CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers have constructed a 226-year history of fire in southern Illinois by looking at fire scars in tree stumps. Their study, the most in-depth fire history reported for the upper Midwest, reveals that changes in the frequency of fires dating back to the time of early European settlement permanently altered the ecology of the region. The researchers took advantage of a 1996 timber harvest of old growth post oak trees in Hamilton County. "I was just amazed at the fire scars in these trees," said William McClain, a botanist with the Illinois State ...

The Hospital Clínic of Barcelona presented today the results of the telemedicine program "Hospital VIHrtual", coordinated by Dr. Felipe Garcia and Dr. Agata León, from the Hospital Clínic Service of Infectious Diseases directed by Dr. Josep M ª Gatell. The tool has been created by a team from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, led by Prof. Enrique J. Gómez and César Cáceres. Through a direct connection via a webcam, Dr. Garcia showed a virtual consultation and explained the benefits of the project, which does not replace the classic face to face visits but complements ...

New Rochelle, NY, March 14, 2011—The first human studies of an oral drug regimen to prevent HIV infection in high-risk individuals yielded a promising near 50% reduction in HIV incidence, but a number of issues require additional research before oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) can be implemented on a large scale, according to an article in AIDS Patient Care and STDs, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com). The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/apc After the success of a trial of PrEP in a high risk population ...

BETHLEHEM, PA—A team of electrical engineers and chemists at Lehigh University have experimentally verified the "rainbow" trapping effect, demonstrating that plasmonic structures can slow down light waves over a broad range of wavelengths. The idea that a rainbow of broadband light could be slowed down or stopped using plasmonic structures has only recently been predicted in theoretical studies of metamaterials. The Lehigh experiment employed focused ion beams to mill a series of increasingly deeper, nanosized grooves into a thin sheet of silver. By focusing light along ...

Boston, MA – With 180,000 men diagnosed with prostate cancer each year, it is one of the most common types of cancer in the country. For this reason, it has been cited as a good marker for health care spending in general, reflective of the greater trends across the United States. New research from the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center (DF/BWCC) shows that newer, more expensive treatment options for prostate cancer were adopted rapidly and widely during 2002 – 2005 without proof of their cost-effectiveness, and may offer explanations for why health care spending ...

Mutations in three pathways important for suppressing tumors cooperate to launch glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor that strikes children and adults. But new research from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists shows those changes alone are not sufficient to cause cancer. Tumor formation requires additional mutations, some affecting different points in the same disrupted regulatory pathways. Researchers demonstrated that in mouse models of glioblastoma, tumors develop in several regions of the brain. The findings, as well as the technique investigators ...

Read the comments on any website and you may despair at Americans' inability to argue well. Thankfully, educators now name argumentive reasoning as one of the basics students should leave school with. But what are these skills and how do children acquire them? Deanna Kuhn and Amanda Crowell, of Columbia University's Teachers College, have designed an innovative curriculum to foster their development and measured the results. Among their findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, dialogue is a better path to developing ...

HOUSTON - Researchers discovered a new, key component in the spread of lung cancer as well as a likely way to block it with drugs now in clinical trial. The study was published today (Monday, March 14) in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. A team led by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center found a way to identify metastasis-prone lung cancer cells and then uncovered a mechanism that shifts primary tumor cells into a more deadly type of cell with the capacity to move elsewhere in the body. "We think tumors have to learn how to metastasize ...

DENVER – Those working for healthier humans around the globe are making headway in fighting communicable diseases such as AIDS, malaria and diarrheal illness, according to research from the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures in the University of Denver's (DU) Josef Korbel School of International Studies. The center recently released the third in a series of five volumes that focus on human progress in which researchers explore topics such as education, poverty, infrastructure and governance. The latest book is Improving Global Health: Forecasting the ...

VIDEO: When an external magnetic field is applied to the solution of nanorods, they align themselves parallel to one another like a set of tiny flashlights turned in one direction, and... Click here for more information. RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Chemists at the University of California, Riverside have developed tiny, nanoscale-size rods of iron oxide particles in the lab that respond to an external magnetic field in a way that could dramatically improve how visual information ...

A faster, better and cheaper desalination process enhanced by carbon nanotubes has been developed by NJIT Professor Somenath Mitra. The process creates a unique new architecture for the membrane distillation process by immobilizing carbon nanotubes in the membrane pores. Conventional approaches to desalination are thermal distillation and reverse osmosis. "Unfortunately the current membrane distillation method is too expensive for use in countries and municipalities that need potable water," said Mitra. "Generally only industry, where waste heat is freely available, ...

A new report shows that older people who receive Guided Care, a new form of primary care, use fewer expensive health services compared to older people who receive regular primary care. Research published in the March 2011 edition of Archives of Internal Medicine found that after 20 months of a randomized controlled trial, Guided Care patients experienced, on average, 30 percent fewer home health care episodes, 21 percent fewer hospital readmissions, 16 percent fewer skilled nursing facility days, and 8 percent fewer skilled nursing facility admissions. Only the reduction ...

