URBANA – Every year farmers spend a lot of money trying to control corn rootworm larvae, which are a significant threat to maize production in the United States and, more recently, in Europe. University of Illinois researchers have been working on validating a model for estimating damage functions. Nicholas Tinsley, a doctoral candidate in crop sciences, has refined a model developed in 2009 by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and in Brescia, Italy, to describe the relationship between root injury caused by these pests and yield loss. He used the equivalent ...

DETROIT - Both nature and nurture appear to be significant factors in early antisocial behaviors of adopted children, a Wayne State University researcher believes. Christopher Trentacosta, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, recently examined data from 361 linked triads (birth mother, adoptive parents, adopted child) in order to assess externalizing behavioral problems such as aggression and defiance when children were 18, 27 and 54 months of age. The triads were part of the Early Growth and Development Study (EGDS), ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The small kerosene lamps that light millions of homes in developing countries have a dark side: black carbon – fine particles of soot released into the atmosphere. New measurements show that kerosene wick lamps release 20 times more black carbon than previously thought, say researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of California, Berkeley. The group published its findings in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. Black carbon is a hazard for human health and the environment, affecting air quality both indoors and out. ...

Young patients with an aggressive form of leukemia who are likely to relapse after chemotherapy treatment can significantly reduce those odds by receiving additional courses of chemotherapy, suggest the findings of a clinical trial led by investigators at Dana-Farber/Children's Hospital Cancer Center in Boston. The trial leaders will present the results of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ALL Consortium study, which involved nearly 500 patients under age 18 with B-precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology ...

Over past decades, many areas of the forested Amazon basin have become a patchwork of farms, pastures and second-growth forest as people have moved in and cleared land--but now many are moving out, in search of economic opportunities in newly booming Amazonian cities. The resulting depopulation of rural areas, along with spreading road networks and increased drought are causing more and bigger fires to ravage vast stretches, say researchers in a new study. The study, focusing on the Peruvian Amazon, is the latest to suggest that land-use changes and other factors, including ...

Blood levels of an immunity-related protein, galectin-1, in patients with newly diagnosed Hodgkin lymphoma reflected the extent of their cancer and correlated with other predictors of outcome, scientists reported at the American Society of Hematology annual meeting. In a study of 315 patients from a German database, researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found that serum galectin-1 levels "are significantly associated with tumor burden and additional adverse clinical characteristics in newly diagnosed Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) patients." The measurements were made ...

When it comes to climate change, deforestation and toxic waste, the assumption has been that conservative views on these topics are intractable. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that such viewpoints can be changed after all, when the messages about the need to be better stewards of the land are couched in terms of fending off threats to the "purity" and "sanctity" of Earth and our bodies. A UC Berkeley study has found that while people who identified themselves as conservatives tend to be less concerned about the environment than ...

Violent acts in James Bond films were more than twice as common in Quantum of Solace (2008) than in the original 1962 movie Dr No, researchers from New Zealand's University of Otago have found. The researchers analysed 22 official franchise films, which span 46 years, to test the hypothesis that popular movies are becoming more violent (The latest Bond film, Skyfall, was not included as it was unreleased at the time of the study). They found that rates of violence increased significantly over the period studied and there was an even bigger increase in portrayals of ...

Infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite have watched the strong thunderstorms in Typhoon Bopha fizzle and shrink in area over the weekend as wind shear increased. Bopha has now dissipated in the South China Sea, just west of Luzon, Philippines. NASA's Aqua satellite has been providing data on Bopha since the day it formed on Nov. 26. In the storm's last days, Aqua's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured infrared data of the storm and showed that cloud top temperatures warmed from Dec. 8 through Dec. 9 as cloud heights fell and thunderstorms lost their ...

NASA's Aqua satellite got "eyeballed" from Cyclone Claudia in the Southern Indian Ocean when two instruments captured the storm's eye in infrared and visible light. Satellite data indicates that Claudia's eye is about 10 nautical miles wide. On Dec. 10 at 0841 UTC (3:41 a.m. EST), NASA's Aqua satellite's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured an infrared view of Cyclone Claudia which showed a clear eye surrounded by powerful thunderstorms. The thunderstorms that surrounded the eye were high in the troposphere and cloud top temperatures topped -63 Fahrenheit ...

An experimental drug combination for preventing graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) was not significantly better than the standard regimen on key endpoints, according to a report of a phase 3 trial at the American Society of Hematology annual meeting. The combination of two immunosuppressive compounds -- tacrolimus plus sirolimus -- did not provide a statistically significant, GVHD-free survival benefit over the long-used standard of care, tacrolimus plus methotrexate, said researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who led the multi-center trial. However, there were ...

Public opinion on environmental issues such as climate change, deforestation, and toxic waste seems to fall along increasingly partisan lines. But new research suggests that environmental messages framed in terms of conservative morals — describing environmental stewardship in terms of fending off threats to the "purity" and "sanctity" of Earth and our bodies — may help to narrow the partisan gap. A study from researchers at UC Berkeley has found that while people who identified themselves as conservatives tend to be less concerned about the environment than their liberal ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Medication reconciliation is a safety practice in which health care professionals review patients' medication regimens when patients transition between settings to reduce the likelihood of adverse drug effects. It is among the most complex clinical tasks required of physicians, nurses and pharmacists, who must work cooperatively to minimize discrepancies and inappropriate medication orders. Now, a University of Missouri gerontologiccal nursing expert suggests that acknowledging practitioners' varying perspectives on the purpose of medication reconciliation ...

