Contact: David Hosansky hosansky@ucar.edu 303-497-8611 Rachael Drummond rachaeld@ucar.edu 303-497-8604 National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Economic cost of weather may total $485 billion in US BOULDER—Everything has its price, even the weather. New research indicates that routine weather events such as rain and cooler-than-average days can add up to an annual economic impact of as much as $485 billion in the United States. The study, led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), found that ...

BOSTON -- June 22, 2011 -- A study led by researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center suggests that adding the amino acid leucine to their diets may help those with pre-diabetes or metabolic syndrome. In an animal study, published in the journal PloS One, mice who had been on a high-fat diet and who also received twice the usual intake of leucine, an amino acid found in protein, showed reductions in their prediabetic conditions with lower blood sugars and less fat in their livers, two of the collection of medical problems associated with insulin resistance that make up ...

A developmental biologist at New York Medical College is proposing a new theory of the origin of birds, which traditionally has been thought to be driven by the evolution of flight. Instead, Stuart A. Newman, Ph.D., credits the emergence of enlarged skeletal muscles as the basis for their upright two-leggedness, which led to the opportunity for other adaptive changes like flying or swimming. And it is all based on the loss of a gene that is critical to the ability of other warm-blooded animals to generate heat for survival. Dr. Newman, a professor of cell biology and ...

CHICAGO --- Caring for patients in a medical intensive care unit in a hospital and flying a 747 are complicated tasks that require tracking thousands of important details, some of which could get overlooked. That's why the pilot has a checklist and a copilot to make sure nothing slips by. A new Northwestern Medicine study shows the attending physician in the intensive care unit could use a copilot, too. The mortality rate plummeted 50 percent when the attending physician in the intensive care unit had a checklist – a fairly new concept in medicine -- and a trusted person ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- How do you teach math students to speak and write effectively about what they do? Crucially, how do you teach their teachers — themselves mathematicians — how to impart and evaluate these skills? Faced with this problem, a group of instructors in MIT's Department of Mathematics decided that many heads are better than one. They began brainstorming ways to encourage teacher-to-teacher collaboration, bridging educators with similar challenges in different courses and from semester to semester. Now, they've developed a tool they believe will be useful ...

Imagine dropping dish soap into a sink full of greasy water. What happens? As soon as the soap hits the water, the grease recoils—and retreats to the edges of the sink. Now, what if the sink was a cancer cell, the globs of grease were cancer-promoting proteins and the dish soap was a potential drug? According to new research from the University of Toronto Mississauga, such a drug could force the proteins to the cell's membrane (a.k.a., the edge of the sink)—and make the cancer cell more vulnerable to chemotherapy. "This is a totally new approach to cancer therapy," ...

University of Minnesota engineering researchers in the College of Science and Engineering have recently discovered a new alloy material that converts heat directly into electricity. This revolutionary energy conversion method is in the early stages of development, but it could have wide-sweeping impact on creating environmentally friendly electricity from waste heat sources. Researchers say the material could potentially be used to capture waste heat from a car's exhaust that would heat the material and produce electricity for charging the battery in a hybrid car. Other ...

Patients with normal left ventricular function who undergo elective unprotected left main coronary artery (ULMCA) percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) with drug-eluting stents (DES) had favorable outcomes according to new research. Results of the multicenter, retrospective study are reported in the June issue of Catheterization and Cardiovascular Interventions, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of The Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI). For patients with ULMCA disease, coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), known commonly ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Hepatocellular carcinoma is the most common cancer to strike the liver. More than 500,000 people worldwide, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, are diagnosed with it yearly. Most of those afflicted die within six months. A big obstacle to treatment of liver cancer is the lack of early diagnosis. Current techniques, including ultrasound, CT and MRI scans, spot tumors only when they have grown to about 5 centimeters in diameter. By that time, the cancer is especially aggressive, resisting chemotherapy and difficult ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, IN—Plant growth retardants, or PGRs, are used in greenhouse operations to produce uniform, compact, and marketable plants. Although PGRs can be applied using a variety of methods, most common applications are foliar sprays or substrate "drenches". Research has shown that drenches provide more uniform results and increase the duration of effectiveness compared with sprays, but the efficacy of drenches can be affected by factors such as the amount of solution applied and the substrate components used. Organic components such as parboiled rice hulls are becoming ...

EAST WAREHAM, MA—Cranberry is an important commercial crop in states such as Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Washington, and Oregon. Insects and disease can pose serious problems for growers trying to realize profits in heavy cranberry production regions. Since cranberry is a perennial crop, pest damage can have a particularly significant negative impact in the next growing season. By studying feeding preferences of insects, entomologists have reported that several insects prefer some cranberry cultivars over others. For instance, several insect herbivores have ...

EAST LANSING, MI—The practice of "topdressing" athletic fields with sand has been used by turfgrass professionals for years. Topdressing is essential to maintaining safe and healthy turf, and using porous sand allows the turfgrass system to retain the necessary pore space for adequate drainage, even in heavy foot traffic. While sand-based athletic fields may be preferred by schools and municipalities, conversion to a sand-based system is expensive. Complete renovation is often cost-prohibitive and renders the field temporarily unusable. Because of these drawbacks, complete ...

