Deerfield, IL (Aug. 3, 2011) – An examination of the world's largest river basins found nutrient-rich and powerful river discharges led to spikes in the blooms of plankton associated with cholera outbreaks. These increased discharges often occur at times of increased temperature in coastal water, suggesting that predicting global warming's potential temperature effect on cholera will be more complicated than first thought, according to a new study published today in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. The findings by the authors will help give public ...

A combination of several well-known safety procedures could greatly reduce patient-harming errors in the use of radiation to treat cancer, according to a new study led by Johns Hopkins researchers. Radiation oncologists use more than a dozen quality assurance (QA) checks to prevent radiotherapy errors, but until now, the Hopkins researchers say, no one has systematically evaluated their effectiveness. Working with researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, the Hopkins team gathered data on about 4,000 "near miss" events that occurred during 2008-2010 at the two ...

For Immediate Release – August 3, 2011 – (Toronto) – Twenty-five percent of people who were hospitalized for depression were readmitted or visited an emergency room again for depression within 30 days of discharge, according to a new study by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). The results are published in this month's edition of the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. A team led by Dr. Elizabeth Lin, Scientist in CAMH's Social and Epidemiological Research Department, tracked hospitalizations for depression across Ontario and found that one-third of patients ...

MIAMI – August 3, 2011 -- Scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science have discovered a technique to track urban atmospheric plumes thanks to a unique isotopic signature found in vehicle emissions. Brian Giebel, a Marine and Atmospheric Chemistry graduate student working with Drs. Daniel Riemer and Peter Swart discovered that ethanol mixed in vehicle fuel is not completely burned, and that ethanol released in the engine's exhaust has a higher 13C to 12C ratio when compared to natural emissions from most living plants. In other ...

A University of Washington computer scientist is calling on the international academic community and engineers working in industry to take a bolder approach when designing how people find information online. In a two-page commentary titled "Search needs a shake-up," published in the Aug. 4 issue of the journal Nature, UW professor of computer science and engineering Oren Etzioni calls on experts to, literally, think outside the search box. The piece is being published on the 20-year anniversary of Tim Berners Lee unveiling his World Wide Web project. Etzioni doesn't ...

ORLANDO, Fla. — August 3, 2011 — During pregnancy, women are counseled to refrain from consuming certain types of foods, beverages and medications in order to avoid jeopardizing the health and development of the fetus. In fact, the American Pregnancy Association has a list of a dozen items they recommend expectant mothers omit from their diets. However, there are some additions, such as folic acid, that, when taken before and/or during pregnancy, can actually reduce the risk of birth defects and other disorders.1 Research presented today at the Era of Hope conference, a ...

ORLANDO, Fla. — August 3, 2011 — In their lifetime, women have more than a 12 percent risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer. 1 This week, research on novel approaches to breast cancer treatment is being presented at the Era of Hope (EOH) conference, a scientific meeting hosted by the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program (BCRP). Existing breast cancer treatments don't work for everyone, and alternative methods and delivery systems for breast cancer treatment are critical to saving and improving patient lives. New approaches to be presented at Era of ...

ORLANDO, Fla. — August 3, 2011 — Research into new methods to prevent and slow metastatic breast cancer will be presented this week at the Era of Hope conference, a scientific meeting hosted by the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program (BCRP). Approximately 6 percent of women with breast cancer will have metastatic disease upon diagnosis, and up to 30 percent of node-negative and 70 percent of node-positive breast cancers will relapse. 1 Common sites for breast cancer to spread are to the lungs, liver, brain and bones. Studies presented at Era of Hope ...

ORLANDO, Fla. — August 3, 2011 — A woman's ethnicity as well as her genetic makeup are two of the main risk factors for hereditary breast cancer. Research into understanding and treating hereditary breast cancer will be presented today at the Era of Hope conference, a scientific meeting hosted by the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program (BCRP). About 5 to 10 percent of breast cancers are thought to be hereditary, resulting from defective genes inherited from a parent. The most common cause of hereditary breast cancer is an inherited mutation in the BRCA1 ...

Writing in the journal Annals of Botany, Professor Douglas Kell argues that developing crops that produce roots more deeply in the ground could harvest more carbon from the air, and make crops more drought resistant, while dramatically reducing carbon levels. In principle, any crops could be treated in this way, giving more productive yields while also being better for the environment. Although the amount of carbon presently sequestered in the soil in the natural environment and using existing crops and grasses has been known for some time, Professor Kell's new analysis ...

New research funded by the Wellcome Trust has shown that sending text message reminders to healthcare workers in rural Africa can improve the implementation of national guidelines for treating malaria. The intervention led to more patients receiving accurate antimalarial treatment. The study, published today in The Lancet, was carried out by researchers at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI)-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Nairobi. Within Africa, the adherence to national malaria treatment guidelines by health workers is vital in making sure that patients ...

The theory that our universe is contained inside a bubble, and that multiple alternative universes exist inside their own bubbles – making up the 'multiverse' – is, for the first time, being tested by physicists. Two research papers published in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D are the first to detail how to search for signatures of other universes. Physicists are now searching for disk-like patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation - relic heat radiation left over from the Big Bang – which could provide tell-tale evidence of collisions ...

Scientists have found opal-like crystals in the Tagish Lake meteorite, which fell to Earth in Canada in 2000. This is the first extraterrestrial discovery of these unusual crystals, which may have formed in the primordial cloud of dust that produced the sun and planets of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago, according to a report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Katsuo Tsukamoto and colleagues say that colloidal crystals such as opals, which form as an orderly array of particles, are of great interest to for their potential use in new electronics and ...

