolated in the pearl millet genome. Their work appeared in the March edition of the journal G3: Genes, Genomics, Genetics. The dwarf varieties are economically important in the U.S., India and ...

Daejeon, Republic of Korea, March 29, 2013 -- As the capacity of handheld devices increases to accommodate a greater number of functions, these devices have more memory, larger display screens, and the ability to play higher definition video files. If the users of mobile devices, including smartphones, tablet PCs, and notebooks, want to share or transfer data on one device with that of another device, a great deal of time and effort are needed. As a possible method for the speedy transmission of large data, researchers are studying the adoption of gigabits per second ...

Scientists have successfully replicated the behaviour of a colony of ants on the move with the use of miniature robots, as reported in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. The researchers, based at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, USA) and at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (Toulouse, France), aimed to discover how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food sources. The study focused mainly on how Argentine ants behave and coordinate themselves in ...

Highlights Among dialysis patients, Hispanics tend to live the longer than Blacks, who in turn live longer than whites. Determining the reasons for these racial and ethnic disparities may be important for improving care. As of 2010, there were approximately 410,000 dialysis patients in the United States. Washington, DC (March 28, 2013) — Among kidney failure patients on dialysis, Hispanics tend to live the longest and Whites the shortest, with Blacks' survival time in between these two, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal ...

Highlights Low vitamin D levels measured at three months after kidney transplantation were linked with lower kidney function and increased kidney scarring at 12 months post-transplant. Other hormones involved with mineral metabolism were not predictors of kidney function or scarring after one year. Vitamin D deficiency is prevalent in patients with kidney failure. Washington, DC (March 28, 2013) — Vitamin D deficiency may decrease kidney function in transplant recipients, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society ...

Two University of Calgary researchers have developed a ground-breaking way to make new affordable and efficient catalysts for converting electricity into chemical energy. Their technology opens the door to homeowners and energy companies being able to easily store and reuse solar and wind power. Such energy is clean and renewable, but it's available only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. The research by Curtis Berlinguette and Simon Trudel, both in the chemistry department in the Faculty of Science, has just been published in Science – one of the world's ...

ANN ARBOR—Wouldn't it be convenient if you could reverse the rusting of your car by shining a bright light on it? It turns out that this concept works for undoing oxidation on copper nanoparticles, and it could lead to an environmentally friendly production process for an important industrial chemical, University of Michigan engineers have discovered. "We report a new physical phenomenon that has potentially significant practical implications," said Suljo Linic, an associate professor of chemical engineering, who led the study, which is published in the March 29 issue ...

STANFORD, Calif. — When Charles Babbage prototyped the first computing machine in the 19th century, he imagined using mechanical gears and latches to control information. ENIAC, the first modern computer developed in the 1940s, used vacuum tubes and electricity. Today, computers use transistors made from highly engineered semiconducting materials to carry out their logical operations. And now a team of Stanford University bioengineers has taken computing beyond mechanics and electronics into the living realm of biology. In a paper to be published March 28 in Science, ...

Eating more fiber may decrease your risk of first-time stroke, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. Dietary fiber is the part of the plant that the body doesn't absorb during digestion. Fiber can be soluble, which means it dissolves in water, or insoluble. Previous research has shown that dietary fiber may help reduce risk factors for stroke, including high blood pressure and high blood levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) "bad" cholesterol. In the new study, researchers found that each seven-gram increase in total daily fiber ...

Human cells have an intrinsic capacity to destroy HIV. However, the virus has evolved to contain a gene that blocks this ability. When this gene is removed from the virus, the innate human immune system destroys HIV by mutating it to the point where it can no longer survive. This phenomenon has been shown in test tube laboratory experiments, but now researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine have demonstrated that the same phenomenon occurs in a humanized mouse model, suggesting a promising new target for tackling the virus, which has killed nearly ...

