PHILADELPHIA — When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, 2010, residents feared that their Gulf of Mexico shores would be inundated with oil. And while many wetland habitats and wildlife were oiled during the three-month leak, the environmental damage to coastal Louisiana was less than many expected, in part because much of the crude never made it to the coast. Research by a trio of geoscientists, including the University of Pennsylvania's Douglas Jerolmack, now offers an explanation for why some of the oil stayed out at sea. Using publicly available ...

For the last few decades, space scientists have generally accepted that the bubble of gas and magnetic fields generated by the sun – known as the heliosphere – moves through space, creating three distinct boundary layers that culminate in an outermost bow shock. This shock is similar to the sonic boom created ahead of a supersonic jet. Earth itself certainly has one of these bow shocks on the sunward side of its magnetic environment, as do most other planets and many stars. A collection of new data from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), however, now indicate ...

Forests in the Amazon Basin are expected to be less vulnerable to wildfires this year, according to the first forecast from a new fire severity model developed by university and NASA researchers. Fire season across most of the Amazon rain forest typically begins in May, peaks in September and ends in January. The new model, which forecasts the fire season's severity from three to nine months in advance, calls for an average or below-average fire season this year within 10 regions spanning three countries: Bolivia, Brazil and Peru. "Tests of the model suggested that ...

GALVESTON, Texas – April 30, 2012 – The proportion of insured girls and young women completing the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine among those who initiated the series has dropped significantly – as much as 63 percent – since the vaccine was approved in 2006, according to new research from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston. The study, published in the current issue of Cancer, reveals the steepest decline in vaccine completion among girls and young women aged nine to 18 – the age group that derives the greatest benefit from the vaccine, which ...

VIDEO: Associate professor Michael Davies (Robinson Institute, University of Adelaide) discusses the findings of a study into the risk of major birth defects associated with assisted reproductive technologies. Click here for more information. A University of Adelaide study has identified the risk of major birth defects associated with different types of assisted reproductive technology. In the most comprehensive study of its kind in the world, researchers from the University's ...

Commercial ships travel across most of the globe and could provide better warnings for potentially deadly tsunamis, according to a study published May 5 by scientists at the University of Hawaii – Manoa (UHM) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. James Foster, lead author and Assistant Researcher at the UH School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), and colleagues were able to detect and measure the properties of the tsunami generated by the magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Maule, Chile (February 2010), even ...

PHILADELPHIA, May 5, 2012 – U.S. Army researcher Maj. Gary H. Wynn, M.D., shared new analysis on why some Soldiers suffering from combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) never seek care or drop out of treatment early during a presentation today at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting. His presentation, "Epidemiology of Combat-Related PTSD in U.S. Service Members: Lessons Learned," also described the approaches the Army is using to address this issue and improve overall patient outcomes. Currently, fewer than half of the Soldiers who report ...

BOSTON, MA—Brown seems to be the color of choice when it comes to the types of fat cells in our bodies. Brown fat expends energy, while its counterpart, white fat stores it. The danger in white fat cells, along with the increased risk for diabetes and heart disease it poses, seems especially linked to visceral fat. Visceral fat is the build-up of fat around the organs in the belly. So in the battle against obesity, brown fat appears to be our friend and white fat our foe. Now a team of researchers led by Jorge Plutzky, MD, director of The Vascular Disease Prevention ...

Research carried out at the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry (PCMD), University of Exeter, has concluded that it would be a safe and cost-effective strategy to screen people with type 2 diabetes who have not yet developed diabetic retinopathy, for the disease once every two years instead of annually. The research is supported by funding from the National Institute for Health Research Peninsula Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (NIHR PenCLAHRC). It is published today (00:01hrs BST Monday 7th May 2012) on-line in Diabetes Care. Diabetic ...

DENVER (May 6, 2012) - Eye color may be an indicator of whether a person is high-risk for certain serious skin conditions. A study, led by the University of Colorado School of Medicine, shows people with blue eyes are less likely to have vitiligo. It then follows, according to scientists, that people with brown eyes may be less likely to have melanoma. Vitiligo is an autoimmune skin disease in which pigment loss results in irregular white patches of skin and hair. Melanoma is the most dangerous kind of skin cancer. The study is published online by the journal Nature ...

Gaining access to the inner workings of a neuron in the living brain offers a wealth of useful information: its patterns of electrical activity, its shape, even a profile of which genes are turned on at a given moment. However, achieving this entry is such a painstaking task that it is considered an art form; it is so difficult to learn that only a small number of labs in the world practice it. But that could soon change: Researchers at MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a way to automate the process of finding and recording information from neurons ...

An abrupt cooling in Europe together with an increase in humidity and particularly in windiness coincided with a sustained reduction in solar activity 2800 years ago. Scientists from the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ in collaboration with Swedish and Dutch colleagues provide evidence for a direct solar-climate linkage on centennial timescales. Using the most modern methodological approach, they analysed sediments from Lake Meerfelder Maar, a maar lake in the Eifel/Germany, to determine annual variations in climate proxies and solar activity. The study published ...

