Tech

BERKELEY, CA – Oceanographers Jim Bishop and Todd Wood of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have measured the fate of carbon particles originating in plankton blooms in the Southern Ocean, using data that deep-diving Carbon Explorer floats collected around the clock for well over a year. Their study reveals that most of the carbon from lush plankton blooms never reaches the deep ocean.

Desert environments are characterized by poor vegetative cover, strong winds, dry, non-cohesive sandy soils, and hyper-arid conditions. In this context, the land resources of Abu Dhabi Emirate in the United Arab Emirates are subjected to various land degradation stresses, including wind erosion, salinization, waterlogging, landfilling, and overgrazing. To sustain the land resources of Abu Dhabi Emirate, land degradation is a matter of urgency and must be accorded greater significance on the environmental agenda.

May 6, 2009 — (BRONX, NY) — Inappropriate use of camphor-containing products may be a common and underappreciated cause of seizures in young children, according to a new study by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. The study, published in this month's issue of Pediatrics, calls for efforts to educate communities about the hazards of camphor and to crack down on illegally marketed camphor products.

Thousands of small electric scooters, bicycles and wheelchairs throughout Europe and Asia are powered by LifePO4 –- a material used in advanced lithium-ion batteries developed by Université de Montréal researchers.

Ethnicity is having a significant impact on timely access to cardiac care in Calgary and likely across Canada as the population's ethnic diversity grows, according to new research led by a team from the University of Calgary.

An article in the current issue of The American Journal of Cardiology suggests there are ethnic differences in pre-hospital recognition of symptoms and access to care, as well as the care pathway once the patient is hospitalized.

Self-cleaning walls, self-cleaning counter tops, self-cleaning fabrics and even micro-robots that can walk on water could be closer to reality because of research recently completed by scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and at Japan's RIKEN institute. 

Humans have marveled for millennia at how water beads up and rolls off flowers, caterpillars and some insects, and how insects like water striders are able to walk effortlessly on water. It's a property called super hydrophobia and it's been examined seriously by scientists since at least the 1930s. 

CINCINNATI—The need for improved monitoring of neurotrauma patients has resulted in the development of a prototype of a novel, multitasking "lab on a tube" at the University of Cincinnati (UC).

Fort Lauderdale, FL (May 4, 2009): Uveitis, or inflammation within the eye, is a group of diseases responsible for years of visual loss roughly comparable to that caused by diabetes. Now, results from a pioneering international Phase 3 program in uveitis, the LUMINATE trials sponsored by Lux Biosciences, demonstrate the ability of LX211 (LUVENIQ™, voclosporin oral capsule) to significantly improve this chronic eye inflammation.

ATLANTA May 4, 2009—A new review finds hospital volume to be a useful, albeit imperfect, predictor of short term mortality. While studies, when combined, show a quantifiable and statistically significant inverse association between case volume and mortality, the review finds that individual studies often fail to show such an association, leading the authors to conclude volume is at best an imperfect proxy for healthcare quality.

New York, NY, May 4, 2009—Private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans will be paid $11.4 billion more in 2009 than what the same beneficiaries would have cost in the traditional Medicare fee-for-service program, according to a new report released today by The Commonwealth Fund. This new analysis, The Continuing Costs of Privatization: Extra Payments to Medicare Advantage Plans Jump to $11.4 Billion in 2009, estimates that since MA was enacted in 2004, $43 billion in extra payments have been made.

BALTIMORE—Pediatric experts from Children's National Medical Center will be featured in 85 presentations, workshops, and posters at the 2009 Pediatric Academic Societies Annual Meeting—the largest meeting for pediatric clinical research in the country.

Presenters and topics include:

Science and engineering are advancing rapidly in part due to ever more powerful computer simulations, yet the most advanced supercomputers require programming skills that all too few U.S. researchers possess. At the same time, affordable computers and committed national programs outside the U.S. are eroding American competitiveness in number of simulation-driven fields.

While caring for stroke survivors can be highly stressful for some families, many families feel little or no strain from caregiving, and even report that being a caregiver can be personally rewarding, according to research published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.

In a study of 75 stroke caregivers:

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Fish don't make noises or contort their faces to show that it hurts when hooks are pulled from their mouths, but a Purdue University researcher believes they feel that pain all the same.

Joseph Garner, an assistant professor of animal sciences, helped develop a test that found goldfish do feel pain, and their reactions to it are much like that of humans. A paper detailing the finding was published in the early online version of the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - With equipment readily available to health officials and businesses, a Purdue University researcher has found a way to detect trace amounts of melamine in infant formula.