from the Washington Post
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More than half of babies in poverty
are being raised by mothers who show
symptoms of mild to severe depression,
potentially creating problems in
parenting and in child development,
according to a new study.
In what was described as the first
detailed portrait of its kind,
researchers reported that one in nine
infants in poverty had a mother with
severe depression and that such mothers
typically breastfed their children for
shorter periods than other mothers who
were poor.
"A mom who is too sad to get up in
the morning won't be able to take care
of all of her child's practical needs,"
said researcher Olivia Golden, who
co-authored the paper with two
colleagues at the District-based Urban
Institute. "If she is not able to take
joy in her child, talk baby talk, play
with the child--those are features of
parenting that brain development
research has told us contribute to
babies' and toddlers' successful
development."
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from the Los Angeles Times
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The resting brain is anything but
idle--that simple proposition would be
clear if you could peer into Mike
Mrazek's noggin as he putters around his
kitchen preparing his daily morning
feast of scrambled eggs, oatmeal and
fresh fruit.
As he plods through his quotidian
ritual of gathering ingredients,
cutting, chopping, bringing the pan to
the correct temperature and boiling
water for tea, Mrazek's thoughts, too,
are something of a scrambled feast, as
he later recounts. Childhood memories
jostle against thoughts of his
girlfriend's progress on a cross-country
journey. Reflections on the tomatoes in
his garden give way to a rehearsal of a
meeting he's having later on at the
university. ...
... Until recently, scientists would
have found little of interest in the
purposeless, mind-wandering spaces
between Mrazek's conscious
breakfast-making tasks--they were just
the brain idling between meaningful
activity.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Scientists working with NASA's Kepler satellite reported Thursday that they might have spotted a planet just 1.5 times the diameter of Earth around a Sun-like star 2,000 light-years away.
"We're still in the process of confirming this candidate is a planet," said Matthew Holman, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, at a NASA-sponsored news conference on Thursday. Dr. Holman is the lead author of an article describing the discoveries that the journal Science published on its Web site.
This is the first announcement of a candidate Earth-size planet by the Kepler mission, which in March 2009 launched a one-ton spacecraft to search for planets like ours that just might harbor life. The planet was among more than 700 candidate planets that the team announced in June. If it is made of similar stuff as Earth, its mass would be three to four times as much.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Food and Drug Administration officials said Thursday their investigators had homed in on chicken feed as a likely major contributor to the salmonella contamination that triggered a nationwide egg recall and potentially caused nearly 1,500 cases of illness.
Feed found at Wright County Egg in Iowa tested positive for salmonella, FDA officials said at a joint news conference with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Salmonella also was found in walkways and manure at Wright County Egg, as well as in ingredients used in the feed. The samples of the salmonella were a genetic match to the salmonella that has made many people sick, officials said.
The feed also was given to young hens, called pullets, that were supplied to Hillandale Farms, also in Iowa.
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from Nature News
Grandma may not be as important as we thought--at least when it comes to evolution. A model published this week questions a popular theory dubbed the 'grandmother hypothesis,' which says that human females, unlike those of the other great apes, survive well past their reproductive prime because of the benefits that post-menopausal women offer to their grandchildren.
The evolutionary biologist William Hamilton initially proposed the idea in a 1966 paper that built on the theoretical work of George Williams and Peter Medawar. But the grandmother hypothesis really took off during the 1980s and 90s on the basis of field data collected by Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and her colleagues.
These researchers found that among Tanzanian hunter-gatherers, the Hadza, mothers faced a trade-off between foraging for food for themselves and any weaned offspring, and caring for new infants. But if grandmothers helped with foraging, they were rewarded with healthier, heavier grandchildren who weaned at a younger age.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON -- A top Pentagon official has confirmed a previously classified incident that he describes as "the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever," a 2008 episode in which a foreign intelligence agent used a flash drive to infect computers, including those used by the Central Command in overseeing combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Plugging the cigarette-lighter-sized flash drive into an American military laptop at a base in the Middle East amounted to "a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control," according to William J. Lynn 3d, deputy secretary of defense, writing in the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.
"It was a network administrator's worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary," Mr. Lynn wrote.
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from Scientific American
The surprise success this summer of a clinical trial on an antiretroviral-based vaginal microbicide provides new traction for efforts to combat AIDS in the developing world. In a special report, Scientific American looks at some new directions to expect for treatment and prevention of this widespread killer.
Drug policy has focused on a policing approach of prohibition and incarceration, which has contributed to spreading HIV within the injection-drug community. Comprehensive drug reform policies are showing better results.
Meanwhile, a paucity of research on men who have sex with other men has done a disservice to efforts to prevent the spread of HIV. And despite questions, the seemingly unsuccessful phase III Thailand trial this past fall spread optimism for an AIDS vaccine.
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from BBC News Online
Researchers in South Africa have revealed the earliest direct evidence of human-made arrows. The scientists unearthed 64,000 year-old "stone points," which they say were probably arrow heads.
Closer inspection of the ancient weapons revealed remnants of blood and bone that provided clues about how they were used. The team reports its findings in the journal Antiquity.
