ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Go ye and sin no more -- or pay for it, when it comes to junk food, smoking and consuming alcohol. That's the message from two Mayo Clinic physicians who say raising "sin" taxes on tobacco and alcoholic beverages and imposing them on sugary drinks and fatty foods would lead many people to cut back, improving public health. The article by Michael Joyner, M.D., and David Warner, M.D., appears in the June issue of the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings. The physicians contend that much of overall health depends on behavior and is relatively independent of ...

The long-standing mystery behind dormant disseminated breast tumor cells and what activates them after years and even decades of latency may have been solved. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have identified the microenvironment surrounding microvasculature – the small blood vessels that transport blood within tissues – as a niche where dormant cancer cells reside. When these blood vessels begin to sprout, the new tips produce molecules that transform dormant cancer cells into metastatic tumors. In ...

In a bid to save £10 million a year the British Treasury is replacing copper–nickel five and ten pence coins with new nickel-plated steel versions. However, while no UK health assessment has taken place, scientists in Sweden have analyzed the allergy risk after the Swedish state bank announced it will reduce traces of nickel in Swedish coinage. The assessment, published in Contact Dermatitis reveals that the UK public's exposure to nickel allergic reactions will increase four fold. The team analyzes skin exposure and metal release in artificial sweat to find that the ...

(PHILADELPHIA) – Research from Thomas Jefferson University is laying the foundation for a genetic test to accurately identify hip dysplasia in newborns so that early intervention can be initiated to promote normal development. This research from Jefferson Orthopedics physician-scientists is currently available in the Journal of Bone and Mineralizing Research (JBMR) online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jbmr.1999/abstract. The researchers studied four generations of a Utah family affected by developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) in most generations. ...

In a report to be released this month, the Promoting Malaria Prevention and Treatment (ProMPT) Project will describe an innovative model for distributing over 12 million mosquito nets to prevent the transmission of malaria in Ghana. In collaboration with the Ghana Health Service (GHS), and funding from the US Agency for international Development (USAID), the four year long project ensured that millions of households learned how to use nets treated with insecticide to kill mosquitoes, which can transmit malaria. The $20 million project, funded through the United States ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Preschoolers universally recognize that one's choices are not always free – that our decisions may be constrained by social obligations to be nice to others or follow rules set by parents or elders, even when wanting to do otherwise. As they age, however, American kids are more prone to acknowledge one's freedom to act against such obligations compared to Nepalese children, who are less willing to say that people can and will violate social codes, finds a cross-cultural study by Cornell University development psychologists published in the current issue ...

Fish can hide in the open ocean by manipulating how light reflects off their skin, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. The discovery could someday lead to the development of new camouflage materials for use in the ocean, and it overturns 40 years of conventional wisdom about fish camouflage. The researchers found that lookdown fish camouflage themselves through a complex manipulation of polarized light after it strikes the fishes' skin. In laboratory studies, they showed that this kind of camouflage outperforms by up to 80 percent the "mirror" ...

(WINSTON-SALEM, NC, June 3, 2013) – When it comes to saving its own hide, the tiger moth can predict the future. A new study by researchers at Wake Forest University shows Bertholdia trigona, a species of tiger moth found in the Arizona desert, can tell if an echo-locating bat is going to attack it well before the predator swoops in for the kill – making the intuitive, tiny-winged insect a master of self-preservation. Predators in the night A bat uses sonar to hunt at night. The small mammal emits a series of ultrasonic cries and listens carefully to the echoes ...

This news release is available in German. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) is to establish 12 new Collaborative Research Centres (CRCs). This was decided by the responsible Grants Committee during its spring session in Bonn. The new CRCs will receive a total of 94 million euros for an initial period of three years and nine months. There will also be a 20% programme allowance for indirect project costs. The new CRCs cover a wide range of topics, including the sociocultural importance of oil, metals, food and other natural resources ...

New Zealand's geologic hazards agency reported this week an ongoing, "silent" earthquake that began in January is still going strong. Though it is releasing the energy equivalent of a 7.0 earthquake, New Zealanders can't feel it because its energy is being released over a long period of time, therefore slow, rather than a few short seconds. These so-called "slow slip events" are common at subduction zone faults – where an oceanic plate meets a continental plate and dives beneath it. They also occur on continents along strike-slip faults like California's San Andreas, ...

Researchers from the University of Valencia and the Natural History Museum of Berlin have studied the fossilised remains of scales and bones found in Teruel and the south of Zaragoza, ascertaining that they belong to a new fish species called Machaeracanthus goujeti that lived in that area of the peninsula during the Devonian period. The fossils are part of the collection housed in the Palaeontology Museum of Zaragoza. In the journal 'Geodiversitas', a research team led by the University of Valencia describes a new species of spiny shark (Acanthodii), a primitive type ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel, June 3, 2013 -- A group of oncologists have revealed in a new study by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers that communicating about death and dying with their patients is one of the most difficult and stressful parts of their work. In the United States, 577,190 deaths from cancer occurred in 2012, according to the American Cancer Society. The online paper published ahead of print in the Journal of Oncology Practice reported that despite this important element of their work, oncologists receive little training in this area, and ...

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite detected dozens of fires burning in central Africa on June 03, 2013. The fires are outlined in red. Most of the fires burn in grass or cropland, which is brownish in this image. The location, widespread nature, and number of fires suggest that these fires were deliberately set to manage land. Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants especially in places where open land for farming is not readily available because of dense vegetation ...

