Earth
Exposure to flame retardants once widely used in consumer products has been falling, according to a new study by researchers at the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. The researchers are the first to show that levels of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) measured in children significantly decreased over a 15-year period between 1998 and 2013, although the chemicals were present in all children tested.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Rear-facing car seats have been shown to significantly reduce infant and toddler fatalities and injuries in frontal and side-impact crashes, but they’re rarely discussed in terms of rear-impact collisions. Because rear-impact crashes account for more than 25 percent of all accidents, researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center conducted a new study to explore the effectiveness of rear-facing car seats in this scenario.
Allogeneic bone marrow transplant (BMT) is an essential treatment to cure patients with blood cancers such as leukemia. In patients who have undergone chemotherapy and radiation, a small number of cancer cells can remain in the bloodstream and allow the malignancy to recur.
How is it that fertilized chicken eggs manage to resist fracture from the outside, while at the same time, are weak enough to break from the inside during chick hatching? It's all in the eggshell's nanostructure, according to a new study led by McGill University scientists.
The findings, reported today in Science Advances, could have important implications for food safety in the agro-industry.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.--Plastics are excellent insulators, meaning they can efficiently trap heat - a quality that can be an advantage in something like a coffee cup sleeve. But this insulating property is less desirable in products such as plastic casings for laptops and mobile phones, which can overheat, in part because the coverings trap the heat that the devices produce.
Bottom Line: While lung cancer death rates among women in most of the United States have declined substantially in recent years, progress among women in a region covering central Appalachia and southern parts of the Midwest and in northern parts of the Midwest has lagged.
Journal in Which the Study was Published: Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
DALLAS - March 29, 2018 - Researchers from UT Southwestern's Charles and Jane Pak Center for Mineral Metabolism and Clinical Research and Internal Medicine's Division of Nephrology recently published work in Nature that reveals the molecular structure of the so-called "anti-aging" protein alpha Klotho (a-Klotho) and how it transmits a hormonal signal that controls a variety of biologic processes. The investigation was performed in collaboration with scientists from New York University School of Medicine and Wenzhou Medical University in China.
A multi-institutional team of scientists describes a new technique that can meld ions from up to eight different elements to form what are known as high entropy alloyed nanoparticles. The atoms of the elements that make up these particles are distributed evenly throughout and form a single, solid-state crystalline structure -- a feat that has never been achieved before with more than three elements. The nanoparticles could have broad applications as catalysts. The findings are published in the journal Science.
Using a mouse model, researchers from North Carolina State University have found that antibiotic use creates a "banquet" for Clostridium difficile (C. diff), by altering the native gut bacteria that would normally compete with C. diff for nutrients. The findings could lead to the development of probiotics and other strategies for preventing C. diff infection.
Rapid greenhouse-gas emissions reductions are needed if governments want to keep in check both the costs of the transition towards climate stabilization and the amount of removing already emitted CO2 from the atmosphere. To this end, emissions in 2030 would need to be at least 20 percent below what countries have pledged under the Paris climate agreement, a new study finds - an insight that is directly relevant for the global stock-take scheduled for the UN climate summit in Poland later this year.
WASHINGTON, D.C., March 28, 2018 -- Optoelectronic engineers in China and Hong Kong have manufactured a special type of liquid crystal display (LCD) that is paper-thin, flexible, light and tough. With this, a daily newspaper could be uploaded onto a flexible paperlike display that could be updated as fast as the news cycles. It sounds like something from the future, but scientists estimate it will be cheap to produce, perhaps only costing $5 for a 5-inch screen. The new optically rewritable LCD design was reported this week in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.
Sea turtles use their flippers to handle prey despite the limbs being evolutionarily designed for locomotion, a discovery by Monterey Bay Aquarium researchers published today in PeerJ.
The in-depth examination of the phenomenon - Limb-use By Foraging Sea Turtles, an Evolutionary Perspective - by authors Jessica Fujii and Dr. Kyle Van Houtan and others reveals a behavior thought to be less likely in marine tetrapods is actually widespread and that this type of exaptation of flippers may have been occurring 70 million years earlier than previously thought.
March 27, 2018 - Mental health symptoms related to attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct disorder are associated with increased errors in a driving simulator and self-reported risky driving behaviors in adolescents, according to study in Nursing Research, published by Wolters Kluw
Groundwater that seeps into the coastal zone beneath the ocean's surface--termed submarine groundwater discharge (SGD)--is an important source of fresh water and nutrients to nearshore coral reefs throughout the globe. Although submarine groundwater is natural, it can act as a conduit for highly polluted water to shorelines. A recently published study, led by researchers at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), sheds light on the ways SGD affects coral reef growth.
DALLAS - March 27, 2018 - Scientists have found a genetic trigger that may improve the brain's ability to heal from a range of debilitating conditions, from strokes to concussions and spinal cord injuries.
A new study in mice from UT Southwestern's O'Donnell Brain Institute shows that turning on a gene inside cells called astrocytes results in a smaller scar and - potentially - a more effective recovery from injury.