Heart bypass surgery is considered the gold standard for most patients with left main coronary artery disease, one of the most serious types of heart disease and one that affects thousands. But a new UCLA study reports favorable long-term outcomes for lower-risk patients with this condition who underwent angioplasty with medication-coated stents, rather than bypass surgery. A more minimally invasive procedure than surgery, angioplasty is performed by snaking a tiny wire up through an artery in the groin to the blocked area of the heart. The clogged artery is cleaned ...

In the war between drugs and drug-resistant diseases, is the current strategy for medicating patients giving many drug-resistant diseases a big competitive advantage?, asks a research paper that will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper argues for new research efforts to discover effective ways for managing the evolution and slowing the spread of drug-resistant disease organisms. The ultimate goal of this new research effort is to develop a new science-based model for drug-resistance management that will inform treatment guidelines ...

URALCHEM, OJSC announces the successful completion of round robin tests of the company's fertilizer carried out by Salamon & Seaber, one of the leading UK analytical laboratories, with the participation of URALCHEM specialists. The main objective of the product sample analysis was to compare the results obtained by applying the methods used in URALCHEM laboratories for quality control to those used by Salamon & Seaber. The test results have proved that the methods certified by Rosstandard (the Russian Federal Agency for Technical Regulation and Metrology) for the ...

OSAKA, JAPAN—In horticultural production, growers often depend on systems that use artificial light to produce high-quality transplants. Although the systems are efficient, fluorescent lamps can produce plants with shorter shoots than those grown under natural light. Studies have indicated that this reduced shoot elongation is due to the high red:far red ratio of typical commercial fluorescent lamps, which emit little far red irradiation. In natural environments a reduction in the red:far red (R:FR) ratio resulting from the absorption of red light by neighboring vegetation ...

LOGAN, UT—In response to increased awareness generated by the expanding local foods movement, demand for fresh strawberries has increased throughout the United States. The fresh market strawberry industry in the U.S. flourishes in California and Florida—states with ideal weather conditions and long growing seasons. Even with challenging growing conditions, small-scale strawberry production operations succeed in other areas of the country, particularly near urban areas where local produce commands premium prices at market. Ideal growing conditions for strawberries occur ...

Tom Anelli, known as The DWI Guy, and his team of drunk driving defense attorneys at Anelli Xavier announce the opening of their Albany, New York, law office at the following address: Anelli Xavier, PC 90 Swan Street Albany, NY 10027 Map and directions While the law firm continues to represent clients throughout the state of New York, this expansion allows the firm's attorneys more flexibility in meeting with its Albany DWI clients. The law firm also upgraded and moved its Syracuse location to: Anelli Xavier, PC 269 W. Jefferson Street, 2nd Floor Syracuse, ...

NEW YORK (June 22, 2011) -- Two studies featuring research from Weill Cornell Medical College have uncovered surprising details about the complex process that leads to the flow of neurotransmitters between brain neurons -- a dance of chemical messages so delicate that missteps often lead to neurological dysfunction. A recent Nature Neuroscience study led by Dr. Timothy Ryan, professor of biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medical College, demonstrates that individual neurons somehow control the speed by which they recycle synaptic vesicles that store neurotransmitters before ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Unless a corn crop is at risk of developing fungal diseases, a Purdue University study shows that farmers would be smart to skip fungicide treatments that promise increased yields. Kiersten Wise, an assistant professor of botany and plant pathology, said fungicides used in fields where conditions were optimal for fungal diseases improved yields and paid for themselves. In fields where fungal diseases are unlikely to develop, however, applying a fungicide is likely a waste of money. "About five years ago, we never used fungicides in hybrid corn. ...

Preparing your estate plan Creating your estate plan will require an estate lawyer who will help you to prepare a structured agreement detailing the passing of your worldly goods to your intended beneficiaries. Your estate plan should provide a clear outline of your intended objectives for the transfer of your estate. The intention of the process is to provide a semblance of clarity to proceedings while preventing costly potential problems such as executor disputes. The documented agreement should contain a detailed breakdown of your liabilities as well as your ...

Washington, D.C. — Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) have defined, for the first time, three different processing stages that a human brain needs to identify sounds such as speech — and discovered that they are the same as ones identified in non-human primates. In the June 22 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, the researchers say their discovery — made possible with the help of 13 human volunteers who spent time in a functional MRI machine — could potentially offer important insights into what can go wrong when someone has difficulty speaking, ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Fat substitutes used in popular snack foods to help people control weight may have the opposite effect, according to Purdue University research. "These substitutes are meant to mimic the taste of fat in foods that are normally high in fat while providing a lower number of calories, but they may end up confusing the body," said Susan E. Swithers, professor of psychological sciences. "We didn't study this in people, but we found that when rats consumed a fat substitute, learned signals that could help control food intake were disrupted, and the rats ...

A recent report by the Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees gave some devastating news to existing and future social security benefit recipients. Projections show that Social Security Trust Funds will reach complete depletion in 2036, leaving eligible Social Security Disability recipients without any benefits to receive. While the report was expected to deliver bad news, the projections were even worse than what most experts anticipated. The rapidly depleting Social Security Disability Trust Funds funds are the casualty of fiscal irresponsibility in Washington; ...

VIDEO: Dr. George W. Holden, a psychologist and parenting expert at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, discusses a new corporal punishment study based on actual audio recordings. Believed to be the first study... Click here for more information. In one recording, a mom spanks her 3-year-old 11 times for fighting with his sister. In another, a mom slaps her son for turning the page of a book while she reads to him. In still another, a mom spanks her 5-year-old when he ...