Researchers at Papworth Hospital, the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have discovered why a new type of dangerous bacterial infection has become more common among people with Cystic Fibrosis around the world. Through their ground-breaking research, the team has developed new measures to protect Cystic Fibrosis patients. People with Cystic Fibrosis are prone to serious infection in part because they have sticky mucus that can clog up their lungs. In recent years doctors have seen a global increase in the number of infections caused by ...

HOUSTON – (March 28, 2013) – Graphene, the single-atom-thick form of carbon, has become famous for its extraordinary strength. But less-than-perfect sheets of the material show unexpected weakness, according to researchers at Rice University in Houston and Tsinghua University in Beijing. The kryptonite to this Superman of materials is in the form of a seven-atom ring that inevitably occurs at the junctions of grain boundaries in graphene, where the regular array of hexagonal units is interrupted. At these points, under tension, polycrystalline graphene has about half ...

LA JOLLA, CA – March 28, 2013 – A team led by scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) has unveiled a new technique for vaccine design that could be particularly useful against HIV and other fast-changing viruses. The report, which appears March 28, 2013, in Science Express, the early online edition of the journal Science, offers a step toward solving what has been one of the central problems of modern vaccine design: how to stimulate the immune system to produce the right kind of antibody response to ...

Virginia Tech College of Engineering researchers have unveiled a life-like, autonomous robotic jellyfish the size and weight of a grown man, 5 foot 7 inches in length and weighing 170 pounds. The prototype robot, nicknamed Cyro, is a larger model of a robotic jellyfish the same team – headed by Shashank Priya of Blacksburg, Va., and professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech – unveiled in 2012. The earlier robot, dubbed RoboJelly, is roughly the size of a man's hand, and typical of jellyfish found along beaches. "A larger vehicle will allow for more payload, ...

One of the leading causes of death in the United States is sudden cardiac arrest, which claims the lives of more than 325,000 people each year. In a study published in the April issue of the journal Resuscitation, Beaumont doctors found that cardiac arrests in K-12 schools are extremely rare, less than 0.2 percent, but out of 47 people who experienced cardiac arrest over a six-year period at K-12 schools, only 15 survived. Survival rate was three times greater, however, when bystanders used a device called an automated external defibrillator, or AED, that helps the heart ...

Sometimes, little things can add up to a lot. In short, that's the message of a research study on small dams, streams and pollution by Steve Powers, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Notre Dame's Environmental Change Initiative (ECI). "Small dams, reservoirs and ponds trap water pollution, which provides an important benefit to water resources," Powers said. "This is especially relevant in agricultural lands of the Midwest U.S., where there are lots of small, but aging dams." Although small individually, the sum total of the small reservoirs and ponds ...

A new research paper by a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame's Environmental Change Initiative (ECI) demonstrates how two cutting-edge technologies can provide a sensitive and real-time solution to screening real-world water samples for invasive species before they get into our country or before they cause significant damage. "Aquatic invasive species cause ecological and economic damage worldwide, including the loss of native biodiversity and damage to the world's great fisheries," Scott Egan, a research assistant professor with Notre Dame's Advanced ...

Images told the story: lower Manhattan in darkness, coastal communities washed away, cars floating in muck. Superstorm Sandy, a harbinger of future extreme weather intensified by climate change, caught the country off guard in October. Unprepared for the flooding and high winds that ensued, the East Coast suffered more than $70 billion in property damage and more than 100 deaths. Will Americans prepare and invest now to minimize the impact of disasters such as Sandy, or deal with storms and rising sea levels after they occur? A new survey commissioned by the Stanford ...

HOUSTON -- (March 28, 2013) -- In some of the first results from a federally funded initiative to find new ways of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal-fired power plants, Rice University scientists have found that CO2 can be removed more economically using "waste" heat -- low-grade steam that cannot be used to produce electricity. The find is significant because capturing CO2 with conventional technology is an energy-intensive process that can consume as much as one-quarter of the high-pressure steam that plants use to produce electricity. "This is just the first ...