With a nod to one of nature's best surface chemists—an obscure desert beetle—polymer scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a convenient way to construct test surfaces with a variable affinity for water, so that the same surface can range from superhydrophilic to superhydrophobic, and everything in between.

When repairing severed or damaged motor nerves with a donor nerve graft, surgeons have traditionally used a sensory nerve from another area of the patient's body. However, these patients often do not fully regain function in the injured area.

But now a team of surgeons at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Barnes-Jewish Hospital has found that repairing a motor nerve in rats with an intact motor nerve yields better results than using a sensory nerve. The research appeared in the March issue of the journal Microsurgery.

Some states spend as little as $35 per person each year on home- and community-based services for seniors, while other states spend more than $1,300 per person annually, according to previous research.

Regardless of how much was spent on home- and community-based services, the researchers found that doubling states' spending on services would reduce the risk of nursing home admission among childless seniors by 35 percent. Seniors who do not have children to help care for them are less likely to have to go into a nursing home if they live in a state that spends more on home- and community- based services, researchers have found.

Thousands of men facing surgical removal of the prostate due to cancer may someday have one less thing to worry about: post-surgical urinary incontinence.

That's because a team of expert urologic surgeons at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center has devised a simple, effective means of reconstructing key anatomical structures that ensure continence.

To download the 8 meter X 4 meter 900M resolution poster it is ony available through BitTorrent, the size is 3.89 GB and it can be downloaded here.

Smaller resolutions below.

The most detailed portraits ever of the Earth's land surface have been created with ESA's Envisat environmental satellite. The portraits are the first products produced as part of the ESA-initiated GlobCover project and are available online.

Bimonthly global composites for May to June 2005 and March to April 2006 can be accessed through a newly developed map server tool on ESA’s GlobCover website.

A research team, including Kent State Professor of Geology Dr. Joseph Ortiz, tracing the origin of the large carbon dioxide increase in Earth’s atmosphere at the end of the last ice age has detected two ancient "burps" that originated from the deepest parts of the southern ocean around Antarctica.

The new study showed carbon that had built up in the ocean over millennia was released in two big pulses at about 18,000 years ago and 13,000 years ago, says Dr. Thomas Marchitto of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who jointly led the study with colleague Dr. Scott Lehman.