CORVALLIS, Ore. – The frigid McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica are a cold, polar desert, yet the sandy soils there are frequently dotted with moist patches in the spring despite a lack of snowmelt and no possibility of rain. A new study, led by an Oregon State University geologist, has found that that the salty soils in the region actually suck moisture out of the atmosphere, raising the possibility that such a process could take place on Mars or on other planets. The study, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, has been published online this week ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A chemically altered osteoporosis drug may be useful in fighting malaria, researchers report in a new study. Unlike similar compounds tested against other parasitic protozoa, the drug readily crosses into the red blood cells of malaria-infected mice and kills the malaria parasite. The drug works at very low concentrations with no observed toxicity to the mouse. The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found the drug by screening a library of about 1,000 compounds used in previous efforts to target an ...

SAN ANTONIO -- A two-year effort to prevent infections in children healing from cardiac surgery reduced sternum infections by 61 percent, a San Antonio researcher announced at the Cardiology 2012 conference Feb. 23 in Orlando, Fla. Faculty from UT Medicine San Antonio carried out a new infection-control protocol for 308 children who underwent sternotomies at CHRISTUS Santa Rosa Children's Hospital between 2009 and 2011. UT Medicine is the clinical practice of the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio. Approach to children ...

Philadelphia, PA, February 27, 2012 – Based on a review of the latest evidence, the Guidelines Committee of the Heart Failure Society of America now recommends that the use of cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) be expanded to a larger group of patients with mild heart failure symptoms. Recommendations for integrating new evidence into clinical practice appear in the February issue of the Journal of Cardiac Failure. CRT devices synchronize the function of the left ventricle so that it contracts more efficiently and in a coordinated way. It does this by stimulating ...

Guoman Hotels' The Grosvenor Hotel has revealed its past connection to one of the most risque residents of 1870s London, with the launch of its opulent 'Courtesan's Boudoir'. The Parisian-inspired Suite has been tenderly created in homage to one of the grand railway hotel's most infamous visitors - the scandalous courtesan, Miss Cora Pearl. A lady notorious with entertaining only the highest members of social standing, including royalty, Cora Pearl was one of the most feted courtesans of her time. In the 1870s, Cora made a rare visit to London and, after arriving at ...

Scientists from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii – Manoa (UHM) and colleagues recently discovered that land-based plant material and coastal macroalgae indirectly support the increased abundances of bottom fish in submarine canyons, like those off the north shore of Moloka'i. Less than a few miles from the shore, these underwater canyons connect to deep river valleys that cut across the landscape of north Moloka'i. The high elevation and forested landscapes along Moloka'i's north shore provide plant material, including ...

SFApps Company (www.sfapps.co) announced their new mobile application network and an innovative growth strategy that will focus on acquiring interests in multiple Apple and Android mobile applications to leverage economies of scale across the SFapps network. "SFApps is consolidating a fragmented app marketplace through investment and acquisition," said co-founder Barth Ballard. "Our strategy is to add value to our mobile app investments by growing cross-platform and global reach, centralizing and renegotiating advertising agreements, and deploying best ...

A padlocked icon in a web-browser or a URL starting with https provides communication security over the Internet. The icon or URL indicates OpenSSL, a cryptography toolkit implementing the SSL protocol, or a similar system is being used. New research by a collaborative team has developed an attack that can circumvent the security OpenSSL should provide. The attack worked on a very specific version of the OpenSSL software, 0.9.8g, and only when a specific set of options were used. Dr Dan Page, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science ...

PHILADELPHIA — Oncologists who treat patients with pancreatic cancer may be one step closer to understanding why gemcitabine, the only currently available treatment, works in some cases but not in others, according to a paper in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. David Tuveson, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of pancreatic cancer medicine at the University of Cambridge, utilized a laboratory model to test the combination of gemcitabine and nab-paclitaxel in pancreatic cancer. "The combination has shown promise in an early clinical ...

Washington, D.C. (28 February 2012)—The prospect of deep cuts in the federal budget threatens to reverse the dramatic progress of a bipartisan US commitment to defeat neglected diseases in developing countries, according to a new report released today by the Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC). Federal investments in global health research and development (R&D) programs that span multiple agencies have helped nurture an array of new vaccines, medicines, diagnostics, and other health products needed to combat diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis (TB), ...

Clean delivery kits combined with clean delivery practices could lead to substantial reductions in neonatal mortality in infants born at home, according to a study published in this week's PLoS Medicine. The authors, led by Nadine Seward and Audrey Prost from the Institute of Child Health at University College London, analysed data from three previous studies to investigate the links between neonatal mortality, the use of clean delivery kits, and individual clean delivery practices in almost 20 000 home births in rural areas of India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. The researchers ...

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Cleusa Ferri of King's College London Institute of Psychiatry, UK and colleagues report on their investigation of mortality rates in over 12 000 people aged 65 years and over in Latin America, India, and China. The authors show that chronic diseases are the main causes of death, with stroke the leading cause in almost all sites studied, and that education has an important effect on mortality. The authors state: "Our findings are important in informing priorities to improve health and reduce deaths in older people…Given the much higher absolute ...

For mental health to gain significant attention, and funding from policymakers globally, it is not enough to convince people that it has a high disease burden but also that there are deliverable and cost-effective interventions – according to South African researchers writing in this week's PLoS Medicine. Mark Tomlinson and Crick Lund from the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health based at the University of Cape Town, argue that global mental health must demonstrate its social and economic impact. The authors argue: "a coherent evidence base for scalable interventions ...

