Tech

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA – Exposure to violent crime may exacerbate asthma in children, according to a study to be presented Saturday, May 1 at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Emerging research suggests that violence and stress may influence the severity of a child's asthma. To explore this association further, researchers conducted a study of 561 children ages 8-14 years in Chicago who had been diagnosed with asthma by a physician.

Latinos have higher rates of developing visual impairment, blindness, diabetic eye disease, and cataracts than non-Hispanic whites, researchers found. These are the first estimates of visual impairment and eye disease development in Latinos, the largest and fastest growing minority population in the United States.

The research was part of the Los Angeles Latino Eye Study (LALES), which was supported by the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health. LALES began in 2000 as the nation's largest and most comprehensive study of vision in Latinos.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– A team of scientists at UC Santa Barbara that helped pioneer research into the quantum properties of a small defect found in diamonds has now used cutting-edge computational techniques to produce a road map for studying defects in alternative materials.

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — A UC Davis team of cardiovascular specialists has demonstrated the effectiveness of using stents -- as compared to traditional open-chest surgery -- to repair aortas that are torn as the result of accidents. The researchers will present their findings at the American Association for Thoracic Surgery Aortic Symposium 2010, which takes place April 29-30 in New York City.

NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites are helping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) keep tabs on the extent of the recent Gulf oil spill with satellite images from time to time. NOAA is the lead agency on oil spills and uses airplane fly-overs to assess oil spill extent.

In this latest image acquired by ESA's Envisat on Thursday at 16:23 UTC, oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico can be seen as a dark blue swirl advancing toward the Louisiana coast.

On Thursday night, the oil spill – five times larger than first estimated – had spread to just under 5 km from the coast, threatening environmental disaster.

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is making it easier to find chemical information online. EPA is releasing a database, called ToxRefDB, which allows scientists and the interested public to search and download thousands of toxicity testing results on hundreds of chemicals. ToxRefDB captures 30 years and $2 billion of testing results.

A Texas A&M University scientist spends hours at a time peering at slides of pollen samples, comparing them to track down the origins of honey with questionable heritage. Some of the samples contain labels from other countries when in fact they originated in China but were re-routed to avoid tariffs of up to 500 percent, says Vaughn Bryant, a palynologist and an anthropology professor at Texas A&M University.

Pokeberries – the weeds that children smash to stain their cheeks purple-red and that Civil War soldiers used to write letters home – could be the key to spreading solar power across the globe, according to researchers at Wake Forest University's Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials.

Nanotech Center scientists have used the red dye made from pokeberries to coat their efficient and inexpensive fiber-based solar cells. The dye acts as an absorber, helping the cell's tiny fibers trap more sunlight to convert into power.

Washington, DC— Doctors at Children's National Medical Center have found that carbon monoxide levels in the blood of young children increase during routine general anesthesia.

Forget what you know about how diseases are diagnosed—new research published in the May 2010 print issue of The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) details a noninvasive ground-breaking tool that detects signs of disease at early molecular stages before symptoms can be seen using traditional methods. Even better, this tool promises to detect some eye diseases so early that they may be reversed before any permanent damage can occur.

A series of novel imaging agents could light up tumors as they begin to form – before they turn deadly – and signal their transition to aggressive cancers.

The compounds – fluorescent inhibitors of the enzyme cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) – could have broad applications for detecting tumors earlier, monitoring a tumor's transition from pre-malignancy to more aggressive growth, and defining tumor margins during surgical removal.