WASHINGTON — The aging of the U.S. population will have broad economic consequences for the country, particularly for federal programs that support the elderly, and its long-term effects on all generations will be mediated by how -- and how quickly -- the nation responds, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council. The unprecedented demographic shift in which people over age 65 make up an increasingly large percentage of the population is not a temporary phenomenon associated with the aging of the baby boom generation, but a pervasive ...

BETHESDA, MD, SEPTEMBER 25, 2012---The good news widely reported this morning of positive results from a clinical drug trial at Boston Children's Hospital for the previously "untreatable" rapid aging disorder in children known as progeria has its scientific roots in basic biology discoveries made in recent years. A paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reports that the use of farnesyl transferase inhibitors (FTI) significantly slows the progress of progeria, a rare and until now "untreatable" lethal genetic disorder. Also ...

LA JOLLA, CA---- Based on two new studies by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, regeneration of a new limb or organ in a human will be much more difficult than the mad scientist and supervillain, Dr. Curt Connors, made it seem in the Amazing Spider-man comics and films. As those who saw the recent "The Amazing Spiderman" movie will know, Dr. Connors injected himself with a serum made from lizard DNA to successfully regrow his missing lower right arm - that is, before the formula transformed him into a reptilian humanoid. But by studying a real ...

Regular mammography screening can help narrow the breast cancer gap between black and white women, according to a retrospective study published in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment in August. Earlier studies have shown that black women in Chicago are more than twice as likely to die of breast cancer compared to white women. Black women with breast cancer reach the disease's late stages more often than white women, and their tumors are more likely to be larger and more biologically aggressive. But according to the study, when women of both races received regular ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Asian Americans likely to vote in November strongly prefer Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, but a large portion of voters – nearly one-third – remain undecided and could play a crucial role in battleground states, according to two reports released today by the National Asian American Survey. Drawn from a nationally representative sample of more than 3,300 interviews, the reports offer the most comprehensive portrait of Asian American political views. Among the fastest growing groups in America, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders exceeded the 5 percent ...

We've heard it time and time again: exercise is good for us. And it's not just good for physical health – research shows that daily physical activity can also boost our mental health. But what actually accounts for the association between exercise and mental health? A new article in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explores whether certain psychosocial factors may help to explain the benefits of daily physical activity for adolescents' mental health. Karin Monshouwer of the Trimbos Institute in the Netherlands and ...

Designing or modifying buildings and communities to facilitate physical activity must include strategies to maximize safety. A new report released today, Active Design Supplement: Promoting Safety, by the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy, New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene's Built Environment and Healthy Housing Program, and the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE) provides explicit guidelines for urban planners, architects, public health advocates, and others to consider when promoting active designs. Experts from New York City's ...

Two new studies from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Chronic Kidney Disease Prognosis Consortium found that the presence of chronic kidney disease itself can be a strong indicator of the risk of death and end-stage renal disease (ESRD) even in patients without hypertension or diabetes. Both hypertension and diabetes are common conditions with chronic kidney disease with hypertension being the most prevalent. The studies were released online in advance of publication in The Lancet. Chronic kidney disease affects 10 to 16 percent of all adults ...

Philadelphia – September 25, 2012—The current trend to digitize everything is not lost on fine art. Documenting, distributing, conserving, storing and restoring paintings require that digital copies be made. The Google Art Project, which brings art from galleries around the world to online audiences, was launched in early 2011 for precisely these reasons. Google's project has been a complex undertaking, however, carried out under carefully controlled settings using state-of-the-art equipment and requiring rigorous postproduction work. In a paper published this month ...

A recently published editorial in the Journal of the American Society of Hypertension (JASH), "Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring Should Be Included in the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES)," recognizes the importance of this national survey instrument but questions the efficiency of its diagnostic methods in assessing hypertension in the population.* Since the 1960s, CDC has utilized traditional blood pressure screening using a sphygmomanometer to measure the brachial artery pressure (a diagnostic instrument used since 1880). Drs. William ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — University of Florida researchers studying river turtles in Missouri found populations of the northern map turtle have not recovered from harvesting in the 1970s. Scientists used data collected by Florida Museum of Natural History herpetology curator Max Nickerson in 1969 and 1980 as a baseline, then surveyed the same stretch of river in the Ozarks in 2004 to determine the northern map turtles had not recovered from a previous 50 percent population loss caused by harvesting, likely for food. River turtles help ecosystems function by cycling nutrients ...

Biologists at New York University have uncovered one way that biological clocks control neuronal activity — a discovery that sheds new light on sleep-wake cycles and offers potential new directions for research into therapies to address sleep disorders and jetlag. "The findings answer a significant question — how biological clocks drive the activity of clock neurons, which, in turn, regulate behavioral rhythms," explained Justin Blau, an associate professor in NYU's Department of Biology and the study's senior author. Their findings appear in the Journal of Biological ...

Tampa, Fla. (Sep. 25, 2012) – In a study to determine the best cryopreservation (freezing) solution to maintain induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, a team of researchers from Japan compared 12 kinds of commercially prepared and readily available cryopreservation solutions and found that "Cell Banker 3" out-performed the other 11 solutions by allowing iPS cells to be preserved for a year at 󈞼 degrees C in an undifferentiated state. The study is published in a recent special issue of Cell Medicine [3(1)], now freely available on-line at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/cm. "iPS ...

