State laws and policies governing the storage and use of surplus blood samples taken from newborns as part of the routine health screening process range from explicit to non-existent, leaving many parents ill-informed about how their babies' left over blood might be used, according to a team led by a member of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Utah. A report on their analysis of the subject is published March 28 in the journal Pediatrics. The study is believed to be one of the first to provide in-depth ...

PHILADELPHIA – By combining sophisticated mathematical techniques more commonly used by spies instead of scientists with the power and versatility of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a Penn neurologist has developed a new approach for studying the inner workings of the brain. A hidden pattern is encoded in the seemingly random order of things presented to a human subject, which the brain reveals when observed with fMRI. The research is published in the journal NeuroImage. Geoffrey K. Aguirre, MD, Assistant Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania ...

Cattle ranchers in southwestern Alberta have suspected it for a long time and now, GPS tracking equipment confirms it: wolf packs in the area are making cow meat a substantial part of their diets. University of Alberta researchers tracked wolves to bone yards, where ranchers dispose of dead cattle, and to sites of fresh cow kills. The study was done over two grazing seasons in 2008 and 2009. The vast study area in southwestern Alberta includes private ranchland and wooded public lands bordering the Rocky Mountains. Researchers found that during the summer months when ...

Warmer air is only part of the story when it comes to Greenland's rapidly melting ice sheet. New research by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) highlights the role ocean circulation plays in transporting heat to glaciers. Greenland's ice sheet has lost mass at an accelerated rate over the last decade, dumping more ice and fresh water into the ocean. Between 2001 and 2005, Helheim Glacier, a large glacier on Greenland's southeast coast, retreated 5 miles (8 kilometers) and its flow speed nearly doubled. A research team led by WHOI physical oceanographer ...

Personal trainer, author and motivational speaker wants women to benefit in the same way that her polycystic ovarian syndrome was transformed Katie Humphrey knows firsthand about just how miserable PCOS can make a woman's life. She struggled for years with deeply distressing side-effects of polycystic ovarian syndrome like the lack of a menstrual cycle, weight gain, acne and constant fatigue. Finally, she was diagnosed with insulin resistance-linked PCOS and urged, like many women with this disorder, to take birth control pills and anti-diabetes medication to improve ...

Russia's boreal forest – the largest continuous expanse of forest in the world, found in the country's cold northern regions – is undergoing an accelerating large-scale shift in vegetation types as a result of globally and regionally warming climate. That in turn is creating an even warmer climate in the region, according to a new study published in the journal Global Change Biology and highlighted in the April issue of Nature Climate Change. The Great Russian forest, which includes much of Siberia, is the size of the contiguous United States. It has experienced significant ...

New Delhi, India – The Indian Government today released new tiger population numbers for the first time since 2007, indicating that numbers have increased in the country that has half of the world's remaining wild tigers. The government estimated current tiger numbers in India at 1,706, up from 1,411 during the last count in 2007. However, the 1,706 figure includes an additional tiger reserve in the count, the Sundarbans, that contained 70 tigers. This area was not counted in 2007. Therefore, when comparing the previous survey with the current one, the official estimate ...

Greengrade, a collaborative online LEED management software tool that allows project teams to communicate, track, and manage LEED project information, today announced a new feature allowing users to access LEED information directly from LEEDuser. LEEDuser helps certify building projects through the key commercial and institutional LEED rating systems, with tipsheets, checklists, sample documentation and forms, forums, and more. "LEEDuser is all about saving time and money on LEED projects by providing the insights and help design and construction professionals need, ...

Calculations by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley estimate that the cancer risk associated with one type of airport security scanners is low based on the amount of radiation these devices emit, as long as they are operated and function correctly. "The doses are low – extremely low," said Rebecca Smith-Bindman, MD, a professor of radiology at UCSF, who made the calculations with Pratik Mehta, an undergraduate at UC-Berkeley. "The amount of radiation in these scans is so low that you don't have to be concerned ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Engineers at Ohio State University have invented a new kind of nano-particle that shines in different colors to tag molecules in biomedical tests. These tiny plastic nano-particles are stuffed with even tinier bits of electronics called quantum dots. Like little traffic lights, the particles glow brightly in red, yellow, or green, so researchers can easily track molecules under a microscope. This is the first time anyone has created fluorescent nano-particles that can change colors continuously. Jessica Winter, assistant professor of chemical and ...

Bixby Land Company, a leading commercial real estate operator and investment manager based in Orange County, Calif., has purchased four Class A industrial properties totaling approximately 850,000 square feet. The acquisitions increase Bixby Land Company's wholly-owned portfolio to more than 5 million square feet and point to Bixby's increasing investment activity as California property markets show signs of improvement. "Our investment in these high-quality properties is a reflection of our confidence in the recovery of commercial real estate, in particular the industrial ...

Conception is a blessed event, be it a child's, or a new book. That is novelist Josie Brown's contention. She should know. The idea for her fourth novel, The Baby Planner [Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books]--about a childless woman who channels her nurturing instincts toward her pregnant clients--was born in the reception area of her mammogram center. "I picked up the only reading material available: a local parenting magazine," explains Brown, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. "My own children are older, so it wasn't necessarily something I felt might interest ...

Between 75 and 80 per cent of all volcanic activity on Earth takes place at deep-sea, mid-ocean ridges. Most of these volcanoes produce effusive lava flows rather than explosive eruptions, both because the levels of magmatic gas (which fuel the explosions and are made up of a variety of components, including, most importantly CO2) tend to be low, and because the volcanoes are under a lot of pressure from the surrounding water. Over about the last 10 years however, geologists have nevertheless speculated, based on the presence of volcanic ash in certain sites, that explosive ...

