Boulder, Colo., USA – Geology articles posted online ahead of print this month survey topography, minerals, faults and tectonics, alluvium, modeling, snowball Earth, fossils and extinction, and pyrite-filled worm burrows. One notable study provides a new eruption date for the Salton Buttes (Calif., USA) of 30,000 years later than that determined by earlier studies, coinciding with the appearance of the earliest known obsidian tools there. Highlights are provided below. GEOLOGY articles published ahead of print can be accessed online at http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/recent. ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —The cabin of a spacecraft halfway to Mars would be the least convenient place -- one cannot say "on earth" -- for a Salmonella or Pneumococcus outbreak, but a wide-ranging new paper suggests that microgravity and prolonged space flight could give unique advantages to germs. What's a space agency to do? Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital infectious disease expert Dr. Leonard Mermel offers several ideas. And no, they are not to add more Vitamin C to the Tang, or to give each crew member a bottle of Purell. It's a lot more complicated ...

PASADENA, Calif.—Thanks to better voting technology over the last decade, the country's election process has seen much improvement, according to a new report released today by researchers at Caltech and MIT. However, the report notes, despite this progress, some problems remain. Spurred by the debacle of hanging chads and other voting problems during the 2000 presidential election, the Voting Technology Project (VTP) was started by Caltech and MIT to bring together researchers from across disciplines to figure out how to improve elections. The VTP issued its first report ...

NEW ORLEANS, La. — People who like to nap say it helps them focus their minds post a little shut eye. Now, a study from Georgetown University Medical Center may have found evidence to support that notion. The research, presented at Neuroscience 2012, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, found that when participants in a study rested, the right hemisphere of their brains talked more to itself and to the left hemisphere than the left hemisphere communicated within itself and to the right hemisphere – no matter which of the participants' hands was dominant. ...

MINNEAPOLIS – Research shows that use of popular antidepressants is linked to an increased risk of some strokes caused by bleeding in the brain, but that the risk is low, according to a multi-study analysis published in the October 17, 2012, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. For the research, scientists analyzed all of the studies that have looked at antidepressant use and stroke, which included 16 studies with more than 500,000 total participants. They found that people taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors ...

ANAHEIM, Calif. — The combination of shortened telomeres, a biological marker of aging associated with cancer development, and elevated depression significantly impacted bladder cancer mortality, according to data presented at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, held here Oct. 16-19, 2012. "We found that patients with bladder cancer with shorter telomeres and high levels of depression symptoms have a threefold increased risk for mortality," said Meng Chen, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at The University of Texas MD Anderson ...

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Twenty-nine percent of patients with colorectal cancer in a nationally representative sample were diagnosed after an emergency, such as an obstruction or perforation of the bowel, according to data presented at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, held here Oct. 16-19, 2012. In addition, African-Americans and those living in high-poverty areas were more likely to present with an emergency diagnosis. "Overall, there are high rates of emergency presentation of colorectal cancer in the United States," ...

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Two components of red meat — dietary protein and dietary iron — may combine to form powerful carcinogens, N-nitroso compounds, which increase risk for bladder cancer. Moreover, individuals with reduced ability to reverse the effects of N-nitroso compounds because of a genetic variation in their RAD52 gene could be at particularly high risk. Chelsea Catsburg, a doctoral student at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, presented these data at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer ...

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Screening for cervical cancer was low among women who self-identified as lesbian — a finding that places them at a potentially elevated risk for the disease, according to data presented at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, held here Oct. 16-19, 2012. "Despite our knowledge of the value of Pap testing for early detection of treatable cervical abnormalities, lesbians are one subset of women who are not getting screened at recommended rates. In fact, nearly 38 percent of lesbians in our study had not ...

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight, staying physically active and maintaining a healthy diet improved survival after cancer diagnosis in an elderly female cancer survivor population, according to data presented at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, held here Oct. 16-19, 2012. Researchers examined cancer survivors' adherence to the 2007 World Cancer Research Fund/American Institute for Cancer Research (WCRF/AICR) guidelines for body weight, physical activity and diet. "Elderly female ...

San Diego, CA (October 17, 2012) – A sweeping study on the issue of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in hospitals shows that using antimicrobial soap and ointment on all intensive-care patients significantly decreases bloodstream infection. The results, which are being presented for the first time at IDWeek 2012TM, may suggest a major change in health care practice that could help save lives. The study involved nearly 75,000 patients in 43 mostly community hospitals in 16 states and involved each hospital's own quality improvement team. Working with these teams enabled ...

SEATTLE – One of the world's leading bone marrow transplant experts is recommending a significant change to current transplant practice for patients who need marrow or adult stem cells from an unrelated donor to treat hematologic malignancies. Fred Appelbaum, M.D., director of the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, asserts that bone marrow – not circulating, peripheral blood, which is the current norm – should be the source for unrelated donor adult stem cells for most patients who require a transplant. The reason: because there is less ...

Ustekinumab, an antibody proven to treat the skin condition psoriasis, has now shown positive results in decreasing the debilitating effects of Crohn's Disease, according to researchers at the University of California San Diego, School of Medicine. The study will appear in the October 18, 2012 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Results from the clinical trial showed ustekinumab (Stelara) increased clinical response and remission in patients suffering from moderate-to-severe Crohn's Disease - a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that can lead ...

