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Expansion of one of the world's most important shipping routes brings with it a unique opportunity to reduce the carbon footprint of the marine industry, experts claim.

Expanded sections of the Panama Canal are due to open in 2014 following an eight-year programme to widen and deepen the waterway in order to increase capacity for liner shipping.

This will remove the breadth restriction of 32.2m (known as 'panamax' in the shipping industry) that has constrained ships using the canal since it opened in 1914.

(TORONTO, Canada – Jan. 24, 2012) – For men diagnosed with low-risk, localized prostate cancer, being treated with the drug dutasteride ("Avodart") delays disease progression and initiating active treatment, and also reduces anxiety, show the results of a three-year international clinical trial led by Dr. Neil Fleshner, Head of the Division of Urology, University Health Network (UHN).

A sudden, serious allergic reaction—known anaphylaxis or anaphylactic shock— following vaccination, is "extremely rare," concludes research published online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

Anaphylaxis can be fatal and can be triggered by several factors, including specific foods, airborne allergens, stings and bites, and drugs/vaccines.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—The personality trait narcissism may have an especially negative effect on the health of men, according to a recent study published in PLoS ONE.

"Narcissistic men may be paying a high price in terms of their physical health, in addition to the psychological cost to their relationships," says Sara Konrath, a University of Michigan psychologist who co-authored the study.

AURORA, Colo. (Jan. 23, 2012) - With growing concern that excessive levels of fructose may pose a great health risk – causing high blood pressure, kidney disease and diabetes – researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, along with their colleagues at the University of Florida, set out to see if two common sweeteners in western diets differ in their effects on the body in the first few hours after ingestion.

Simon Fraser University associate professor James Wakeling is adding to the arsenal of increasingly sophisticated medical imaging tools with a new signal-processing method for viewing muscle activation details that have never been seen before.

Fascinated with the mechanics of muscle movement in people and animals, Wakeling has developed a novel method using ultrasound imaging, 3D motion-capture technology and proprietary data-processing software to scan and capture 3D maps of the muscle structure — in just 90 seconds.

Grand Rapids, Mich. – A recent Van Andel Research Institute (VARI) study published in the journal Science investigating the molecular structure and function of an essential plant hormone could profoundly change our understanding of a key cell process, and might ultimately lead to the development of new drugs for a variety of diseases.

After the huge 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the chairman of BP referred to the victims of the spill as the "small people." He explained it as awkward word choice by a non-native speaker of English, but the authors of a new paper published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, wondered if there was something real behind it. In their study, they found that people who feel powerful tend to overestimate their own height—they feel physically larger than they actually are.

Want to think outside the box? Try actually thinking outside of a box. In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers had students think up solutions to problems while acting out various metaphors about creative thinking and found that the instructions actually worked.

Quantifying how sore a person is after a long workout is a challenge for doctors and researchers, but scientists from Loma Linda and Asuza Pacific Universities think they may have figured it out. Their research article describing a new technique to measure muscle soreness will be published in the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE).

Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) or exercise-induced muscle damage (EIMD) is one of the most common sports injuries, but without a reliable method of quantifying muscle soreness, assessing treatments is difficult.

Parents should be involved in treatment programs for their obese children, according to a new scientific statement published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) testing of self-collected specimens may be a more effective way to screen for cervical cancer in low-resource settings compared to visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) and liquid-based cytology (LBC), according to a study published January 23 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

CHICAGO – Positive affirmation along with patient education appears to help African-American patients with high blood pressure more effectively follow their medication regimen, according to a study published Online First by the Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Hypertension disproportionately affects African-Americans compared to whites, and poorly adhering to a medication regimen can explain poor blood pressure control, which can lead to cardiovascular problems and death, the authors write in the study background.

CHICAGO – The overuse of health care services in the United States appears to be an understudied problem with research literature limited to a few services and rates of overuse varying widely, according to an article published in the January 23 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. This article is part of the journal's Less is More series.

CHICAGO – Individuals who keep their brains active throughout life with cognitively stimulating activities such as reading, writing and playing games appear to have reduced levels of the β-amyloid protein, which is the major part of the amyloid plaque in Alzheimer disease, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

The recent development of the radiopharmaceutical carbon 11-labeled Pittsburgh Compound B ([ 11 C]PiB) has made it possible to image fibrillar (fiber) forms of the β-amyloid (Αβ) protein.