Last week, the Michigan Catastrophic Claims Associations (MCCA) announced it would be instituting a slight fee increase that will be passed on to policyholders in the state. Car insurance providers currently are required to pay the MCCA $143.09 per insured vehicle, which gets incorporated into the premiums of even the cheapest auto insurance companies in the state. That amount will be raised 1.3 percent starting in July. The fee revenue goes into an MCCA-administered fund that exists as a result of the unorthodox structure of Michigan's no-fault system. Unlike the ...

By taking a closer look at animal bones scattered across the wilderness landscape, a researcher at the University of Chicago has found a powerful tool for showing how species' populations have changed over decades or even a century. "The skeletons of long-dead animals lying on landscapes provide critical insight into our understanding of ecosystem history, especially how populations have changed," said the study's author, University of Chicago alumnus Joshua H. Miller, S.M.'05, PhD'09, a postdoctoral research fellow in biological sciences at Wright State University in ...

Lakewood-based HomeSphere, Inc. announced today that they have entered into a partnership with the American Sustainability Initiative (AmeriSus) to effectively manage manufacturer rebates with their BRI and AllTrack applications. Inspired by the Sears kit houses of the 1930s, AmeriSus manages all design, engineering, product and technology selections, procurement, logistics and scheduling for home builders, in order to deliver all materials necessary to construct an affordable, super-efficient homes for the end consumer. AmeriSus catalog homes are designed to fit into ...

For the first time, a virus that causes respiratory disease in humans has been linked to the deaths of wild mountain gorillas, reports a team of researchers in the United States and Africa. The finding confirms that serious diseases can pass from people to these endangered animals. The researchers are from the non-profit Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project; the Wildlife Health Center at the University of California, Davis; the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University; and the Rwanda Development Board. Their study, which reports the 2009 deaths ...

NEW YORK (March 28, 2011) -- Bariatric surgery should be considered earlier in the treatment of eligible patients to help stem the serious complications that can result from diabetes, according to an International Diabetes Federation (IDF) position statement presented by leading experts at the 2nd World Congress on Interventional Therapies for Type 2 Diabetes in New York. The statement was written by 20 leading experts in diabetes and bariatric surgery who have made a series of recommendations on the use of weight-loss surgery as a cost-effective treatment option for ...

Just like snowflakes, no two people are alike, even if they're identical twins according to new genetic research from The University of Western Ontario. Molecular geneticist Shiva Singh has been working with psychiatrist Dr. Richard O'Reilly to determine the genetic sequencing of schizophrenia using identical or monozygotic twins. The study is published in this month's PLoS ONE. Singh looked at about one million markers of identical twins (and their two parents) where only one twin had schizophrenia. "The most informative feature of schizophrenia is that it sometimes ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – How exactly bacterial pathogens cause diseases in plants remains a mystery and continues to frustrate scientists working to solve this problem. Now Wenbo Ma, a young plant pathologist at the University of California, Riverside, has performed research on the soybean plant in the lab that makes major inroads into our understanding of plant-pathogen interactions, a rapidly developing area among the plant sciences. Her breakthrough research can help scientists come up with effective strategies to treat crops that have succumbed to disease or, when used ...

Total Mortgage Services, LLC, a leading mortgage lender, announced today that it has received its District of Columbia Mortgage Lender License from Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking and can now originate residential mortgage loans in the District of Columbia. Total Mortgage is licensed as a mortgage lender in District of Columbia and holds Mortgage Lender License NMLS2764. "We are excited about now being able to help borrowers throughout Washington DC with their current purchase and refinancing needs," commented John Walsh, President of Total Mortgage. ...

MadCap Software, Inc. (http://www.madcapsoftware.com), the leader in multi-channel content authoring and a showcase company for Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft XPS, today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has awarded MadCap a patent for its "Visual Document Structure Indicator" technology. The patented design provides the basis of the Structure Bars in MadCap Flare, MadCap's flagship XML-based software for single-source multi-channel publishing, which give users unprecedented ease in creating and publishing structured content. Structure ...

Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine have found that patients with Alzheimer's disease have lower glucose utilization in the brain than those with normal cognitive function, and that those decreased levels may be detectable approximately 20 years prior to the first symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. This new finding could lead to the development of novel therapies to prevent the eventual onset of Alzheimer's. The study is published online in the journal Translational Neuroscience. Using mice modified to develop Alzheimer's disease, the research team found that ...

Icebergs cool and dilute the ocean water they pass through and also affect the distribution carbon-dioxide-absorbing phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean, according to a team of researchers from UC San Diego and the University of San Diego. The effects are likely to influence the growth of phytoplankton in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean and especially in an area known as "Iceberg Alley" east of the Antarctic Peninsula. Enhanced phytoplankton growth would increase the rate at which carbon dioxide is removed from the ocean, an important process in the carbon ...

A team of scientists has discovered that descendants of "exploratory" butterflies that colonized new habitats differ genetically from their more cautious cousins. The team, led by James Marden, a professor of biology at Penn State University, and Christopher Wheat, a post-doctoral scholar working at both Penn State and the University of Helsinki, has revealed some of the genetic bases for faster egg maturation, a higher rate of energy metabolism, and superior flight ability -- traits that provide an advantage to butterflies that stray from familiar territory to found new ...