Culture

LOS ANGELES — Clinical trial results published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week offer additional evidence that a new device may help relieve chronic heartburn symptoms that standard treatment cannot. The Keck Medical Center of USC was one of 14 U.S. and European medical centers to test the device prior to its March 2012 approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Using a threshold of 7 or 8 mm to define a positive lung cancer result in a baseline round of computed tomography (CT) could decrease false positive screening results. However, prospective research is needed to determine whether increasing the threshold may delay diagnosis of cancer in some patients.

Alaska is already feeling the consequences of a changing climate in melting permafrost, coastal erosion, and retreating sea ice.

Sequestration laws were created to be the ultimate in liberal fairness - if Congress and the President count not agree, automated controls would impact everyone equally. This would outrage the voting populace and force them to play nicely.

Yet instead of voters forcing the President and Congress to play nicely together, special interests are circling the wagons around their funding.

State supreme court justices who don't face voters are generally more effective than their elected counterparts, according to research led by Princeton University political scientists.

The research combines data about almost 6,000 state supreme court rulings nationwide between 1995 and 1998 with a new theoretical model to reach the conclusions that appointed justices generally bring a higher quality of information to the decision-making process, are more likely to change their preconceived opinions about a case, and are less likely to make errors than elected justices.

The economic benefits of intensive vegetable cultivation inside plastic greenhouses, particularly for small-holders, have driven a rapid mushrooming of long plastic tents in farmlands worldwide – but particularly in China, where they cover 3.3 million hectares and produce approximately US $60 million in produce (2008 figures).

The method conserves water, binds up carbon, shrinks land use, protects against soil erosion and exhaustion, and mitigates problematic dust storms.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– For over a century, the rubber tappers of Acre, Brazil collected the valuable sap of the rubber trees from the forests of the western Amazon. As the demand for natural rubber declined, however, the Brazilian government sought to stimulate the economy in the 1970's by encouraging southern ranchers to bring their cattle to the isolated state and convert the forests to pastureland.

Highlights

EAST LANSING, Mich. --- When doctors encounter a patient with a massive pulmonary embolism, they face a difficult choice: Is it wise to administer a drug that could save the patient's life, even though many people suffer life-threatening bleeding as a result?

Based on new findings published in the American Journal of Medicine, Michigan State University researchers are answering that question in no uncertain terms.

In the first human study of its kind, researchers activated heart failure patients' stem cells with gene therapy to improve their symptoms, heart function and quality of life, according to a study in the American Heart Association journal Circulation Research. Researchers delivered a gene that encodes a factor called SDF-1 to activate stem cells like a "homing" signal.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Student loans provide more help to women than they do for men in encouraging graduation from college, a new nationwide study reveals.

Findings showed that, on average, taking out loans actually makes graduation more likely for all students. But at a certain point – which is about $2,000 lower for men than for women – debt has diminishing returns and becomes less effective at boosting chances of graduation.

One reason loans help women more may be tied to job prospects for college dropouts – which are much better for men than for women.

Pre-war vulnerability is just as important as combat-related trauma in predicting whether veterans' symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) will be long-lasting, according to new research published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

What: The U.S. government today released two new documents to guide researchers in carrying out dual use research of concern.

Montreal, February 21, 2013 – Nobody can foresee disaster, but changing climate conditions are prompting smart communities increasingly to prepare for them with solid emergency response plans and protocols. Images as recent as those from the 2011 wildfire in Slave Lake, Alberta or as distant as those from the 1998 ice storm in Eastern Ontario and Quebec are distressing reminders that no area is immune from devastation, and reinforce the need to be prepared.

Kyoto, Japan – Working with a group from Nagasaki University, a research group at the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) at Japan's Kyoto University has announced in the Feb. 21 online publication of Cell Stem Cell has successfully modeled Alzheimer's disease (AD) using both familial and sporadic patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and revealed stress phenotypes and differential drug responsiveness associated with intracellular amyloid beta oligomers in AD neurons and astrocytes.