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PORTLAND, Ore. July 23, 2008. A fire is currently burning through a study area where projections were made about fire behavior about 2 years ago. Managers used data and analysis from the Gotchen Late-Successional Reserve (LSR) study in the planning, analysis, and implementation of treatments near where the Cold Springs fire is now active.

For the first time, children as young as 5 have been shown to understand issues regarding integration and separation. The research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), confirms that the ethnic composition of primary schools has a direct impact on children's attitudes towards those in other ethnic groups and on their ability to get on with their peers.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – A study out of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center demonstrates emergency room doctors are correctly identifying patients who are having a heart attack, even when laboratory tests haven't yet confirmed it.

The study used data from a registry called i*trACS, and analyzed patients with heart attack symptoms who were admitted to emergency departments (EDs) in eight participating U.S. centers.

The findings were released today in the Emergency Medicine Journal.

The School of Physics, Shandong University, has shown that the coercivity mechanism of HDDR Nd-Fe-B permanent magnetic alloy is greatly related to its microstructure defect at the grain boundary. The investigation can provide a clear understanding of coercivity mechanism, and hence will be reported in Science in China Series G-Physics, Mechanism and Astronomy.

DALLAS – July 24, 2008 – One of the reasons people on low-carbohydrate diets may lose weight is that they reduce their intake of fructose, a type of sugar that can be made into body fat quickly, according to a researcher at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Dr. Elizabeth Parks, associate professor of clinical nutrition and lead author of a study appearing in a current issue of the Journal of Nutrition, said her team's findings suggest that the right type of carbohydrates a person eats may be just as important in weight control as the number of calories a person eats.

Newly developed software will help to allay patients' fears about who has access to their confidential data. Research published today in the open access journal BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making describes a computer program capable of deleting details from medical records which may identify patients, while leaving important medical information intact.

Men who eat an average of half a serving of soy food a day have lower concentrations of sperm than men who do not eat soy foods, according to research published online in Europe's leading reproductive medicine journal, Human Reproduction, today (Thursday 24 July). The association was particularly marked in men who were overweight or obese, the study found.

There is no justification for denying obese patients knee replacement surgery: They benefit almost as much as anyone else from the procedure, concludes a small study published ahead of print in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.

Around 55,000 knee replacements are performed every year in England to relieve the pain and disability of knee osteoarthritis.

For patients receiving kidney transplants, treatment with cholesterol-lowering "statin" drugs may lead to longer survival, reports a study in the November 2008 Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN).

Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York have found that sorafenib (Nexavar) helps patients with advanced liver cancer live about 44 percent longer compared with patients who did not receive the anti-cancer drug. The findings, published in the July 23rd, 2008 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, is a significant advance in the management of liver cancer, which is the third cause of cancer death globally, often resulting in death within a year of diagnosis.

In a study of parasites living in three estuaries on the Pacific coast of California and Baja California, researchers have determined that biomass of these parasites exceeds that of top predators, in some cases by more than 20 times.

Their findings, which could have significant ecological and biomedical implications, appear in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

Biomass is the amount of living matter that exists in a given habitat. It is expressed either as the weight of organisms per unit area or as the volume of organisms per unit volume of habitat.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A recent study shows that popular fish oil supplements have an effect on the healing process of small, acute wounds in human skin. But whether that effect is detrimental, as researchers initially suspected, remains a mystery.

The omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oils are widely considered to benefit cardiovascular health and other diseases related to chronic inflammation because of their anti-inflammatory properties. But insufficient inflammation during the initial stage of wound healing may delay the advancement of later stages.

Titanium, a protean element with applications from pigments to aerospace alloys, could get a new role as an environmentally friendly additive for automotive oil, thanks to work by materials scientists from Afton Chemical Corporation (Richmond, Va.) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a technique to measure the formation of clumps of proteins in protein-based pharmaceuticals. This first systematic study* clarifies the conditions under which scientists can be assured that their instruments are faithfully measuring the formation of protein aggregates, a major concern because of its impact on quality control and safety in biologic drug manufacturing.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) - In a study of free-living and parasitic species in three estuaries on the Pacific coast of California and Baja California, a team of researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, the United States Geological Survey, and Princeton University has determined that parasite biomass in those habitats exceeds that of top predators, in some cases by a factor of 20. Their findings, which could have significant biomedical and ecological implications, appear in the July 24 issue of the science journal Nature.