New biological research may be relevant to the effects of a mother's high-fat diet during pregnancy on the development of obesity in her children. An animal study at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia suggests that a high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet causes oxidative stress -- an excess of deleterious free radicals -- during pregnancy, predisposing the offspring to obesity and diabetes. Feeding rats antioxidants before and during pregnancy completely prevented obesity and glucose intolerance in their offspring. If the results in animals prove to be similar ...

A new study has shown that a surgical technique called microdissection testicular sperm extraction (TESE) can effectively locate and extract viable sperm in more than one-third of adult male childhood cancer survivors who were previously considered sterile due to prior chemotherapy treatment. As a result, many of the men were subsequently able to father children with the help of in vitro fertilization. The findings offer a new option for many cancer survivors who want to have children but were thought infertile because of earlier cancer treatment. "It was previously ...

In the early stages of human embryogenesis, a transcription factor called Twist1 plays a key regulatory role in how the embryo assumes form and function. Much later in life, however, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, say Twist1 can re-emerge, taking a darker and more deadly turn. In a paper published in the March 15, 2011 issue of Cancer Cell, UCSD scientists led by Jing Yang, PhD, assistant professor of pharmacology and pediatrics, identify a unique function of Twist1 in later life: it promotes the formation of invadopodia in ...

TORONTO, Ont., March 14, 2011 -- Some physicians are prescribing opioids such as OxyContin 55 times as often as others, according to a new study led by St. Michael's Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). The study found most opioid-related deaths occur among patients treated by physicians who frequently prescribe opioids, suggesting doctors who prescribe a lot of opioids may not be doing so safely. "We found that the 20 per cent of family doctors who are frequent prescribers wrote 55 times as many prescriptions as the 20 per cent of family ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – New research reveals why people read fitness and fashion magazines featuring photos of impossibly thin or muscular models -- models whose appearance highlight the readers' own flaws. Many previous studies have found that people who are unhappy with their physical appearance feel even more dissatisfied when they are shown photos of models who have "ideal" bodies. "So you have to wonder: why do we still buy those magazines and watch those television programs when they should just make us more dissatisfied?" said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, associate professor ...

Providing clues into why the severity of a common parasitic infection can vary greatly from person to person, a new Johns Hopkins study shows that each one of three strains of the cat-borne parasite Toxoplasma gondii sets off a unique reaction in the nerve cells it invades. Past research suggests that the parasite, estimated to infect 25 percent of people worldwide, can trigger or exacerbate psychotic symptoms and schizophrenia in genetically predisposed people. The findings of the new study, published in the March issue of the journal Infection and Immunity, help explain ...

New research by Chongsuk Ryou, researcher at the UK Sanders-Brown Center on Aging and professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics in the UK College of Medicine, may shed light on possible treatments for prion diseases. Prion diseases, which include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow" disease) in cattle, are caused by prions — unconventional pathogens composed of infectious protein particles and resistant to conventional sterilization procedures. Presently there is no known agent or procedure that can halt ...

New Rochelle, NY, March 14, 2011–Adolescents and young adults are neither children nor adults and those affected by cancer require targeted care that crosses the boundaries between pediatric and adult oncology, according to several pioneers in this still-developing field of adolescent and young adult oncology. An illuminating roundtable discussion by these experts will be published in the premier issue of Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology, a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed publication of Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com). The Roundtable has been published ...

The so-called cellular slime mold, a unicellular organism that may transition into a multicellular organism under stress, has just been found to have a tissue structure that was previously thought to exist only in more sophisticated animals. What's more, two proteins that are needed by the slime mold to form this structure are similar to those that perform the same function in more sophistical animals. Shortly after an animal embryo forms, it develops a single layer of cells that, shaped like a hollow ball, is empty at its center. Acting as a kind of "man behind the curtain" ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study suggests that combining two experimental anticancer peptide agents might simultaneously block formation of new tumor blood vessels while also inhibiting the growth of tumor cells. This early test of the two agents in a breast cancer model suggests that the double hit can stifle tumor progression, avoid drug resistance and cause few side effects, say researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James) who developed the agents and evaluated ...

HILO, Hawaii—A team of scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology and the USDA Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW) has developed new, more accurate methods for mapping carbon in Hawaii's forests. Their research appears in an online issue of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. The growing market for private and public entities to purchase carbon offsets has led to a need to find better monitoring techniques to accurately quantify the amount of carbon (C) held in our nation's forests. Combining ...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have ruled out an alternate theory on the nature of dark energy after recalculating the expansion rate of the universe to unprecedented accuracy. The universe appears to be expanding at an increasing rate. Some believe that is because the universe is filled with a dark energy that works in the opposite way of gravity. One alternative to that hypothesis is that an enormous bubble of relatively empty space eight billion light-years across surrounds our galactic neighborhood. If we lived near the center of this void, observations ...

The massive rain storm that stretched from New York to Florida last week dropped some record rainfall and NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite measured that rainfall from space. Those rainfall totals were assembled in a "rain map" created at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Although the heaviest rainfall last week was in the southern United States, flooding was reported in states from Louisiana to northern New York. A rainfall analysis was created made by merging precipitation data from multiple satellites. This Multisatellite ...