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Research has shown that certain marginalized groups — including the mentally ill, the disabled and ethnic minorities such as African Americans and Latinos — fare worse than others in the aftermath of natural disasters, suffering disproportionate impoverishment, injuries and fatalities.

Abnormal heart rhythms – arrhythmias – are killers. They strike without warning, causing sudden cardiac death, which accounts for about 10 percent of all deaths in the United States.

Vanderbilt investigators have discovered a new molecular mechanism associated with arrhythmias. Their findings, reported in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, could lead to novel arrhythmia treatments.

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — The association between tobacco smoke and cancer deaths — beyond lung cancer deaths — has been strengthened by a recent study from a UC Davis researcher, suggesting that increased tobacco control efforts could save more lives than previously estimated.

The epidemiological analysis, published online in BMC Cancer, linked smoking to more than 70 percent of the cancer death burden among Massachusetts men in 2003. This percentage is much higher than the previous estimate of 34 percent in 2001.

Scientists studying climate change have long believed that while most of the rest of the globe has been getting steadily warmer, a large part of Antarctica – the East Antarctic Ice Sheet – has actually been getting colder.

CORAL GABLES, FL (January 21, 2008)- Jizhou Song, a professor in the University of Miami College of Engineering and his collaborators Professor John Rogers, at the University of Illinois and Professor Yonggang Huang, at Northwestern University have developed a new design for stretchable electronics that can be wrapped around complex shapes, without a reduction in electronic function.

Rochester, Minn. – January 21, 2009 – A new study appearing in The Prostate has found that certain measles virus vaccine strain derivatives, including a strain known as MV-CEA, may prove to be an effective treatment for patients with advanced prostate cancer. The findings show that this type of treatment, called virotherapy, can effectively infect, replicate in and kill prostate cancer cells.

Irvine, Calif., Jan. 21, 2009 — An insecticide used to fumigate termite-infested buildings is a strong greenhouse gas that lives in the atmosphere nearly 10 times longer than previously thought, UC Irvine research has found.

Sulfuryl fluoride, UCI chemists discovered, stays in the atmosphere at least 30-40 years and perhaps as long as 100 years. Prior studies estimated its atmospheric lifetime at as low as five years, grossly underestimating the global warming potential.

January 21, 2009 — (Bronx, NY) — A topical microbicide that silences two genes can safely protect against genital herpes infection for as long as one week, according to a joint study by researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Harvard Medical School.

DURHAM, N.C. -- After announcing last April a method for growing exceptionally long, straight, numerous and well-aligned carbon cylinders only a few atoms thick, a Duke University-led team of chemists has now modified that process to create exclusively semiconducting versions of these single-walled carbon nanotubes.

The achievement paves the way for manufacturing reliable electronic nanocircuits at the ultra-small billionths of a meter scale, said Jie Liu, Duke's Jerry G. and Patricia Crawford Hubbard Professor of Chemistry, who headed the effort.

A team of medical scientists from the University of Leicester has published research which looks into the harmful substances in liquid medicines that premature babies are being exposed to.

Research published today (Jan 20) ahead of print in the Fetal & Neonatal Edition of Archives of Disease in Childhood documents the non-drug ingredients (excipients) present in liquid medicines given to premature infants as part of their medical care.

NEW YORK, Jan. 21, 2009 – Researchers from Joslin Diabetes Center, Boston, and ActiveSite Pharmaceuticals, Inc., San Francisco, announced today that they have demonstrated that a specific inhibitor of the protease plasma kallikrein, ASP-440, developed by ActiveSite Pharmaceuticals, may provide a new therapeutic approach for treatment of diabetic retinopathy, the most common eye-related complication of diabetes. The study, which was partly funded by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF), is published in the February 2009 issue of the journal Hypertension.

Milan, Italy, 21 January 2009 - A new study conducted at the Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience of the University of Bologna, and published by Elsevier in the February 2009 issue of Cortex (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex) shows that, in confabulating patients, memory accuracy improves when attentional resources are reduced.

Researchers led by Drs. Lillian Maggio-Price and Brian Iritani at The University of Washington found that mice that lack the immune inhibitory molecule Smad3 are acutely sensitive to both bacterially-induced inflammation and cancer. They report these findings in the January 2009 issue of The American Journal of Pathology.

Bacteria contribute to the development of certain cancers, in some measure, by stimulating chronic inflammation. Absence of a molecule that inhibits inflammation, Smad3, may therefore increase susceptibility to colon cancer.

Troy, N.Y. – Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered a new method for controlling the nature of graphene, bringing academia and industry potentially one step closer to realizing the mass production of graphene-based nanoelectronics.

Graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, was discovered in 2004 and is considered a potential heir to copper and silicon as the fundamental building blocks of nanoelectronics.