Scientists have reported that an experimental vaccine targeting one of the most common genetic drivers of pancreatic cancer, called mutant KRAS, is safe and generated a durable immune responses aimed at preventing the cancer.
In a recent JAMA article,
2008 National Survey of Mental Health Treatment Facilities
data of psychiatric hospitals, residential treatment centers and freestanding outpatient clinics or partial-care and multiservice mental health groups found that only 63 percent of U.S. counties have at least one mental health facility that provides outpatient treatment for youth.
Less than half of U.S. counties have a mental health facility with special programs for youth with severe emotional disturbance. The gaps in infrastructure are even larger in rural communities, where less than half even have one mental health facility that provides outpatient care and only one-third has outpatient facilities with specific programs for youth with severe illness.
About 45 years ago, Penn evolutionary biologist a
Daniel Janzen reasoned
that change in species from site to site across mountain ranges in the tropics should be greater than in temperate latitudes
When is it time for parents to help and when it is time to back away?
Since kids were having children of their own at age 18 a century ago it seems obvious that hovering over college-age students is not needed. And a new paper in Journal of Child and Family Studies
says that college students with over-controlling parents are more likely to be depressed and less satisfied with their lives. This so-called helicopter parenting style negatively affects students' well-being by violating their need to feel both autonomous and competent.
Wind energy is not very efficient and activists have turned on it because 300,000 out of 10,000,000,000 birds are killed by wind turbines each year. Without subsidies it would not exist but exist it does, only now manufacturers have had to discover physics they did not anticipate.
Wind turbine failures primarily happen because components are weakened under turbulent air flow conditions and then need to be replaced, at significant cost.
Ancient carbon trapped in Arctic permafrost is extremely sensitive to sunlight and can release climate-warming carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere faster than previously thought if exposed to the surface when long-frozen soils melt and collapse..
They studied places in Arctic Alaska where permafrost is melting and is causing the overlying land surface to collapse, forming erosional holes and landslides and exposing long-buried soils to sunlight, and found that sunlight increases bacterial conversion of exposed soil carbon into carbon dioxide gas by at least 40 percent compared to carbon that remains in the dark.
Dance is a beautiful form of expression, but it can be physically taxing and strenuous on the human body, particularly for children and adolescents.
According to a new analysis, between 1991 and 2007 the annual number of dance-related injuries increased 37 percent, from 6,175 to 8,477 injuries. Sprains and/or strains were the most common types of dance-related injuries at 52 percent, with falls (45 percent) being the most common causes of injuries.
A group has created a new computer system that can quickly reconstruct protolanguages, the rudimentary ancient tongues from which modern languages evolved. And their tool is already 85 percent as accurate as the manual reconstructions performed by expert linguists, they write in PNAS.
Protolanguages are reconstructed by grouping words with common meanings from related modern languages, analyzing common features, and then applying sound-change rules and other criteria to derive the common parent.
The new tool designed by Bouchard-Côté and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley analyzes sound changes at the level of basic phonetic units, and can operate at much greater scale than previous computerized tools.
Lead is a common element found in old paints, soil, water and the atmosphere. At high doses it is lethal but also causes minor symptoms like headaches.
Small children are obviously impacted more and lead has been linked to irreversible damage to organs, kidneys in particular, and the nervous system including the brain. Now lead exposure is implicated in 'learning disabilities', behavioral problems, lowered intelligence, stunted growth, and hearing impairment.
Apple's iPhone success is unquestioned but the perception exceeds the reality. Instead, the more modest expectations of Android devices make people far more satisfied with them. iPhone 5 only ranks fifth in device satisfaction in a study of 93,825 US mobile users.
Europeans may not like immigrants from the east now, but that is where Stone Age Europe got its agriculture, and thus an origin of Western civilization, according to new data resulting from a study of the teeth of prehistoric farmers and the hunter-gatherers with whom they briefly overlapped.
Agriculture was introduced to Central Europe from the Near East by colonizers who brought farming technology with them.
President Barack Obama has been criticized for a lack of diversity in his cabinet compared to his predecessor - charges he also faced when he was president of the Harvard Law Review and only 25% of editors chosen by him were women. His Supreme Court Justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, were women but their selection meant that all 9 Supreme Court Justices have been chosen from a 230 mile section of the United States - two Ivy League Schools, Harvard and Yale, making decisions for all Americans. Critics again claimed a lack of diversity.
In the ongoing culture war among climate scientists, climate scientologists and climate deniers, few things stands out like the effect of volcanoes.
Volcanoes are well-known for cooling the climate but how much has been unclear, leading to radically differing claims and interpretations. Atmospheric chemists from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Copenhagen say that patterns of isotopes found in ancient volcanic sulfur trapped in ice cores, and patterns due to stratospheric photochemistry, are a way to say for sure which historic episodes of global cooling were caused by volcanic eruptions.
