April 5, 2012 - Old houses and vacant lots may not look like much to the naked eye, but to some, the site is better than gold. Excavations over the years can create a challenge to study what's left behind and often appears as if dirt and debris ended up mixed in a blender then pressed by a giant trash compactor. However, in Detroit, one scientist and geologist is finding some of the city's abandoned lots provide a surprising "natural laboratory" for studying certain processes involved in soil formation; particularly the weathering of rocky and mineral objects within ...

Rockville, Md., April 5, 2012 — In new research published in the April Journal of Food Science, analyses of the first known public database compiling reports on food fraud and economically motivated adulteration in food highlight the most fraud-prone ingredients in the food supply; analytical detection methods; and the type of fraud reported. Based on a review of records from scholarly journals, the top seven adulterated ingredients in the database are olive oil, milk, honey, saffron, orange juice, coffee, and apple juice. The database was created by the U.S. Pharmacopeial ...

Earth is clingy when it comes to copper. A new Rice University study this week in the journal Science finds that nature conspires at scales both large and small -- from the realms of tectonic plates down to molecular bonds -- to keep most of Earth's copper buried dozens of miles below ground. "Everything throughout history shows us that Earth does not want to give up its copper to the continental crust," said Rice geochemist Cin-Ty Lee, the lead author of the study. "Both the building blocks for continents and the continental crust itself, dating back as much as 3 billion ...

Harvard stem cell researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have taken a critical step in making possible the discovery in the relatively near future of a drug to control cystic fibrosis (CF), a fatal lung disease that claims about 500 lives each year, with 1,000 new cases diagnosed annually. Beginning with the skin cells of patients with CF, Jayaraj Rajagopal, MD, and colleagues first created induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and then used those cells to create human disease-specific functioning lung epithelium, the tissue that lines the airways and is ...

Smithsonian scientists and their colleagues have uncovered a new threat posed by invasive Burmese pythons in Florida and the Everglades: The snakes are not only eating the area's birds, but also the birds' eggs straight from the nest. The results of this research add a new challenge to the area's already heavily taxed native wildlife. The team's findings are published in the online journal Reptiles & Amphibians: Conservation and Natural History. Burmese pythons, native to southern Asia, have taken up a comfortable residence in the state of Florida, especially in the Everglades. ...

Differences in factors such as income, education and marital status could contribute overwhelmingly to the gap in life expectancy between blacks and whites in the United States, according to one of the first studies to put a number on how much of the divide can be attributed to disparities in socioeconomic characteristics. A Princeton University study recently published in the journal Demography reveals that socioeconomic differences can account for 80 percent of the life-expectancy divide between black and white men, and for 70 percent of the imbalance between black ...

Post-doctoral researcher David Fluri and Professor Peter Zandstra at the University of Toronto's Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) have developed a unique new technique for growing stem cells that may make possible cost-effective, large-scale stem cell manufacturing and research. Although stem cells are widely used for the testing of new drugs, researchers have always faced difficulties manufacturing enough viable cells from a culture. Typically, stem cells are grown on surfaces that must be scraped, and which must then be differentiated from ...

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite provides a look at thunderstorms in three dimensions and shows scientists the heights of the thunderclouds and the rainfall rates coming from them, both of which indicate severity. Powerful thunderstorms that created severe weather were more than 8 miles high. NOAA's National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center received 18 reports of tornadoes occurring on April 3 over northeastern Texas. Some of these very destructive storms dropped softball sized hail as they passed to the south of the Dallas/Fort ...

Many women do not fully appreciate the consequences of delaying motherhood, and expect that assisted reproductive technologies can reverse their aged ovarian function, Yale researchers reported in a study published in a recent issue of Fertility and Sterility. "There is an alarming misconception about fertility among women," said Pasquale Patrizio, M.D., professor in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at Yale School of Medicine and director of the Yale Fertility Center. "We also found a lack of knowledge about steps women can take early in their reproductive ...

La Jolla, CA----The discovery of a major gear in the biological clock that tells the body when to sleep and metabolize food may lead to new drugs to treat sleep problems and metabolic disorders, including diabetes. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, led by Ronald M. Evans, a professor in Salk's Gene Expression Laboratory, showed that two cellular switches found on the nucleus of mouse cells, known as REV-ERBα and REV-ERBβ, are essential for maintaining normal sleeping and eating cycles and for metabolism of nutrients from food. The findings, ...

New research by UCLA life scientists could lead to predictions of which plant species will escape extinction from climate change. Droughts are worsening around the world, posing a great challenge to plants in all ecosystems, said Lawren Sack, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author of the research. Scientists have debated for more than a century how to predict which species are most vulnerable. Sack and two members of his laboratory have made a fundamental discovery that resolves this debate and allows for the prediction of how diverse ...

Ecosystems are changing worldwide as a result of shrinking sea ice, snow, and glaciers, especially in high-latitude regions where water is frozen for at least a month each year—the cryosphere. Scientists have already recorded how some larger animals, such as penguins and polar bears, are responding to loss of their habitat, but research is only now starting to uncover less-obvious effects of the shrinking cryosphere on organisms. An article in the April issue of BioScience describes some impacts that are being identified through studies that track the ecology of affected ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 6, 2012—As global temperatures rise, the most threatened ecosystems are those that depend on a season of snow and ice, scientists from the nation's Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network say."The vulnerability of cool, wet areas to climate change is striking," says Julia Jones, a lead author in a special issue of the journal BioScience released today featuring results from more than 30 years of LTER, a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). In semi-arid regions like the southwestern United States, mountain snowpacks are the dominant ...

