Traces of crude oil that linger on the shores of Alaska's Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez oil spill remain highly biodegradable, despite almost 20 years of weathering and decomposition, scientists are reporting in a new study. Their findings, which appear in ACS' semi-monthly journal Environmental Science & Technology, suggest a simple approach for further cleaning up remaining traces of the Exxon Valdez spill — the largest in U.S. waters until the 2010 Deepwater Horizon episode. Albert D. Venosa and colleagues note that bacteria, evaporation, sunlight, and ...

Garlic has "significant" potential for preventing cardiomyopathy, a form of heart disease that is a leading cause of death in people with diabetes, scientists have concluded in a new study. Their report, which also explains why people with diabetes are at high risk for diabetic cardiomyopathy, appears in ACS' bi-weekly Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Wei-Wen Kuo and colleagues note that people with diabetes have at least twice the risk of death from heart disease as others, with heart disease accounting for 80 percent of all diabetes-related deaths. They are ...

In a real-life "back to the future" story, scientists today reported that the sustainable, environmentally-friendly process that gave birth to plywood a century ago is re-emerging as a "green" alternative to wood adhesives made from petroleum. Speaking at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, they described development of new soy-based glues that use a substance in soy milk and tofu and could mean a new generation of more eco-friendly furniture, cabinets, flooring, and other wood products. "Protein adhesives allowed the development of composite wood products such ...

Drug manufacturers have been adjusting to strict new government standards that limit the amount of potentially harmful impurities in medicine, according to the cover story of the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine. The impurities are "genotoxic," capable of damaging the DNA in genes. C&EN Senior Correspondent Ann Thayer notes that internationally accepted regulations long have limited the levels of impurities permitted in prescription drugs. But guidelines have not covered so-called genotoxic impurities (GTIs), substances that ...

It remains an unresolved question whether adult patients with Hodgkin's lymphoma, a certain type of lymph node cancer, benefit from allogeneic stem cell transplantation (SCT) with an unrelated donor. This is due to the fact that studies are lacking that compare this therapy with autologous transplantation or conventional chemotherapy without SCT. In addition, the few studies comparing SCT with an unrelated donor versus SCT with a related donor provide neither proof nor indications of an advantage. However, it cannot be inferred from the studies that both procedures are ...

Boston, Mass. -- A national epidemiologic study finds a strong, consistent correlation between adult diabetes and particulate air pollution that persists after adjustment for other risk factors like obesity and ethnicity, report researchers from Children's Hospital Boston. The relationship was seen even at exposure levels below the current EPA safety limit. The report, published in the October issue of Diabetes Care, is among the first large-scale population-based studies to link diabetes prevalence with air pollution. It is consistent with prior laboratory studies finding ...

Blueberries may help fight atherosclerosis, also known as hardening of the arteries, according to results of a preliminary U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)-funded study with laboratory mice. The research provides the first direct evidence that blueberries can help prevent harmful plaques or lesions, symptomatic of atherosclerosis, from increasing in size in arteries. Principal investigator Xianli Wu, based in Little Rock, Ark., with the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Arkansas Children's Nutrition Center and with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 29, 2010 – Premature infants are often examined for retinopathy of prematurity (ROP). This exam can be quite stressful for the neonate, causing changes in heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturation, and increased crying. In a recent study published in the Journal of AAPOS, the Official Publication of the American Association of Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus, researchers found that feeding infants one hour before the examination unexpectedly reduced stress but did not increase vomiting or gastric aspirates. Investigators from ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Flicking through a wallpaper app with backgrounds of Mickey Mouse and a tropical waterfall, Peter Gilbert gets a plain, black and white text notification on his smartphone. A third of the way down the screen it says, "Taint: Phone Number, IMEI, ICCID (sim card identifier)." The message alerts Gilbert that the wallpaper app has sent his phone's number and other identifying information to imnet.us. Checking online, it appears the address is a website in Shenzhen, China. The notification came from TaintDroid, a prototype extension to the Android mobile-phone ...

Troy, N.Y. – The purification of drug components is a large hurdle facing modern drug development. This is particularly true of drugs that utilize proteins, which are notoriously difficult to separate from other potentially deadly impurities. Scientists within the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to understand and improve an important protein purification process. "We hope to use our insights to help those in the industry develop improved processes to provide ...

Publicly available cell-phone applications from application markets are releasing consumers' private information to online advertisers, according to a joint study by Intel Labs, Penn State, and Duke University. Researchers at the participating institutions have developed a realtime monitoring service called TaintDroid that precisely analyses how private information is obtained and released by applications "downloaded" to consumer phones. TaintDroid is an extension to the Android mobile-phone platform that tracks the flow of sensitive data through third-party applications. In ...

MANHATTAN, KAN. -- For two Kansas State University professors, receiving one of software engineering's most prestigious awards was more than 10 years in the making. A seven-member research team that included K-State's John Hatcliff, professor of computer and information science, and Robby, associate professor of computing and information science, set out in 1998 to illustrate how different technologies could test for problems that arise when computer programs multitask. The team published "Bandera: Extracting Finite-State Models from Java Source code" in 2000. The publication ...

