This press release is available in German. (Jena) On their mission to the moon in 1969 the Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin created arguably the most famous footprints ever. Since the time the astronauts of the Apollo 11 Mission stepped onto the surface of our satellite their footprints remain almost unchanged. And as no breath of wind will ever be able to blow them away they will be visible forever. Not quite so old but equally 'immortal' are many traces that have been left behind by humans at the South Pole of the Earth. This is the result of a report ...

A University of Colorado Cancer Center review published this week in the journal Lancet Oncology describes possible long-term side-effects of new, targeted therapies in pediatric cancer patients: what we don't know may hurt us. "As pediatricians who treat kids with cancer, we expect the side-effects of traditional chemotherapies: low white blood count, infections, even long-term heart trouble or infertility. But there's the impression that these new, molecularly targeted agents are much less toxic. That may be true, especially in adult patients, but until we have more ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Now that President Obama has put climate change back on the table in his second inaugural address, a new national poll finds growing public support for regulating greenhouse gas emissions and requiring utilities to switch to lower-carbon fuel sources. The percentage of Americans who think climate change is occurring has rebounded, according to the Duke University national online survey, and is at its highest level since 2006. The study also finds that while Americans support regulating greenhouse gas emissions, they do not favor market-based approaches ...

VIDEO: Antarctica's Don Juan Pond, the world's saltiest body of water, needs its salt to keep from freezing into oblivion. Scientists had assumed that the saltwater brine that sustains the pond... Click here for more information. PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Antarctica's Don Juan Pond might be the unlikeliest body of water on Earth. Situated in the frigid McMurdo Dry Valleys, only the pond's high salt content — by far the highest of any body of water on the planet — ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (February 7, 2013) – Injury to the subcortical structures of the inner brain is a major contributor to worsening neurological abnormalities after "awake craniotomy" for brain tumors, reports a study in the February issue of Neurosurgery, official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. During a procedure intended to protect critical functional areas in the outer brain (cortex), damage to subcortical areas—which may be detectable on MRI scans—is a major ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (February 7, 2013) – For women with aneurysms involving the brain blood vessels, pregnancy and delivery don't appear to increase the risk of aneurysm rupture, reports a paper in the February issue of Neurosurgery, official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. The study also finds that women with known, unruptured aneurysms have a very high rate of cesarean delivery—which isn't supported by evidence and "may not be necessary," according to Dr. Brian ...

In the evening of Feb. 5, 2013, the sun erupted with two coronal mass ejections or CMEs that may glance near-Earth space. Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and ESA/NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, show that the first CME began at 7 p.m. EST and left the sun at speeds of around 750 miles per second. The second CME began at 10:36 p.m. EST and left the sun at speeds of around 350 miles per second. Historically, CMEs of this speed and direction have been benign. Not to be confused with ...

When migrating, sockeye salmon typically swim up to 4,000 miles into the ocean and then, years later, navigate back to the upstream reaches of the rivers in which they were born to spawn their young. Scientists, the fishing community and lay people have long wondered how salmon find their way to their home rivers over such epic distances. How do they do that? A new study, published in this week's issue of Current Biology and partly funded by the National Science Foundation, suggests that salmon find their home rivers by sensing the rivers' unique magnetic signature. ...

Three NASA scientists teamed up to develop and demonstrate NASA's first wide-field-of-view soft X-ray camera for studying "charge exchange," a poorly understood phenomenon that occurs when the solar wind collides with Earth's exosphere and neutral gas in interplanetary space. The unique collaboration involved heliophysics, astrophysics and planetary science divisions at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and resulted in the first successful demonstration of the Sheath Transport Observer for the Redistribution of Mass (STORM) instrument and a never-before-flown ...

Self-esteem, optimism and perceived control influence depression in stroke survivors and their spouse caregivers — who should be treated together, according to research presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2013. Researchers, who analyzed 112 depressed stroke survivors up to 8 weeks after hospital discharge and their spouses, found self-esteem and optimism influenced each partners' depression. "We usually have been focused on the outcome of the stroke survivor, but we found that the self-esteem and optimism of the spouse caretaker ...

MINNEAPOLIS – The number of people with Alzheimer's disease is expected to triple in the next 40 years, according to a new study published in the February 6, 2013, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "This increase is due to an aging baby boom generation. It will place a huge burden on society, disabling more people who develop the disease, challenging their caregivers, and straining medical and social safety nets," said co-author Jennifer Weuve, MPH, ScD, assistant professor of medicine, Rush Institute for Healthy Aging ...

MINNEAPOLIS – Wearing a nerve stimulator for 20 minutes a day may be a new option for migraine sufferers, according to new research published in the February 6, 2013, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The stimulator is placed on the forehead, and it delivers electrical stimulation to the supraorbital nerve. For the study, 67 people who had an average of four migraine attacks per month were followed for one month with no treatment. Then they received either the stimulation 20 minutes a day for three months or sham ...

Women who are more aware of their bodies from within are less likely to think of their bodies principally as objects, according to research published February 6 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Vivien Ainley and Manos Tsakiris from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London. The authors asked healthy female student volunteers aged between 19 – 26 to concentrate and count their own heartbeats, simply by "listening" to their bodies. Their accuracy in this heartbeat perception test was compared with their degree of self-objectification, based ...