Boulder, Colorado, USA – In the June issue of GSA Today, Kieran O'Hara of the University of Kentucky and E.K. Esawi of Elizabethtown Community & Technical College propose a new model for the eruption of Yellowstone Park's Old Faithful geyser. The model, which replicates the geyser's eruption interval for 2000-2011, is based on three stages of convective boiling in the conduit. The preplay phase, which triggers the main eruption, plays a key role in determining the eruption interval, the duration of which is the sum of the preplay time and the time to uppermost (stage ...

SINGAPORE – A research team led by the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS) in Singapore has identified ways to inhibit the function of a key protein linked to stem cell-like behavior in terminal-stage chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), making it possible to develop drugs that may extend the survival of these patients. The study, published in the prestigious international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the result of a long-standing collaboration between Duke-NUS, the Experimental Therapeutics Centre at the Agency for Science, Technology ...

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of a large light-brown colored plumes of smoke from two large fires burning in New Mexico: the Thompson Ridge Fire (left) and the Tres Lagunas Fire (right). Inciweb reported that the Thompson Ridge Fire is located in the Valles Caldera National Preserve, located about two miles northeast of La Cueva, New Mexico. The fire is reported to be human-caused, and started on May 31, 2013. So far, 1,906 acres have burned in the Preserve. The Tres Leguans Fire was started by a downed power line on May 30. The fire started about 10 miles ...

Here are highlights from the online issue of Discovery's Edge, Mayo Clinic's research magazine. You may cite and link to this publication as often as you wish. Republication is allowed with proper attribution. Please include the following subscription information as your editorial policies permit: Visit Discovery's Edge for subscription information. Regenerating Heart Tissue Through Stem Cell Therapy Read the details of how Mayo Clinic's unique stem cell technique restored strength and endurance to heart attack patients in three European countries. This groundbreaking ...

In the brain, cell-to-cell communication is dependent on neurotransmitters, chemicals that aid the transfer of information between neurons. Several proteins have the ability to modify the production of these chemicals by either increasing or decreasing their amount, or promoting or preventing their secretion. One example is tomosyn, which hinders the secretion of neurotransmitters in abnormal amounts. Dr. Boaz Barak of Tel Aviv University's Sagol School of Neuroscience, in collaboration with Prof. Uri Ashery, used a method for modifying the levels of this protein in the ...

NASA's Terra satellite captured this natural-color satellite image of California's Powerhouse Fire with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on June 1, 2013. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS's thermal bands, are outlined in red. According to the CBSnews.com, "Nearly 3,000 people from some 700 homes were under evacuation orders Monday as a wildfire north of Los Angeles kept growing, feeding on old, dry brush, some of which hadn't burned in decades. The blaze had burned about 46 square miles in the mountains and canyons of the ...

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of a large light-brown colored plume of smoke blowing east-southeast from the Tres Lagunas Fire burning in New Mexico. On June 3, the smoke is forecast to blow in a more northerly and easterly direction, affecting Las Vegas, I-25 and surrounding communities. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite has infrared capabilities that can detect heat from the various wildfires. This image was captured on May 31, 2013 21:00 UTC (5 p.m. EDT/3p.m. MT). In the MODIS images, fires, or ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – College-aged women judge promiscuous female peers – defined by bedding 20 sexual partners by their early 20s – more negatively than more chaste women and view them as unsuitable for friendship, finds a study by Cornell University developmental psychologists. Notably, participants' preference for less sexually active women as friends remained even when they personally reported liberal attitudes about casual sex or a high number of lifetime lovers. Men's views, on the other hand, were less uniform – favoring the sexually permissive potential friend, the ...

TRANSPORTATION – Better, cleaner engines . . . Air in the United States could be cleaner in years to come because of a laboratory researchers expect will help in the development of new standards for fuel economy and emissions evaluations. The Vehicle Systems Integration Laboratory provides unprecedented capabilities that will be invaluable to manufacturers of diesel and conventional engines, transmissions, and other drivetrain and emissions components. The payoff is that manufacturers can test different designs under real-world conditions, saving time and money. "We can ...

To the list of oncogenic drivers of lung cancer that includes ALK, EGFR, ROS1 and RET, results of a University of Colorado Cancer Center study presented at ASCO 2013 show that mutations in the gene NTRK1 cause a subset of lung cancers. "We're reconceptualizing lung cancer as many, related diseases. And we need to learn to identify and treat each individually. We can treat the forms of the disease that depend on ALK and EGFR mutations. We're getting very close to treating lung cancers that depend on ROS1 and RET. And now we show another oncogenic driver of the disease ...

BALTIMORE -- Smartphones and tablets can make for sleep-disrupting bedfellows. One cause is believed to be the bright light-emitting diodes that allow the use of mobile devices in dimly lit rooms; the light exposure can interfere with melatonin, a hormone that helps control the natural sleep-wake cycle. But there may be a way to check your mobile device in bed and still get a good night's sleep. A Mayo Clinic study suggests dimming the smartphone or tablet brightness settings and holding the device at least 14 inches from your face while using it will reduce its potential ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The fate of a species may rest upon a single butterfly captured in late May by University of Florida lepidopterists. A UF research technician netted a female Schaus swallowtail in Biscayne National Park on Elliott Key, the first capture of a female since a multi-agency work group got a permit to do so last year. The Schaus population has declined so much that last year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) issued UF an emergency permit to collect eggs. That effort ended without a single female sighting last summer but got off to a promising ...