Extreme weather, major accidents, forest fires or attacks: Citizens, rescue services and the authorities need to receive as much advance warning as possible to be able to react as quickly as possible. "Independent warning systems for each of these catastrophes and for every situation that may affect people are not feasible financially, though," observes project manager Ulrich Meissen of the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and System Technology ISST in Berlin. "In addition, that would lead to a large collection of parallel items of information that can even prove a mutual ...

Using a method based on geographic positioning systems that allowed them to characterize the topography of the bats' molars in a way similar to how geographers characterize mountain surfaces, the researchers calculated a measure of dental complexity that reflects how "rugged" the surface of the tooth is. They illustrate a trend from relative simplicity of the shearing molars in insect eaters and omnivores to high complexity of the crushing molars in fruit eaters. Working with field-collected bat skulls, researchers Sharlene Santana and Betsy Dumont of UMass Amherst, with ...

Scientists have discovered the first evidence linking brain function variations between the left and right sides of the brain to size at birth and the weight of the placenta. The finding could shed new light on the causes of mental health problems in later life. The research, conducted at the University of Southampton and the Medical Research Council (MRC) Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit at Southampton General Hospital, reveals that children who were born small, with relatively large placentas, showed more activity on the right side of their brains than the left. It is this ...

Nele Festjens and Nico Callewaert of VIB and Ghent University have improved the efficacy of the vaccine for tuberculosis. The new vaccine affords - as already proven in mice - better protection against the disease. The development of a new tuberculosis vaccine is a priority in the fight against the disease which claims the lives of 1.7 million people each year. The current vaccine provides only partial protection. Nico Callewaert: "Our vaccine is more effective because it is more quickly recognized by the immune system of the vaccinated person. We have, as it were, ...

Parents and caregivers have traditionally relied on cribs, playpens and bassinets to protect children while they sleep. The massive crib recalls followed by the announcement in December 2010 by the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to ban drop-side cribs have caused many families to question the safety of these products. A new study conducted by researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital examined injuries associated with cribs, playpens and bassinets among children younger than ...

Inducing labor without a medical reason is associated with negative outcomes for the mother, including increased rates of cesarean delivery, greater blood loss and an extended length of stay in the hospital, and does not provide any benefit for the newborn. As the number of scheduled deliveries continues to climb, it is important for physicians and mothers-to-be to understand the risks associated with elective induction. The new findings, published in the February issue of the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, only apply to women having their first child, and may not ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Among the many differences between girls and boys, add the effects from caffeine -- physiological, behavioral and subjective -- to the list. Results of a double-blind, placebo-controlled, dose-response study of the response of youth to caffeine found that, in general, boys get a greater rush and more energy from caffeine than girls. Boys also reported they felt that caffeine had a positive effect on their athletic performance. Girls didn't report on this issue. The study, conducted by Jennifer L. Temple, PhD, a neurobiologist and assistant professor ...

Unlike alcohol problems and antisocial behavior, depression doesn’t decline with age in addiction-prone women in their 30s and 40s – it continues to increase, a new study led by University of Michigan Health System researchers found. The longitudinal analysis examined the influences of the women’s histories, family life and neighborhood instability on their alcoholism symptoms, antisocial behavior and depression over a 12-year period covering the earlier years of marriage and motherhood. The research, published in Development and Psychopathology, is part of an ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. - Mayo Clinic researchers confirmed that patients who receive therapeutic hypothermia after resuscitation from cardiac arrest have favorable chances of surviving the event and recovering good functional status. In therapeutic hypothermia, a patient's body temperature is cooled to 33 degrees Celsius following resuscitation from cardiac arrest, in order to slow the brain's metabolism and protect the brain against the damage initiated by the lack of blood flow and oxygenation. This study was published in the December 2010 issue of Annals of Neurology. "Therapeutic ...

AMES, Iowa -- Why would anyone falsely confess to a crime they didn't commit? It seems illogical, but according to The Innocence Project, there have been 266 post-conviction DNA exonerations since 1989 -- 25 percent of which involved a false confession. A new Iowa State University study may shed light on one reason for those false confessions. In two experiments simulating choices suspects face in police interrogations, undergraduate subjects altered their behavior to confess to illegal activities in order to relieve short-term distress (the proximal consequence) while ...

Yet some athletes deliberately train at high altitude, with less oxygen, so they can perform better. Their bodies adapt to the reduced oxygen. Now a doctor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine has explored the relationship between lack of oxygen, called hypoxia, and the inflammation that can injure or kill some patients who undergo surgery. In a liver transplant, for example, the surgery and anesthesiology can go perfectly yet the new liver will fail because of hypoxia. "Understanding how hypoxia is linked to inflammation may help save lives of people who ...

A powerful solar flare has ushered in the largest space weather storm in atleast four years and has already disrupted some ground communications on Earth, said University of Colorado Boulder Professor Daniel Baker, an internationally known space weather expert. Classified as a Class X flare, the Feb. 15 event also spewed billions of tons of charged particles toward Earth in what are called coronal mass ejections and ignited a geomagnetic storm in Earth's magnetic field, said Baker, director of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Such powerful ejections ...