In their February editorial, the PLoS Medicine Editors reflect on recent research by Olav Lindqvist and colleagues which describes nonpharmacological palliative care for cancer patients in the last days of life. The qualitative study found that the approaches used by palliative care staff were multifaceted, with physical, psychological, social, spiritual, and existential care interwoven in caregiving activities. The Editors comment: "[Lindqvist and colleagues' findings] reveal the complex and sometimes subtle caregiving approaches that palliative care staff take to improve ...

The ability to detect and respond to magnetic fields is not usually associated with living things. Yet some organisms, including some bacteria and various migratory animals, do respond to magnetic fields. In migratory animals like fish, birds, and turtles, this behavior involves small magnetic particles in the nervous system. However, how these particles form and what they are actually doing is not fully understood. In a new study, published February 28 in the online, open-access journal PLoS Biology, Keiji Nishida and Pamela Silver of Harvard Medical School take a major ...

Some disease-causing parasites are known to favor one sex over the other in their host species, and such differences between the sexes have generally been attributed to differences in immune responses or behavior. But in a new article, published February 28 in the magazine section of the online, open-access journal PLoS Biology, David Duneau from Cornell University and Dieter Ebert from the University of Basel now propose that all sorts of characteristics that differ between the sexes of the host species can influence a parasite's adaptation. These characteristics, such ...

Reconstructing family trees dating back to 1811, Dutch researchers have estimated the death risk for people with inherited heart rhythm disorders, according to a study in Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics, a journal of the American Heart Association. Heart rhythm disorders can result in sudden cardiac death in apparently healthy people because of severe disturbances in the rhythm of the heart. The risk is high for people who carry one of these rare genes and have symptoms such as fainting. Before the study, the risk in people without symptoms was less certain. Thus, ...

U-Jam Fitness, a cardio dance fitness program that unites world beats with urban flavor and takes students around the world from Hip-Hop to Bollywood, announced a special 90 minute class and celebration in honor of its two year anniversary. U-Jam Fitness founders Susy C. Marks and Matt Marks launched the athletic dance fitness program in January 2010 to give students of all levels an intense and sweat-induced workout set to exciting, high energy music--a unique combination of world beats with urban rhythm. In just two years, the fitness program has exploded and now ...

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have discovered a new 'off switch' in our immune response which could be boosted in diseases caused by over-activation of our immune system, or blocked to improve vaccines. The findings are published this week in the journal Nature Communications. The research was funded by Health Research Board, Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland. The research team, led by Dr Anne McGettrick and Professor Luke O'Neill, at the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute, have discovered that a protein, called TMED7, can shut down part of our immune ...

MONTREAL, February 28, 2012 – Research results published in Brain Injury by Université de Montréal neuropsychologist Dave Ellemberg reveal that adolescents are more sensitive to the effects of a sport-related concussion than adults or children. These kinds of injuries mostly affect their working memory – the brain function that enables us to process and store short-term information and that is essential for activities such as reading and mental calculation. "The frontal regions of the brain are more vulnerable to concussions. These areas oversee executive functions responsible ...

BOSTON -- (Feb. 28, 2012) -- Using high-precision microscopy and X-ray scattering techniques, University of Oregon researchers have gained eye-opening insights into the process of applying green chemistry to nanotechnology that results in high yields, improves efficiency and dramatically reduces waste and potential negative exposure to human health or the environment. University of Oregon chemist James E. Hutchison described his lab's recent efforts to monitor the dynamics of nanoparticles in an invited talk today at the American Physical Society's March Meeting (Feb. ...

New figures published today (Wednesday) estimate that there will be nearly 1.3 million deaths from cancer in 2012 in the European Union (EU) – 717,398 men and 565,703 women. Although the actual numbers have increased, the rate (age-standardised per 100,000 population) of people who die from the disease continues to decline. Writing in the cancer journal Annals of Oncology [1], a group of researchers from Italy and Switzerland estimate that the overall cancer death rates will be 139 per 100,000 men and 85 per 100,000 women in 2012. Compared with confirmed deaths in 2007 ...

Individual atoms of a certain chemical element can be very stubborn when it comes to separation, mainly because techniques rely on a difference in chemical and physical properties — atoms are almost identical in both regards. However, if you peer closely enough into the atoms, there are subtle differences that can have very big effects. These "different" atoms, called isotopes, are heavily relied on in areas of medicine and nuclear energy and now researchers have proposed a novel way of isolating them. Reported today, Wednesday 29 February, in the Institute of Physics ...

Lower back pain due to Modic changes can be hard to treat and the currently recommended therapy of exercise and staying active often does not help alleviate the pain. Results of a trial, published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine, comparing exercise therapy, and staying active, to daily rest and lumbar support, showed that both treatments resulted in the same small level of improvement in pain, disability, and general health. Modic changes (MC) in the spine, where the bone marrow is infiltrated by serum (fluid), fatty deposits, or by sclerosis, can ...

With the addition of Clearwater Safety lights, police motor officers in Folsom, CA now ride with increased confidence. The department recently took delivery of Clearwater "Krista" Police LED lights for the BMW R1200RT motorcycles. Folsom Police Sergeant, Kirk Morris, contacted Clearwater's owner, Glenn Stasky, upon learning of the police lights. "The light demonstration was impressive. Stasky offered to install a set of lights on one of our bikes for evaluation. We rotated the bike throughout the department and it soon became evident that we wanted to ...