Culture

A 3,000-year record from 52 of the world's oldest trees shows that California's western Sierra Nevada was droughty and often fiery from 800 to 1300, according to new research.

Scientists reconstructed the 3,000-year history of fire by dating fire scars on ancient giant sequoia trees, Sequoiadendron giganteum, in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park. Individual giant sequoias can live more than 3,000 years.

Jennifer Smith, PhD, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was belly crawling her way to the end of a long, narrow tunnel carved in the rock at a desert oasis by Egyptians who lived in the time of the pharaohs.

The UChicago team found that making cells assume a star shape promotes a tense cytoskeleton, which provides structural support for cells, while a flower shape promotes a looser cytoskeleton. "On a flower shape you get the majority of cells turning to fat, and on a star shape you've got the majority of cells turning into bone," said Kris Kilian, a National Institutes of Health Fellow in Mrksich's research group. The UChicago team published its findings in the March 1 Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They would love to be perfect mothers. Instead, they feel ashamed and inadequate, and fearful that their children might inherit their eating difficulties.

Imagine an ordinary Norwegian home, where Mum is having dinner with her three-year-old son. Underneath the surface of this seemingly idyllic scene, the woman is fighting a fierce battle with herself, thinking: "I wish he could finish eating, so I can go to the bathroom and throw up."

This is just one of many real-life stories Kristine Rørtveit has listened to while working on her thesis.

Providing emergency contraception to women in advance of need does not reduce pregnancy rates, despite increased use and faster use after unprotected sexual intercourse. These are the findings according to a new review published in The Cochrane Library.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – A vaccine designed to prevent cervical cancer also may protect females from post-surgical recurrence of the disease, according to researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

A new study shows that the Gardasil vaccine reduces the likelihood of human papillomavirus (HPV)-related disease recurring after teen and adult women already have had surgery to remove cancer or certain pre-cancerous changes, said Warner Huh, M.D., an associate professor in the UAB Division of Gynecologic Oncology and lead presenter on the study.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Questionable lending helped sink the U.S. economy, but also provided a lifeline that kept countless firms afloat and averted an even deeper recession, according to research by a University of Illinois finance expert.

Boosting the radiation dose given to prostate cancer patients to a level that cut tumor recurrence in half did not increase the severity of side effects reported by patients up to a decade later. The study led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center researchers also found that patients characterized the impact of continuing side effects on their quality of life as considerably less bothersome than would be expected, based on earlier studies. The article appears in the March 17 cancer issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

ATLANTA – New chemotherapy agents appear associated with improvements in survival time for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer but at substantial cost.

Young Britons see significantly more on-screen smoking in movies than their US peers, finds research published ahead of print in the journal Tobacco Control.

The UK film classification system, which rates more films as suitable for young people than its US counterpart, is to blame, say the authors.

The research team assessed the number of on-screen smoking/tobacco occurrences in 572 top grossing films in the UK, which included 546 screened in the US plus 26 high earning films released only in the UK.

Living through the trauma of war seems to increase the risk of developing asthma, suggests research published ahead of print in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Those who are most traumatised are twice as likely to develop the condition as those who are least traumatised by their experiences of war, the research suggests.

The authors base their findings on a random sample of just over 2000 Kuwaiti civilians who endured the Iraqi invasion and seven month occupation of their country in 1990, and were aged between 50 and 69 at the time.

Simple, low-cost measures such as wearing a pedometer to inspire walking and spending a few minutes a day meditating can put adolescents on the track toward better health, researchers report.

These types of side-effect-free steps can quickly help lower important numbers like blood pressure, heart rate and even weight, counteracting today's unhealthy, upward trends among young people, said Dr. Vernon Barnes, physiologist at the Medical College of Georgia's Georgia Prevention Institute.

Both new diagnoses and a history of non-melanoma skin cancer appear to have become increasingly common, and the disease affects more individuals than all other cancers combined, according to two reports in the March issue of Archives of Dermatology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

In an article published in the March 2010 Archives of Dermatology, researchers report that in the United States, melanoma treatment in late stages of the disease is of significant cost in the population 65 years and older.

HOUSTON -- (March 15, 2010) -- The film "Avatar" isn't the only 3-D blockbuster making a splash this winter. A team of scientists from Houston's Texas Medical Center this week unveiled a new technique for growing 3-D cell cultures, a technological leap from the flat petri dish that could save millions of dollars in drug-testing costs. The research is reported in Nature Nanotechnology.