BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A first draft of the cacao genome is complete, a consortium of academic, governmental, and industry scientists announced today. Indiana University Bloomington scientists performed much of the sequencing work, which is described and detailed at http://www.cacaogenomedb.org/, the official website of the Cacao Genome Database project. Despite being led and funded by a private company, Mars Inc., Cacao Genome Database scientists say one of their chief concerns has been making sure the Theobroma cacao genome data was published for all to see -- especially ...

A new technology for removing water from ultrafine coal slurry has been successfully tested at the commercial scale at an operating coal cleaning plant. The technology offers the possibility of reducing the coal slurry impoundment problem from the source. A peer-reviewed paper on this new technology was presented Sept. 15 at the 13th Australian Coal Preparation Society Conference, Cairns, Queensland. Cleaning coal after it has been mined is done with water. The bulk of the coal mined is relatively coarse in size and, therefore, can be readily washed of impurities and ...

BOSTON—Cancer patients who die in the hospital or an intensive care unit have worse quality of life at the end-of-life, compared to patients who die at home with hospice services, and their caregivers are at higher risk for developing psychiatric illnesses during bereavement, according to a study by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. One striking finding of the study, reported in the September 13th issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, was that bereaved caregivers of patients who died in an intensive care unit (ICU) were five times more likely to be diagnosed ...

Reducing the delivery of nutrients to the Chesapeake Bay is one of the most important components of restoration efforts to achieve a healthy Bay ecosystem. The USGS has developed a new method for tracking the progress toward reducing nitrogen and phosphorus delivery from the watershed to the Bay. "The public and public officials care deeply about progress towards clean water goals for the Chesapeake Bay and other impaired waters of the Nation," said Robert Hirsch, USGS Research Hydrologist who led the development of this new method. "We developed the new technique and ...

The number of times our cells can divide is dictated by telomeres, stretches of DNA at the tips of our chromosomes. Understanding how telomeres keep our chromosomes – and by extension, our genomes – intact is an area of intense scientific focus in the fields of both aging and cancer. Now, scientists at The Wistar Institute have published the first detailed report on the structure and function of a crucial domain in the protein known as Cdc13, which sustains telomeres by clamping to DNA and recruiting replicating enzymes to the area. While the nature of this portion of ...

Hurricane Igor is a monster hurricane in terms of strength and size. To get a perspective on its size, it is the same distance from one end of the storm to the other as it is from Boston, Mass. to Richmond, Va., some 550 miles. That's a 10-hour drive from one end to the other, and NASA satellites captured that entire distance in one image. Because Hurricane Igor is a large storm and even if Igor doesn't make a direct landfall in Bermuda, the extent of the winds (the wind field) is so large that the National Hurricane Center noted that Bermuda can be buffeted by winds ...

Scientists are reporting discovery of the biological secrets that enable plants growing near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant to adapt and flourish in highly radioactive soil — legacy of the 1986 nuclear disaster in the Ukraine. Their study, which helps solve a long-standing mystery, appears in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal. Martin Hajduch and colleagues note that plants have an unexpected ability to adapt to an environment contaminated with radiation following the April 26, 1986 accident at Chernobyl. Their previous research, for example, ...

NASA's Aqua satellite captured the birth of Tropical Storm Karl on Sept. 14 as it passed overhead at 3:05 p.m. EDT in the Caribbean. This morning, Karl made landfall in the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. By 5 p.m. EDT on Sept. 14, System 92L intensified quickly in the western Caribbean and became the thirteenth tropical depression that quickly fired up into Tropical Storm Karl. NASA's Aqua satellite was flying overhead at 3:05 p.m. EDT and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument captured a visible image of Karl as he was rapidly ...

Carbon nanotubes — those tiny particles poised to revolutionize electronics, medicine, and other areas — are much bigger in the strength department than anyone ever thought, scientists are reporting. New studies on the strength of these submicroscopic cylinders of carbon indicate that on an ounce-for-ounce basis they are at least 117 times stronger than steel and 30 times stronger than Kevlar, the material used in bulletproof vests and other products. The findings, which could expand commercial and industrial applications of nanotube materials, appear in the monthly journal ...

CHICAGO --- The millions of middle-aged and older adults who suffer from insomnia have a new drug-free prescription for a more restful night's sleep. Regular aerobic exercise improves the quality of sleep, mood and vitality, according to a small but significant new study from Northwestern Medicine. The study is the first to examine the effect of aerobic exercise on middle-aged and older adults with a diagnosis of insomnia. About 50 percent of people in these age groups complain of chronic insomnia symptoms. The aerobic exercise trial resulted in the most dramatic ...

Scientists reported new evidence on the effectiveness of that old folk remedy — cranberry juice — for urinary tract infections at the ACS' 240th National Meeting. "A number of controlled clinical trials — these are carefully designed and conducted scientific studies done in humans — have concluded that cranberry juice really is effective for preventing urinary tract infections," said Terri Anne Camesano, Ph.D., who led the study. "That has important implications, considering the size of the problem and the health care costs involved." Estimates suggest that urinary tract ...

Tests of a potential vaccine against "Ich" — the dreaded "white-spot" disease that plagues fish in commercial fish farms, public aquariums, pet fish retail outlets, and home aquariums — are raising hopes for finally controlling the disease, scientists reported at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. "Outbreaks of the parasitic disease caused by Ichthyophthirius (Ich) can result in losses of 50-100 percent of fish," Dehai Xu, Ph.D., said. "The disease is very common, and almost every home fish hobbyist has encountered it. Once the parasite infects ...

