Pasadena, CA— A team of astronomers, led by Wendy Freedman, director of the Carnegie Observatories, have used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to make the most accurate and precise measurement yet of the Hubble constant, a fundamental quantity that measures the current rate at which our universe is expanding. These results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal and are available online. The Hubble constant is named after 20th Century Carnegie astronomer Edwin P.Hubble, who astonished the world by discovering that our universe is expanding now and has been growing ...

CHICAGO, Oct. 3, 2012 – Yesterday U.S. Army surgeons exhibited new research findings in two poster presentations at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress. The poster presentation titled, "Assessment of Disease Features and Immune Response in Breast Cancer Patients with Recurrence after Receiving AE37, a HER2 Peptide Vaccine," outlined outcomes of injecting AE37, a HER-2 derived vaccine, in breast cancer survivors following completion of standard therapy. Those who received injections of AE37 were more likely to survive disease-free than the control group. ...

Scientists at USC have discovered a new type of drug for the treatment of ovarian cancer that works in a way that should not only decrease the number of doses that patients need to take, but also may make it effective for patients whose cancer has become drug-resistant. The drug, which so far has been tested in the lab on ovarian cancer cells and on mice tumors, was unveiled last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "We need a new generation of drugs," said Shili Xu, a USC graduate student and lead author of the PNAS paper. "We need to ...

New research proves the validity of one of the most promising approaches for combating Alzheimer's disease (AD) with medicines that treat not just some of the symptoms, but actually stop or prevent the disease itself, scientists are reporting. The study, in the journal ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, also identifies a potential new oral drug that the scientists say could lead the way. Wenhui Hu and colleagues point out that existing drugs for AD provide only "minimal" relief of memory loss and other symptoms, creating an urgent need for new medicines that actually combat ...

If applied to the $5-billion-per-year dietary supplement industry, "quality by design" (QbD) — a mindset that helped revolutionize the manufacture of cars and hundreds of other products — could ease concerns about the safety and integrity of the herbal products used by 80 percent of the world's population. That's the conclusion of an article in ACS' Journal of Natural Products. Ikhlas Khan and Troy Smillie explain that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates dietary supplements as a category of foods, rather than drugs. Manufacturers are responsible for ...

Scientists are describing what may be a "complete solution" to cleaning up oil spills — a superabsorbent material that sops up 40 times its own weight in oil and then can be shipped to an oil refinery and processed to recover the oil. Their article on the material appears in ACS' journal Energy & Fuels. T. C. Mike Chung and Xuepei Yuan point out that current methods for coping with oil spills like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster are low-tech, decades-old and have many disadvantages. Corncobs, straw and other absorbents, for instance, can hold only about 5 times their ...

Billions of people around the world today will unknowingly perform a chemical reaction first reported 100 years ago. And the centennial of the Maillard reaction — which gives delightful flavor to foods ranging from grilled meat to baked bread to coffee — is the topic of a fascinating article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN is the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. Sarah Everts, C&EN senior editor, explains in the article that French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard took a first stab ...

Certificate of Need, a form of state government regulation designed to keep mortality rates and health care costs down, appears to do neither for heart bypass surgery, according to a health economics researcher at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM). Her findings are reported in an article appearing in today's online edition of the journal Medical Care Research and Review. Lead author Vivian Ho, the chair in health economics at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy and a professor of medicine at BCM, found that states that removed Certificate ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The colorful leaves piling up in your backyard this fall can be thought of as natural stores of carbon. In the springtime, leaves soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, converting the gas into organic carbon compounds. Come autumn, trees shed their leaves, leaving them to decompose in the soil as they are eaten by microbes. Over time, decaying leaves release carbon back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In fact, the natural decay of organic carbon contributes more than 90 percent of the yearly carbon dioxide released into Earth's atmosphere ...

After a series of Philadelphia hospitals started closing their maternity units in 1997, infant mortality rates increased by nearly 50 percent over the next three years. The mortality rates subsequently leveled off to the same rate as before the closures, but pediatric researchers say their results underscore the need for careful oversight and planning by public health agencies in communities experiencing serious reductions in obstetric services. Between 1997 and 2007, 9 of 19 obstetric units closed in Philadelphia, resulting in 40 percent fewer obstetric beds. Other research ...

A simple new test, in which the patient swallows a string, can monitor treatment of eosinophilic esophagitis as effectively as an invasive, expensive and uncomfortable procedure that risks complications, particularly in children. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, working in collaboration with clinician-investigators at the University of Colorado Denver/Children's Hospital Colorado and Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago, reported their findings in a study published recently online in the journal Gut. Eosinophilic esophagitis, ...

MAYWOOD, Ill. – Gender-specific group therapy is effective for treating depressed women with Type 2 diabetes, according to a study published in the latest issue of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine and funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research. Evidence suggests that antidepressants may disrupt blood-sugar control and can be associated with increased weight gain; therefore, other treatment options are needed for depression. "Using antidepressants to treat depression, although important, can be associated with side effects that make compliance an issue for people ...

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 3, 2012 – Milk consumption has been linked to improved health, with decreased risks of diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and colon cancer. A group of scientists in Sweden found that lactoferricin4-14 (Lfcin4-14), a milk protein with known health effects, significantly reduces the growth rate of colon cancer cells over time by prolonging the period of the cell cycle before chromosomes are replicated. In a new study, investigators report that treatment with Lfcin4-14 reduced DNA damage in colon cancer cells exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light. ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Not everyone is able to be hypnotized, and new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine shows how the brains of such people differ from those who can easily be. The study, published in the October issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, uses data from functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging to identify how the areas of the brain associated with executive control and attention tend to have less activity in people who cannot be put into a hypnotic trance. "There's never been a brain signature of being hypnotized, and we're ...

