Snowmelt in the Colorado River basin is occurring earlier, reducing runoff and the amount of crucial water available downstream. A new study shows this is due to increased dust caused by human activities in the region during the past 150 years. The study, led by a NASA scientist and funded by the agency and the National Science Foundation, showed peak spring runoff now comes three weeks earlier than before the region was settled and soils were disturbed. Annual runoff is lower by more than five percent on average compared to pre-settlement levels. The findings have ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – More than 35 years after Oregon began one of the nation's most ambitious land use planning programs, a new study suggests it's still difficult to demonstrate that it has accomplished one of its primary goals – protecting agricultural lands and a thriving forest, farm and ranching industry. There's some evidence that the laws have provided a "measurable degree of protection," scientists say in the report. However, there are also impacts that were little anticipated or considered four decades ago, such as the growth of "hobby farms" in which farming or ...

Snowmelt in the Colorado River basin is occurring earlier, reducing runoff and the amount of crucial water available downstream. A new study shows this is due to increased dust caused by human activities in the region during the past 150 years. The study, led by a NASA and UCLA scientist and funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), showed peak spring runoff now comes three weeks earlier than before the region was settled and soils were disturbed. Annual runoff is lower by more than 5 percent on average, compared with pre-settlement levels. The findings ...

Washington, DC – Findings from an animal study suggest that obese women can reduce their increased risk of endometrial disease if they take vitamin D supplements, say researchers at the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. The scientists report in Cancer Prevention Research published online today that 25 percent of obese mice fed a vitamin D supplemented diet developed endometrial cancer, while 67 percent of obese mice not treated with the vitamin developed cancer. They also report that vitamin D offered no protective effects for normal weight mice; whether ...

Fluorescent microscopy makes use of molecules, such as green fluorescent protein (GFP), that emit colored light when illuminated with light of a specific wavelength. Molecules like GFP can be used to label proteins of interest and can reveal information about the relationships of molecules within cells. Fluorescence polarization, also known as anisotropy, is specific parameter of fluorescence that can provide additional information about the properties of individual molecules. Fluorescence anisotropy has been used to study isolated molecules. Now, a recent study describes ...

Tendons are the body's marionette strings, connecting bones to muscles that raise an eyebrow or propel us into a full run. That is, until an unusually forceful or awkward pull on the strings leaves us with a sprain, strain or tear. Surgeons attempt to repair over 300,000 of these injuries every year, and doctors visits for sore tendons run into the millions. Using a combination of nanoscience and biomedical and civil engineering to explore tendon structure from atoms on up, researchers have unraveled part of the mystery behind why we have problems with our tendons. A ...

A Dutch-German medical research team led by Harald Schmidt from Maastricht University, Netherlands, and Christoph Kleinschnitz, University of Würzburg, Germany, has discovered that an enzyme is responsible for the death of nerve cells after a stroke. The enzyme NOX4 produces hydrogen peroxide, a caustic molecule also used in bleaching agents. Inhibition of NOX4 by an experimental new drug in mice with stroke dramatically reduces brain damage and preserves brain functions, even when given hours after the stroke. These findings will be published next week in the online, open ...

CRP is commonly used as a serum marker for inflammation or infection, but the genetic effects of CRP variants on acute-phase serum CRP concentrations in patients with rheumatoid arthritis may be large enough to have a clinically relevant impact on the assessment of inflammatory disease activity, which in turn may influence therapeutic decision making. Furthermore, failure to take into account the potential for genetic effects may result in the inappropriate reassurance or under-treatment of patients simply because they carry low-CRP associated genetic variants. These are ...

Community Health Workers can safely and effectively provide integrated management of pneumonia and malaria to communities by dispensing amoxicillin to children with non-severe pneumonia and artemether-lumefantrine to children with malaria (after using rapid diagnostic tests). Furthermore, these activities result in a significant increase in the proportion of appropriately-timed antibiotic treatment for non-severe pneumonia and in a significant decrease in inappropriate use of antimalarials. These are the results from a study by Kojo Yeboah-Antwi from the Boston School ...

There are now 75 clinical trials and 11 systematic reviews of trials published every day, with no signs this pace is slowing. How will we ever cope?, ask Hilda Bastian, Paul Glasziou, and Sir Iain Chalmers in this week's PLoS Medicine, who also decry the continued poor quality of many of these studies. Analysing the history and growth of reviews of evidence, the authors recommend that we must now reduce unnecessary trials and prioritise truly systematic review of the literature, so that the needs of patients, clinicians, and policymakers are met. "Streamlining and innovation ...

Regional efforts towards an AIDS vaccine must be strengthened and harmonized, says a new article in this week's PLoS Medicine Magazine. Yiming Shao from the National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention in Beijing, China and colleagues from a range of Asian and international agencies announce the formation of AVAN—the AIDS Vaccine for Asia Network—that aims to strengthen its regional efforts in finding an AIDS vaccine. The authors say that AVAN has been set up to help facilitate the development of a regional AIDS vaccine strategy that will: accelerate research ...

Patients with mild to moderate heart failure who received educational materials and self-management counseling in an attempt to improve adherence to medical advice did not have a reduced rate of death or hospitalization compared to patients who received educational materials alone, according to a study in the September 22/29 issue of JAMA. There have been advances in the development of effective therapies for heart failure, but challenges remain in the delivery of these therapies to patients. "Patient nonadherence to heart failure drugs ranges from 30 percent to 60 percent ...