A new approach to anchor teeth back in the jaw using stem cells has been developed and successfully tested in the laboratory for the first time by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The new strategy represents a potential major advance in the battle against gum disease, a serious infection that eventually leads to tooth loss. About 80 percent of U.S. adults suffer from gum disease, according to the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. Researchers in UIC's Brodie Laboratory for Craniofacial Genetics used stem cells obtained from ...

PHILADELPHIA – After experiencing a potentially traumatic event – a car accident, a physical or sexual assault, a sports injury, witnessing violence – as many as 1 in 5 children will develop Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A new approach that helps improve communication between child and caregiver, such as recognizing and managing traumatic stress symptoms and teaching coping skills, was able to prevent chronic and sub-clinical PTSD in 73 percent of children. The intervention, called the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention (CFTSI) also reduced PTSD symptoms ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Researchers at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center have published the first report using imaging to show that changes in brain tissue can occur in breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. The cognitive effects of chemotherapy, often referred to as "chemobrain," have been known for years. However, the IU research is the first to use brain imaging to study women with breast cancer before and after treatment, showing that chemotherapy can affect gray matter. The researchers reported their findings in the October 2010 edition ...

DALLAS – Sept. 29, 2010 – More people are drinking than 20 years ago, according to a UT Southwestern Medical Center analysis of national alcohol consumption patterns. Gathered from more than 85,000 respondents, the data suggests that a variety of factors, including social, economic and ethnic influences and pressures, are involved in the increase. "The reasons for the uptick vary and may involve complex sociodemographic changes in the population, but the findings are clear: More people are consuming alcohol now than in the early 1990s," said Dr. Raul Caetano, dean of ...

The Magellanic Stream is an arc of hydrogen gas spanning more than 100 degrees of the sky as it trails behind the Milky Way's neighbor galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has long been thought to be the dominant gravitational force in forming the Stream by pulling gas from the Clouds. A new computer simulation by Gurtina Besla (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and her colleagues now shows, however, that the Magellanic Stream resulted from a past close encounter between these dwarf galaxies rather than effects of the ...

In recent human trials for a promising new class of drug designed to target the hepatitis C virus (HCV) without shutting down the immune system, some of the HCV strains being treated exhibited signs of drug resistance. In response, an interdisciplinary team of Florida State University biologists, chemists and biomedical researchers devised a novel genetic screening method that can identify the drug-resistant HCV strains and the molecular-level mechanisms that make them that way –– helping drug developers to tailor specific therapies to circumvent them. The potentially ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- In the largest, most modern, single-institution study of its kind, Mayo Clinic urologists mined a long-term data registry for survival rates of patients who underwent radical prostatectomy (http://www.mayoclinic.org/radical-prostatectomy/) for localized prostate cancer. The findings are being presented at the North Central Section of the American Urological Association's 84th Annual Meeting in Chicago. A radical prostatectomy is an operation to remove the prostate gland and some of the tissue around it. In this study, Mayo Clinic researchers discovered ...

Results from a 12-month multi-center clinical trial did not show therapeutic benefit of abatacept over placebo in patients with non-life threatening systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Abatacept failed to prevent new disease flares in SLE patients tapered from corticosteroids in an analysis where mild, moderate and severe disease flares were evaluated together. Full details of the phase IIb clinical trial are published in the October issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR). The ACR estimates that 161,000 to 322,000 adults ...

NASA is providing data from three satellites to give forecasters valuable information on newly strengthened Tropical Storm Nicole. Nicole was Tropical Depression 16 until 11 a.m. EDT, Sept. 29 and NASA data helped confirm her new designation. Satellite data from NASA showed frigid thunderstorm cloud top temperatures, heavy rainfall, and extensive cloud cover as Nicole strengthened. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument uses infrared technology to take a tropical cyclone's temperature. AIRS sits on NASA's Aqua satellite and captured an image of those cloud ...

PHILADELPHIA –- Computational biologists at the University of Pennsylvania say that species are still accumulating on Earth but at a slower rate than in the past. In the study, published in the journal PLoS Biology, Penn researchers developed a novel computational approach to infer the dynamics of species diversification using the family trees of present-day species. Using nine patterns of diversification as alternative models, they examined 289 phylogenies, or evolutionary trees, representing amphibians, arthropods, birds, mammals, mollusks and flowering plants. The ...

The Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the co-trustees for natural resources affected by the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill announced today they have started the injury assessment and restoration planning phase of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, a legal process to determine the type and amount of restoration needed to compensate the public for harm to natural resources and their human uses as a result of the spill. This is the second phase of the NRDA process. Much of the initial "preassessment" phase has already ...

A study led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego shows that California's 40 year-long tobacco control program has resulted in lung cancer rates that are nearly 25 percent lower than other states. "The consistency in the trends from cigarette sales and population surveys was reassuring" said John P. Pierce, PhD, Sam M. Walton Professor of Cancer Research in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at UCSD School of Medicine and director of the Population Sciences Division at Moores UCSD Cancer Center. "What is really important is that the widening ...

September 28, 2010 – Although first responders willingly put themselves in harm's way during disasters, new research indicates that they may not be as willing— if the disaster is a potentially lethal pandemic. In a recent study, researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health found that more than 50% of the first responders and other essential workers they surveyed might be absent from work during a serious pandemic, even if they were healthy. The study, reported online in the October issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, ...