The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico 2010 could have been avoided if the experiences of earlier disasters had been put to use, researcher Charles Woolfson, Linköping university, claims. The United States government is now accusing BP of gross negligence and deliberate misconduct, and taking the company to court. On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the ocean south of the southern coast of the US. The explosion led to the deaths of eleven people and an unfathomable environmental catastrophe. Charles Woolfson, former professor of Labour Sociology ...

Serious gaming can be used to enhance surgical skills, but games developed or used to train medical professionals need to be validated before they are integrated into teaching methods, according to a paper in the October issue of the surgical journal BJS. Researchers from The Netherlands reviewed 25 research studies covering 30 serious games published between 1995 and 2012. "Many medical professionals may still have a rather out-dated view of the average gamer as being someone who is too young to vote, afraid of daylight and busy killing mystical dwarves in their parent's ...

VIDEO: The animation shows how the MASP-2 (blue) attaches itself to the complement protein C4 (orange), and the structural rearrangements that occur in the C4 due to this. Note that although... Click here for more information. The complement system is part of the innate immune system and is composed of about 40 different proteins that work together to defend the body against disease-causing microorganisms. The complement system perceives danger signals in the body by recognising ...

This press release is available in German. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many Americans started driving more due to a fear of flying – and lost their lives in traffic accidents. But why did this happen more frequently in some states than in others? And why didn't Spanish driving habits change in the same way following the 2004 train bombings in Madrid? Wolfgang Gaissmaier and Gerd Gigerenzer from the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin present new findings on this topic in the ...

"The most important thing for us is to raise awareness of the dangers of artificial light at night and we have already come a long way now that the American Medical Association (AMA) recently announced its new policy recognizing adverse health effects of exposure to light at night and encouraging further research into the matter," said Prof. Abraham Haim, a leading authority on light pollution, who coordinated the 21st International Congress of Zoology (ICZ) that was held last week at the University of Haifa, Israel. The panel of world experts discussed "Light Pollution ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new method for forecasting seasonal hurricane activity that is 15 percent more accurate than previous techniques. "This approach should give policymakers more reliable information than current state-of-the-art methods," says Dr. Nagiza Samatova, an associate professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work. "This will hopefully give them more confidence in planning for the hurricane season." Conventional models used to predict seasonal hurricane activity rely on classical ...

The small ostracod Ankylocythere sinuosa measures no more than half a millimetre in length and lives on other crayfish. And, Spanish scientists have discovered it for the first time in Europe. The finding suggests that it arrived along with the invader crayfish Procambarus clarkii some 30 years ago but it is still unknown whether it can invade other crustacean species or whether it benefits or damages the expansion of the already established red swamp crayfish. The red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) originates from the USA and Mexico and has been present in the Iberian ...

Electronic Jewelry for Health Bracelets and amulets are in the works at Dartmouth's Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (ISTS). Rather than items of mere adornment, the scientists and engineers are constructing personal mobile health (mHealth) devices—highly functional jewelry, as it were. mHealth is a rapidly growing field where technology helps you or your physician monitor your health through mobile devices. This approach can offer more accurate and timely diagnoses as well as lower health costs. However, smartphones are often used to transmit collected ...

University of Adelaide researchers say a small wasp that scientists had forgotten about for more than 200 years is now making a name for itself – as a predator of Australia's most common dangerous spider, the redback. The wasp (Agenioideus nigricornis) was first described scientifically in 1775 by Danish entomologist Johan Christian Fabricius, thanks to samples collected in Australia during Captain Cook's first great voyage (1768). "Since then, scientists have largely forgotten about the wasp," says Professor Andy Austin from the University of Adelaide's Australian ...

Scientists at The University of Nottingham say adverse side-effects caused by the anti-parasitic drug quinine in the treatment of malaria could be controlled by what we eat. The research, carried out by Nottingham scientists on the University's campuses in the UK and Malaysia, indicates that natural variation in our levels of the amino acid, tryptophan, has a marked bearing on how we respond to quinine treatment. It appears that the lower our levels of tryptophan the more likely it is that we would suffer side-effects. And because tryptophan is an essential amino acid ...

VIDEO: Research carried out at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid analyzes the search and visualization systems used by commercial stock photography agencies, whose estimated annual net sales reach over 150 billion... Click here for more information. Stock photography agencies, and not just those companies that dominate the digital photography market, are at the forefront of information search tools. "Their search, visualization and information downloading systems are extraordinarily ...

Forgetfulness, lack of orientation, cognitive decline… about 700, 000 Germans suffer from Alzheimer's disease (AD). Now researchers from the University of Ulm, among them the Epidemiologist Professor Gabriele Nagel and the Neurologist Professor Christine von Arnim, have discovered that the serum-concentration of the antioxidants vitamin C and beta-carotene are significantly lower in patients with mild dementia than in control persons. It might thus be possible to influence the pathogenesis of AD by a person's diet or dietary antioxidants. 74 AD-patients and 158 healthy ...

