Earth

PHILADELPHIA--Doctors diagnose about 2000 adults with uveal melanoma, a cancer of the eye, every year. In half of cases, the disease metastasizes to the liver. For these patients treatment options are scarce. Researchers at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center (SKCC) -- Jefferson Health and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Young people who self-harm are three times more likely to commit violent crime than those who do not, according to new research from the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University.

The study also found young people who harm themselves and commit violent crime -- "dual harmers" -- are more likely to have a history of childhood maltreatment and lower self-control than those who only self-harm. Thus, programs aimed at preventing childhood maltreatment or improving self-control among self-harmers could help prevent violent crime, the authors state.

While a sudden coughing fit is a protective reflex to clear the airway, chronic cough can be caused by multiple factors that must be investigated to determine treatment. Cough is just one of several laryngeal symptoms including hoarseness and dysphoric breathing that can become debilitating. Until recently, the cause of these severe laryngeal symptoms could not be identified in many patients, and the only treatments were to manage them with medication and rehabilitation therapy.

Most evolutionary biologists distinguish one species from another based on reproductivity: members of different species either won't or can't mate with one another, or, if they do, the resulting offspring are often sterile, unviable, or suffer some other sort of reduced fitness.

One answer to our greenhouse gas challenges may be right under our feet: Soil scientists Oliver Chadwick of UC Santa Barbara and Marc Kramer of Washington State University have found that minerals in soil can hold on to a significant amount of carbon pulled from the atmosphere. It's a mechanism that could potentially be exploited as the world tries to shift its carbon economy.

A study carried out by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania finds that low wages and poor benefits leave many female health care workers living below the poverty line. The report that will appear in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health has been published online.

High levels of low-density lipoproteins, parcels of lipids and protein that carry cholesterol, are a leading risk factor for heart disease. Many cholesterol medications lower LDL, some of them by targeting the protein PCSK9. In the January issue of the Journal of Lipid Research, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, report on an investigation into why experiments on PCSK9 give different results in a test tube and in liver cells. What they found may explain how a mutation in PCSK9 that has long puzzled scientists leads to heart disease.

Monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors are potential drug candidates for treating neurological disorders such as anxiety, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

NEW YORK, December 31, 2018 - Researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York and at the City College of New York (CCNY) have developed a metamaterial that can transport sound in unusually robust ways along its edges and localize it at its corners.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- A group of Florida Museum of Natural History scientists has issued a "call to action" to use big data to tackle longstanding questions about plant diversity and evolution and forecast how plant life will fare on an increasingly human-dominated planet.

In a commentary published today in Nature Plants, the scientists urged their colleagues to take advantage of massive, open-access data resources in their research and help grow these resources by filling in remaining data gaps.

Bottom Line: Children can exhibit physical aggression when they are very young but that behavior typically declines before and during elementary school. However, a small proportion of children have atypically high physical aggression problems into adolescence, which may put them at increased risk for violent crime, social maladjustment, and alcohol and drug abuse. This observational study of 2,223 boys and girls used information from mothers, teachers and the children to trace the development of physical aggression problems from infancy to adolescence.

Doctors at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine are pioneering the use of primary targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) to prevent or reduce debilitating phantom limb and stump pain in amputees.

New York, NY (December 27, 2018) -- In the largest population genomics investigation to date, a team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Stanford University, and the University of Colorado have discovered that kidney disease risk variants of the gene APOL1, previously known to affect African and African American populations, are also found at appreciable frequencies in Caribbean and Latin American populations.

Every month or two, a massive pulse of clouds, rainfall and wind moves eastward around the Earth near the equator, providing the tropics their famous thunderstorms.

This band of recurring weather, first described by scientists in 1971, is called the Madden-Julian Oscillation. It has profound effects on weather in distant places, including the United States. Atmospheric scientists have long studied how the Madden-Julian Oscillation modulates extreme weather events across the globe, from hurricanes to floods to droughts.

An amusing commercial shows someone having a bad day, and how that person's mood affects each person down the line, with more bad moods. This emotional "contagion" may be a real-world phenomenon, and it appears that what we experience online can have a similar effect. Examining over 2000 video blogs, or vlogs on YouTube, researchers from Tilburg University, Netherlands, found we mirror the emotions of those we see online and we seek out people who share our emotions.