www.MrsP.com, the popular, award-winning kids' entertainment site, announced today the entry dates and other details of its fourth annual Be-A-Famous-Writer Contest. The list of celebrity judges this year includes Academy Award-winning actress and reading advocate Julia Roberts, who recently played the Evil Queen in Mirror, Mirror. The free contest is open to United States residents. Entries will be accepted through October 15, 2012. "Julia Roberts must know a thing or two about picking good scripts. She's starred in some of the most successful films of the past ...

Marine conservationists from the Wildlife Conservation Society working with other coral reef experts have identified heat-tolerant coral species living in locations with continuous background temperature variability as those having the best chance of surviving climate change, according to a new simplified method for measuring coral reef resilience. Therefore, coral reefs with these characteristics should receive immediate attention for conserving this highly threatened ecosystem, according to the authors of a study appearing today in the online journal PLOS ONE. The ...

Despite nearly three decades of conflict, Sri Lanka has succeeded in reducing malaria cases by 99.9 percent since 1999 and is on track to eliminate the disease entirely by 2014. According to a paper published today in the online, open-access journal PLOS ONE, researchers from Sri Lanka's Anti-Malaria Campaign and the UCSF Global Health Group examined national malaria data and interviewed staff of the country's malaria program to determine the factors behind Sri Lanka's success in controlling malaria, despite a 26-year civil war that ended in 2009. Typically, countries ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic recently marked its first births resulting from in vitro fertilization using a new time-lapse incubator that minimizes disturbances from human handling as embryos develop and helps fertility specialists better identify the healthiest embryos. Mayo experts say it may improve pregnancy outcomes for all patients receiving IVF. The twins born at Mayo and babies delivered at the Fertility Centers of New England mark the first reported births in the United States using the technology. Millions of women in the United States have difficulty becoming ...

Amsterdam, NL, August 29, 2012 – Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most common brain disorders, with an estimated 35 million people affected worldwide. In the last decade, research has advanced our understanding of how AD affects the brain. However, diagnosis continues to rely primarily on neuropsychological tests which can only detect the disease after clinical symptoms begin. In a supplement to the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, investigators report on the development of imaging-based biomarkers that will have an impact on diagnosis before the disease process ...

New York, NY (August 30, 2012) — Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers have identified a potential medical treatment for the cognitive effects of stress-related disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The study, conducted in a PTSD mouse model, shows that an experimental drug called S107, one of a new class of small-molecule compounds called Rycals, prevented learning and memory deficits associated with stress-related disorders. The findings were published today in the online edition of Cell. "With the dramatic rise in cases of PTSD ...

Washington, DC (August 27, 2012) Men and women are less likely to experience negative effects to sexual violent media when watching a positive portrayal of a strong female character, even when that character is a victim of sexual violence. Christopher Ferguson, Assistant Professor at Texas A&M International University, surveyed 150 university students in a controlled environment in a recent study published in the Journal of Communication. Each participant screened a variety of TV shows that portrayed women in different lights when it came to sexual violence. The results ...

SEATTLE – African Americans have higher blood levels of a protein associated with increased heart-disease risk than European Americans, despite higher "good" HDL cholesterol and lower "bad" triglyceride levels. This contradictory observation now may be explained, in part, by a genetic variant identified in the first large-scale, genome-wide association study of this protein involving 12,000 African American and Hispanic American women. Lead researcher Alexander Reiner, M.D., an epidemiologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and colleagues describe their findings ...

To be successful, nature conservation measures must account for the complexity of the human impact and how nature responds to them, at different spatial and temporal scales. "Scale-sensitive research" emerges as a new, interdisciplinary field in nature conservation where researchers adjust concepts, analyses, and tools to the scale in which these might be used. Policy-makers, on their side, must ensure that the decisions they take resolve ecological problems at the relevant administrative and spatial scales. Scientists involved in SCALES, a large-scale integrating project ...

Biodiversity and environmental monitoring is of crucial importance to diagnose changes in the environment and natural populations in order to provide conservation practice with relevant data and recommendations. The information from monitoring is required, for example, for the design and evaluation of biodiversity policies, conservation management, land use decisions, and environmental protection. Birds are headline indicators of biodiversity due to their worldwide distribution and popularity. More than 600 bird monitoring programs are in place in Europe, resulting in ...

The biota of island archipelagos is of considerable interest to biologists. These isolated areas often act as 'evolutionary laboratories', spawning biological diversity rapidly and permitting many mechanisms to be observed and studied over relatively short periods of time. Such islands are often the places of new discoveries, including the documentation of new species. The Republic of Cape Verde comprises 10 inhabited islands about 570 kilometers off the coast of West Africa and have been known since at least 1456. Although the bee fauna of the islands was thought to ...

The year 2010 marked the deadline for the political targets to significantly reduce and halt biodiversity loss. The failure to achieve the 2010 goal stimulated the setting up of new targets for 2020. In addition, preventing the degradation of ecosystems and their services has been incorporated in several global and the EU agendas for 2020. To successful meet these challenging targets requires a critical review of the existing and emerging biodiversity policies to improve their design and implementation, say a team scientists in a paper published in the open access journal ...

Mars, Incorporated, working in partnership with AOAC International, has successfully completed a multi-laboratory, first-of-its-kind validation of a method for analyzing flavanols and procyanidins in cocoa-based products. The study, just published in the latest edition of the Journal of AOAC International, details the results of a comprehensive evaluation of this method by 12 international laboratories, which included academic, industrial and commercial institutions. As it has been proved to be reproducible, robust, and readily transferable, this method could have far-reaching ...

