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COLUMBIA, Mo. – Binge drinking among college students has long been viewed as dangerous and destructive. Government and non-profit health organizations spend millions of dollars annually on public service announcements (PSAs) aimed at dissuading college students from hazardous drinking habits. These organizations primarily use "loss-framed", or negative messages to show the dangers of binge drinking.

Cisplatin is one of the most widely used anticancer chemotherapeutics. However, it has some severe side effects in normal tissues, in particular it is toxic to the kidneys. Understanding the mechanisms underlying this toxicity could identify targets for drugs that could be given together with cisplatin to protect the kidney during chemotherapy. In this context, a team of researchers, led by Zheng Dong, at Georgia Health Sciences University, Augusta, has now identified the signaling protein PKC-delta as a critical regulator of cisplatin-mediated kidney toxicity in mice.

BOSTON—Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have identified an overactive network of growth-spurring genes that drive stem-like breast cancer cells enriched in triple-negative breast tumors, a typically aggressive cancer that is highly resistant to current therapies.

COLUMBIA, Mo. ¬— Previous studies have shown that customer satisfaction plays a key role in the health and future success of any company. When customers are satisfied, they keep coming back to the same store and invite their friends to do the same. Now, a new study from the University of Missouri has found that CEOs who pay attention to employees' job satisfaction are able to boost both customer satisfaction and "repurchase intentions," or the number of customers that intend to purchase products from the store.

That's what viewers of the past HBO series Sex and the City may ask themselves when faced with the prospect of uncomfortable discussions about sexual health with partners, friends and doctors.

Researchers found that college students were more than twice as likely to talk about sexual health issues with their partners after watching a Sex and the City episode featuring the characters Samantha and Miranda having similar conversations, compared to students who saw different episodes.

CHICAGO --- Gay young men in serious relationships are six times more likely to have unprotected sex than those who hook up with casual partners, according to new Northwestern Medicine research.

The findings provide a new direction for prevention efforts in this population who account for nearly 70 percent of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in adolescents and young adults in the United States and who also have the highest increase in new infections.

MADISON — It's an issue that crops up wherever humans and big predators — wolves, bears, lions — coexist.

"It's just hard to live alongside large carnivores. They damage crops, they kill livestock and pets, they threaten people's safety," says University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Adrian Treves. And the sheer presence of a wolf nearby has typically been enough to make farmers fear for their animals, he adds. "Wherever there were carnivores, people thought there was risk."

A recently published paper highlights that while the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is more common in those with migraine than those without migraine irrespective of sex, the risk is greater in male migraineurs than female migraineurs. Study details are now available in Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain, published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Headache Society.

New research raises the possibility that the critically short supply of livers for organ donation could be expanded by treating so-called "marginal" livers with a substance that protects them from damage after being connected to recipients' blood supplies. The report appears in ACS' journal Molecular Pharmaceutics.

With the curtain about to rise on a much-anticipated new era of "nanoagriculture" — using nanotechnology to boost the productivity of plants for food, fuel, and other uses —scientists are reporting a huge gap in knowledge about the effects of nanoparticles on corn, tomatoes, rice and other food crops. Their article appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Who would have thought that Gila monster saliva would be the inspiration for a blockbuster new drug for Type 2 diabetes? Or that medicines for chronic pain, heart attacks, high blood pressure and stroke would emerge from venom of the Magician's cone snail, the saw-scaled viper, the Brazilian lancehead snake and the Southeastern pygmy rattlesnake? These are just some of the sources contributing to the emergence of potential new drugs based on "peptides" that is the topic of the cover story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine.

Patients who undergo surgery are more likely to suffer surgical site infections (SSIs) if the operating theatre is noisy, according to research published in the July issue of BJS, the British Journal of Surgery.

Swiss researchers studied 35 patients who underwent planned, major abdominal surgery, exploring demographic parameters, the duration of the operation and sound levels in the theatre. Six of the patients (17 per cent) developed SSIs and the only variable was the noise level in the operating theatre, which was considerably higher in the infected patients.

"Even though the number of veterans in this study was small, the results were very impressive," Rosenthal said. "These young men were in extreme distress as a direct result of trauma suffered during combat, and the simple and effortless Transcendental Meditation technique literally transformed their lives."

A PhD student at the University of Leeds has developed a fast, accurate and inexpensive method of creating detailed vegetation community maps over very large areas, by coupling aerial photographs with data from maps.

Working in partnership with the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, Ute Bradter from Leeds' Faculty of Biological Sciences, has collated existing data (such as soil type, altitude, slope and aspect) and using a sophisticated statistical model, predicted the distribution of plant communities at a high resolution in the Yorkshire Dales, over 1600 km2.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---University of Michigan physicists used the electric fields generated by intersecting laser beams to trap and manipulate thousands of microscopic plastic spheres, thereby creating 3-D arrays of optically induced crystals.

The technique could someday be used to analyze the structure of materials of biological interest, including bacteria, viruses and proteins, said U-M physicist Georg Raithel.