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CORVALLIS, Ore. – As homes and cities expand closer to forests and wildlands across the American West, increasing wildfire threats have created an unlikely new phenomena – confidence in government.

Recent studies show that people in neighborhoods adjacent to public forest lands can and do trust natural resource managers to a surprising degree, in part because the risks they face are so severe.

Researchers from the Australian Venom Research Unit (AVRU) at the University of Melbourne have collaborated with scientists from the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of Costa Rica, to develop new antivenom against the lethal Papuan taipan.

The preclinical studies of this antivenom have been published in the international journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

DALLAS – June 29, 2011 – Reducing the intervals between giving cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and an electronic defibrillator shock after cardiac arrest significantly improves survival, according to UT Southwestern Medical Center emergency medicine doctors involved in an international study.

A team of engineers and scientists at the University of British Columbia has developed a device that can be implanted behind the eye for controlled and on-demand release of drugs to treat retinal damage caused by diabetes.

Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of vision loss among patients with diabetes. The disease is caused by the unwanted growth of capillary cells in the retina, which in its advanced stages can result in blindness.

The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) today welcomed the publication of positive results of the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST).

The NLST study, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that lung cancer deaths fell by 20% and all-cause mortality fell by 7% when heavy smokers were screened regularly using low-dose spiral computed tomography (CT) compared with standard chest x-ray. The NLST study followed more than 53,000 current and former smokers ages 55-74.

CHICAGO— The National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) is the first scientific study that provides clear evidence that CT screening significantly reduces the death rate due to lung cancer. NLST data shows 20 percent fewer lung cancer deaths among trial participants who had the CT scan compared with the chest x-ray. Until now, no screening test for lung cancer has proven effective in detecting tumors at an early, more treatable stage.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Zeroing in on the early cell mutations that enable a cancer to grow is one of the best ways to find a personalized therapy to stop it. Scientists were able to use a statistical approach for the first time to map out the order in which these abnormalities form to analyze the pattern of DNA changes in advanced skin and ovarian tumors.

In order to realize the full potential of advanced biofuels that are derived from non-food sources of lignocellulosic biomass—e.g., agricultural, forestry, and municipal waste, and crops such as poplar, switchgrass and miscanthus—new technologies that can efficiently and cost-effectively break down this biomass into simple sugars are required. Existing biomass pretreatment technologies are typically derived from the pulp and paper industry and rely on dilute acids and bases to break down the biomass.

Capturing birds using mist nets to study behaviour, movement or the demographics of a species is one of the most common research techniques in ornithology, yet until now there have been no large scale studies into the risks mist nets pose to birds. Writing in the British Ecological Society's Methods in Ecology and Evolution researchers from California used a dataset of over 345,000 records to evaluate the risks of mist netting.

Mobile phones could hold the key to people giving up smoking after a programme involving sending motivational and supportive text messages to smokers doubled quit rates at six months.

The findings of the txt2stop trial, which was led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and funded by the Medical Research Council, are published in The Lancet today.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Research results from the National Lung Screening Trial, published online June 29 in the New England Journal of Medicine confirm that helical low-dose CT (LDCT) scans for lung cancer reduce deaths in heavy smokers by 20 percent compared to X-ray scans, but several other key findings from the data gathered in the study, including cost-effectiveness, will be released in the next six months, said a Brown University statistician who helped lead the massive government-funded study.

June 30, 2011 – The development of agriculture was a significant event in human cultural evolution, but we are not the only organisms to have adopted an agricultural way of life. In a study published online today in Genome Research (www.genome.org), researchers have sequenced the genome of a fungus farming leaf-cutting ant, revealing new insights into the genetics and molecular biology behind this unusual lifestyle.

Scientists have found a 20 percent reduction in deaths from lung cancer among current or former heavy smokers who were screened with low-dose helical computed tomography (CT) versus those screened by chest X-ray. The primary research results from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) were published online today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Philadelphia — Results of the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) published online in the June 30 New England Journal of Medicine report a twenty percent reduction in lung cancer deaths among study participants who were screened with low-dose helical computed tomography (CT) versus those screened with chest X-ray. Conducted by the American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ACRIN) and the National Cancer Institute's Lung Screening Study Group, the NLST enrolled 53,000 current and former heavy smokers aged 55 to 74 at 33 sites across the United States.

Modern humans never co-existed with Homo erectus—a finding counter to previous hypotheses of human evolution—new excavations in Indonesia and dating analyses show. The research, reported in the journal PLoS One, offers new insights into the nature of human evolution, suggesting a different role for Homo erectus than had been previously thought.

The work was conducted by the Solo River Terrace (SoRT) Project, an international group of scientists directed by anthropologists Etty Indriati of Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia and Susan Antón of New York University.