Qubit-based computing exploiting spooky quantum effects like entanglement and superposition will speed up factoring and searching calculations far above what can be done with mere zero-or-one bits. To domesticate quantum weirdness, however, to make it a fit companion for mass-market electronic technology, many tricky bi-lateral and multi-lateral arrangements---among photons, electrons, circuits, cavities, etc.---need to be negotiated. A new milestone in this forward march: a Princeton-Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) collaboration announces the successful excitation ...

ANAHEIM, Calif. – Oct.17, 2012. Nearly 38 percent of lesbians polled in a national survey were not routinely screened for cervical cancer, putting them at risk of developing a highly preventable cancer, according to a University of Maryland School of Medicine study being presented at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research. Cervical cancer is caused by a sexually transmitted virus, the human papillomavirus (HPV), and can be detected through regular Pap smears. The percentage of lesbians not being screened as recommended ...

The giant impact believed to have formed the Earth-Moon system has long been accepted as canon. However, a major challenge to the theory has been that the Earth and Moon have identical oxygen isotope compositions, even though earlier impact models indicated they should differ substantially. In a paper published today in the journal Science online, a new model by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), motivated by accompanying work by others on the early dynamical history of the Moon, accounts for this similarity in composition while also yielding an appropriate mass for Earth ...

It's a big claim, but Washington University in St. Louis planetary scientist Frédéric Moynier says his group has discovered evidence that the Moon was born in a flaming blaze of glory when a body the size of Mars collided with the early Earth. The evidence might not seem all that impressive to a nonscientist: a tiny excess of a heavier variant of the element zinc in Moon rocks. But the enrichment probably arose because heavier zinc atoms condensed out of the roiling cloud of vaporized rock created by a catastrophic collision faster than lighter zinc atoms, and the remaining ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Among the oddities of the outer solar system are the middle-sized moons of Saturn, a half-dozen icy bodies dwarfed by Saturn's massive moon Titan. According to a new model for the origin of the Saturn system, these middle-sized moons were spawned during giant impacts in which several major satellites merged to form Titan. Erik Asphaug, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will present this new hypothesis October 19 at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical ...

It takes both teeth and jaws to make a pretty smile, but the evolutionary origins of these parts of our anatomy have only just been discovered, thanks to a particle accelerator and a long dead fish. All living jawed vertebrates (animals with backbones, such as humans) have teeth, but it has long been thought that the first jawed vertebrates lacked pearly gnashers, instead capturing prey with gruesome scissor-like jaw-bones. However new research, led by the University of Bristol and published today in Nature, shows that these earliest jawed vertebrates possessed teeth ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Researchers at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore have identified numerous new subtypes of gastric cancer that are triggered by environmental factors. Reported in the Oct. 17, 2012, issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine, the findings are based on the science of epigenetics, a study of gene activity. The insights into the complexities of stomach cancer could lead to better treatment approaches for the second leading cancer killer in the world, behind lung cancer. "Gastric cancer is a heterogenous disease with individual patients ...

An Indiana University study that examined the effect of age and physical activity on lower leg muscle reflexes and coordination concluded that participation in physical activity was beneficial for lower leg muscle coordination across both sides of the body in both young and older study participants. Lower limb muscle communication is essential for everyday tasks, such as walking, balancing, and climbing stairs. "The results of this study suggest that participation in physical activity contributes to greater crossed-spinal reflex stability in both young and elderly subjects," ...

A mayfly trapped in 16-million-year-old-amber reveals a hitchhiking springtail, a wingless arthropod that is amongst the most commonly found bugs all over the world. The new research, published Oct 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE led by David Penney from the University of Manchester, UK, is the first to show that springtails travelled on winged insects like mayflies, and only the second example of this mode of travel by springtails in the past or present. Springtails are among the most abundant group of arthropods, found in large numbers in soil all over the world. ...

Dolphins sleep with only one half of their brains at a time, and according to new research published Oct. 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE, this trait allows them to stay constantly alert for at least 15 days in a row. Brian Branstetter from the National Marine Mammal Foundation and colleagues found that dolphins can use echolocation with near-perfect accuracy continuously for up to 15 days, identifying targets and monitoring their environment. The researchers studied 2 dolphins, one male and one female, and found that they were capable of this task with no signs ...

Men and women with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) may show subtle but significant differences in the cognitive functions impacted by the condition, according to new research published Oct 17 by Meng-Chuan Lai and colleagues from the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, UK in the open access journal PLOS ONE. Though individuals with autism show sex-specific differences in serum biomarkers, genetics and brain anatomy, little is known about any sex-dependent differences in cognition caused by ASC. Following their previous report on behavioral sex differences ...

Children with autism have difficulty identifying inappropriate social behavior, and even when successful, they are often unable to justify why the behavior seemed inappropriate. New brain imaging studies show that children with autism may recognize socially inappropriate behavior, but have difficulty using spoken language to explain why the behavior is considered inappropriate, according to research published Oct. 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Elizabeth Carter from Carnegie Mellon University and colleagues. The authors say the results of their functional ...