Among patients receiving immunosuppressive therapy for severe aplastic anemia (a condition in which the bone marrow is unable to produce blood cells), the length of telomeres (chromosome markers of biological aging) was not related to the response to treatment but was associated with a higher rate of relapse (return to low blood cell counts) and lower overall survival, according to a study in the September 22/29 issue of JAMA. Severe aplastic anemia is characterized by life-threatening cytopenias (blood cell count below normal), but this condition can be treated by bone ...

The incidence of serious infection after common ultrasound-guided procedures, such as biopsy, fine-needle aspiration (a form of biopsy) and thoracentesis (procedure involving needle drainage of the chest cavity) is low, according to a study in the October issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology (www.ajronline.org). Ultrasound imaging, also called ultrasound scanning or sonography, involves exposing part of the body to high-frequency sound waves to produce pictures of the inside of the body. "Ultrasound-guided procedures are safe, effective and accurate in that ...

Adverse cardiac events are rare one year after patients are admitted to the emergency room with low-to-moderate risk chest pain and are discharged due to a negative cardiac computed tomography angiogram (CTA), according to a study in the October issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology (www.ajronline.org). Cardiac CTA is a noninvasive heart-imaging test that determines whether fatty deposits or calcium deposits have built up in the coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart muscle. Earlier discharge of patients with low-to-moderate risk chest pain after ...

The growing use of rapid response teams dispatched by hospitals to evaluate patients whose conditions have suddenly deteriorated may be masking systemic problems in how hospitals care for their sickest patients, says a prominent Johns Hopkins patient safety expert. In a commentary published in the Sept. 22 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and co-author Eugene Litvak, Ph.D., president of the Institute for Healthcare ...

Plants picked up to 150 years ago by Victorian collectors and held by the million in herbarium collections across the world could become a powerful – and much needed – new source of data for studying climate change, according to research published this week in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Ecology. The scarcity of reliable long-term data on phenology – the study of natural climate-driven events such as the timing of trees coming into leaf or plants flowering each spring – has hindered scientists' understanding of how species respond to climate change. But ...

Washington, D.C. (September 21, 2010) -- Laser ablation is well known in medical applications like dermatology and dentistry, and for more than a decade it has been used to vaporize materials that are difficult to evaporate for high-tech applications like deposition of superconductors. Now researchers in the Journal of Applied Physics, which is published by the American Institute of Physics have studied the properties of femtosecond laser ablation plumes to better understand how to apply them to specialized films. Salvatore Amoruso at University of Naples, Italy and ...

Washington, D.C. (September 21, 2010) -- For months, Anthony West could hardly believe what he and his colleagues were seeing in the lab -- or the only explanation for the unexpected phenomena that seemed to make sense. Several of the slightly doped high-purity barium titanate (BT) ceramics his research group was investigating were not following the venerable Ohm's Law, which relates electrical voltage to current and resistance. Applying or removing a voltage caused a gradual change in the materials' electrical resistance. The new effect was seen consistently regardless ...

Washington, D.C. (September 21, 2010) -- Research is closing in on the next-generation of ultra-high-density magneto-optical storage devices that could store more than 6,000 Terabits (6 petabits) of data, more than 70 times the contents of the entire U.S. Library of Congress, on a single 5-inch disc. Yet the vast storage amount is limited by the ability to write data quickly enough to the device. In the Journal of Applied Physics, researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University in China have demonstrated a way to record on ferromagnetic films using a laser-assisted ultrafast magnetization ...

Washington, D.C. (September 21, 2010) -- At its most basic level, understanding chemistry means understanding what electrons are doing. Research published in The Journal of Chemical Physics not only maps the movement of electrons in real time but also observes a concerted electron and proton transfer that is quite different from any previously known phase transitions in the model crystal, ammonium sulfate. By extending X-ray powder diffraction into the femtosecond realm, the researchers were able to map the relocation of charges in the ammonium sulfate crystal after they ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Patients who experience physical or psychological stress – including rigorous exercise – one or two days before a cancer treatment might be unknowingly sabotaging their therapy, new research suggests. Stress in the body – even physical stress caused by intense exercise – activates a stress-sensitive protein that can spark a series of events that allow cancer cells to survive such treatments as chemotherapy and radiation, according to the research. Though the study involved a series of experiments in breast cancer cell cultures, the researchers say ...

Broca's region is classically regarded as the motor centre for speech. Our ability to form phonemes and words is controlled here. According to the maps of the cerebral cortex developed by Korbinian Brodmann, which are still in use today, Broca's region is composed of two areas. Over the last few years, however, researchers have begun to question this subdivision as a result of experience gained in clinical studies and the findings of magnetic resonance imaging analyses. "Lesions in Broca's region could result in a dozen different language problems," says Professor Katrin ...

For advanced activities of our daily life (such as driving a car, or seeing a movie), to be awake is important. It has been known so far that neuropeptide in the brain called "Orexin"controls sleep and awakening besides appetite. Here, the research group led by Dr. Akihiro Yamanaka, National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), found that orexin-releasing neurons have the self-excitation mechanism that activate each other among them, and maintain awaking. From this result, the application to doze prevention or insomnia treatment can be expected. It is reported in ...

The Dying Swan is sometimes moving smoothly and gently, sometimes in a dramatic and fiery manner, as Tchaikovsky´s majestic music from the ballet Swan Lake is playing. Yet this is no ordinary ballet dancer, but a robot in the form of a swan, created at Mälardalen University and choreographed by professional dancer Åsa Unander-Scharin. The swan robot´s just over four-minute-long dance has so far been seen only by a select few. But it has already made a big impression. Tearful eyes and words like "touching", "fascinating" and "beautiful" are some of the reactions. - We ...