Tech

OAK BROOK, Ill. – September 29, 2010 – The October issue of GIE: Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE), features the results of two randomized controlled trials of unsedated colonoscopy comparing water infusion versus air insufflation to distend the colon.

 'nano-LEDs'

While refining their novel method for making nanoscale wires, chemists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) discovered an unexpected bonus—a new way to create nanowires that produce light similar to that from light-emitting diodes (LEDs). These "nano-LEDs" may one day have their light-emission abilities put to work serving miniature devices such as nanogenerators or lab-on-a-chip systems.

The Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the co-trustees for natural resources affected by the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill announced today they have started the injury assessment and restoration planning phase of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, a legal process to determine the type and amount of restoration needed to compensate the public for harm to natural resources and their human uses as a result of the spill.

Publicly available cell-phone applications from application markets are releasing consumers' private information to online advertisers, according to a joint study by Intel Labs, Penn State, and Duke University.

Researchers at the participating institutions have developed a realtime monitoring service called TaintDroid that precisely analyses how private information is obtained and released byapplications "downloaded" to consumer phones. TaintDroid is an extension to the Android mobile-phone platform that tracks the flow of sensitive data through third-party applications.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Flicking through a wallpaper app with backgrounds of Mickey Mouse and a tropical waterfall, Peter Gilbert gets a plain, black and white text notification on his smartphone.

A third of the way down the screen it says, "Taint: Phone Number, IMEI, ICCID (sim card identifier)." The message alerts Gilbert that the wallpaper app has sent his phone's number and other identifying information to imnet.us. Checking online, it appears the address is a website in Shenzhen, China.

Traces of crude oil that linger on the shores of Alaska's Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez oil spill remain highly biodegradable, despite almost 20 years of weathering and decomposition, scientists are reporting in a new study. Their findings, which appear in ACS' semi-monthly journal Environmental Science & Technology, suggest a simple approach for further cleaning up remaining traces of the Exxon Valdez spill — the largest in U.S. waters until the 2010 Deepwater Horizon episode.

The key to the stability of any building is its foundation, but it is difficult to test some building sites in advance – such as those on the moon. New research from North Carolina State University is helping resolve the problem by using computer models that can utilize a small sample of soil to answer fundamental questions about how soil at a building site will interact with foundations.

In a recently published study in the journal Addiction, researchers from Bowling Green State University report evidence of an association between father's incarceration and substantially elevated risks for illegal drug use in adolescence and early adulthood.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Twelve years ago, then 28-year-old graduate student Brian Zikmund-Fisher was forced into the toughest choice of his life: Die from a blood disorder within a few years or endure a bone marrow transplant that could cure him or kill him in weeks.

Detection of acute HIV infection (the stage of disease immediately after HIV acquisition but before HIV antibodies are detectable) with pooled nucleic acid amplification testing (that detects the presence of HIV genetic material in the blood before antibodies are detectable) is feasible but not cost-effective in all settings.

Washington, D.C. (September 28, 2010) -- The second law of thermodynamics is a big hit with the beret-wearing college crowd because of its implicit existential crunch. The tendency of a closed systems to become increasingly disordered if no energy is added or removed is a popular, if not depressing, "things fall apart" sort-of-law that would seem to confirm the adolescent experience.

In a very large cohort of African-American women in the US, the association between the consumption of alcohol, tea, and coffee and the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus (late onset diabetes) was studied for 12 years. Tea and decaffeinated coffee showed no relation with diabetes, but the regular moderate intake of both caffeinated coffee and alcohol appeared to reduce the risk of contracting late onset diabetes significantly.

In comments sent to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) called out 10 specific challenges to proposed modifications to HIPAA Privacy and Enforcement Rules. AMIA's comments, sent on behalf of its membership of 4,000 informatics professionals, detail key issues of concern related to the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on HIPAA modifications, along with suggestions for models of change. The following areas were cited:

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