A Canadian model has won a landmark case in a New York court after Google was forced to disclose the online identity of a blogger who anonymously posted derogatory comments about the Vogue covergirl.
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(AP) -- Electronic medical records are a life-or-death issue at Sac-Osage Hospital - not necessarily just for the patients, but for the hospital itself.
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Although lead content in paint has been restricted in the United States since 1978, University of Cincinnati (UC) environmental health researchers say in major countries from three continents there is still widespread failure to acknowledge its danger and companies continue to sell consumer paints that contain dangerous levels of lead.
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What do the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone," global climate change, and acid rain have in common? They're all a result of human impacts to Earth's biology, chemistry and geology, and the natural cycles that involve all three.
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An alien plant species has invaded Missouri and is threatening to overrun crops and livestock pastures. To combat the scourge weed, officials are deliberately releasing two alien insect species to destroy its roots and seeds. What could possibly go wrong?
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A longstanding and fruitful collaboration between researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology and the University of Neuch?l in Switzerland, together with contributions from ...
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is searching for ways to guide, without prescribing action.
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Researchers have developed an easy method of measuring the volume of the placenta during pregnancy.
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Almost half of Bangladeshi women with young children experience violence from their husbands, and their children appear to have a higher risk of recent respiratory infections and diarrhea, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
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Two common anti-influenza drugs - Relenza and Tamiflu - appear equally effective at preventing common flu symptoms when given before infection, say researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine. However, data is lacking on the effectiveness and safety of the two drugs in vulnerable groups such as the very young and people with compromised immune systems.
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Bowing to the fiscal realities surrounding health care reform and budget deficits, two of President Barack Obama's top economic officials -- Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers -- indicate middle-class taxes might have to go up in order to finance the administration's agenda.
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It is widely believed that providing better access to medical care can improve the health of Americans. New research at National Jewish Health indicates, however, that having insurance and a medical provider is not enough to improve asthma control among elementary and middle school students. National Jewish Professor of Pediatrics Stanley Szefler, MD, and his colleagues report in the August 2009 issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology that asthma control was poor among 155 students with asthma, regardless of whether they had medical insurance or an identified medical provider.
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Major depression and coronary artery disease are only modestly related throughout an individual's lifetime, but studying how the two interact over time and in twin pairs paints a more complex picture of the associations between the conditions, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. For example, the association between coronary artery disease onset and major depression risk is much stronger over time than vice versa.
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Customers want fresh food, which is neither unripe nor spoiled. A new system based on metal oxide sensors could check the safety and quality of foods reliably, quickly and economically -- such as how ripe that pineapple really is.
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When buying a pineapple, the customer often stands helplessly in front of the supermarket shelf â€" which one is already ripe? If the fruit is eaten immediately it's often still not sweet enough, if it's left too long it has rotten patches. Laboratory tests are too slow and too costly to provide the answers.
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Pine trees grown for 12 years in air one-and-a-half times richer in carbon dioxide than today's levels produced twice as many seeds of at least as good a quality as those growing under normal conditions, a Duke University-led research team reported Monday (Aug. 3) at a national ecology conference.
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(AP) -- Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn drove quietly out of the Japanese automaker's soon-to-open headquarters Sunday in the first public viewing of its new zero-emission vehicle.
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The remains of Captain Michael "Scott" Speicher, the first American lost in the Persian Gulf War, have been found in Iraq, the military said Sunday, after struggling for nearly two decades with the question of whether he was dead or alive.
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The interplay between dark energy and the shape of the universe leaves the fate of the cosmos hanging in the balance, warns physicist Pedro Ferreira
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New research helps explain why infection with herpes simplex virus-2 (HSV-2), which causes genital herpes, increases the risk for HIV infection even after successful treatment heals the genital skin sores and breaks that often result from HSV-2.
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New research helps explain why infection with herpes simplex virus-2 (HSV-2), which causes genital herpes, increases the risk for HIV infection even after successful treatment heals the genital skin sores and breaks that often result from HSV-2.
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Non-small cell lung cancer patients who have progressed on a cetuximab-containing regimen may respond to erlotinib, Fox Chase Cancer Center researchers reported today at the annual meeting of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer.
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ROME, Aug. 1, 2009 (Reuters) -- A roughly 4,500 year-old skeleton of a man, probably a warrior killed by an arrow to the chest, has been discovered on a beach south of Rome, Italian police said. ... > read full story
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Taking the most commonly-prescribed anti-diabetic drug, metformin, reduces an individual's risk of developing pancreatic cancer by 62 percent, according to research from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, published in the Aug. 1 issue of Gastroenterology.