The fifteenth tropical depression of the Atlantic Ocean hurricane season was born on Oct. 3 an NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of it as it came to be. NASA's Terra satellite passed over newborn Tropical Depression 15 on Oct. 3 at 8:52 a.m. EDT in the central Atlantic Ocean and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument captured an image of the storm. Shortly after the image was created, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center looking at the MODIS and other satellite data determined that the low pressure area had become a depression. On ...

NASA's Aqua satellite took an infrared "picture" of Tropical Storm Maliksi in the western North Pacific Ocean and identified the strongest part of the storm being east of its center. On Oct. 3 at 1500 UTC (11 a.m. EDT), Tropical storm Maliksi had maximum sustained winds of 45 knots (51.7 mph/83.3 kph). It was located about 470 nautical miles (541 miles/870.4 km) south-southeast of Tokyo, Japan, near 29.4 North and 143.1 East. Maliksi was speeding to the north-northeast at 21 knots (24.1 mph/38.8 kph). The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies ...

VIDEO: On Oct. 2 at 11:43 p.m. EDT, heavy convective thunderstorms were found in Nadine's northeastern quadrant by NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite. Wind shear had separated the center... Click here for more information. NASA satellites continue to gather data from Tropical Storm Nadine on its twenty-second day of life in the eastern Atlantic as it threatens the Azores again. NASA data has shown that wind shear is pushing the bulk of clouds and ...

Tropical Storm Gaemi is packing a lot of power around its middle and on one side of the storm, and that was apparent in NASA satellite imagery. NASA's Terra satellite passed over Tropical Storm Gaemi on Oct. 3 at 0300 UTC (11:00 p.m. EDT, Oct. 2) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument captured a true-color image of the storm. The image showed a bright white, rounded area around the center that indicated higher, stronger thunderstorms. Higher, stronger thunderstorms also wrapped around the center in a wide band that stretches from north ...

JUPITER, FL, October 3, 2012 – Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have developed a novel technology that can identify, in animal models, potential biomarkers of ulcerative colitis, a type of inflammatory bowel disease that affects the lining of the colon. The study was published October 3, 2012, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The new research focuses on the protein arginine deiminases (PAD), which have been implicated in a number of diseases, including cancer, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. PADs participate ...

Berkeley — Bisphenol A (BPA), an estrogen-like compound that has drawn increased scrutiny in recent years, has been linked to changes in thyroid hormone levels in pregnant women and newborn boys, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Normal thyroid function is essential to the healthy growth and cognitive development of fetuses and children. Yet, until this study, to be published Thursday, Oct. 4, in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, little was known about the effects of BPA exposure on thyroid hormones in pregnant ...

A compassion-based meditation program can significantly improve a person's ability to read the facial expressions of others, finds a study published by Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. This boost in empathic accuracy was detected through both behavioral testing of the study participants and through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brain activity. "It's an intriguing result, suggesting that a behavioral intervention could enhance a key aspect of empathy," says lead author Jennifer Mascaro, a post-doctoral fellow in anthropology at ...

DatingMashup.com is proud to announce its sponsorship of Phoenix Fashion Week. Dale P. Ballard, Founder and CEO of DatingMashup.com explains, "We'll be providing a special gift that will be found inside various VIP "swag" bags. We think this is a wonderful event not only for DatingMashup.com members, but for anyone who loves fashion and enjoys donating to charitable causes." This exciting event is taking place at The Talking Stick Resort Casino in Scottsdale, Arizona. The event will house thousands of people over four days and will include a ...

New Harmony Soap Company, a maker of natural, nutrient-rich soaps and skin health products, will introduce a pair of Artisan Wine Soaps this weekend at the 10th Annual Wabash Valley Wine & Art Festival in historic Palestine, Illinois. As an artisan vendor at the popular Fall festival 45 miles southwest of Terre Haute,Indiana, New Harmony Soap Company will debut a Red Wine Soap and a Honey Wine Soap. The red wine soap is crafted using Reggae Red table wine vinted by Easley Winery of Indianapolis. The honey wine soap uses Camelot Mead Honey Wine vinted by Oliver Winery ...

The boys are, literally, back in town (flying in from Finland, Norway and the US) to appear in a video by renowned film director Tony Klinger (Get Carter, Shout At The Devil, Deep Purple Over Japan, The Kids are Alright - The Who). The A list of rock's greatest are appearing in the promotional video for 'Honest' John Plain's single 'Never Listen To Rumours' are Michael Monroe and Sami Yaffa (Hanoi Rocks/New York Dolls) Martin Chambers (The Pretenders), Glen Matlock (Sex Pistols), Casino Steel (The Boys, Johnny Cash, Carlene Carter), Darrell Bath (The Crybabys and Dogs D'Amour) ...

[Gigi Capone PR] Canada - The world's top 3 sound systems are set to share the stage together Thanksgiving weekend in both Ottawa on at the St. Anthony Banquet Hall on the 6th; then at E.B.Club Lounge in Montreal on the 7th. A Stone Love, Bass Odyssey and Wyclef Refugee All-Star Sound (WRAS) concert for the first time ever; this grandiose event is sure to make a deep mark in reggae history. The buzz surrounding this event has made major waves in the industry since WRAS first started promoting the show in August. Top selecta for the sound Sean "Da Entertainer" ...