ITHACA, N.Y. – With projections of 9.5 billion people by 2050, humanity faces the challenge of feeding modern diets to additional mouths while using the same amounts of water, fertilizer and arable land as today. Cornell University researchers have taken a leap toward meeting those needs by discovering a gene that could lead to new varieties of staple crops with 50 percent higher yields. The gene, called Scarecrow, is the first discovered to control a special leaf structure, known as Kranz anatomy, which leads to more efficient photosynthesis. Plants photosynthesize ...

Have you ever woken up to a sunny forecast only to get soaked on your way to the office? On days like that it's easy to blame the weatherman. But BYU mechanical engineering professor Julie Crockett doesn't get mad at meteorologists. She understands something that very few people know: it's not the weatherman's fault he's wrong so often. According to Crockett, forecasters make mistakes because the models they use for predicting weather can't accurately track highly influential elements called internal waves. Atmospheric internal waves are waves that propagate between ...

Maternal inflammation during early pregnancy may be related to an increased risk of autism in children, according to new findings supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health. Researchers found this in children of mothers with elevated C-reactive protein (CRP), a well-established marker of systemic inflammation. The risk of autism among children in the study was increased by 43 percent among mothers with CRP levels in the top 20th percentile, and by 80 percent for maternal CRP in the top 10th ...

In biology, molecules can have multi-way interactions within cells, and until recently, computational analysis of these links has been "incomplete," according to T. M. Murali, associate professor of computer science in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. His group authored an article on their new approach to address these shortcomings, titled "Reverse Engineering Molecular Hypergraphs," that received the Best Paper Award at the recent 2012 ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Biomedicine. Intricate networks of connections among molecules ...

Bullying, whether it's physical aggression or spreading rumors, boosts the social status and popularity of middle school students, according to a new UCLA psychology study that has implications for programs aimed at combatting school bullying. In addition, students already considered popular engage in these forms of bullying, the researchers found. The psychologists studied 1,895 ethnically diverse students from 99 classes at 11 Los Angeles middle schools. They conducted surveys at three points: during the spring of seventh grade, the fall of eighth grade and the spring ...

ST. LOUIS, Jan. 24, 2013 – A new study published in The Journal of Nutrition demonstrates the benefits of consuming a protein blend for muscle protein synthesis after exercise. This study is a first-of-its-kind, conducted by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch, and utilizes the proteins from soy, whey and casein consumed after an acute bout of resistance exercise. These proteins have complementary amino acid profiles and different digestion rates (amino acid release profiles). The results demonstrate prolonged delivery of amino acids to muscles and ...

Healthy men and women show little difference in their hearts, except for small electrocardiographic disparities. But new genetic differences found by Washington University in St. Louis researchers in hearts with disease could ultimately lead to personalized treatment of various heart ailments. Generally, men are more susceptible to developing atrial fibrillation, an irregular, rapid heartbeat that may lead to stroke, while women are more likely to develop long-QT syndrome, a rhythm disorder that can cause rapid heartbeats and sudden cardiac death. While prior studies ...

MADISON – Zhen Huang freely admits he was not interested in blood vessels four years ago when he was studying brain development in a fetal mouse. Instead, he wanted to see how changing a particular gene in brain cells called glia would affect the growth of neurons. The result was hemorrhage, caused by deteriorating veins and arteries, and it begged for explanation. "It was a surprising finding," says Huang, an assistant professor of neuroscience and neurology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "I was mainly interested in the neurological aspect, how the brain ...

New York, NY—January 24, 2013—Samuel K. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has taken his innovative lab-on-a-chip and developed a way to not only check a patient's HIV status anywhere in the world with just a finger prick, but also synchronize the results automatically and instantaneously with central health-care records—10 times faster, the researchers say, than the benchtop ELISA, a broadly used diagnostic technique. The device was field-tested in Rwanda by a collaborative team from the Sia lab and ICAP at Columbia's Mailman School ...

Animal scientists in Brazil have found that a small dose of the feed additive ractopamine can boost pork production without changing how pork looks or tastes. In the latest issue of the Journal of Animal Science, researchers report that a 5 mg/kg dose of ractopamine increased muscle mass and feed efficiency, and had no noticeable effect on pork marbling, fat content, toughness or color. The researchers came to this conclusion by testing pork from 340 pigs raised under commercial conditions. "We found that if [pork producers] use 5 mg/kg of ractopamine in the finishing ...

TORONTO, Jan. 24, 2013—Up to one-third of patients undergoing surgery in Ontario have a treatable form of anemia but are not optimally treated for it. A paper published online today in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia says that hospitals that do treat patients with anemia have better outcomes, including fewer blood transfusions and infections and shorter hospital stays. A common option for management of anemia has been blood transfusion. But blood transfusions are expensive and are associated with higher death and complication rates. Dr. Gregory Hare, an anesthesiologist ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Health care practitioners now can access patients' data using electronic medical records, which often include information systems that assess individuals' medical histories and clinical research to facilitate doctors' diagnoses. A University of Missouri researcher says the increased use of computerized clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) leads to greater patient dissatisfaction and could increase noncompliance with preventative care and treatment recommendations. Victoria Shaffer, an assistant professor of health sciences and psychological sciences, ...

ANN ARBOR—A new way of making crystalline silicon, developed by U-M researchers, could make this crucial ingredient of computers and solar cells much cheaper and greener. Silicon dioxide, or sand, makes up about 40 percent of the earth's crust, but the industrial method for converting sand into crystalline silicon is expensive and has a major environmental impact due to the extreme processing conditions. "The crystalline silicon in modern electronics is currently made through a series of energy-intensive chemical reactions with temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees ...