Funding from an anonymous wealthy family has been the secret to progress, at long last, in developing drugs that show promise for helping millions of people worldwide with Fragile X syndrome, the most common genetic cause of autism. That's the topic of a fascinating article in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine. C&EN Senior Editor Lisa Jarvis notes that until recent interest from big pharmaceutical companies, a small drug company in Cambridge, Mass. named Seaside Therapeutics was virtually the only company trying to develop ...

Rapid improvements in facial-recognition software mean airport security workers might one day know with near certainty whether they're looking at a stressed-out tourist or staring a terrorist in the eye. A research team led by Dr. Alice O'Toole, a professor in The University of Texas at Dallas' School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, is evaluating how well these rapidly evolving recognition programs work. The researchers are comparing the rates of success for the software to the rates for non-technological, but presumably "expert" human evaluation. "The government ...

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Sept. 14, 2010) – A new investigational drug designed to penetrate and attack pancreatic cancer cells has been administered to a patient for the first time ever at the Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center at Scottsdale Healthcare. ASG-5ME is a potent, targeted compound designed to selectively kill cancer cells, says Daniel Von Hoff, MD, a principal investigator in the Phase I clinical trial. Pancreatic cancer is a fast-growing and difficult to treat form of cancer, and is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States. "ASG-5ME is intended ...

SALT LAKE CITY—The Intermountain West is renowned for the beauty of its towering mountains and high deserts, but according to new research from an investigator with the University of Utah Brain Institute the region's lofty altitudes significantly influence a deadly problem: the high prevalence of suicides in this part of the country. In the Sept. 15, 2010, online edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry, Perry F. Renshaw, M.D., Ph.D., MBA, professor of psychiatry at the U School of Medicine and an investigator with Utah Science Technology and Research (USTAR) initiative, ...

A new study demonstrates that young doctors often fail to heed the Biblical injunction, "physician, heal thyself." In a research letter published in the September 15, 2010, issue of JAMA, researchers report that three out of five residents surveyed came to work in the previous year while sick, possibly exposing their patients and colleagues to suboptimal performance and, in many cases, communicable disease. The survey, which involved multiple hospitals, found that 60 percent of residents—physicians who have completed medical school and are getting on-the-job advanced ...

Scientists have overturned the conventional wisdom that cooperation is essential for the well-being of the whole population, finding evidence that slackers can sometimes help the common good. Researchers, from Imperial College London, the Universities of Bath and Oxford, University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology studied populations of yeast and found that a mixture of 'co-operators' and 'cheats' grew faster than a more utopian one of only "co-operators." The study, publishing next week in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology, ...

In research published this week in PLoS Medicine, results from the Shanghai Women's Health Study reveal the impact of lifestyle-related factors on mortality in a cohort of Chinese women – confirming the results from other Western research studies. The large prospective cohort study by Wei Zheng and colleagues (from Vanderbilt University & Shanghai Cancer Institute) showed that lifestyle factors other than active smoking and alcohol consumption, have a major combined impact on total mortality on a scale comparable to the effect of smoking. For example healthier lifestyle-related ...

David Henry from the University of Toronto and colleagues analysed Australian news stories over a five-year period, and examined whether experienced specialist health reporters write better stories than other categories of journalists. They found that it does matter who writes news stories that cover the benefits and harms of health care interventions: stories written by specialist health journalists working for a single media outlet were of higher quality than those written by less experienced writers. The authors say their findings are important because "this source of ...

Amos Channon from the University of Southampton, United Kingdom and colleagues outline the complexities of urban advantage in maternal health where the urban poor often have worse access to health care than women in rural areas. They used improved methods to measure urban poverty in 30 countries, and found substantial inequalities in maternal and newborn health, and in access to health care. The authors outline two main patterns of urban inequality in developing countries, and offer recommendations for improving access to care. INFORMATION: Funding: No funding was received ...

Medical students with higher levels of distress (burnout) were more likely to self-report unprofessional conduct related to patient care and less altruistic professional values, according to a study in the September 15 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical education. "Professionalism is a core competency for all physicians. Professionalism includes being honest, acting with integrity, advocating for the needs of patients, reducing barriers to equitable health care, and adhering to an ethical code of conduct," the authors write. "Despite the widely acknowledged importance ...

Medical students with moderate to severe depression more frequently endorsed several depression stigma attitudes than nondepressed students and had a higher rate of suicidal thoughts, according to a study in the September 15 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical education. "Medical students experience depression, burnout, and mental illness at a higher rate than the general population, with mental health deteriorating over the course of medical training. Medical students have a higher risk of suicidal ideation and suicide, higher rates of burnout, and a lower quality ...

Fourth-year medical students who participated in an educational intervention were more likely to seek, identify and incorporate into care patient circumstances that may require variation from standard care, compared to students in a control group, according to a study in the September 15 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical education. "Clinical decision making requires 2 distinct skills: classifying patients' conditions into diagnostic and management categories that permit the application of best-evidence guidelines, and individualizing or contextualizing care for ...

Sunita Sah, M.B.Ch.B., B.Sc., M.B.A., M.S., and George Loewenstein, Ph.D., of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, conducted a study to determine whether reminding resident physicians of the sacrifices made to obtain training, as well as suggesting this as a potential rationalization, increases self-stated willingness to accept gifts from industry. In a study that included a survey of 301 U.S. resident physicians, the researchers found that "reminding physicians of sacrifices made in obtaining their education resulted in gifts being evaluated as more acceptable: 21.7 ...