Extreme 'housework' cuts the life span of female Komodo Dragons An international team of researchers has found that female Komodo Dragons live half as long as males on average, seemingly due to their physically demanding 'housework' such as building huge nests and guarding eggs for up to six months. The results provide important information on the endangered lizards' growth rate, lifestyle and population differences, which may help plan conservation efforts. The Komodo dragon is the world's largest lizard. Their formidable body size enables them to serve as top predators ...

More people still die from cardiovascular disease than any other illness. Dubbed the number one killer and the silent killer, modern medicine has been researching and incorporating complementary and alternative approaches to help treat and in some cases reverse and hopefully prevent this health problem at an earlier stage of the disease. One of those modalities is meditation. A new research review paper on the effects of the stress-reducing Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique on the prevention and treatment of heart disease among youth and adults provides the hard ...

Information technology and electronics are becoming entwined with our everyday lives in industry, the service sector, transport, logistics, health care, housing, education, and our leisure time, almost without our noticing it. The changes are already apparent to consumers in the energy sector, for example: remotely readable meters are rapidly becoming more common, enabling developments such as new pricing models that encourage the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. The remote control of machines and devices is experiencing substantial growth and spreading to smaller ...

Active surveillance of small kidney masses is a safe and effective alternative to immediate surgery, with similar overall and cancer specific survival rates, according to a study published in the November issue of the urology journal BJUI. The technique is primarily used to treat elderly patients who have complex health issues or decline surgery. But researchers from the Department of Urology at Churchill Hospital, Oxford, UK, say that the results of their study suggest that active surveillance could safely be extended to other selected patients. "The incidence ...

Governments and institutions should focus on developing adaption policies to address and mitigate against the negative impact of global warming, rather than putting the emphasis on carbon trading and capping greenhouse-gas emissions, argue Johannesburg-based Wits University geoscientist Dr Jasper Knight and Dr Stephan Harrison from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. "At present, governments' attempts to limit greenhouse-gas emissions through carbon cap-and-trade schemes and to promote renewable and sustainable energy sources are prob¬ably too late to arrest ...

A command doctrine used by the US military and NATO designed to warn personnel of Nuclear, Chemical and Biological (NBC) hazards could be overly conservative and degrade war fighting effectiveness or, under certain conditions, risk lives because it is susceptible to changes in wind direction and speed that happen in periods shorter than its two-hourly updates. Writing in the International Journal of Environmental Pollution, Nathan Platt and Leo Jones of the Institute for Defense Analyses, in Alexandria, Virginia explain how "Allied Tactical Publication-45(C)" relies on ...

Pfizer Consumer Healthcare is very pleased that study investigators at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, chose Centrum® Silver® for the Physicians' Health Study II. The Centrum® multivitamins' quality, among other factors, led investigators to choose Centrum® Silver® for inclusion in the study. Centrum® Silver® multivitamins currently available in stores have since been updated and improved to reflect advances in nutritional science. In response to the Physicians' Health Study II findings shared this morning, Pfizer Consumer ...

Monozygotic twins have the same genome, that is, the same DNA molecule in both siblings. Despite being genetically identical, both twins may have different diseases at different times. This phenomenon is called "twin discordance". But how can people who have the same genetic sequence present different pathologies and at different ages? The explanation partly lies in the fact that the chemical signals added in the DNA to "switch off" or "switch on" genes can be different. These signals are known as epigenetic marks. The research team led by Manel Esteller, director of ...

Athens, Ga. – Ecologists in the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology have found that evolutionary diversity can be an effective method for identifying hotspots of mammal biodiversity. In a paper published Oct. 17 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they report that evolutionary diversity can be an effective proxy for both the sheer number of species as well as their characteristics and ecological roles. Their findings could help conservation organizations better protect threatened species across the globe. There are several measures of biodiversity, ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — There's a new contender in the race to find an inexpensive alternative to platinum catalysts for use in hydrogen fuel cells. Brown University chemist Shouheng Sun and his students have developed a new material — a graphene sheet covered by cobalt and cobalt-oxide nanoparticles — that can catalyze the oxygen reduction reaction nearly as well as platinum does and is substantially more durable. The new material "has the best reduction performance of any nonplatinum catalyst," said Shaojun Guo, postdoctoral researcher in Sun's lab and ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Twitter, best known as the 140-character social-networking site where Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga chit-chat with fans, has become a new literary format that is improving student learning, a new study argues. Christine Greenhow, assistant professor of education at Michigan State University, found that college students who tweet as part of their instruction are more engaged with the course content and with the teacher and other students, and have higher grades. "Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary practice," said Greenhow, who also studies ...

Amsterdam, October 17, 2012 – The claim that nanopore technology is on the verge of making DNA analysis so fast and cheap that a person's entire genome could be sequenced in just minutes and at a fraction of the cost of available commercial methods, has resulted in overwhelming academic, industrial, and global interest. But a review by Northeastern University physicist Meni Wanunu, published in a special issue on nanopore sequencing in Physics of Life Reviews, questions whether the remaining technical hurdles can be overcome to create a workable, easily produced commercial ...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, and TRIESTE, Italy — To encourage researchers around the world to adhere to universal science values and ethical behavior, a new report on responsible science has been issued by the InterAcademy Council and the IAP – the global network of science academies. The report is the first product of the IAC and IAP's project on scientific integrity, initiated in response to several major trends reshaping the research enterprise, including the increasingly global and interdisciplinary nature of science, its heightened role in policy debates, and the continued ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a new technique that uses sound waves to rapidly separate selected collections of cells for use in biomedical research. "We think this is important because it will make it faster and easier for researchers to sort out the live cells they need for research ranging from disease study to drug development," says Dr. Xiaoning Jiang, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and adjunct professor of biomedical engineering at NC State and co-author ...