Cognitive and psychiatric impairments are common among long-term survivors of acute lung injury (ALI), and these impairments can be assessed using a telephone-based test battery, according to a new study. "Neuropsychological impairment is increasingly being recognized as an important outcome among survivors of critical illness, but neuropsychological function in long-term ALI survivors has not been assessed in a multi-center trial, and evidence on the etiology of these impairments in ALI survivors is limited," said lead author Mark E. Mikkelsen, MD, MSCE, assistant professor ...

When most people look at a forest, they see walking trails, deer yards, or firewood for next winter. But scientists at the Harvard Forest and Smithsonian Institution take note of changes imperceptible to the naked eye -- the uptake and storage of carbon. What they've learned in a recent study is that an immense amount of carbon is stored in growing trees, but if current trends in Massachusetts continue, development would reduce that storage by 18 percent over the next half century. Forest harvesting would have a much smaller impact. Jonathan Thompson is Research Ecologist ...

PHILADELPHIA — The 24-hour internal clock controls many aspects of human behavior and physiology, including sleep, blood pressure, and metabolism. Disruption in circadian rhythms leads to increased incidence of many diseases, including metabolic disease and cancer. Each cell of the body has its own internal timing mechanism, which is controlled by proteins that keep one another in check. One of these proteins, called Rev-erb alpha, was thought to have a subordinate role because the clock runs fairly normally in its absence. New work, published in Genes and Development ...

It may seem like a game of tag, but it's an innovative tool for teaching the fundamentals of epidemiology, the science of how infectious diseases move through a population. An international team of scientists--including researchers who teach an annual clinic at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Muizenberg, South Africa--is helping epidemiologists improve the mathematical models they use to study outbreaks of diseases like cholera, AIDS and malaria. In 2011, attendees at the clinic were treated to a game of "Muizenberg Mathematical Fever," where ...

Both radiation and many forms of chemotherapy try to kill tumors by causing oxidative stress in cancer cells. New research from USC on a protein that protects cancer and other cells from these stresses could one day help doctors to break down cancer cells' defenses, making them more susceptible to treatment. In the March 23 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, scientists led by USC Professor Kelvin J. A. Davies demonstrated that a protein known as Nrf2 governs a cell's ability to cope with oxidative stress by increasing the expression of key genes for removing ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – An analysis of 35 headwater basins in the United States and Canada found that the impact of warmer air temperatures on streamflow rates was less than expected in many locations, suggesting that some ecosystems may be resilient to certain aspects of climate change. The study was just published in a special issue of the journal BioScience, in which the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network of 26 sites around the country funded by the National Science Foundation is featured. Lead author Julia Jones, an Oregon State University geoscientist, said ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System have shown that elevated pulse pressure may increase the risk of cerebrovascular disease (CVD) in older adults with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Their study has been published in the early online edition of Journal of Alzheimer's Disease in advance of the June 5 print publication. The findings may have treatment implications, since some antihypertensive medications specifically address the pulsatile component of blood pressure. Pulse pressure (PP) – the difference between ...

GALVESTON, April 6, 2012 – Stroke patients receiving in-patient rehabilitation are more likely to land back in the hospital within three months if they are functioning poorly, show signs of depression and lack social support according to researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston. Hospital readmission for older adults within 30 days of discharge costs Medicare roughly $18 billion annually. Among the first of such research to explore the risk of re-hospitalization among this patient segment, the study is available online at The Journals ...

STANFORD, Calif. — An invasive heart test used routinely to measure heart function is being dramatically overused, especially among patients who recently underwent similar, more effective tests, according to a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine. "This adds both risk to the patient and significant extra cost," said first author of the study Ronald Witteles, MD, assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine and program director of Stanford's internal medicine residency training program, who called the rates of unnecessary use "shockingly high." The ...

VIDEO: Richard Ryan, professor of clinical and social psychology at the University of Rochester, discusses research on the psychological roots of homophobia. A new study shows that individuals who reported themselves... Click here for more information. Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates. The study is ...

SINGAPORE, April 8, 2012 – An international team of scientists, led by researchers from the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS) in Singapore and National Cancer Centre of Singapore, has identified hundreds of novel genes that are mutated in stomach cancer, the second-most lethal cancer worldwide. The study, which appears online on April 8, 2012 in Nature Genetics, paves the way for treatments tailored to the genetic make-up of individual stomach tumors. Stomach cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death globally with more than 700,000 deaths each year, ...

Genetics researchers have identified at least two new gene variants that increase the risk of common childhood obesity. "This is the largest-ever genome-wide study of common childhood obesity, in contrast to previous studies that have focused on more extreme forms of obesity primarily connected with rare disease syndromes," said lead investigator Struan F.A. Grant, Ph.D., associate director of the Center for Applied Genomics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "As a consequence, we have definitively identified and characterized a genetic predisposition to common ...