Cutting-edge NASA technology has made this year's NASA Hurricane mission a reality. NASA and other scientists are currently flying a suite of state-of-the-art, autonomously operated instruments that are gathering difficult-to-obtain measurements of wind speeds, precipitation, and cloud structures in and around tropical storms. "Making these measurements possible is the platform on which the instruments are flying," said Paul Newman, the deputy principal investigator of NASA's Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3), managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – The October issue of Lithosphere covers geology in Wyoming, USA; the California Coast Ranges, USA; the Alpine Fault, New Zealand; the South Atlantic seafloor; the central Himalaya in Nepal; and Sidekan, Kurdistan Region, Iraqi Zagros suture zone. Topics and methods include tectonics, orogeny, hazards, paleogeography, trigonometrics, multiple-point data analysis, LiDAR, oceanic isostasy, computer modeling, and spectroscopy. Abstracts are online at http://lithosphere.gsapubs.org/content/current. Representatives of the media may obtain complimentary ...

Nearly two weeks after becoming a tropical storm in the central Atlantic back on September 11th, NASA satellites confirm that Nadine is still spinning away south of the Azores as a minimal tropical storm. One of those satellites called TRMM has been providing forecasters with rainfall rates and cloud heights. Nadine initially formed into a tropical depression from an African easterly wave that had propagated westward out into the central Atlantic from the coast of Africa. Nadine initially moved northwestward then northward before getting caught up in the westerlies over ...

Tampa, Fla. (Sep. 25, 2012) – In a study to investigate how transplanted islet cells can differentiate and mature into insulin-producing pancreatic cells, a team of Japanese researchers found that using a specific set of transcription factors (proteins that bind to specific DNA sequences) could be transduced into mouse pancreatic stem cells (mPSCs) using Sendai virus (SeV), a mouse influenza virus, as a carrier, or vector. The study is published in a recent issue of Cell Medicine [3(1)], now freely available on-line at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/cm. "Diabetes ...

NASA's Aqua satellite has been obtaining infrared, visible and other data everytime it passes over Typhoon Jelawat and Tropical Storm Ewiniar in the western North Pacific, and a combination of two images from Aqua's AIRS satellite puts the storms in perspective. A combined image created from infrared data obtained by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies on NASA's Aqua satellite provides a comparison of the two monster storms in the western North Pacific Ocean basin . An infrared image of Typhoon Jelawat captured on Sept. 25 was combined with an ...

The MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites provide some of the most clear and stunning imagery of tropical cyclones, and captured a visible image of Category 2 hurricane Miriam off the western coast of Mexico. MODIS stands for the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer. Terra's MODIS and Aqua's MODIS view the entire Earth's surface every 1 to 2 days, acquiring data in 36 spectral bands, or groups of wavelengths. NASA's Aqua satellite flew over Hurricane Miriam on Sept. 24 at 21:00 UTC and the MODIS instrument captured a visible image ...

Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from ...

Scientists using the camera aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are acquiring stereo images of the moon in high resolution (0.5 to 2 meters/pixel) that provide 3-D views of the surface from which high resolution topographic maps are made. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera Narrow Angle Camera (LROC NAC) team from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University are currently developing a processing system to automatically generate anaglyphs from most of these stereo pairs. An anaglyph is an image that can be viewed in 3-D using red-blue/green glasses. LROC ...

An Evolutionary Biologist at The University of Manchester, working with scientists in the United States, has found compelling evidence that parts of the brain can evolve independently from each other. It's hoped the findings will significantly advance our understanding of the brain. The unique 15 year study with researchers at the University of Tennessee and Harvard Medical School also identified several genetic loci that control the size of different brain parts. The aim of the research was to find out if different parts of the brain can respond independently of each ...

Children living in low-income urban areas appear especially prone to developing asthma, possibly related to infections they acquire early in life. In a new study in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, available online, researchers from the University of Wisconsin in Madison investigated viral respiratory illnesses and their possible role in the development of asthma in urban versus suburban babies. The differences in viral illness patterns they found provide insights that could help guide the development of new asthma treatments in children. Viral respiratory illnesses ...

PowerStone Property Management Inc. a full service Orange County, California based property management firm, today announced that it has added several new employees and promoted 3 managers. The announcement was made by CEO Rene Decker. "We're very excited to add such a high caliber of people to our team who are attracted to PowerStone because of our solid reputation and phenomenal growth." He adds, "Every gain we make also allows us to promote from within. I'm especially pleased with the way our company culture is evolving." New hires include Amanda ...

EVM2812 TI DSP Evaluation Board for Motion Control System Toronto, Canada ¨C GAO Tek Inc. (www.GAOTek.com) is offering its EVM2812 TI DSP evaluation board which has a 32-bit fixed-point Flash DSP operating at 150 MHz. This evaluation board is specially optimized for motor driving and control systems. This EVM2812 TI DSP evaluation board, model B0M10002, is based on the MS320F2812 series DSPs. It features on-chip flash program memory, on-chip and extendable SRAM and extendable EEPROM. This module forms a complete digital servo motion control system by interfacing with ...