WASHINGTON, DC, October 17, 2012 — Hindus and Muslims are less likely than Christians and Jews to have premarital sex, and Muslims are the least likely among people of these religious groups to have extramarital sex, according to a new study that analyzed data on premarital and extramarital sexual behaviors in over 30 developing countries around the world. Co-authored by Amy Adamczyk, an Associate Professor of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Brittany Hayes, a Ph.D. student in John Jay's Criminal Justice program, the study, "Religion and Sexual Behaviors: ...

The scale of the challenge to reduce the use of anti-psychotic drugs by people with dementia may be under-estimated, according to researchers from Aston University and the University of East Anglia, working with NHS Kent and Medway. There is a key public health challenge to reduce the prescribing of anti-psychotic drugs to people with dementia as they are thought to be associated with up to 1,800 deaths a year. Ian Maidment, corresponding author and a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacy from Aston University has worked in medication management in dementia for 20 ...

In newscasts after intense wind and ice storms, damaged trees stand out: snapped limbs, uprooted trunks, entire forests blown nearly flat. In a storm's wake, landowners, municipalities and state agencies are faced with important financial and environmental decisions. A study by Harvard University researchers, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and published in the journal Ecology, yields a surprising result: when it comes to the health of forests, native plants and wildlife, the best management decision may be to do nothing. Salvage logging is a ...

Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center have carried out a clinical trial in which patients with metastatic melanoma were given chemotherapy and an immunotherapy of adoptive cell transfer (ACT) with tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL). Tumor tissues were surgically removed from patients, minced and grown in culture. The treatment combined chemotherapy, then ACT with TIL, followed by interleukin-2 (IL-2). The combination therapy drew a high response rate from some patients. The study appears in the October issue of the Journal of Immunotherapy. "Our purpose was to demonstrate ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- A team led by MIT neuroscientists has developed a way to monitor how brain cells coordinate with each other to control specific behaviors, such as initiating movement or detecting an odor. The researchers' new imaging technique, based on the detection of calcium ions in neurons, could help them map the brain circuits that perform such functions. It could also provide new insights into the origins of autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other psychiatric diseases, says Guoping Feng, senior author of a paper appearing in the Oct. 18 issue of the journal ...

The use of electronic health records is linked to significantly higher quality care, according to a new study¹ by Lisa Kern and her team, from the Health Information Technology Evaluation Collaborative in the US. Their work appears online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer. Electronic health records (EHRs) have become a priority in the US, with federal incentives for 'meaningful' use of EHRs. Meaningful use entails tracking and improving specific patient outcomes, as well as gathering and storing information. Kern and colleagues examined ...

It's a common lament among parents: Kids are growing up too fast these days. Parents worry about their kids getting involved in all kinds of risky behavior, but they worry especially about their kids' forays into sexual relationships. And research suggests that there may be cause for concern, as timing of sexual development can have significant immediate consequences for adolescents' physical and mental health. But what about long-term outcomes? How might early sexual initiation affect romantic relationships in adulthood? Psychological scientist Paige Harden of the ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Oct. 17, 2012 — Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory have devised a method to use cosmic rays to gather detailed information from inside the damaged cores of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, which were heavily damaged in March 2011 by a tsunami that followed a great earthquake. In a paper in Physical Review Letters, researchers compared two methods for using cosmic-ray radiography to gather images of nuclear material within the core of a reactor similar to Fukushima Daiichi Reactor No. 1. The team found that Los Alamos' scattering method ...

New Rochelle, NY, October 17, 2012—SELEX is a rapid, efficient, and iterative high-throughput method for screening large libraries of molecules to identify those with the potential to be developed as drug compounds or research tools. Advances in SELEX technology that have enabled screening in live cells, called Cell-SELEX, are explored in a comprehensive Review article published in BioResearch Open Access, a bimonthly peer-reviewed open access journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The article is available free on the BioResearch Open Access website. Cell-SELEX uses live ...

PASADENA, Calif.—Imagine navigating through a grocery store with your cell phone. As you turn down the bread aisle, ads and coupons for hot dog buns and English muffins pop up on your screen. The electronics industry would like to make such personal navigators a reality, but, to do so, they need the next generation of microsensors. Thanks to an ultrasensitive accelerometer—a type of motion detector—developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Rochester, this new class of microsensors is a step closer to reality. Beyond ...

(Boston) – A study led by researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) provides novel insight into the impact that Huntington's disease has on the brain. The findings, published online in Neurology, pinpoint areas of the brain most affected by the disease and opens the door to examine why some people experience milder forms of the disease than others. Richard Myers, PhD, professor of neurology at BUSM, is the study's lead/corresponding author. This study, which is the largest to date of brains specific to Huntington's disease, is the product of nearly 30 ...