When studying relationships, psychological scientists have often focused on how couples fight. But how they recover from a fight is important, too. According to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, couples' abilities to bounce back from conflict may depend on what both partners were like as infants. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have been following a cohort of people since before they were born, in the mid-1970s. When the subjects were about 20 years old, they visited the lab with their romantic ...

LOS ANGELES (February 18, 2011) – Scientists at the Children's Center for Cancer and Blood Diseases and The Saban Research Institute of Children's Hospital Los Angeles today announced a breakthrough discovery in understanding how the body fights leukemia. They have identified a protein called CD19-ligand (CD19-L) located on the surface of certain white blood cells that facilitates the recognition and destruction of leukemia cells by the immune system. This work represents the first report of a bioengineered version of CD19-L, a recombinant human biotherapeutic agent, ...

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 18 – Only one out of more than 1,900 people evaluated met the American Heart Association (AHA) definition of ideal cardiovascular health, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Their findings were recently published online in Circulation. Ideal cardiovascular health is the combination of these seven factors: nonsmoking, a body mass index less than 25, goal-level physical activity and healthy diet, untreated cholesterol below 200, blood pressure below 120/80 and fasting blood sugar below 100, explained ...

DALLAS – Feb. 17, 2011 – Low levels of the anti-aging hormone Klotho may serve as an early warning sign of the presence of kidney disease and its deadly cardiovascular complications, according to findings by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers. Using mice, investigators found that soft-tissue calcification, a common and serious side effect of chronic kidney disease (CKD), improves when Klotho hormone levels are restored. The study is available online in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. The essential Klotho protein, which is produced by the kidneys, ...

One bad apple is all it takes to spoil the barrel. And one misfolded protein may be all that's necessary to corrupt other proteins, forming large aggregations linked to several incurable neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Stanford biology Professor Ron Kopito has shown that the mutant, misfolded protein responsible for Huntington's disease can move from cell to cell, recruiting normal proteins and forming aggregations in each cell it visits. Knowing that this protein spends part of its time outside cells "opens up the possibility ...

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a new sampling device that could prevent thousands of people worldwide from dying of pneumonia each year. Called PneumoniaCheck, the device created at Georgia Tech is a solution to the problem of diagnosing pneumonia, which is a major initiative of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Pneumonia, an inflammation of the lungs, kills about 2.4 million people each year. The problem is particularly devastating in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, where a child dies ...

The most widely prescribed antidepressants – medicines such as Prozac, Lexapro and Paxil – work by blocking the serotonin transporter, a brain protein that normally clears away the mood-regulating chemical serotonin. Or so the current thinking goes. That theory about how selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) work can now be put to the test with a new mouse model developed by neuroscientists at Vanderbilt University. These mice, described in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), express a serotonin transporter that ...

While a world free of nuclear weapons remains a goal for governments around the world, nuclear security constitutes a major challenge for the 21st century, as recognised at the 2010 nuclear security summit in Washington. Citizens are generally aware of international efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but they are often unaware of nuclear security research and the important role science in this field. A new European nuclear security training centre and enhanced international collaboration are good examples. A recent survey on the EU´s radiological ...

To build the next generation of sensors – with applications ranging from medical devices to robotics to new consumer goods – Chang Liu looks to biology. Liu, professor of mechanical engineering and electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, is using insights from nature as inspiration for both touch and flow sensors — areas that currently lack good sensors for recording and communicating the senses. Liu will discuss his research in a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Association ...

The arrival of affordable, high throughput DNA sequencing, coupled with improved bioinformatics and statistical analyses is bringing about major advances in the field of molecular plant breeding. Multidisciplinary breeding programs on the world's major crop plants are able to investigate genome-wide variations in DNA sequences and link them to the inheritance of highly complex traits controlled by many genes, such as hybrid vigor. Furthermore, there has been a step-change in speed and cost-effectiveness. What previously took six generations to achieve can now be done in ...

NEW YORK, February 4, 2011 –– A defining feature of a scientific discovery is replication by others. In today's age of computational science, this means higher standards of communication of discoveries — making available the data that generated the results along with the published research paper. Doing this makes the technology behind the finding widely accessible, facilitating re-use and verification of results. Tools and approaches to facilitate such knowledge transfer will be discussed at a symposium titled The Digitization of Science: Reproducibility and Interdisciplinary ...

SAN DIEGO, CA – Knee pain related to osteoarthritis (OA) is a common complaint among obese individuals and retired professional athletes, especially former NFL players, but researchers presenting their work at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's Specialty Day program (February 19th) say they have a simple solution: lose weight. "Our research on patients who were obese with early-onset knee osteoarthritis showed that those individuals who underwent isolated weight loss via bariatric surgery and lost an average of 57 pounds within the first six months ...

SAN DIEGO, CA – Despite known risks and outcomes of the common elbow procedure known as Tommy John surgery, parents, coaches and players still have incorrect assumptions regarding player performance, say researchers presenting their study at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's Specialty Day in San Diego, CA (February 19th). "Despite the recognized risk of pitch type and amount of pitches, nearly a third of those we surveyed did not believe pitch counts were a risk factor for injury. Even more disturbing was that fact that a quarter of players and coaches ...