Tiny particles used in a range of everyday products from computers to shampoo can adversely affect the lungs in very different ways, a study has shown. Research by the University of Edinburgh suggests that industrial manufacturers using nanoparticles should be aware of the risks that different types of nanoparticles pose to workers who handle them. Nanoparticles – which can be 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair – are potentially hazardous to workers handling the chemicals used to make products as they may be at risk of inhaling them. The particles ...

Several leading medical journals have come together to urge health professionals everywhere to put health at the heart of climate change negotiations. An editorial published simultaneously in the BMJ, the Lancet and the Finnish Medical Journal today, warns that the links between climate policy and health policy must not be overlooked. The editorial has also been made available for publication in all peer reviewed medical journals worldwide through the World Association of Medical Editors. Written by Robin Stott and Ian Roberts on behalf of the Climate and Health Council, ...

New research that provides potential for exciting new approaches to targeting diseases such as cancer has been announced by an international team of academics. They have also announced the potential for more targeted treatments following their identification of proteins that play a vital role in the life of a human cell. The research teams from Germany and the UK have published their work in the Advance Online Publication on Nature Cell Biology's website. The teams are from the Centre for Molecular Biology at the University of Heidelberg and from the Department of ...

Research from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) shows that children with severe congenital heart defects have twice the risk of anxiety at 18 months of age compared to healthy children. Children with mild and moderate heart defects, on the other hand, did not show an increased risk of anxiety. - These findings suggest that children with severe forms of congenital heart defects are prone to emotional problems at a very young age. The increased risk of anxiety could be related to the number of medical procedures and hospital admissions that characterise the ...

Amsterdam, November 17th, 2010¬ -- Black holes, or the remnants of hyper-or supernova explosions, have intrigued scientists since the concept was first introduced in 1967. Astronomers have only ever been able to observe gamma-ray bursts, considered the births of young black holes, at far distance. Researchers have now found compelling evidence for the birth of a black hole in the so-called local Universe--representing the youngest black hole ever discovered in our cosmic neighborhood. The results of this research have been published in the most recent issue of the Elsevier ...

Nov. 16, 2010 — The numerous technical and operational breakdowns that contributed to the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and spill from the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico suggest the lack of a suitable approach for managing the inherent risks, uncertainties, and dangers associated with deepwater drilling operations and a failure to learn from previous "near misses," says an interim report of preliminary findings from a committee of the National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council. The events also suggest insufficient checks and balances for critical ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — One of biggest factors promoting the diversity of coastal ocean life is how fast the water flows, according to new research by ecologists at Brown University. Experiments and observation in Palau, Alaska, and Maine showed that the faster the flow, the greater the number of invertebrate species that live on rocks under the water. The findings, published the week of Nov. 15 in the journal Ecology Letters, could help improve management of delicate and complex coastal ecosystems, said James Palardy, a former Brown doctoral student and ...

Scientists at the University of Southampton have developed a new kind of underwater sonar device that can detect objects through bubble clouds that would effectively blind standard sonar. Just as ultrasound is used in medical imaging, conventional sonar 'sees' with sound. It uses differences between emitted sound pulses and their echoes to detect and identify targets. These include submerged structures such as reefs and wrecks, and objects, including submarines and fish shoals. However, standard sonar does not cope well with bubble clouds resulting from breaking waves ...

Cells in the brain called pericytes that have not been high on the list of targets for treating diseases like Alzheimer's may play a more crucial role in the development of neurodegenerative diseases than has been realized. The findings, published Nov. 4 in Neuron, cast the pericyte in a surprising new role as a key player shaping blood flow in the brain and protecting sensitive brain tissue from harmful substances. By manipulating pericyte levels, scientists were able to re-create in the brains of mice an array of abnormalities that mirror in striking fashion the brain ...

Medical websites like WebMD provide consumers with more access than ever before to comprehensive health and medical information, but the sites' utility becomes limited if users use unclear or unorthodox language to describe conditions in a site search. However, a group of Georgia Tech researchers have created a machine-learning model that enables the sites to "learn" dialect and other medical vernacular, thereby improving their performance for users who use such language themselves. Called "diaTM" (short for "dialect topic modeling"), the system learns by comparing multiple ...

CINCINNATI—Researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have found a potential genetic target for heart disease, which could lead to therapies to prevent the development of the nation's No. 1 killer in its initial stages. These findings will be presented for the first time at the American Heart Association's (AHA) Scientific Sessions in Chicago Nov. 17. The study, led by WenFeng Cai, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow under the direction of Litsa Kranias, PhD, AHA distinguished scientist and Hanna Chair in Cardiology in the department of pharmacology and cell biophysics, ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Medications do not have a chance to fight health problems if they are taken improperly or not taken at all. Non-adherence to medications costs thousands of lives and billions of dollars each year in the United States alone, according to the New England Healthcare Institute. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have developed an intervention strategy that is three times more effective than previously studied techniques at improving adherence in patients. Cynthia Russell, associate professor in the MU Sinclair School of Nursing, found that patients ...

Results of a Toronto Western Hospital study show that patients suffering back pain get quicker diagnosis and treatment when a Nurse Practitioner conducts the first examination. Traditionally, patients face long and anxiety-ridden wait times - up to 52 weeks – before an initial examination by a spine surgeon. Results from the year long TWH study showed wait times for patients examined by a Nurse Practitioner were significantly shorter, ranging from 10 to 21 weeks. "Waiting times for specialty consultations in public healthcare systems worldwide are lengthy and impose undue ...