WASHINGTON -- Teens who play mature-rated, risk-glorifying video games may be more likely than those who don't to become reckless drivers who experience increases in automobile accidents, police stops and willingness to drink and drive, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. "Most parents would probably be disturbed to learn that we observed that this type of game play was more strongly associated with teen drivers being pulled over by the police than their parenting practices," said study lead author Jay G. Hull, PhD, of Dartmouth ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- As outbreaks of preventable diseases such as whooping cough and measles increase in the United States, researchers from the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine are investigating whether altruism, known to influence adults' decisions to immunize themselves, influences parental decisions to vaccinate their children. "If enough people are immunized against a particular disease, it prevents outbreaks of that disease and protects the community. This is known as herd immunity, and it's a very important benefit of childhood immunization," ...

WASHINGTON, D.C.—September 11, 2012—Today, The Dengue Vaccine Initiative (DVI) welcomed new clinical trial results that reveal progress in developing the first-ever dengue vaccine. In a publication in The Lancet, pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur reported results from the first study conducted to evaluate the efficacy of any dengue vaccine candidate against clinical dengue disease in a population naturally exposed to dengue. Dengue vaccine development efforts have been difficult because dengue is caused by four different related viruses, known as DENV 1, 2, 3 and ...

New Orleans, LA – A research study conducted by Dr. Jesus Lovera, Assistant Professor of Neurology at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, and colleagues has found that the herbal supplement Ginkgo biloba does not improve cognitive function in patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS.) Cognitive impairment affects 40-60% of people with MS, most commonly affecting their processing speed, memory, and executive skills. The research findings were published online ahead of print in Neurology on September 5, 2012. This study followed up on a promising earlier small study by ...

People face this predicament all the time—can you determine a person's character in a single interaction? Can you judge whether someone you just met can be trusted when you have only a few minutes together? And if you can, how do you do it? Using a robot named Nexi, Northeastern University psychology professor David DeSteno and collaborators Cynthia Breazeal from MIT's Media Lab and Robert Frank and David Pizarro from Cornell University have figured out the answer. The findings were recently pub¬lished in the journal Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for ...

(Garrison, NY) When Facebook introduced a feature that enables people to register to become organ and tissue donors, thousands did so, dwarfing any previous donation initiative, write Blair L. Sadler and Alfred M. Sadler, Jr., in a commentary in Bioethics Forum, the blog of the Hastings Center Report, which analyzes the "Facebook effect" on donation. The Sadlers, Founding Fellows of The Hastings Center, helped draft the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, established in 1968 to standardize state laws on the donation of organs and tissue after death. Blair Sadler, a lawyer, is ...

WHAT: The genetic sequencing and reconstruction of the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide have advanced scientists' understanding of influenza biology and yielded important information on how to prevent and control future pandemics, according to a new commentary by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and several other institutions. By sequencing the 1918 virus, researchers were able to confirm that the viruses that caused influenza pandemics in 1957, 1968, ...

By including chemotherapy as a conditioning regimen prior to treatment, researchers have developed a refined gene therapy approach that safely and effectively restores the immune system of children with a form of severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), according to a study published online today in Blood, the Journal of the American Society of Hematology (ASH). SCID is a group of rare and debilitating genetic disorders that affect the normal development of the immune system in newborns. Infants with SCID are prone to serious, life-threatening infections within the first ...

Consumers will pay more when they are given different options to pursue short-term goals, but will pay more for similar options when pursuing long-term goals, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "Many of the benefits of pursuing self-control goals such as being healthy are experienced in the future. Thus, a key component of our success in meeting our goals is the ability to remain motivated. One way for consumers to manage motivation is to strategically choose the options available to them in pursuing their goals," write authors Jordan Etkin ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. — Parents of newborns with the sickle cell anemia trait were less likely to receive genetic counseling than parents whose babies are cystic fibrosis carriers, a new study from the University of Michigan shows. University of Michigan researchers found that 20 percent of physicians reported their patients with newborns carrying the sickle cell trait did not get any genetic counseling. In contrast, parents of babies who were cystic fibrosis carriers received more counseling overall (92 percent vs. 80 percent). The research was published online in the ...

WASHINGTON ― To more effectively defend against ballistic missile attacks, the U.S. should concentrate on defense systems that intercept enemy missiles in midcourse and stop spending money on boost-phase defense systems of any kind, concludes a new, congressionally mandated report from a committee of the National Research Council. The committee was asked to assess the feasibility, practicality, and affordability of U.S. boost-phase missile defenses and compare them with other alternatives for countering limited nuclear or conventional ballistic missile attacks ...

Researchers from the University of Rochester and Texas A&M University have found that, over a period of five months following the disastrous 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, naturally-occurring bacteria that exist in the Gulf of Mexico consumed and removed at least 200,000 tons of oil and natural gas that spewed into the deep Gulf from the ruptured well head. The researchers analyzed an extensive data set to determine not only how much oil and gas was eaten by bacteria, but also how the characteristics of this feast changed with time. "A significant amount ...

Consumers nurture romantic ideas of nature by engaging in practices that are often harmful to the environment, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Could eco-friendly products provide a solution? "Nature is often considered the ideal place to escape from everyday life. Consumers enjoy romantic escapes from culture in contexts as diverse as surfing, tropical island holidays, and the Burning Man festival. But by viewing nature as simply the opposite of culture, consumers often expedite the destruction of the experiences of nature they desire most," ...