News Articles

The number of California blue whales has rebounded to near historical levels - and they would be even higher if they didn't run into or get hit by commercial shipping.
Blue whales, nearly 100 feet in length and weighing 190 tons as adults, are the largest animals on earth. And they are the heaviest ever, weighing more than twice as much as the largest known dinosaur, the Argentinosaurus. As a species, they were considered hunted nearly to extinction but new international laws have put enforceable limits on catches of whales and blue whales seem to be the first to have recovered.

The coffee plant has a newly sequenced genome and that can tell scientists what they really want to know about: the evolution of caffeine.
The sequences and positions of genes in the coffee plant show that they evolved independently from genes with similar functions in tea and chocolate, which also make caffeine. Coffee did not inherit caffeine-linked genes from a common ancestor, but instead developed the genes on its own.
Why Coffee?

Doctors in Australia are reporting 61 percent fewer cases of genital warts among young women since the introduction of the national human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination program.
The study reviewed more than a million patient encounters between 2000 and 2012 and found a significant year-on-year reduction in the management rate of genital warts in women aged 15-27 years since the vaccination program started. 
The HPV vaccination program was introduced in 2007, and the rate of genital wart presentation fell dramatically from 4.33 per 1,000 encounters pre-program (2002-2006) to 1.67 per 1,000 encounters in the post-program period (2008-2012).

Asteroid 2014 RC will buzz the Earth today. But don't be alarmed. The small asteroid was initially discovered on the night of August 31st by the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, AZ, and independently detected the next night by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, located on the summit of Haleakala on Maui, Hawaii. Both reported their observations to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, MA. Additional follow-up observations by the Catalina Sky Survey and the University of Hawaii 88-inch on Mauna Kea confirmed the orbit of 2014 RC. From its brightness, astronomers estimate that the asteroid is about 60 feet in size. 

Hospitals can greatly improve their flu vaccination rate among health care workers by forcing employees to get them, finds the Henry Ford Health System where they did just that.
Citing its own data, Henry Ford researchers say the health system achieved employee vaccination rates of 99 percent in the first two years of its mandatory policy, in which annual vaccination compliance is a condition of employment. Nationally, 63 percent of health care workers were immunized against the flu in the past two years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Wheat is the latest fad diet victim and a new study presented at the European Respiratory Society's International Congress adds to its villainy. It says flour is worse for occupational asthma in French workers than toxic chemicals.
The scholars analyzed all cases of occupational asthma in France to understand who was most affected by the condition and what the main causes were. Data were collected over a 3-year period from a network of respiratory doctors specialized in occupational diseases. 330 cases were analyzed.  

Blood may look like blood but it doesn't always behave like blood. 
The longer blood is stored, the less it can carry oxygen into the tiny microcapillaries of the body, says a new study that used optical techniques to measure the stiffness of the membrane surrounding red blood cells over time. They found that, even though the cells retain their shape and hemoglobin content, the membranes get stiffer, which steadily decreases the cells' functionality.

If you enjoy a sweet, fleshy peach today, give some thanks to scientifically minded, free-market farmers in China 7,500 years ago.A new analysis has found that the domestic peaches popular worldwide today can trace their ancestry back to the lower Yangtze River Valley in Southern China at least that long ago.  Radiocarbon dating of ancient peach stones (pits) discovered in the Lower Yangtze River Valley indicates that the peach seems to have been diverged from its wild ancestors as early as 7,500 years ago. 

The Obama administration opened up a new front in the culture wars by creating a stunning social media campaign to get out the vote, and they have leveraged new media since; only one internal photographer gets to take pictures, for example, and those pictures go right to social media.
And they don't involve media organizations in reaching places like the Middle East and North Africa, they go right to Twitter.

A new blood test could allow doctors to predict which ovarian cancer patients will respond to particular types of treatment. The test could be developed and used in hospitals within the next few years.  It would mean medics could see which patients could benefit from blood vessel-targeting drugs - such as bevacizumab - in addition to conventional therapy. Meanwhile, others who are not going to benefit would be spared the time and side effects associated with having the drug.  The test would also help to reduce the cost to the NHS. Ovarian cancer has seen little increase in survival rates over the last few decades and scientists are seeking new treatment strategies to improve the standard approach of surgery and chemotherapy.

If Americans adopted the recommendations the USDA's "Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010," diet-related greenhouse gas emissions would increase 12 percent, according to scholars, and if Americans reduced their daily caloric intake to the recommended level of about 2,000 calories while shifting to a healthier diet, greenhouse gas emissions would decrease by only 1 percent.
What must happen is that Americans must switch to no animal products, say Martin Heller and Gregory Keoleian of the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems, who looked at the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of about 100 foods, as well as the potential effects of shifting Americans to a diet recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

Millions of Americans are thought to experience mental illness in a given year, and the impacts of mental illness are undoubtedly felt by millions more in the form of family members, friends, and coworkers.
Though there are concerns about a lack of evidence-based treatment in mental health, it is better than doing nothing - yet nothing is what up to 40% of individuals with serious mental illness get, according to a new report in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. They cite stigma as a significant barrier to care for many individuals with mental illness.