Body

CHICAGO – A study that surveyed 103 African-American women suggests that nearly 40 percent of the women reported avoiding exercise at times because of their hair, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Dermatology, a JAMA Network publication.

CHICAGO – The annual economic burden of pediatric caustic ingestion injuries was estimated at nearly $23 million with an estimated prevalence of injuries requiring hospitalization for 807 children in 2009, according to a report in the December issue of Archives of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery, a JAMA Network publication.

As a new year approaches, the University of Notre Dame's John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values has announced its first annual list of emerging ethical dilemmas and policy issues in Science and Technology for 2013.

The Reilly Center explores conceptual, ethical and policy issues where science and technology intersect with society from different disciplinary perspectives. Its goal is to promote the advancement of science and technology for the common good.

TORONTO, Dec. 17, 2012—People with HIV are being hospitalized in Ontario significantly less often than they were 15 years ago when combination antiretroviral drug therapy (cART) was introduced, new research has found.

However, women with HIV are still hospitalized more than men with HIV as are low-income people with HIV compared with high-income people with HIV, according to a study by Tony Antoniou, a pharmacist and researcher in the Department of Family Medicine at St. Michael's Hospital.

Phragmites australis, an invasive species of plant called common reed, grows rapidly into dense stands of tall plants that pose an extreme threat to Great Lakes coastal wetlands. Early treatment is the key to controlling Phragmites.

But how can these invasive reeds be eradicated before they take over their environment if we don't know where they are?

Along with pollutants from Asia, transpacific dust plumes deliver vast quantities of microbes to North America, according to a manuscript published online ahead of print in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Scientists at Rochester Institute of Technology have published the whole genome sequence of bacteria associated with Jamaican sugarcane and Riesling grapevines in the September and November issues of the Journal of Bacteriology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology.

MADISON – As the federal government builds on its $1 billion investment to clean up and restore the Great Lakes, an international research consortium has developed innovative new maps of both environmental threats and benefits to help guide cost-effective approaches to environmental remediation of the world's largest fresh water resource.

How can the immune system be reprogrammed once it goes on the attack against its own body? EPFL scientists retrained T-cells involved in type I diabetes, a common autoimmune disease. Using a modified protein, they precisely targeted the white blood cells (T-lymphocytes, or T-cells) that were attacking pancreatic cells and causing the disease. When tested on laboratory mice, the therapy eliminated all signs of the pathology. This same method could be a very promising avenue for treating multiple sclerosis as well.

A surprising number of microorganisms – 99 percent more kinds than had been reported in findings published just four months ago – are leaping the biggest gap on the planet. Hitching rides in the upper troposphere, they're making their way from Asia across the Pacific Ocean and landing in North America. For the first time researchers have been able to gather enough biomass in the form of DNA to apply molecular methods to samples from two large dust plumes originating in Asia in the spring of 2011.

There's a reason emergency personnel train for the aftermath of a dirty bomb or an explosion at a nuclear power plant. They'll be faced with a deluge of urgent tasks, such as identifying who's been irradiated, who has an injury-induced infection, and who's suffering from both.

Unfortunately, there isn't a quick way to screen for people exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. There also isn't a quick way to distinguish between people suffering from radiation exposure versus an infection due to an injury or chemical exposure.

Physicians should not prescribe cognitive enhancers to healthy individuals, states a report being published today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). Dr. Eric Racine and his research team at the IRCM, the study's authors, provide their recommendation based on the professional integrity of physicians, the drugs' uncertain benefits and harms, and limited health care resources.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- A plant may start to prime its defenses as soon as it gets a whiff of a male fly searching for a mate, according to Penn State entomologists. Once tall goldenrod plants smell a sex attractant emitted by true fruit fly males, they appear to prepare chemical defenses that make them less appealing to female flies that could damage the plants by depositing eggs on them, the researchers said.

The DNA mutations that accumulate over time as women age are not the sole contributor to the higher frequency of breast cancer in women over 50, Mark LaBarge, PhD, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) reported on Dec. 17 in a presentation at the American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

Changes in the populations of progenitor cells in breast tissue may be a powerful and until now overlooked factor in breast cancer and aging, he said.

For the first time, a defective protein that plays a specific role in degrading intermediate filaments (IF), one of three classes of filaments that form the structure of nerve cells, has been discovered by an international team of researchers.