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(AP) -- A federal jury on Friday ordered a Boston University graduate student who admitted illegally downloading and sharing music online to pay $675,000 to four record labels.
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Japanese game-maker Nintendo said today that sales of its popular Wii motion-sensing game console -- which has outsold Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox -- fell for the first time in its ...
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There's a new type of evolution going on and it may not be to our liking, says Susan Blackmore
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Mozilla announced Friday that it had passed one billion downloads of Firefox, its Web browser that has gained popularity as a free alternative to Microsoft's ubiquitous Internet Explorer.
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(AP) -- Apple Inc. says it has fixed an iPhone vulnerability that lets hackers knock people offline - and possibly take over the phones - by sending them specially crafted text messages.
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A new approach to windows that could let in more light and cut indoor lighting needs by up to 99% in buildings in Tropical regions without losing the cooling effect of shades. Details are reported in the International Journal of Engineering Systems Modelling and Simulation this month.
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Transposons are mobile genetic elements found in the hereditary material of humans and other organisms. They can replicate and the new copies can insert at novel sites in the genome. Because this threatens the whole organism, molecular mechanisms have evolved which can repress transposon activity. Professor Klaus Förstemann of the Gene Center of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich and a team of researchers working with the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster have now uncovered a new type of cellular defence that acts against DNA sequences present in high copy numbers inside the cell, even if they have not integrated into the genome. Small molecules of RNA (a class of nucleic acid closely related to the genetic material DNA) play the central role. "Transposons are genomic parasites, so to speak", says Förstemann. "If they are allowed to proliferate, the genome can become unstable or cancers can develop. We now want to find out whether mammalian cells possess this newly discovered defence mechanism and to elucidate precisely how it works." (EMBO Journal online, 30 July 2009.)
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AP - Italy has approved the use of the abortion drug RU-486, capping years of debate and defying opposition from the Vatican, which warned of immediate excommunication for doctors prescribing the pill and for women who use it.
Nanosized robots are going to compete at RoboCup 2009 in a microscopic soccer stadium. Each team's nanobots will have to pass some agility tests to be allowed to compete in the miniscule soccer matches. In the matches the nanobots try to "kick" a dust mite size ball through a goal. The skills the nanobots use in the competition are similar to skills that nanobots will require for futuristic technologies like microsurgery. Take a look:
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CBS News reports that a school of battery-powered robotic fish will monitor pollution in the Spanish harbor of Gijon. The robotic fish contain special sensors to help them avoid rocks, ships and other objects so they won't need to be remotely monitored or remote controlled. The robotic fish will patrol the harbor of Gijon, in northern Spain under a $3.6 million grant from the European Union. Hu said Gijon was chosen because port authorities there had expressed an interest in the technology.
The plan might seem "like something straight out of science fiction," said Rory Doyle, a researcher working on the project, but he explained that there was a very simple reason for choosing fishlike machines to monitor the harbor's environmental health.
"The design of fish which nature has produced is a very energy-efficient one," Doyle said. "The fish's efficiency is created by hundreds of millions of years' of evolution. Submarines come nowhere near it."
Information gathered from the robo-fish would be transmitted to the port's control center using a wireless Internet signal when the devices surfaced. The data gathered would be used to create a three-dimensional pollution map of the harbor's area. Here's a video (no sound) that shows the robotic fish in action. (via Daily Mail, Ecofriend.org)
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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark., July 30 (UPI) -- Electrical engineering researchers at two universities will receive stimulus funds to help modernize the U.S. power grid, the National Science Foundation ...
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A new computer game prototype combines work and play to help solve a fundamental problem underlying many computer hardware design tasks.
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Though digital technologies and high-speed communications have significantly expanded the capabilities of scientists -- allowing them to analyze and share vast amounts of data -- these technologies are also raising difficult questions for researchers, institutions, and journals. Because digital data can be manipulated more easily than other forms, they are particularly susceptible to distortion. Questions about how to maintain the data generated, who should have access, and who pays to store them can be controversial.
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29 July 2009: Researchers at the University of Liverpool have discovered that the Amazon river, and its transcontinental drainage, is around 11 million years old and took its present shape about 2.4 million years ago.
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The air in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics was cleaner than the previous year's, due to aggressive efforts by the Chinese government to curtail traffic, increase emissions standards and halt construction in preparation for the games, according to a Cornell study.
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A higher density of blood vessels and other unique physiological features in the flight muscles of bar-headed geese allow them to do what even the most elite of human athletes struggle to accomplish â€" assert energy at high altitudes, according to a new UBC study.