PHILADELPHIA –A Penn research team, led by Mitchell Lazar, MD, PhD, director of the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, reports in Nature Medicine that mice in which an enzyme called histone deacetylase 3 (HDAC3) was deleted had massively fatty livers, but lower blood sugar, and were thus protected from glucose intolerance and insulin resistance, the hallmark of diabetes. Insulin resistance occurs when the body does a poor job of lowering blood sugars. Typically, patients with obesity and type ...

Brain networks may avoid traffic jams at their busiest intersections by communicating on different frequencies, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the University Medical Center at Hamburg-Eppendorf and the University of Tübingen have learned. "Many neurological and psychiatric conditions are likely to involve problems with signaling in brain networks," says co-author Maurizio Corbetta, MD, the Norman J. Stupp Professor of Neurology at Washington University. "Examining the temporal structure of brain activity from this perspective may ...

The one year results from a study into whether two drug treatments (Lucentis and Avastin), are equally effective in treating neovascular or wet age-related macular degeneration (wet AMD), have been reported today at an international research meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.* The findings will also appear online shortly in the leading journal Ophthalmology. Wet AMD is a common cause of loss of vision in older people. In the UK, around 70 per cent of people will experience severe loss of sight within two years of being diagnosed. For four years, a team of scientists ...

BATON ROUGE – LSU's Mark Batzer, along with research associate Jerilyn Walker and assistant professor Miriam Konkel, have published research determining that modern-day orangutans are host to ancient jumping genes called Alu, which are more than 16 million years old. The study was done in collaboration with the Zoological Society of San Diego and the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle and is featured in the new open access journal Mobile DNA. These tiny pieces of mobile DNA are able to copy themselves using a method similar to retroviruses. They can be thought of ...

Oral zinc treatments may shorten the duration of symptoms of the common cold in adults, although adverse effects are common, according to a study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Canadian researchers looked at 17 randomized controlled trials with 2121 participants between 1 and 65 years of age to determine the efficacy and safety of zinc in treating the common cold. All trials were double-blinded and used placebos as well as oral zinc preparations. The authors found that, compared with placebos, zinc significantly reduced the duration of cold ...

Screening younger men and men at risk of prostate cancer can be beneficial in reducing metastatic cancer and deaths and should not be abandoned, states an article published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). The United States Preventive Services Task Force, which last issued prostate screening guidelines in 2008, recently issued a draft recommendation against prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for men of all ages. However, the American Cancer Society and the American Urological Association both recommend that men be given a choice about whether they ...

Overcoming a learning disability to become a physician will actually help in being compassionate toward patients, writes a medical student of his struggle with a severe reading disability in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Daniel Heffner, a medical student at the University of British Columbia who will graduate in 2013, has struggled with a severe reading disability that caused laborious reading and poor marks in school until he was diagnosed at age 12. His diagnosis allowed him to realize he could succeed, and he applied himself to overcoming his disability. ...

Giving people the freedom -- but not too much freedom -- to express themselves may help designers build more interactive web portals and online communities, according to Penn State researchers. The researchers found that people increased their interactivity and developed a greater sense of community when they could write their own blog posts, change the look of their site and add gadgets, such as weather and news feeds, to personalized websites or portals. However, the researchers noted that interactivity and satisfaction dropped if participants had the option to choose ...

Sauropod dinosaurs could in principle have produced enough of the greenhouse gas methane to warm the climate many millions of years ago, at a time when the Earth was warm and wet. That's according to calculations reported in the May 8th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. The hulking sauropods, distinctive for their enormous size and unusually long necks, were widespread about 150 million years ago. As in cows, methane-producing microbes aided the sauropods' digestion by fermenting their plant food. "A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes ...

1. Evidence Review: Screening Women for Intimate Partner Violence May Have Benefits, Few Harms Intimate partner violence, or IPV, includes a range of abusive behaviors perpetrated by someone who is in an intimate relationship with the victim. Abusive behaviors may include physical violence, sexual violence, rape, and psychological aggression – all of which have immediate health effects on the victim. While victims and perpetrators can be male or female, women are disproportionately victimized (up to 5.3 million women are affected each year in the U.S.). In 2004, the ...

Philadelphia, PA, May 7, 2012 – While active monitoring of serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels in men over 50 has greatly improved early detection of prostate cancer, prediction of clinical outcomes after diagnosis remains a major challenge. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have found that a genetic abnormality known as copy number variation (CNV) in prostate cancer tumors, as well as in the benign prostate tissues adjacent to the tumor and in the blood of patients with prostate cancer, can predict whether a patient will experience ...

The requirement for efficient mosquito mass-rearing technology has been one of the major obstacles preventing the large scale application of the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) against mosquitoes. However, according to a new article in the next issue of the Journal of Medical Entomology, scientists at the Untited Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have developed a larval rearing unit based on the use of a stainless steel rack that is expected to be able to successfully rear 140,000–175,000 adult mosquitoes ...

HOUSTON -- (May 7, 2012) – The deletion of part of a gene that plays a role in the synthesis of carnitine – an amino acid derivative that helps the body use fat for energy – may play a role in milder forms of autism, said a group of researchers led by those at Baylor College of Medicine (http://www.bcm.edu) and Texas Children's Hospital (http://www.texaschildrens.org). "This is a novel inborn error of metabolism," said Dr. Arthur Beaudet (http://www.bcm.edu/genetics/index.cfm?pmid=10579), chair of molecular and human genetics at BCM and a physician at Texas Children's ...