October 6, 2011 -- Over 10 million people age 12 or older are estimated to have driven under the influence of illicit drugs in the prior year, according to a 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. While marijuana is the most commonly detected non-alcohol drug in drivers, its role in causing crashes has remained in question. To examine the link between marijuana use by drivers and risk of a car accident, researchers at Columbia University did a meta-analysis of nine epidemiologic studies and found that drivers who test positive for marijuana or report driving within ...

Be it at school, office, the neighborhood or the community people live in, conflicting situations amongst various groups might arise on an almost day to day basis. Today, the prevalence of these intergroup conflicts is on the rise and has resulted in minor disagreements amongst friends to waging full scale wars between countries. Social psychology research has always maintained that individuals often identify themselves with the social group they belong to and will bond together to defend their identity at all cost. Now, a new study published in the latest issue of Psychological ...

In a painstaking re-analysis of Hubble Space Telescope images from 1998, astronomers have found visual evidence for two extrasolar planets that went undetected back then. Finding these hidden gems in the Hubble archive gives astronomers an invaluable time machine for comparing much earlier planet orbital motion data to more recent observations. It also demonstrates a novel approach for planet hunting in archival Hubble data. Four giant planets are known to orbit the young, massive star HR 8799, which is130 light-years away. In 2007 and 2008 the first three planets were ...

AMHERST, Mass. -- New research based on post-hospital arrival data from U.S. trauma centers finds that even after adjusting for differences in injury severity, gun use, and other likely causes of race difference in death from assault, African-Americans have a significantly higher overall post-scene of injury mortality rate than whites. The study was conducted by Anthony R. Harris, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and colleagues and published in August by the Journal of Trauma, Injury, Infection and Critical Care. The study, ...

A study published this week in the American Journal of Sociology finds that people who lack personal wealth in the form of a car or financial assets are significantly less likely to enter into a first marriage. The results, according to study author Daniel Schneider of Princeton University, shed light on recent changes in marriage patterns in the U.S. For the past few decades, Americans have been getting married later in life and are becoming more likely forego marriage altogether. Between 1970 and 2000, the median age of first marriage in the U.S. rose by about four ...

The tropics in the eastern Pacific were quiet for a couple of days after Hurricane Hilary dissipated, and today gave birth to Tropical Depression 10 and Tropical Storm Irwin. NASA's Aqua satellite captured an infrared image of both storms and saw the powerful convection in the center of Irwin that enabled the storm to go from a depression to a tropical storm in a short time. The eleventh tropical depression quickly grew into Tropical Storm Irwin this morning, as strong convection surged around its center of circulation. That convection (rising air that creates the thunderstorms ...

Tropical Storm Philippe took its time to strengthen into a hurricane because of wind shear problems. The wind shear lessened, and Philippe became a hurricane today, after 12 days of moving across the Atlantic Ocean. NASA's TRMM satellite saw towering thunderstorms and intense rainfall within Philippe yesterday, which provided forecasters with a clue that the storm was strengthening. Philippe reached hurricane status this morning, Oct. 6, 2011. Over two days, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite provided forecasters with cloud heights and rainfall rates ...

An international collaboration of astrophysicists, including a group from the Department of Physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has detected pulsed gamma rays from the neutron star at the heart of the Crab Nebula with energies far higher than the common theoretical models can explain. The pulsed gamma rays had energies between 100 and 400 billion electronvolts (Gigaelectronvolts, or GeV), far higher than 25 GeV, the highest energy radiation from the neubla previously detected. A 400 GeV photon is 11 orders of magnitude – almost a trillion ...

An international team of scientists has detected the highest energy gamma rays ever observed from a pulsar, a highly magnetized and rapidly spinning neutron star. The VERITAS experiment measured gamma rays coming from the Crab Pulsar at such large energies that they cannot be explained by current scientific models of how pulsars behave, the researchers said. The results, published today in the journal Science, outline the first observation of photons from a pulsar system with energies greater than 100 billion electron volts -- more than 50 billion times higher than ...

CHICAGO --- In the moments before you "stop and smell the roses," it's likely your brain is already preparing your sensory system for that familiar floral smell. New research from Northwestern Medicine offers strong evidence that the brain uses predictive coding to generate "predictive templates" of specific smells -- setting up a mental expectation of a scent before it hits your nostrils. Predictive coding is important because it provides animals -- in this case, humans -- with a behavioral advantage, in that they can react more quickly and more accurately to stimuli ...

PORTLAND, Ore. — Modern medicine's ability to save lives through organ transplantation has been revolutionized by the development of drugs that prevent the human body from rejecting the transplanted organ. But those antirejection drugs have their own side effects — sometimes serious. A group of researchers led by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University has discovered the process that may be causing many of those side effects. And the discovery means those side effects likely can be dealt with cheaply and easily — with a class of widely used drugs that are often ...

Philadelphia, PA, October 6, 2011 – Bone marrow-derived cells (BMDCs) participate in the growth and spread of tumors of the breast, brain, lung, and stomach. To examine the role of BMDCs, researchers developed a mouse model that could be used to track the migration of these cells while tumors formed and expanded. Their results, published in the November issue of The American Journal of Pathology, strongly suggest that more effective cancer treatments may be developed by exploiting the mechanism by which bone marrow cells migrate to tumors and retard their proliferation. "Our ...

