Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is useful in detecting breast tumors and in cancer evaluation but its current pre-operative use in breast conserving surgery isn't helping patients as it should. 

Traditionally, patients who are scheduled to undergo breast-conserving lumpectomy for breast cancer undergo a breast MRI prior to surgery to help inform the surgeon about the size, shape, and location of the tumor. The issue is that MRIs are performed with the patient lying face down, but then the surgery is performed with the patient lying face up. 

From protecting our most valuable works of art to enabling smartphone displays, glass has become one of our most important materials. Making it even more versatile is the next challenge. Developing new glass compositions is largely a time-consuming, trial-and-error exercise. But now scientists have developed a way to decode the glass "genome" and design different compositions of the material without making and melting every possibility. Their report appears in ACS' journal Chemistry of Materials.

An experimental drug prevented learning deficits in young mice exposed repeatedly to anesthesia, according to a study led by researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center and published June 22 in Science Translational Medicine.

The study results may have implications for children who must have several surgeries, and so are exposed repeatedly to general anesthesia. Past studies have linked such exposure to a higher incidence of learning disabilities, attention deficits and hyperactivity.

New research suggests that higher late life cognitive reserve--an ability to offset the losses associated with age- and disease-related changes in the brain--may help prevent delirium.

In a study of 142 older surgical patients, greater participation in cognitive activities was linked with lower incidence and lower severity of delirium; however, higher literacy was not. Among individual leisure activities, reading books, using electronic mail, singing, and playing computer games were associated with lower dementia incidence and severity.

Clouds may have a net warming or cooling effect on climate, depending on their thickness and altitude. Artificially formed clouds called contrails form due to aircraft effluent. In a cloudless sky, contrails are thought to have minimal effect on climate. But what happens when the sky is already cloudy? In a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, scientists at ACES and colleagues from the UK show that contrails that are formed within existing high clouds increase the reflectivity of these clouds, i.e. their ability to reflect light. The researchers hope that their discovery offers important insights into the influence of aviation on climate.

The team, led by James Cook University's Associate Professor Eric Roberts, discovered the oldest known example of fungus gardens within fossil termite nests from the Great Rift Valley of Africa in 25 million year old sediments.

Fungus farming termite colonies cultivate fungi in gardens in subterranean nests or chambers, helping to convert plant material into a more easily digestible food source for the termites.

Assoc Prof Roberts said that scientists had previously used DNA from modern termites to estimate the origin of termite 'fungus farming' behavior back to at least 25 to 30 million years ago.