Meanwhile, about 17 percent of the Brazilian Amazon has been deforested since the opening of the basin to development in the mid-1960s, he said.
Critics warn the Amazon is close to a tipping point in which the continued stripping of forests will stem rainfall and turn the tropical region into scrubland. Because trees pull moisture from the ground and release it back into the atmosphere, leading to rainfall, cutting them down threatens this "vegetative recycling" process, Walker said.
Each percentage point increase in the African American population in a county appears to be associated with a decrease in the number of specialists within that county who diagnose and treat colorectal cancer, according to a report in the June issue of Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. In contrast, counties with a higher percentage of Asian Americans appear to have more colorectal cancer specialists.
DURHAM, N.C. -- American researchers who have been studying the rare and threatened bonobo ape will lead monitoring efforts after a group of orphan bonobos are returned to the wild in the Congo for the first time this month.
On June 14 and 28, for the first time ever, a group of 18 orphan bonobos will be returned to the wild.
"We'll be monitoring the social behavior and feeding habits of the bonobos as they adjust to life back in the wild," said Duke anthropologist Brian Hare, who will be leading the monitoring with Richard Wrangham of Harvard.
Arlington, VA—As Congress drafts health care reform legislation, HIV clinicians urge lawmakers to include a public plan option to ensure affordable access to comprehensive care for HIV patients—nearly 30 percent of whom have no insurance. The HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA) believes that a public plan option can help offer everyone the chance to benefit from early and reliable access to lifesaving HIV care and treatment.
The immune system's T-cells react to foreign protein fragments and therefore are crucial to combating viruses and bacteria. Errant cells that attack the body's own material are in most cases driven to cell death. Some of these autoreactive T-cells, however, undergo a kind of reeducation to become "regulatory T-cells" that keep other autoreactive T-cells under control. A group led by immunologist Professor Ludger Klein of LMU Munich has now shown that the developmental stage of an autoreactive T-cell is decisive to its ultimate destiny.
Alcohol-related deaths among U.S. college students rose from 1,440 deaths in 1998 to 1,825 in 2005, along with increases in heavy drinking and drunk driving, according to an article in the July supplement of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
The immune system's T-cells react to foreign protein fragments and therefore are crucial to combating viruses and bacteria. Errant cells that attack the body's own material are in most cases driven to cell death. Some of these autoreactive T-cells, however, undergo a kind of reeducation to become "regulatory T-cells" that keep other autoreactive T-cells under control. A group led by immunologist Professor Ludger Klein of LMU Munich has now shown that the developmental stage of an autoreactive T-cell is decisive to its ultimate destiny.
Alcohol-related deaths, heavy drinking episodes and drunk driving have all been on the rise on college campuses over the past decade, a new government study shows.
Using figures from government databases and national surveys on alcohol use, researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) found that drinking-related accidental deaths among 18- to 24-year-old students have been creeping upward -- from 1,440 in 1998 to 1,825 in 2005.
Trust in science is diminishing, according to recent studies, especially in the area of biomedicine, biotech and genetics. University of Alberta researchers Tim Caulfield and Tania Bubela blame it on the complexity of many discoveries and they're concerned the whole message from the study isn't getting across to the general public.
Copenhagen, Denmark, Thursday 11 June 2009: Undertaking a supervised exercise programme can have beneficial effects on functional status and physical function, reduce the need for daily corticosteroid and anti-inflammatory intake and improve levels of depression and anxiety in people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), according to a new study presented today at EULAR 2009, the Annual Congress of the European League Against Rheumatism in Copenhagen, Denmark.
BATON ROUGE – Elizabeth Derryberry, post-doctoral researcher at the LSU Museum of Natural Science, has found a link between alterations in bird songs and the rapid change in the surrounding habitat. Her research will be featured in the July 2009 issue of the American Naturalist.
It's happy hour for Texas wineries.
Research now shows that wines produced in the Lone Star State share the anti-cancer traits known to exist in wines from other producing regions.
Extracts from two Texas red wines decreased cancer cell growth in a comparable magnitude as other wines previously studied, according to Dr. Susanne Talcott, Texas AgriLife Research food and nutrition scientist.
Comparing the characteristics of 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' films, online DVD rental services like Netflix can project the length of time that customers will rent films, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).
Management Insights, a regular feature of the journal, is a digest of important research in business, management, operations research, and management science. It appears in every issue of the monthly journal.
Copenhagen, Denmark, Friday 12 June 2009: Over half (63%) of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) also suffer from psychiatric disorders, with the majority of these (87%) occurring in the depressive spectrum, according to the results of a new study presented today at EULAR 2009, the Annual Congress of the European League Against Rheumatism in Copenhagen, Denmark. Interestingly, over half (52%) of the patients studied indicated that they had experienced stress events before the onset of their RA.
Fingerprints mark us out as individuals and leave telltale signs of our presence on every object that we touch, but what are fingerprints really for? According to Roland Ennos, from the University of Manchester, other primates and tree-climbing koalas have fingerprints and some South American monkeys have ridged pads on their tree-gripping tails, so everyone presumed that fingerprints are there to help us hang onto objects that we grasp.