DURHAM, N.C. -- The cost of complying with tougher EPA air-quality standards could spur an increased shift away from coal and toward natural gas for electricity generation, according to a new Duke University study. The stricter regulations on sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, nitrogen oxide and mercury may make nearly two-thirds of the nation's coal-fired power plants as expensive to run as plants powered by natural gas, the study finds. "Because of the cost of upgrading plants to meet the EPA's pending emissions regulations and its stricter enforcement of current ...

TORONTO, ON – Chemical Engineering Professor Tim Bender and Post-Doctoral Fellow Benoit Lessard's discovery of an unexpected side product of polymer synthesis could have implications for the manufacture of commercial polymers used in sealants, adhesives, toys and even medical implants, the researchers say. Bender and Lessard discuss their discovery in "Boron subphthalocyanine polymers by facile coupling to poly (acrylic acid-ran-styrene) copolymers and the associated problems with autoinitition when employing nitroxide mediated polymerization," a paper published this ...

(Boston) – Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have shown that using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure blood flow over atherosclerotic plaques could help identify plaques at risk for thrombosis. The findings, which appear in the March issue of Circulation Cardiovascular Imaging, offer a non-invasive application in the diagnosis and treatment of patients with atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is a chronic disease of the human vascular system associated with lipid (cholesterol) accumulation and inflammation. It can remain silent and undetected ...

It seems the ads were right. A milk mustache is a good thing to have. Animal and dairy scientists have discovered that drinking milk at an early age can help mammals throughout their lives. But understanding exactly how milk affects the body is a complicated story of hormones, antibodies and proteins, as well as other cells and compounds researchers have not yet identified. Learning how milk affects offspring was the subject of the Lactation Biology Symposium, held as part of the 2012 Joint Annual Meeting in Phoenix, AZ. The presentations were summarized in a recent ...

Highlights Individuals who are overweight starting in early adulthood are twice as likely to have chronic kidney disease at age 60 to 64 years than those who are not overweight. Larger waist-to-hip ratios ("apple-shaped" bodies) during middle age are also linked with chronic kidney disease at age 60 to 64 years. More than one-third of chronic kidney disease cases at age 60 to 64 years in the US could be avoided if nobody became overweight until at least that age. In 2008, more than 1.4 billion adults worldwide were overweight, with approximately 500 million of ...

Highlights: Growth hormone therapy can help reverse growth problems in children with kidney failure. Growth hormone therapy increases bone turnover in children on dialysis Additional studies are needed to evaluate the impact of growth hormone therapy on final height, fracture risk, bone deformities, and puberty in children with kidney failure. Growth failure occurs early in chronic kidney disease and causes severe short stature in children. Washington, DC (April 4, 2013) — Growth hormone therapy can help reverse growth problems in children with kidney failure, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio—Two annually dated ice cores drawn from the tropical Peruvian Andes reveal Earth's tropical climate history in unprecedented detail—year by year, for nearly 1,800 years. Researchers at The Ohio State University retrieved the cores from a Peruvian ice cap in 2003, and then noticed some startling similarities to other ice cores that they had retrieved from Tibet and the Himalayas. Patterns in the chemical composition of certain layers matched up, even though the cores were taken from opposite sides of the planet. In the April 4, 2013 online edition of the ...

TORONTO, ON – Pigments found in plants and purple bacteria employed to provide protection from sun damage do more than just that. Researchers from the University of Toronto and University of Glasgow have found that they also help to harvest light energy during photosynthesis. Carotenoids, the same pigments which give orange color to carrots and red to tomatoes, are often found together in plants with chlorophyll pigments that harvest solar energy. Their main function is photoprotection when rays of light from the sun are the most intense. However, a new study published ...

LA JOLLA, CA – April 4, 2013 – Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have illuminated the mechanism at the heart of one of the most useful processes in modern chemistry. A reaction that is robust and easy to perform, it is widely employed to synthesize new pharmaceuticals, biological probes, new materials and other products. But precisely how it works had been unclear since its invention at TSRI more than a decade ago. "These new findings allow us to exert greater control of the reaction and make it faster and more efficient under the most challenging conditions," ...

Chronic or persistent pain is a common — and likely under-recognized — complication of ischemic strokes (caused by a blocked blood vessel) according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. In a large trial of treatments to prevent a second stroke, researchers found that 10.6 percent of more than 15,000 stroke survivors developed chronic pain. "Chronic pain syndromes are common, even following strokes of mild to moderate severity," said Martin J. O'Donnell, M.D., lead author and professor of translational medicine at the National University of ...

Walking briskly can lower your risk of high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes as much as running can, according to surprising findings reported in the American Heart Association journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology. Researchers analyzed 33,060 runners in the National Runners' Health Study and 15,045 walkers in the National Walkers' Health Study. They found that the same energy used for moderate intensity walking and vigorous intensity running resulted in similar reductions in risk for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and ...

A custom-built programmable 3D printer can create materials with several of the properties of living tissues, Oxford University scientists have demonstrated. The new type of material consists of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside our bodies. These printed 'droplet networks' could be the building blocks of a new kind of technology for delivering drugs to places where they are needed and potentially one day replacing or interfacing with damaged human tissues. Because droplet ...

