News Articles

Of about 250,000 women enrolled in an integrated healthcare delivery system, increased CT utilization between 2000 and 2010 could mean an increase in the risk of breast cancer for certain women, including younger patients and those who received repeat exams. According to the study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), nuclear medicine examinations may also contribute to increased breast cancer risk. 
CT uses ionizing radiation in the form of X-rays to produce cross-sectional images of the body. In nuclear medicine imaging, a radiopharmaceutical—a compound that includes a small amount of a radioactive material—is delivered inside the body to help visualize internal organs.

A community of bacteria that survives in a dark, salty and sub-freezing environment has been discovered beneath nearly 20 meters of ice in one of Antarctica's most isolated lakes.
Lake Vida, the largest of several unique lakes found in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, contains no oxygen, is mostly frozen and possesses the highest nitrous oxide levels of any natural water body on Earth. A briny liquid that is approximately six times saltier than seawater percolates throughout the icy environment that has an average temperature of minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit.

What do you get when you combine onerous government regulations that have increased exponentially, experimental climates that mean lots of products just may not work, and if they do work you get a product that will only be yours for a few years and during that time a whole bunch of lawyers will look for ways to sue you?
You get modern biomedical research.  And a terrible climate for private investment.

A large number of friends on Facebook has been linked to higher levels of stress, according to surveys compiled by the University of Edinburgh Business School which found that the more groups of people in someone's Facebook friends, the greater potential to cause offense. No surprise, adding employers or parents resulted in the greatest increase in anxiety. 

Alaska's Columbia Glacier, an iconic glacier featured in the documentary "Chasing Ice" and one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world, will cease retreating around 2020, according to a study by the University of Colorado Boulder.
Their computer model predicts the retreat of the Columbia Glacier will stop when the glacier reaches a new stable position, about 15 miles upstream from the stable position it occupied prior to the 1980s.   

NASA's Cassini mission has spotted a second feature shaped like the 1980s video game icon Pac-Man, this time on Saturn's moon Tethys.The pattern appears in thermal data obtained by Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer, with warmer areas making up the Pac-Man shape.

A new substance class for the treatment of multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases now promises increased efficacy paired with fewer side effects. To achieve this, a team of scientists have combined two already approved pharmaceutical substances with each other using a chemical linker structure.

A researcher has discovered a critical reason why women experience fertility problems as they get older. The solution could be simple — putrescine water.
Putrescine is naturally produced in mammals by an enzyme called ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) and is easily absorbed and cleared by the body. In female mammals, ODC levels are known to rise during ovulation, when the egg cell matures and is released from the ovary.  Dr. Johné Liu, a senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and professor at the University of Ottawa, has shown that ODC levels rise very little in older females. He has also shown that inhibiting ODC levels in young mice leads to an increase in egg cells with chromosomal defects. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms recently parsed 2.5 million articles from 498 different English-language (online) news outlets over a period of ten months and created data about what was contained.  Could AI qualitatively give people more interesting news?
The results showed what you likely knew - online tabloid newspapers are more readable than broadsheets and use more sentimental language. Among 15 U.S. and U.K. newspapers, The Sun was the 'easiest' to read - comparable to the BBC's children's news program, Newsround - while they found the The Guardian was the most difficult to read.

You can see the color white and you can hear white noise but you can also smell a white odor, says new research. 
When we see white, we are seeing a mixture of light waves of different wavelengths. The hum we call white noise is a combination of assorted sound frequencies but in both cases a stimulus must meet two conditions: The mix that produces them must span the range of our perception and each component must be present at the exact same intensity.
Both of these conditions can be met with odors, so as to produce a white smell - it just involves technical difficulties, like getting the intensities of all the scents to be identical. 

Psychologists from the University of Leicester have carried out eye tests to examine reading styles in young and old people and say there isn't just an eyesight issue - the way we read words changes as we grow older.
They digitally manipulated text, combined with precise measures of readers' eye movements, and say this provided new insight into how young and older adults use different visual cues during reading. Their experiments used precise measures of readers' eye movements to assess how well they read lines of text that had been digitally manipulated to enhance the salience of different visual information - sometimes the text was blurred and other times the features of the individual letters were sharply defined.

The best way to get precise information regarding the inner structure of atoms and molecules is to excite them by means of resonant laser light but this laser light can lead to measurable modifications within the atom's electron shell, above a certain intensity. The act of getting the information changes the study.
Scientists of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) say they have now shown experimentally how to prevent such "light shifts" and that this confirms the advantages of "hyper" Ramsey excitation that had already been predicted theoretically.