Increasing levels of high-density lipoproteins, better known as HDL or "good" cholesterol, reduced the risk for heart attack and stroke among patients with diabetes. That's according to a new study appearing online today in The American Journal of Cardiology. The observational study, one of the largest of its kind, examined the medical records of more than 30,000 patients with diabetes and also found that patients whose HDL levels decreased had more heart attacks and strokes. Researchers studied patients with diabetes because they are more prone to heart disease ...

Cultivars of popular ornamental woody plants that are being sold in the United States as non-invasive are probably anything but, according to an analysis by botanical researchers published in the October issue of BioScience. Tiffany M. Knight of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and her coauthors at the Chicago Botanic Garden write that the claims of environmental safety are in most cases based on misleading demographic evidence that greatly underestimates the plants' invasive potential. What is more, the offspring of cultivars do not usually "breed true" and ...

New York, NY, October 7, 2011—A new set of strategies released today by the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System could dramatically improve how the U.S. health care system serves vulnerable populations—those in the U.S. who are uninsured, low-income, or members of racial and ethnic minority groups. According to the new report, Ensuring Equity: A Post-Reform Framework to Achieve High Performance Health Care for Vulnerable Populations, closing the health care divide will require a three-pronged policy framework that ensures adequate access to ...

Most people know that some planets have moons but would be surprised to know that some asteroids do, too. According to Joshua Emery, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, about 20 percent of them do. Emery is part of an international team of planetary astronomers, led by Franck Marchis of the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., searching for moons around asteroids. The discovery of moons around asteroids is important because it can provide clues to the asteroid's formation. Emery ...

Boulder, CO, USA - Space is a violent place. If a star explodes or black holes collide anywhere in our part of the Milky Way, they'd give off colossal blasts of lethal gamma-rays, X-rays and cosmic rays and it's perfectly reasonable to expect Earth to be bathed in them. A new study of such events has yielded some new information about the potential effects of what are called "short-hard" interstellar radiation events. Several studies in the past have demonstrated how longer high-energy radiation bursts, such as those caused by supernovae, and extreme solar flares can ...

New findings of researchers from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Mauro Mandrioli, Valentina Monti and Gian Carlo Manicardi) show that in aphids the two X chromosomes have a different inheritance. The study was published in Comparative Cytogenetics. Aphids are insects with a sex determination model based on the presence of two X chromosomes (XX) in females and a single X chromosome (XO) in males. Previous studies suggested that X chromosome loss during male determination was random and that both X chromosomes have the same probability to be inherited in males. ...

Researchers at Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve often encounter signs of mountain lion activity, from lion scat to the occasional deer carcass covered with leaves. But few have actually caught a glimpse of the shy feline. Now, images captured by remote wildlife cameras confirm that mountain lions (also called pumas or cougars) make regular visits to Stanford's 1,189-acre preserve in the hills five miles west of the main campus. Since September 2009, a network of motion-activated infrared cameras has recorded more than 40 photographs and videos of mountain ...

Biological invasions, i.e. the spread of introduced, non-native species, not only serve as ecological model systems, but also bring out the importance of economic activities on ecological processes. Two recent books have shown the extent and variety of the interaction of economics with invasion science and also the variety of approaches to tackling these problems. Three researchers, lead by Mark Williamson from the University of York, England, argue in the latest issue of the open access journal NeoBiota that the ecological and economic dimensions of the problem of invasive ...

Cities are generally regarded as hostile for wildlife and urbanization a dramatic form of destruction of natural habitats. Still, they are far from dead zones. Their biodiversity may even exceed that of surrounding landscapes, owing to heterogeneous environments and frequent localization in naturally rich areas that historically supplied diverse resources for their human inhabitants. "This is definitely the case of the city of Prague, Czech Republic", says the lead author Prof. Vojtěch Jarošík of the study published in the open access journal NeoBiota. "Prague contains ...

The company smartphone, the private cellphone, keys for house and car, wallet – the objects we carry around with us every day are becoming more numerous all the time. Which is why many people also use their business smartphone for personal purposes. It may be convenient, but employees and the IT department have different interests: most employees would prefer unlimited use of their smartphones, installing and using whatever programs they like. But this can also open the door to hackers in search of ways of attacking. As a result, IT departments often try to limit the use ...

The farmer casts a worried gaze at his potato field: where only recently a lush green field of plants was growing, much of the foliage has now turned brown – presumably the result of a fungal disease. Usually, by the time the disease becomes visible, it is already too late. The course of the disease is then so advanced that there is little the farmer can do to counteract the damage done. To determine early on whether and how severely his plants are diseased, he would have to submit samples to a laboratory on a regular basis. There, researchers usually employ the ELISA method, ...

It is 7:30 a.m. and high time she left the house; she mustn't be late for her 8 o'clock appointment. But the young lady still feels the need to check that she closed all her windows, because the forecast is for thunderstorms that afternoon. Later, in the car, she realizes that she forgot to check one of the rooms when she went round the house. In situations like this, window contacts can make life easier and give peace of mind. These little electronic helpers are fitted onto window handles, and they can tell from the position of the handle whether the window is wide open, ...

Many of you might know that Congenital Dyserythropoietic Anemia type II (CDA II) is a rare blood disorder, due to a failure in final part of erythropoiesis. What will surprise you is the fact that some mutations responsible for the disease can be tracked 3.000 years back. A study led by the ENERCA member Prof. Achille Iolascon, from CEINGE Advanced Biotechnologies (Naples, Italy) and the University of Naples Federico II, analyzes two mutations (E109K and R14W) of the SEC23B gene and discovers one of them is responsible for the higher frequency of CDA II in Italian population. ...