Non-invasive 'liquid biopsies' can find metastatic or recurrent prostate cancer, in a low cost assay suitable for most healthcare systems, finds research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Medicine. Genomic signatures of prostate cancer, isolated from plasma DNA, display abnormal copy numbers of specific areas of chromosomes. It is even possible to separate out patients who develop resistance against hormone deprivation therapy, which is the most common form of treatment in men with metastatic prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer ...

Up to 2009 there is no statistically significant evidence of any reduction in smoking amongst men – and very little evidence of a reduction in smoking amongst women – resulting from the introduction of EU minimum tax legislation in Spain in 2006. This is despite the price of cigarettes rising up to three times faster than before the legislation came into effect, according to a new study published online in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research. The World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control exhorts Parties to implement tax policies aimed ...

Cutting down on salt and, at the same time, increasing levels of potassium in our diet will have major health and cost benefits across the world, according to studies published on bmj.com today. Such a strategy will save millions of lives every year from heart disease and stroke, say experts. Much evidence shows that reducing salt intake lowers blood pressure and thereby reduces the risk of stroke and heart disease. Less is known about the potential benefits of increasing potassium intake, but lower potassium consumption has been linked with elevated blood pressure. The ...

Cambridge, Mass. – April 4, 2013 – Agios Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the leading biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing novel drugs in the fields of cancer metabolism and rare metabolic genetic diseases, announced today the publication of two articles in the journal Science by Agios scientists and their collaborators demonstrating the effects of the company's small molecule isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 and 2 (IDH1 and IDH2) mutant specific inhibitors in primary human tumor models. These data add to a growing body of scientific research demonstrating the ...

There are cells in your brain that recognize very specific places, and have that as one of their main jobs. These cells, called place cells, are found in an area behind your temple called the hippocampus. While these cells must be sent information from nearby cells to do their job, so far no one has been able to determine exactly what kind of nerve cells, or neurons, work with place cells to craft the code they create for each location. Neurons come in many different types with specialized functions. Some respond to edges and borders, others to specific locations, others ...

Experts from The University of Manchester have revealed their findings from the most in-depth study ever to take place in the UK into the tragic instances of child killing by parents, known as filicide. The research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, found 37 per cent of parents and step-parents who killed their children were suffering from some form of mental illness and 12% had been in contact with mental health services within a year of the offence. Academics from the University's Institute of Brain Behaviour and Mental Health analysed 297cases of convicted filicide ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Crocodilians have nerves on their faces that are so sensitive, they can detect a change in a pond when a single drop hits the water surface several feet away. Alligators and crocodiles use these "invisible whiskers" to detect prey when hunting. Now, a new study from the University of Missouri has measured the nerves responsible for this function, which will help biologists understand how today's animals, as well as dinosaurs and crocodiles that lived millions of years ago, interact with the environment around them. "The trigeminal nerve is the nerve responsible ...

Gordon, the unique supercomputer launched last year by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, recently completed its most data-intensive task so far: rapidly processing raw data from almost one billion particle collisions as part of a project to help define the future research agenda for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Under a partnership between a team of UC San Diego physicists and the Open Science Grid (OSG), a multi-disciplinary research partnership funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, ...

Some thirty million years ago, Ganges river dolphins diverged from other toothed whales, making them one of the oldest species of aquatic mammals that use echolocation, or biosonar, to navigate and find food. This also makes them ideal subjects for scientists working to understand the evolution of echolocation among toothed whales. New research, led by Frants Havmand Jensen, a Danish Council for Independent Research | Natural Sciences postdoctoral fellow at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, shows that freshwater dolphins produce echolocation signals at very low sound ...

ANN ARBOR—One of the major obstacles to growing new organs—replacement hearts, lungs and kidneys—is the difficulty researchers face in building blood vessels that keep the tissues alive, but new findings from the University of Michigan could help overcome this roadblock. "It's not just enough to make a piece of tissue that functions like your desired target," said Andrew Putnam, U-M associate professor of biomedical engineering. "If you don't nourish it with blood by vascularizing it, it's only going to be as big as the head of a pen. "But we need a heart that's this ...

Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanically active world in the Solar System, with hundreds of volcanoes, some erupting lava fountains up to 250 miles high. However, concentrations of volcanic activity are significantly displaced from where they are expected to be based on models that predict how the moon's interior is heated, according to NASA and European Space Agency researchers. Io is caught in a tug-of-war between Jupiter's massive gravity and the smaller but precisely timed pulls from two neighboring moons that orbit further from Jupiter – Europa and Ganymede. Io ...

TORONTO, ON, April 5, 2013 — Only half of people with arthritis who had a hip or knee replacement reported a significant improvement in pain and mobility after surgery, according to a new study led by Women's College Hospital and the Institute for Clinical and Evaluative Sciences (ICES). "Many patients with hip and knee arthritis have the condition in more than one of their hip or knee joints," said the study's lead author Dr. Gillian Hawker. "So it's not surprising that replacing a single joint doesn't alleviate all their pain and disability — patients may need subsequent ...

Mothers suffering from postpartum depression after a high-risk pregnancy would turn to online interventions if available anonymously and from professional healthcare providers, according to researchers from Case Western Reserve University's Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing and College of Arts and Sciences. Postpartum depression, a moderate to severe depression that can occur after a woman has given birth, affects about 7 to 15 percent of new mothers. The effects can be felt soon after delivery to as long as a year later. The Case Western Reserve study, which recruited ...