Reading text on digital devices like tablet computers requires less effort from older adults than reading on paper, according to research published February 6 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Matthias Schlesewsky and colleagues from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, in collaboration with colleagues from Georg August University Göttingen and the University of Marburg, Germany. In the past, surveys have shown that people prefer to read paper books rather than on e-readers or tablet computers. Here, the authors evaluated the origins of this preference in ...

A fragment of human lower jaw recovered from a Serbian cave is the oldest human ancestor found in this part of Europe, who probably evolved under different conditions than populations that inhabited more western parts of the continent at the same time, according to research published February 6 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by William Jack Rink of McMaster University, Canada, and the international team under the direction of Dušan Mihailović, University of Belgrade, Serbia, and Mirjana Roksandic, University of Winnipeg, Canada. The fossil was found to be ...

Fort Detrick, Md. – An international collaboration of researchers from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC), Tunisia and France has demonstrated a high cure rate and remarkably few side effects in treating patients with cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) with an investigational antibiotic cream. CL is a parasitic disease that causes disfiguring lesions, with 350 million people at risk worldwide and 1.5 million new cases annually, including U.S. military personnel serving abroad and the socio-economically disadvantaged in the developing world, especially ...

Tropical rainforests are often called the "lungs of the planet" because they generally draw in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. But the amount of carbon dioxide that rainforests absorb, or produce, varies hugely with year-to-year variations in the climate. In a paper published online this week (Feb 6 2013) by the journal Nature, a team of climate scientists from the University of Exeter, the Met Office-Hadley Centre and the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, has shown that these variations reveal how vulnerable the rainforest is to climate change. Lead author ...

Researchers from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway university asked healthy female student volunteers aged between 19 – 26, to concentrate hard and count their own heartbeats, simply by "listening" to their bodies. Their accuracy in this heartbeat perception test was compared with their perception of their bodies as objects, measured by scores on the Self-Objectification Questionnaire. According to the results, the more accurate the women were in detecting their heartbeats, the less they tended to think of their bodies as objects. These findings have important ...

A new study made available online today in 'Addiction' shows that, between 2002 and 2009, the percentage of deaths caused by alcohol in British Columbia, Canada dropped more than expected when minimum alcohol price was increased, while alcohol-related deaths increased when more private alcohol stores were opened. The paper has significant implications for international alcohol policy. The study was carried out by researchers from British Columbia, the westernmost province in Canada, using three categories of death associated with alcohol – wholly alcohol attributable ...

"You don't know what you've got 'til it's collapsed." That's how University of Guelph integrative biologists might recast a line from an iconic folk tune for their new research paper warning about the perils of ecosystem breakdown. Their research, published today as the cover story in Nature, suggests farmers and resource managers should not rely on seemingly stable but vulnerable single-crop monocultures. Instead they should encourage more kinds of plants in fields and woods as a buffer against sudden ecosystem disturbance. Based on a 10-year study, their paper also ...

Researchers have found a genetic variant that doubles the likelihood that people will have calcium deposits on their aortic valve. Such calcification, if it becomes severe, can cause narrowing or a blockage of the aortic valve, a condition called aortic stenosis. The study is the first large-scale, genome-wide association study to uncover a genetic link to aortic valve calcification. An article detailing the findings is published in the February 7, 2013 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The study's lead investigators — from Johns Hopkins, Harvard University, ...

LA JOLLA, CA – February 6, 2013 – We take it for granted that our chromosomes won't stick together, yet this kind of cellular disaster would happen constantly were it not for a protein called TRF2. Now, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered key details of how TRF2 performs this crucial chromosome-protecting function. The finding represents a significant advance in cell biology and also has implications for our understanding of cancer and the aging process. "Cells tend to interpret their chromosome ends as sites of DNA damage, and without ...

Montreal, February 7th, 2013 – Researchers have discovered a gene associated with a form of cholesterol that increases the risk of developing aortic stenosis, the most common form of heart valve disease, by more than half. This international study, involving the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC), is the first of its kind to uncover a genetic link with aortic valve disease – a condition that affects more than 5 million people in North America. The results of the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, point to the first ...

Older bikers are up to three times as likely to be seriously injured in a crash as younger motor bike enthusiasts, indicates US research published online in Injury Prevention. The findings are a cause for concern, because of the increasing popularity of motor bike ownership among older adults, and their increasing tendency to be involved in a crash, warn the authors. In the US, the percentage of bikers over the age of 50 has more than doubled from just over 1 in 10 in 1990 to 1 in 4 in 2003, while the average age of those involved in a motorbike crash has been steadily ...

One in every 20 cases of the serious condition of pregnancy, pre-eclampsia, may be linked to increased levels of the air pollutant ozone during the first three months, suggests a large study published in the online journal BMJ Open. Mothers with asthma may be more vulnerable, the findings indicate. Pre-eclampsia is characterised by raised blood pressure and the presence of protein in the urine during pregnancy. It can cause serious complications, if left untreated. The authors base their findings on almost 121,000 singleton births in Greater Stockholm, Sweden, between ...