News Articles

Malware - malicious software written for purposes like identity theft - could get a lot more dangerous.With so much information stored, and advancements in programming, malware programs could soon not only engage in traditional data theft or taking over a computer, but also 'steal' data on behavior patterns, a higher level of danger than easily detectable attacks.

The National Academies (the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine) announced the recipients of their 2010 Communication Awards today. Part of the Keck Futures Initiative, these awards recognize excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering, and medicine to the general public. With support from the W.M. Keck Foundation, these $20,000 prizes have been awarded since 2003.   This year's winners will be honored during a ceremony on Oct. 22 at the Keck Center in Washington, D.C.Winners:

Baseball players will tell you that a fastball can rise - and elementary physics says it can also, the same way an airplane rises because the teardrop shape of a wing causes air to go over the top faster than below the flatter bottom, 'sucking' it into the air.    Sure, if the baseball is going 200 MPH it can happen.  But they don't.

A new study suggests watermelon can be an effective natural weapon against prehypertension, a precursor to cardiovascular disease.   It still won't hurt to exercise, of course.Estimates are that up to 60 percent of U.S. adults are prehypertensive or hypertensive. Prehypertension is characterized by systolic blood pressure readings of 120-139 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) over diastolic pressure of 80-89 mm Hg. "Systolic" refers to the blood pressure when the heart is contracting. "Diastolic" reflects the blood pressure when the heart is in a period of relaxation and expansion.

What's 7 billion light years away, equivalent in weight to 800,000,000,000,000 of our Suns and holds hundreds of galaxies?    It's the most galaxy cluster ever discovered, that's what.Astronomers using the South Pole Telescope discovered the behemoth and designated it the rather unspectacular SPT-CL J0546-5345.   Redshift measures how light from a distant object has been stretched by the universe's expansion. Located in the southern constellation Pictor (the Painter), the cluster has a redshift of z=1.07. This puts it at a distance of about 7 billion light-years, meaning we see it as it appeared 7 billion years ago, when the universe was half as old as now and our solar system didn't exist yet.

A few months ago, an undercover investigation by the GAO found patients were getting blatantly ridiculous advice from personal genetic profiling services.   One representative claimed they could repair DNA damage, one said their supplements could cure all kinds of diseases.  The luster is off personalized medicine once companies allow claims to exceed reality.

Mental health clinicians need a new way classify personality disorders.  A more scientific and practical method of categorizing disorders could improve treatment, says a new analysis.The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) scheduled to come out in 2013, could be a complete train wreck due to inclusion of virtually every personality type as some spectrum of disorder.  What is needed is some sanity because the DSM is considered "The Bible" of the U.S. mental health industry and is used by insurance companies as the basis for treatment approval and payment. 

In the wake of blackouts across Italy in 2003 and that same year in the US northeast, two recent studies caused a Congress that has usually been preoccupied with important things like a law that will limit TV commercial volume to berate the energy industry because a military analyst worried that an attack on a small, unimportant part of the U.S. power grid might, like dominoes, bring the whole grid down.

What happens to sunscreens when they are exposed to sunlight?   They degrade, and how the skin is affected by those degradation products is the subject of research at the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology presented at a dermatologist conference in Gothenburg.Concerns about a hole in the ozone layer and a change in sunbathing habits have brought an increase in the number of cases of skin cancer worldwide. One way of dealing with this has been to advocate sunscreens, though greater use of these products has alsi triggered an increase in contact allergies and photocontact allergies to sun protection products.

Biometric scientists at the University of Southampton say they can identify ears with a 100% success rate.In a new paper, scientists from the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) described how a technique called the image ray transform can highlight tubular structures such as ears, making it possible to identify them.The research describes how the transform is capable of highlighting tubular structures such as the helix of the ear and spectacle frames and, by exploiting the elliptical shape of the helix, can be used as the basis of a method for enrolment for ear biometrics.

Oil fields are highly specific ecosystems - they contain no oxygen and the temperature, pressure and salinity are often high, which makes them home to a very particular community of bacteria.Geert van der Kraan, a doctoral student who received his Ph.D. from TU Delft on the subject, says using bacterial changes as a biomonitoring tool in oil fields can be a way of keeping tabs on the state of the oil field itself - and increase its yield.

Ultrasound can speed the healing of fractures, according to results of a randomized, controlled trial published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders. The researchers found that the use of low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) in patients with tibial fractures which showed inadequate progress toward healing resulted in 34% greater bone mineral density (BMD) in the fracture area after 16 weeks than use of a sham device.Jon E. Block, Ph.D. worked with a team of researchers from University Hospital Marburg and the University of Ulm, Germany, to test LIPUS in 51 patients and 50 controls.