PHILADELPHIA—Infectious diseases in Ghana tend to capture the most attention, but a quiet crisis may soon take over as the country's most threatening epidemic: cancer. A new study published in January in the journal BMC Cancer, led by Kosj Yamoah, M.D., Ph.D., a resident in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital, takes aim at the issue by investigating prostate cancer diagnoses and treatment delivery in black men living in the West African region, in order to devise research strategies to help improve health outcomes. Overall, ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A retailer's optimal store layout is the result of balancing the interests of two different types of markets – consumers and suppliers, says new research co-written by a University of Illinois business professor. According to Yunchuan "Frank" Liu, a retailer's strategic manipulation of store layout is driven by an incentive to balance the shopping process of "fit-uncertain consumers" and the pricing behavior of upstream suppliers. "Retailers face two different kinds of markets – the consumers who buy goods, and the manufacturers that supply goods," ...

Tropical Cyclone Garry is in a good environment to intensify and satellite imagery from NOAA's GOES-15 satellite helped confirm that the storm has become more organized. NOAA's GOES-15 satellite captured an infrared image of Tropical Storm Garry when it was located about 330 nautical miles (379.8 miles/ 611.2 km) east of Pago Pago, American Samoa. The image, created by the NASA GOES Project at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., was taken Jan. 24 at 1500 UTC (10 a.m. EST). The image showed a bright white circle of clouds that indicate strong thunderstorms ...

Infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite revealed that a band of thunderstorms on the eastern side of Tropical Storm Oswald's remnants still contained some punch. Oswald's remnants have triggered severe weather warnings in parts of Queensland, Australia. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the eastern side of the remnants of Tropical Cyclone Oswald the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured an infrared image of a powerful band of thunderstorms over the Coral Sea. The band of thunderstorms east of Oswald's center showed some strong convection and ...

Flying high over Antarctica, a NASA long duration balloon has broken the record for longest flight by a balloon of its size. The record-breaking balloon, carrying the Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder (Super-TIGER) experiment, has been afloat for 46 days and is on its third orbit around the South Pole. "This is an outstanding achievement for NASA's Astrophysics balloon team," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Keeping these huge balloons aloft for such long periods lets us do ...

Irvine, Calif. (Corrected version) — Exposing pregnant mice to low doses of the chemical tributyltin (TBT) – which was used in marine antifouling paints and is used as an antifungal agent in some paints, certain plastics and a variety of consumer products – can lead to obesity for multiple generations without subsequent exposure, a UC Irvine study has found. After exposing pregnant mice to TBT at low concentrations, similar to those found in the environment and in humans, researchers observed increased body fat, liver fat and fat-specific gene expression in liver and ...

In a development that could lead to faster and more effective toxicity tests for airborne chemicals, scientists from Rice University and the Rice spinoff company Nano3D Biosciences have used magnetic levitation to grow some of the most realistic lung tissue ever produced in a laboratory. The research is part of an international trend in biomedical engineering to create laboratory techniques for growing tissues that are virtually identical to those found in people's bodies. In the new study, researchers combined four types of cells to replicate tissue from the wall of ...

Pulsars—tiny spinning stars, heavier than the sun and smaller than a city—have puzzled scientists since they were discovered in 1967. Now, new observations by an international team, including University of Vermont astrophysicist Joanna Rankin, make these bizarre stars even more puzzling. The scientists identified a pulsar that is able to dramatically change the way in which it shines. In just a few seconds, the star can quiet its radio waves while at the same time it makes its X-ray emissions much brighter. The research "challenges all proposed pulsar emission theories," ...

A prospective study led by researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine has found that low serum vitamin D levels in the months preceding diagnosis may predict a high risk of premenopausal breast cancer. The study of blood levels of 1,200 healthy women found that women whose serum vitamin D level was low during the three-month period just before diagnosis had approximately three times the risk of breast cancer as women in the highest vitamin D group. The study is currently published online in advance of the print edition of the journal ...

Cincinnati, OH, January 25, 2013 -- Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), such as ibuprofen and naproxen, are commonly used to treat pain and reduce fever in children. However, the use of NSAIDs has been shown to cause acute kidney injury (AKI) in some children. A new study scheduled for publication in The Journal of Pediatrics reports the findings on the number of children diagnosed with AKI caused by NSAIDs in one hospital over an 11 ½ year span. Dr. Jason Misurac and colleagues from the Indiana University School of Medicine and Butler University retrospectively ...

Yoga has positive effects on mild depression and sleep complaints, even in the absence of drug treatments, and improves symptoms associated with schizophrenia and ADHD in patients on medication, according to a systematic review of the exercise on major clinical psychiatric disorders. Published in the open-access journal, Frontiers in Psychiatry, on January 25th, 2013, the review of more than one hundred studies focusing on 16 high-quality controlled studies looked at the effects of yoga on depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, sleep complaints, eating disorders and cognition ...

Sick children, especially those with some dehydration from flu or other illnesses, risk significant kidney injury if given drugs such as ibuprofen and naproxen, Indiana University School of Medicine researchers said Friday. In an article published online Jan. 25 by the Journal of Pediatrics, Jason Misurac, M.D., and colleagues from IU and Butler University reported that nearly 3 percent of cases of pediatric acute kidney injury over a decade could be traced directly to having taken the common nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs. Although relatively few ...