Tech

UCSF researchers have that found routinely offering rapid HIV tests to patients in community health centers can significantly increase the number of patients screened for HIV.

Study findings are published in the December 2009 issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Men newly diagnosed with prostate cancer have an increased risk of cardiovascular events and suicide, reports a new study in this week's PLoS Medicine. Katja Falland Fang Fang from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden and their colleagues found that the relative risks of cardiovascular events and suicide were elevated during the first year after prostate cancer diagnosis, particularly during the first week.

Research published this week in PLoS Medicine finds that the global spread of Hepatitis C virus (HCV) coincided with widespread use of transfused blood and with the expansion of intravenous drug use but slowed before wholesale implementation of anti-HCV screening.

"So many disparate elements, both natural and man-made, converge in the Himalayas," said William Lau, a climatologist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "There's no other place in the world that could produce such a powerful atmospheric heat pump," referring to a new hypothesis he's put forward to explain the rapid retreat of Himalayan glaciers in recent decades.

Soot from fire in an unventilated fireplace wafts into a home and settles on the surfaces of floors and furniture. But with a quick fix to the chimney flue and some dusting, it bears no impact on a home's long-term environment.

A new modeling study from NASA confirms that when tiny air pollution particles we commonly call soot – also known as black carbon – travel along wind currents from densely populated south Asian cities and accumulate over a climate hotspot called the Tibetan Plateau, the result may be anything but inconsequential.

TORONTO, ON – University of Toronto quantum optics researchers Sajeev John and Xun Ma have discovered new behaviours of light within photonic crystals that could lead to faster optical information processing and compact computers that don't overheat.

WASHINGTON – Black soot deposited on Tibetan glaciers has contributed significantly to the retreat of the world's largest non-polar ice masses, according to new research by scientists from NASA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Soot absorbs incoming solar radiation and can speed glacial melting when deposited on snow in sufficient quantities.

RICHLAND, Wash. – As communities brace for rising wintertime influenza cases, scientists are developing a mathematical and visual analytic toolkit to help health officials quickly analyze pandemics and craft better response strategies.

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have created a Pandemic Influenza Planning Tool to model the spread of a disease through various age groups and geographic populations. It also allows decision-makers to carefully assess the benefit of their decisions for different scenarios in advance.

HOUSTON -- (Dec. 14, 2009) -- Researchers at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) have created a single nanoparticle that can be tracked in real time with MRI as it homes in on cancer cells, tags them with a fluorescent dye and kills them with heat. The all-in-one particle is one of the first examples from a growing field called "theranostics" that develops technologies physicians can use to diagnose and treat diseases in a single procedure.

Scientists once thought of tool use as a defining feature of humans. That's until examples of tool use came in from other primates, along with birds and an array of other mammals. Now, a report in the December 14th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, adds an octopus to the growing list of tool users.

Athens, Ga. – A new study published by researchers from the University of Georgia and the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., has found that cancer patients with dementia have a dramatically lower survival rate than patients with cancer alone, even after controlling for factors such as age, tumor type and tumor stage.

But the study, published in the early online edition of the journal Critical Reviews in Oncology/Hematology, also argues that a diagnosis of dementia shouldn't discourage the use of cancer screenings and appropriate cancer treatments.

CINCINNATI—A new study by University of Cincinnati (UC) nephrologists shows that most dialysis patients admitted to long-term care hospitals face readmission to acute care facilities, and those with acute kidney failure don't often recover full kidney function.

This study is being published in the advanced online edition of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, the official journal of the National Kidney Foundation.

CHESTNUT HILL, MA (12/11/2009) – Boston College researchers have observed the "hot electron" effect in a solar cell for the first time and successfully harvested the elusive charges using ultra-thin solar cells, opening a potential avenue to improved solar power efficiency, the authors report in the current online edition of Applied Physics Letters.

HOUSTON - Black women are less likely than white women to receive radiation therapy after a lumpectomy, the standard of care for early stage breast cancer, according to a new study by researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

The largest of its kind and the first to examine such racial disparities in radiation therapy, the study was published today in Cancer. It was first presented at the 2008 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Breast Cancer Symposium.

SAN ANTONIO — Using Herceptin with chemotherapy, instead of after, clearly improves treatment of women with HER2+ breast cancer, and should be the new standard of care, says a Mayo Clinic researcher who led what is regarded to be a key clinical trial determining the best use of Herceptin.