After decades of public safety campaigns focused on drinking and driving, it may be time to focus on the seventh leading cause of injury-related death, according to Bureau of Occupational Health and Injury Prevention at New York State Department of Health and Columbia University scholars looking at New York State.
Rates of infection with the deadly superbug Clostridium difficile were highest in the Northeast region of the country and in the spring season over the last 10 years, according to a new study.Researchers from the University of Texas retrospectively analyzed 2.3 million cases of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) from 2001-2010 and found the highest incidence in the Northeast (8.0 CDI discharges/1000 total discharges), followed by the Midwest (6.4/1000), South (5.0/1000), and the West (4.8/1000).Seasonally, spring had the most cases (6.2 CDI discharges/1000 total discharges), followed by winter (5.9/1000), summer (5.9/1000) and fall (5.6/1000). Adults and older adults followed overall trends, whereas pediatric CDI was highest in winter.
When we think of genetically modified organisms, we usually picture the modern legal definition and a controversy related to how science can aid in herbicide tolerance and insect resistance, but there are other applications of such engineered plants, such as the incorporation of genes for specific nutrients. Golden Rice is a famous example. Though it is protested by environmental groups, it has been shown to be able to help prevent blindness and death for millions of children.A new paper suggests that similar bio-fortification of rice with a gene to produce more folate (vitamin B9) could significantly reduce the risk of spina bifida and other neural tube defect conditions caused by deficiency of this nutrient.
Neuroscientists have discovered brain circuitry for encoding positive and negative learned associations in mice. After finding that two circuits showed opposite activity following fear and reward learning, the researchers proved that this divergent activity causes either avoidance or reward-driven behaviors.
Greenland climate during the last ice age was very unstable, the researchers say, characterized by a number of large, abrupt changes in mean annual temperature that each occurred within several decades. These so-called "Dansgaard-Oeschger events" took place every few thousand years during the last ice age. Temperature changes in Antarctica showed an opposite pattern, with Antarctica cooling when Greenland was warm, and vice versa.
When a crystal lattice is excited by a laser pulse, waves of jostling atoms can travel through the material at about 28,000 miles/second, close to one sixth the speed of light. Now researchers can take movies of such superfast movement.STAMP - Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography - is a new high-speed camera that can record events at a rate of more than 1-trillion-frames-per-second, 1000X faster than conventional high-speed cameras.
When consumers taste cheap wine and rate it highly because under the belief it is expensive, is it just a placebo or has belief actually changed their brain function, causing them to experience the cheap wine in the same physical way as the expensive wine? People enjoy identical products such as wine or chocolate more if they have a higher price tag so a new study examined the neural and psychological processes required for such marketing placebo effects to occur. The authors conclude that preconceived beliefs may create a placebo effect so strong that the actual chemistry of the brain changes in a brain imaging analysis.
The occurrence of altruism and spite - helping or harming others at a cost to oneself - depends on similarity not just between two interacting individuals but also to the rest of their neighbors, according to a new model developed by psychologist DB Krupp and mathematician Peter Taylor of Queen's University. Individuals who appear very different from most others in a group will evolve to be altruistic towards similar partners, and only slightly spiteful to those who are dissimilar to them but individuals who appear very similar to the rest of a group will evolve to be only slightly altruistic to similar partners but very spiteful to dissimilar individuals, often going to extreme lengths to hurt them.
A study has shown a new way that brown fat, a potential obesity-fighting target, is regulated in the body.
In an upcoming Cell Metabolism article, researchers examined long non-coding RNA (Ribonucleic acid) in adipose (fat) tissue in mice. Long non-coding RNAs have recently become appreciated as important control elements for different biological functions in the body.
The team created a catalog of 1,500 long non-coding RNA in mouse adipose tissues - which is the most comprehensive catalog ever created of its type. Using the catalog they were then able to identify a specific long non-coding RNA without which the brown fat cell cannot develop properly.
Agriculture is a breathtaking achievement of modern science. We are on the path to being able to feed the world for the first time in history and the upward trend in obesity is due to the fact that more food has been produced at lower cost with less environmental strain than ever believed realistic.
But it still has a price. There are claims that approximately 35% of global greenhouse gases come from agriculture.
A new paper argues that regenerative, organic farming, ranching and land use could lead to sequestering several hundred billion tons of excess CO2. Increasing the soil's organic content will not only fix carbon and reduce emissions, it will also improve the soil's ability to retain water and nutrients and resist pests and droughts.
It's a First World Idyll that ancient indigenous people sustained themselves using nature's bounty, in harmony with the land.
Science knows otherwise. Instead, from Alaska to Washington, indigenous people created productive clam gardens to ensure abundant and sustainable clam harvests. There was nothing natural about it.
On April 25th, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal, claiming over 5,000 lives and affecting millions more. Relief efforts are under way and satellite imagery is helping to visualize the damage but radar images from the ESA Sentinel-1A satellite showed why Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, experienced so much damage The maximum land deformation, shown in before and after pictures, is 8 miles away. The two acquisition dates lead to rainbow-colored interference patterns in the combined image, known as an ‘interferogram’, enabling scientists to quantify the ground movement.
The world's population is getting healthier and part of that reason for that is sanitation - but a larger population and a still limited infrastructure means a complex and multi-dimensional approach is needed to manage a rising tide of solid wasteThere is no magic bullet solution like importing modern trucks or technologies or to improve roads. The challenges are daunting - the World Bank’s Urban Development department estimates that the amount of municipal solid waste will reach 2.2 billion tons per year over the next decade.
