News Articles

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) had been used to treat menopausal estrogen deficiency  for decades but the 2002 publication of a major study, the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), indicated increased risk for certain outcomes in older women, without increasing longevity.This sparked debate regarding potential benefits and harm of HRT.A new article published in The American Journal of Medicine conducted a meta-analysis of the available data using Bayesian methods and concluded that HRT almost certainly decreases mortality in younger postmenopausal women. 

An explosion detected on April 23 by NASA's Swift satellite was more than 13 billion light-years from Earth, representing an event that occurred 630 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only four percent of its current age of 13.7 billion years.Astronomers turned telescopes from around the world to study the blast, dubbed GRB 090423.  National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) first looked for the object the day after the discovery, detected the first radio waves from the blast a week later, then recorded changes in the object until it faded from view more than two months later.

Researchers say they have discovered how to transform human embryonic stem cells into germ cells, the embryonic cells that ultimately give rise to sperm and eggs, an advance that will allow researchers to observe previously inaccessible human germ cells in laboratory dishes."This achievement opens a new window into what was only recently a hidden stage of human development," said Susan B. Shurin, M.D., acting director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH Institute that provided funding for the study. "Laboratory observation of human germ cells has the potential to yield important clues to the origins of unexplained infertility and to the genesis of many birth defects and chromosomal disorders."

NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope has captured more than one thousand discrete sources of gamma rays in its first year, including a measurement that provided experimental evidence about the very structure of space and time, unified as space-time in Einstein's theories.

Your Jack-o'-Lantern may scare away more than just birds - the skin of that pumpkin contains a substance that could put a scare into microbes that cause millions of cases of yeast infections in adults and infants each year, says a new study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.Kyung-Soo Hahm, Yoonkyung Park and colleagues note that some disease-causing microbes are becoming resistant to existing antibiotics so scientists worldwide are searching for new antibiotics. Past studies had hinted that pumpkin, long used as folk medicine in some countries, might have antibiotic effects.

Are accident rates higher for people with a particular gene variant?    Bad drivers may, in part,  have their genes to blame, suggests a new study by UC Irvine neuroscientists.People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it – and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant.

The performative and improvisatory aspects of music compares favorably with the temporal, polyphonic aspects of scholarly research,  says University of Illinois professor of education Liora Bresler.Understanding that could improve both research and education, she says.   Bresler, who studied musicology and was a pianist before becoming an education professor, said that knowing there was an audience to perform for "really intensifies the relationship between the music and the performer." This, she said, is analogous to how a teacher should think of a lecture or a researcher a presentation at a conference.

Wolfgang Fink, visiting associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (Caltech, to you)  says a paradigm shift in planetary exploration is coming - and it involves space robots. Fink and a team at Caltech, the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Arizona are developing software along with a robotic test bed that can mimic a field geologist or astronaut - the software, they say, will allow a robot to think on its own. 

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life 150 years ago next month, he avoided conjecture about the origin of life and "To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator" shows that he had limits on the cultural firestorm he wanted to create in the name of science.

Virtually every study in the last two years has blamed neighborhoods for obesity rather than the people who eat too much - but living near a variety of restaurants, convenience stores, supermarkets and even fast food outlets actually lowers your risk for obesity, according to a new study from the University of Utah.Surprisingly, people who live more than a half mile away from any food outlets are the ones who tend to be fatter.   The study suggests that placing restrictions on fast food outlets may not be effective, but that initiatives to increase healthy neighborhood food options may reduce individuals' obesity risks, especially if focused on low-income neighborhoods.

On Memorial Day, May 26, 2008, the "Roadrunner" supercomputer exceeded a sustained speed of 1 petaflop/s, or 1 million billion calculations per second. "Petaflop/s" is computer jargon—peta signifying the number 1 followed by 15 zeros (sometimes called a quadrillion) and flop/s meaning "floating point operation per second." Shortly after that it was named the world's fastest supercomputer by the TOP500 organization at the June 2008 International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden Germany.

Nepotism has a bad connotation in the workplace or French politics but being surrounded by relatives does lead to better group dynamics and more cooperation in some animals, and certainly spiders, according to a new study published in BMC Evolutionary Biology.In a new study, the researchers found that Stegodyphus tentoriicola spiders are far more efficient at foraging for food and cooperate better when they’re related to each other and, as with humans and other animals, relatedness may favor the evolution of less selfish behavior, more collaboration and better group dynamics.