Biomembranes enclose biological cells like a skin. They also surround organelles that carry out important functions in metabolism and cell division. Scientists have long known in principle how biomembranes are built up, and also that water molecules play a role in maintaining the optimal distance between neighboring membranes—otherwise they could not fulfill their vital functions. Now, with the help of computer simulations, scientists of the Technische Universität München (TUM) and the Freie Universität Berlin have discovered two different mechanisms that prevent neighboring ...

Danish researchers at University of Copenhagen lead the way for future monitoring of marine biodiversity and resources. By using DNA traces in seawater samples to keep track of fish and whales in the oceans. A half litre of seawater can contain evidence of local fish and whale faunas and combat traditional fishing methods. Their results are now published in the international scientific journal PLOS ONE. "The new DNA-method means that we can keep better track of life beneath the surface of the oceans around the world, and better monitor and protect ocean biodiversity and ...

Boulder, Colorado, USA – In the September issue of GSA TODAY Guillaume Girard and John Stix of McGill University in Montreal join the debate regarding future scenarios of intracaldera volcanism at Yellowstone National Park, USA. Using data from quartz petrography, geochemistry, and geobarometry, Girard and Stix suggest that magma ascent during the most recent eruptions of intracaldera rhyolites occurred rapidly from depths of 8-10 km to the surface along major regional faults, without intervening storage. They consequently predict that future volcanism, which could include ...

The policies that several states have adopted giving tax deductions or credits to living organ donors do not appear to have increased donation rates. Authors of the study, appearing in the August issue of the American Journal of Transplantation, found little difference in the annual number of living organ donations per 100,000 population between the 15 states that had enacted some sort of tax benefit as of 2009 and states having no such policy at that time. "There continue to be sizeable shortages in available organs for transplant, despite a number of interventions ...

Scientists have established a genetic mouse model for primary ovarian insufficiency (POI), a human condition in which women experience irregular menstrual cycles and reduced fertility, and early exposure to estrogen deficiency. POI affects approximately one in a hundred women. In most cases of primary ovarian insufficiency, the cause is mysterious, although genetics is known to play a causative role. There are no treatments designed to help preserve fertility. Some women with POI retain some ovarian function and a fraction (5-10 percent) have children after receiving ...

The hormone estrogen stimulates the growth of breast cancers that are estrogen-receptor positive, the most common form of breast cancer. The drug tamoxifen blocks this estrogen effect and prolongs the lives of, and helps to cure, patients with estrogen-sensitive breast cancer. About 30 percent of these patients have tumors that are resistant to tamoxifen. This study shows how these resistant tumors survive and grow, and it identifies an experimental agent that targets these breast cancers. COLUMBUS, Ohio – A study by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive ...

Scientists' discovery of an important step in the body's process for healing wounds may lead to a new way of treating inflammation. A study published today in Current Biology details how an international team of researchers led by Monash University's Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI) discovered the mechanism, which shuts down the signal triggering the body's initial inflammatory response to injury. When the body suffers a wound or abrasion, white blood cells, or leukocytes, travel to the site of the injury to protect the tissue from infection and start ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- When the parasite responsible for malaria infects human red blood cells, it launches a 48-hour remodeling of the host cells. During the first 24 hours of this cycle, a protein called RESA undertakes the first step of renovation: enhancing the stiffness of the cell membranes. That increased rigidity impairs red blood cells' ability to travel through the blood vessels, especially at fever temperatures, according to a new study from researchers at MIT, the Institut Pasteur and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). This marks the ...

Washington, DC, August 30, 2012 – Less than half of U.S. schools address pandemic preparedness in their school plan, and only 40 percent have updated their school plan since the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, according to a study published in the September issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). A team of researchers from Saint Louis University collected and analyzed survey responses from approximately 2,000 school nurses serving primarily elementary, middle, ...

Bethesda, MD—A research report published in the September 2012 issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology offers a possible explanation of why some cancer vaccines are not as effective as hoped, while at the same time identifies a new therapeutic strategy for treating autoimmune problems. In the report, scientists suggest that cancer, even in the very early stages, produces a negative immune response from dendritic cells, which prevent lymphocytes from working against the disease. Although problematic for cancer treatment, these flawed dendritic cells could be valuable therapeutic ...

An entire group of millipedes previously unknown in Australia has been discovered by a specialist – on museum shelves. Hundreds of tiny specimens of the widespread tropical family Pyrgodesmidae have been found among bulk samples in two museums, showing that native pyrgodesmids are not only widespread in Australia's tropical and subtropical forests, but are also abundant and diverse. The study has been published in the open access journal ZooKeys. "Most pyrgodesmid species are so small they could be easily overlooked," explained millipede specialist Dr Robert Mesibov, ...

Rats born to mothers fed high-fat diets but who get normal levels of fat in their diets right after birth avoid obesity and its related disorders as adults, according to new Johns Hopkins research. Meanwhile, rat babies exposed to a normal-fat diet in the womb but nursed by rat mothers on high-fat diets become obese by the time they are weaned. The experiments suggest that what mammalian babies — including humans — get to eat as newborns and young children may be more important to their metabolic future than exposure to unhealthy nutrition in the womb, the Hopkins ...