Sunlight represents the cleanest, greenest and far and away most abundant of all energy sources, and yet its potential remains woefully under-utilized. High costs have been a major deterrant to the large-scale applications of silicon-based solar cells. Nanopillars - densely packed nanoscale arrays of optically active semiconductors - have shown potential for providing a next generation of relatively cheap and scalable solar cells, but have been hampered by efficiency issues. The nanopillar story, however, has taken a new twist and the future for these materials now looks ...

Scientists are looking for answers — including commercial bathroom disinfectants and over-the-counter fungicides used to fight athlete's foot — to help in the battle against a strange fungus that threatens bat populations in the United States. That's the topic of an article in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine. C&EN Senior Correspondent Stephen K. Ritter notes that despite their poor public image, bats are beneficial. They pollinate plants, spread seeds, and eat vast numbers of insects that otherwise could destroy food ...

Scientists have identified a mysterious culprit that threatens headaches, stuffy noses, skin rash and other allergy symptoms when more than 500 million people worldwide drink wine. The discovery could help winemakers in developing the first low allergenic vintages — reds and whites with less potential to trigger allergy symptoms, they say. The new study appears in ACS' monthly Journal of Proteome Research. Giuseppe Palmisano and colleagues note growing concern about the potential of certain ingredients in red and white to cause allergy-like symptoms that range from stuffed ...

Many mental health disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia, produce changes in social behavior or interactions. The frequency and/or severity of these disorders is substantially greater in boys than girls, but the biological basis for this difference between the two sexes is unknown. Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have discovered differences in the development of the amygdala region of the brain – which is critical to the expression of emotional and social behaviors – in animal models that may help to explain why some mental health disorders ...

Scientists are reporting a key advance toward development of a way to combat the terrible plant diseases that caused the Irish potato famine and still inflict billions of dollars of damage to crops each year around the world. Their study appears in ACS' bi-weekly journal Organic Letters. Teck-Peng Loh and colleagues point out that the Phytophthora fungi cause extensive damage to food crops such as potatoes and soybeans as well as to ornamental plants like azaleas and rhododendrons. One species of the fungus caused the Irish potato famine in the mid 1840s. That disaster ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — With employers increasingly reluctant to supply references for former employees in order to avoid legal liability, the creation of a centralized reference pool for workers may make labor markets in the U.S. more efficient, a University of Illinois expert in labor and employment law says. Law professor Matthew W. Finkin says that not only do employees face challenges when securing references from past employers, but employers also expose themselves to lawsuits when they provide a reference. "Employees benefit from references, but there's nothing in ...

Scientists are reporting that variants of a drug already approved for treating multiple sclerosis show promise as a long sought treatment for victims of bioterrorist attack with botulinum neurotoxin — which is 10,000 times deadlier than cyanide and the most poisonous substance known to man. The potential drugs also could be useful in treating other forms of botulism poisoning as well as Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, and myasthenia gravis, they say in an article in ACS Chemical Biology, a monthly journal. Kim D. Janda and colleagues explain that the lack of ...

Last year Nicholas Kristof declared in his New York Times column what banks need to fix their problems: Not just a bailout, but also "women, women, and women." Women are generally thought to be less willing to take risks than men, so he speculated that the banks could balance out risky men by employing more women. Stereotypes like this about women actually influence how women make financial decisions, making them more wary of risk, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Anecdotally, many people ...

DURHAM, N.C. – The ability to tell the difference between crystals that formed naturally and those formed by human activity can be important to archaeologists in the field. This can be a crucial bit of information in determining the ancient activities that took place at a site, yet archaeologists often wait for months for the results of laboratory tests. Now, however, an international team of physicists, archaeologists and materials scientists has developed a process that can tell in a matter of minutes the origin of samples thousands of years old. The new device is ...

Birmingham, Ala. – An investigational drug targeting a defective protein that causes cystic fibrosis has been shown to improve lung function in a small study of CF patients, according to findings published Nov. 18, 2010, in the New England Journal of Medicine. The investigational drug, VX-770, appeared to improve function of what is known as CFTR--the faulty protein responsible for CF. It is among the first compounds being developed for CF that specifically targets the root cause of cystic fibrosis. Patients who took VX-770 for 28 days showed improvements in several key ...

New data show that many children with autism spectrum disorders have greater academic abilities than previously thought. In a study by researchers at the University of Washington, 90 percent of high-functioning children with autism spectrum disorders showed a discrepancy between their IQ score and their performance on reading, spelling and math tests. "Academic achievement is a potential source of self-worth and source of feeling of mastery that people may not have realized is available to children with autism," said Annette Estes, research assistant professor at the ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In September, 2007, the Anaktuvuk River Fire burned more than 1,000 square kilometers of tundra on Alaska's North Slope, doubling the area burned in that region since record keeping began in 1950. A new analysis of sediment cores from the burned area revealed that this was the most destructive tundra fire at that site for at least 5,000 years. Models built on 60 years of climate and fire data found that even moderate increases in warm-season temperatures in the region dramatically increase the likelihood of such fires. The study was published this October ...