Scientists are reporting an advance toward a fast, inexpensive urine test to detect and monitor the effectiveness of treatment for tuberculosis (TB), which is on a rampage in the developing world. Their study appears in the ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry. A team led by Virander Singh Chauhan and Ranjan Kumar Nanda notes that TB strikes an estimated 10 million people and kills 3 million each year, mostly in developing countries. Health care workers diagnose the disease by identifying the TB bacterium in sputum or blood samples. But current tests tend to be time-consuming, ...

Scientists have confirmed the feasibility of using a new drug delivery system — the basis for a battery-powered skin patch — to administer medication that shows promise for treating peripheral artery disease (PAD) and healing stubborn skin ulcers and burns. The needle-free delivery of the medication, which cannot be given by mouth and can have side effects when injected, is reported in the ACS journal, Molecular Pharmaceutics. Yogeshvar Kalia and colleagues explain that the medication consists of fibroblast growth factors (FGFs), proteins that have shown promise for treating ...

Manufacturers of everything from smart phones to SUVs are starting to design products not just for the customer's use, but also for an often troublesome life after the consumer, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine. The cover story by C&EN Senior Editor Melody M. Bomgardner focuses on product stewardship, an increasingly popular approach to environmental protection in which manufacturers, retailers, users, and disposers share responsibility for reducing the environmental impacts of products. That means, for instance, ...

The European Respiratory Journal is today (04 August 2011) publishing the updated guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) that aim to help manage drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB). The new document 'The WHO guidelines for the programmatic management of drug-resistant tuberculosis: 2011 update' focuses on priority areas for healthcare professionals in the diagnosis, treatment and care of drug-resistant TB. It also calls for more research to guide the management of the condition. TB is a pandemic that killed 1.7 million people in 2009, excluding those who died ...

U.S. production of ethanol for fuel has been rising quickly, topping 13 billion gallons in 2010. With the usual rail, truck and barge transport methods under potential strain, existing gas pipelines might be an efficient alternative for moving this renewable fuel around the country. But researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) caution that ethanol, and especially the bacteria sometimes found in it, can dramatically degrade pipelines. At a conference this week,* NIST researchers presented new experimental evidence that bacteria that feed ...

Gram for gram, novel carbon nanofiber-filled coatings devised by researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Texas A&M University outperformed conventional flame retardants used in the polyurethane foam of upholstered furniture and mattresses by at least 160 percent and perhaps by as much as 1,130 percent. The impressive test results, reported in the journal Polymer,* suggest that significant fire-safety advantages can be gained by coating polyurethane foam (PUF) with a club-sandwich-like arrangement of thin layers containing carbon ...

DNA, a molecule famous for storing the genetic blueprints for all living things, can do other things as well. In a new paper,* researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describe how tailored single strands of DNA can be used to purify the highly desired "armchair" form of carbon nanotubes. Armchair-form single wall carbon nanotubes are needed to make "quantum wires" for low-loss, long distance electricity transmission and wiring. Single-wall carbon nanotubes are usually about a nanometer in diameter, but they can be millions of nanometers ...

Scheduling umpire crews in Major League Baseball (MLB) can be a daunting task. However, Tallys Yunes, assistant professor of management science at the University of Miami School of Business Administration and his collaborators have created a novel solution. The team developed an efficient method to generate high-quality schedules for the MLB. The study is titled "Scheduling Major League Baseball Umpires and the Traveling Umpire Problem" published online ahead of print by the journal Interfaces, a popular outlet for practitioners in the field of Operations Research. ...

Research led by the Warwick Crop Centre in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick has developed a unique collection of information about the disease resistance of 96 of the world's onion varieties. It will be a crucial resource for commercial growers and seed producers trying to combat one of the most difficult diseases affecting onion crops. This work may also have benefits in terms of and reduced fertiliser consumption and enhanced drought tolerance. The work on onions in this research funded by Defra (The Department for Environment, Food and Rural ...

Researchers at Emory and Georgia Tech have developed a method for predicting which areas of the coronary arteries will develop more atherosclerotic plaque over time, based on intracoronary ultrasound and blood flow measurements. The method could help doctors identify "vulnerable plaque," unstable plaque that is likely to cause a heart attack or stroke. It involves calculating shear stress, or how hard the blood tugs on the walls of the arteries, based on the geometry of the arteries and how fast the blood is moving. The results were posted online this week in the journal ...

New research raises troubling concerns about the use of aggressive drug therapies to treat a wide range of diseases such as MRSA, C. difficile, malaria, and even cancer. "The universally accepted strategy of aggressive medication to kill all targeted disease pathogens has the problematic consequence of giving any drug-resistant disease pathogens that are present the greatest possible evolutionary advantage," says Troy Day, one of the paper's co-authors and Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Biology at Queen's. The researchers note that while the first aim of a drug ...

Measuring the levels of a natural body chemical may allow doctors to reduce the duration of antibiotic use and improve the health outcomes of critically ill patients. "Infection is a common and expensive complication of critical illness and we're trying to find ways to improve the outcomes of sick, elderly patients and, at the same time, reduce health care costs," says Daren Heyland, a professor of Medicine at Queen's, director of the Clinical Evaluation Research Unit at Kingston General Hospital, and scientific director of the Technology Evaluation in the Elderly Network. Prolonged ...