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An international team of scientists, including botanists from the University of Toronto, have identified a pair of genes which can be used to catalogue the world's plants using a technique known as DNA barcoding â€" a rapid and automated classification method that uses a short genetic marker in an organism's DNA to identify it as belonging to a particular species.
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Scientists at this observatory outside Hangzhou joined residents and tourists across China and India in observing the longest total solar eclipse in a century and probably the most-viewed ever.
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A new study has revealed the origins of tiger stripes and a subsurface ocean on Enceladus- one of Saturn's many moons. These geological features are believed to be the result of the moon's unusual chemical composition and not a hot core, shedding light on the evolution of planets and guiding future space exploration.
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SPACE.com - Before undocking from the International Space Station Tuesday, the crew aboard the shuttle Endeavour transferred nearly 1,200 pounds of water to the orbiting outpost. But one crewmember kept a small, but very special, set of water samples for the ride home.
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Reuters - The United States needs to boost NASA's budget by $1.5 billion to fly the last seven shuttle missions and should extend International Space Station operations through 2020, members of a presidential panel reviewing the U.S. human space program said on Tuesday.
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HealthDay - THURSDAY, July 30 (HealthDay News) -- Treatment with "suicide" genes slowed ovarian tumor growth in mice and may one day offer a way to treat late-stage ovarian cancer in women, U.S. scientists say.
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To make the conversion of biomass to biofuels more cost-effective, new technologies are essential, according to Dr. Richard Hess from the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls in the US and his team. Their cost-analysis1 of the steps involved in the corn stover* supply chain is published in Springer's journal Cellulose, in a special issue dedicated to technological advancements in the conversion of corn stover to biofuels.
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Concern over access to clean water is no longer just an issue for the developing world, as California faces its worst drought in recorded history. According to state's Department of Water Resources, supplies in major reservoirs and many groundwater basins are well below average. Court-ordered restrictions on water deliveries have reduced supplies from the two largest water systems, and an outdated statewide water system can't keep up with population growth.
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U.S. Department of Energy laboratories fight off millions of cyber attacks every year, but a near real-time dialog between these labs about this hostile activity has never existed – until now.
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States that have passed privacy laws restricting the ability of hospitals to disclose patient information have seen the sharing of electronic medical records suffer by more than 24%, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).
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Do friends wear the same style of shoe or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, which is why they became friends in the first place? Or once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors?
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Venus Express has charted the first map of Venus's southern hemisphere at infrared wavelengths. The new map hints that our neighbouring world may once have been more Earth-like, with both, a plate tectonics system and an ocean of water.
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The withdrawal of Nevada's Yucca Mountain as a potential nuclear waste repository has reopened the debate over how and where to dispose of spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste.
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New Scientist is collaborating with Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a ground-breaking experiment to electronically tag and follow ordinary trash to the end of its life
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The world's oceans and seas hold an awesome amount of power, but effective ways to harness it have proved elusive – until now
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The newest and heaviest addition to the periodic table – element 112 – is to be called Copernicium in honour of Nicolaus Copernicus
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We owe our very existence to plants, which – thanks to their relationship with CO2 – have prevented the Earth from freezing over
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Designer clusters of atoms that can mimic other elements have for the first time been devised with magnetic properties – the advance could lead to superfast "spintronics" computers
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Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center have found a way to block the genetic flaw at the heart of a common form of muscular dystrophy. The results of the study, which were published today in the journal Science, could pave the way for new therapies that essentially reverse the symptoms of the disease.
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There she is again: the cute girl at the mall. Big eyes. Long legs. She smiles at you. You're about to make your move… but wait! What's she wearing? It's a letterman jacket, one clearly belonging to a hulking football player named "Steve." This girl is taken. Wisely, you move on.
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Many of the objects found today in the asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter may have formed in the outermost reaches of the solar system, according to an international team of astronomers led by scientists from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI).
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An international team of astronomers has found a better way to examine the origins and evolution of galaxies that form following supernova explosions – the starting point for the formation of galaxies when a star explodes – and they have discovered new supernovae in the process.
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GREAT MOMENTS IN SCIENCE: Almost everyone has a 'bad hair day', but what kind of hair, curly or straight, is more prone to tangles and knots? Dr Karl combs through the statistics.
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AP - New NASA photos of the moon show the leftovers from man's exploration 40 years ago. For the first time, photos from space pinpoint equipment left behind from Apollo landings, and even the well-worn tracks made by astronauts on the moon surface. The images are from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was launched last month and now circles the moon in search of future landing sites.
AP - NASA could put a man on the moon but didn't have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission.
Henry Spencer ponders where we'd be now if the Apollo programme hadn't been cancelled
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