ATLANTA - A two-prong approach combining ibrutinib and rituximab (Rituxin®) to treat aggressive chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) produced profound responses with minor side effects in a Phase 2 clinical trial at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Researchers presented the results today at the 54th annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH). "This is a patient population with a great need for more targeted therapies," said Jan Burger, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in MD Anderson's Department of Leukemia. Burger was lead author of ...

Physicians associated with "patient philanthropy" – financial donations from grateful patients to a medical institution – are concerned with how these contributions might affect their own behavior and attitudes, and how they might impact the doctor-patient relationship. A new study¹ by Scott Wright, MD and Joseph A. Carrese, MD, MPH of Johns Hopkins University, and colleagues, explores this topic. The paper considers the perspectives of internal medicine physicians working in an academic medical center who have had experiences with these situations. Their findings appear ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. – Some stroke patients may benefit from cerebral angioplasty and stent placement, according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology. "As many as 70 percent of ischemic stroke patients could have positive clinical outcomes with the additional use of intra-arterial revascularization using stents," said Martin Roubec, M.D., Ph.D., a neurologist in the Comprehensive Stroke Center at the University Hospital Ostrava in the Czech Republic. Ischemic stroke, the most common form of stroke, occurs when blockage in an artery—often from a blood ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. – A combination of diagnostic tests, including imaging and cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers can improve prediction of conversion from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology. "Because new treatments are likely to be most effective at the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease, there is great urgency to develop sensitive markers that facilitate detection and monitoring of early brain changes in individuals at risk," said Jeffrey R. Petrella, M.D., associate professor of radiology, ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Employing a combination of imaging and biomarker tests improves the ability of doctors to predict Alzheimer's in patients with mild cognitive impairment, according to researchers at Duke Medicine. The findings, which appear Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2012, in the journal Radiology, provide new insight into how to accurately detect Alzheimer's before the full onset of the disease. Duke researchers studied three tests – magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), fluorine 18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET), and cerebrospinal fluid analysis – to ...

San Diego, CA, December 11, 2012 – The average American child from age 8 to 18 watches about 4.5 hours of TV each day. Seventy percent have a TV in the bedroom and about one-third of youth aged 6-19 is considered obese. Previous studies have shown that TV viewing time during childhood and adolescence continues into adulthood, resulting in overweight and elevated total cholesterol. An investigative team from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, LA reports new study findings, establishing the relationship between having and watching TV in the bedroom ...

The SARS epidemic of 2002-2003 was short-lived, but a novel type of human coronavirus that is alarming public health authorities can infect cells from humans and bats alike, a fact that could make the animals a continuing source of infection, according to a study to be published in in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, on December 11. The new coronavirus, called hCoV-EMC, is blamed for five deaths and several other cases of severe disease originating in countries in the Middle East. According to the new results, hCoV-EMC uses ...

One common idea about why there are fewer women professors in the sciences than men is that women are less willing to work the long hours needed to succeed. Writing in the January Issue of BioScience, Shelley Adamo of Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada, rejects this argument. She points out that women physicians work longer hours than most scientists, under arguably more stressful conditions, but that this does not deter women from entering medicine. Why, then, do women leave the academic track in biology at higher rates than they leave the medical profession? ...

Imagine not being able to touch a touch-screen device. Tablets and smartphones—with all their educational, entertaining and social benefits—would be useless. Researchers at Georgia Tech are trying to open the world of tablets to children whose limited mobility makes it difficult for them to perform the common pinch and swipe gestures required to control the devices. Ayanna Howard, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and graduate student Hae Won Park have created Access4Kids, a wireless input device that uses a sensor system to translate physical movements ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Following the birth of a child, new mothers may have an altered perception of stresses around them, showing less interest in threats unrelated to the baby. This change to the neuroendocrine circuitry could help the mothers adapt to the additional stress often accompanying newborns, say researchers from Indiana University's Kinsey Institute and the University of Zurich. When viewing disturbing images during the study, postpartum women reported less distress and demonstrated less activity in their amygdala, the part of the brain that controls emotional ...

Researchers at the Moffitt Cancer Center have found that delayed tumor growth and enhanced survival of mice bearing melanoma were possible by blocking the reconstitution of myeloid-derived suppressor cells and Tregs (suppressors of anti-tumor activity) after total body irradiation had eliminated them. Blocking myeloid-derived suppressor cells and regulatory T-cell reconstitution improved adoptive T-cell therapy, an immunotherapy designed to suppress tumor activity. The study appears in the December issue of The Journal of Immunology. "Melanoma is a leading cause of ...

If you're going to host a voiceover industry event, you may as well invite the very best and most talented individuals in the voiceover industry. That's exactly what VoiceoverCity, LLC has done by making plans to host their 1st annual voiceover conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The event has been designed to educate, inspire, and connect voice-talent from around the country in a fun and exciting way. The idea to have the conference here in Atlanta started when VoiceoverCity founder, Gerald Griffith, notice the need to provide a way for voice-talent in the southeastern ...