The arrow heads were excavated from layers of ancient sediment in Sibudu Cave in South Africa. During the excavation, led by Professor Lyn Wadley from the University of the Witwatersrand, the team dug through layers deposited up to 100,000 years ago. Marlize Lombard from the University of Johannesburg, who led the examination of the findings. She described her study as "stone age forensics".
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from USA Today
A small study of an experimental drug for advanced melanoma--a brutal disease that often kills within nine months--is giving rare hope to doctors and patients.
For the first time, doctors say, new therapies that include the drug allow them to envision a time when they might be able to keep melanoma patients alive for years, treating the tumor as they would a chronic disease.
The pill, known as PLX4032, doesn't cure melanoma, and it helps only the roughly 50% of melanoma patients whose tumors have a mutation in a key gene called BRAF. But among those patients in the study, 81% saw their tumors shrink. And for those 32 patients, the drug kept melanoma in check for a median of seven months, says the study's lead author, Keith Flaherty of Massachusetts General Hospital.
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from BBC News Online
Even the most extreme geoengineering approaches will not stop sea levels from rising due to climate change, a study suggests. New research proposes that as many as 150 million people could be affected as ocean levels increases by 30cm to 70cm by the end of this century.
This could result in flooding of low-lying coastal areas, including some of the world's largest cities. The team published the study in the journal PNAS.
Scientists led by John Moore from Beijing Normal University, China, write that to combat global warming, people need to concentrate on sharply curbing greenhouse gas emissions and not rely too much on proposed geoengineering methods. "Substituting geoengineering for greenhouse emission control would be to burden future generations with enormous risk," said Svetlana Jevrejeva of the UK's National Oceanography Centre, a co-author of the study.
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from National Geographic News
In the battle for bugs, wolf spiders are outwitting carnivorous plants, according to the first study to show members of the plant and animal kingdoms competing for prey. In parts of Florida and southern Georgia, two species of wolf spider eat the same insects as the pink sundew--a type of carnivorous plant.
Sundews catch bugs using a sticky mucilage on the tips of their leaves. The small plants then release digestive enzymes, which begin to process the trapped animals, leaving only their exoskeletons behind.
Sosippus floridanus spiders, meanwhile, build funnel webs slightly off the ground, at the same height as the sundews. And a wandering wolf spider species, Rabidosa rabida, actively hunts for the same insects the sundews tend to trap.
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from New Scientist
From blackout-inducing g forces to withered muscles and bones, there aren't many tougher physical challenges than going into space.
This has been highlighted by the release of medical records from astronauts who worked on board the Russian space station Mir, which detail the gruelling effects space travel has on human health before, during and after a mission. Along with research on muscle wastage in astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS), the records demonstrate the need for better countermeasures against the hazards of living in space before any interplanetary missions are attempted.
The records were collected by Gilles Clément of the International Space University in Toulouse, France, and colleagues, who oversaw the selection, flights and rehabilitation of six European astronauts who worked on board Mir between 1988 and 1999. They have only just been released because the astronauts requested a 10-year delay.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
The largest egg recall in U.S. history comes at a point of great consolidation in the egg industry, when a shrinking number of companies produce most of the eggs found on grocery shelves and a defect in one operation can jeopardize a significant segment of the marketplace.
Just 192 large egg companies own about 95 percent of laying hens in this country, down from 2,500 in 1987, according to United Egg Producers, an industry group. Most of those producers are concentrated in five states: Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and California.
"I don't think people have any idea when they see all these brand names in the stores that so many are coming from the same place," said Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food and Water Watch, a food safety organization. "It raises the stakes--if one company is doing something wrong, it affects a lot of food."
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from BBC News Online
Pakistan's prime minister says the government is "seriously concerned" about the potential spread of epidemic diseases in the flood-hit country. Yousuf Raza Gilani was speaking during high-level talks aimed at preventing a mass health crisis.
Doctors in many areas are reportedly struggling to cope with the spread of diseases such as diarrhoea and cholera. The UN says more than 17 million people have been affected by the floods, with about 1.2 million homes destroyed.
There are fears of further flooding as the Indus river at Hyderabad, already at a 50-year high, is expected to rise even more. Mr. Gilani told the meeting of senior doctors, health ministry officials, UN representatives and members of non-governmental organisations that Pakistan was experiencing "the worst natural calamity of its history".
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
An experimental synthetic cornea implanted in 10 patients may be a potential alternative to cadaver corneas for curing vision loss due to corneal inflammation and scarring, researchers said Wednesday.
Eye surgeons currently use primarily cadaver corneas for transplants, but that requires the use of anti-rejection drugs and presents a risk of infection. Plastic corneas can also be used, but they present other problems and are generally tried only when tissue transplants have failed.
The new artificial corneas use collagen produced in yeast as a scaffolding that allows cells from the recipient to grow into the graft so that it mimics the original tissue. The two-year preliminary test showed that the biosynthetic corneas restored vision as effectively as cadaver corneas, did not require anti-rejection drugs and allowed normal tears to form.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Cathy Hayes was cracking jokes as she recorded a close encounter with a buffalo on her camera in a recent visit to Yellowstone National Park. "Watch Donald get gored," she said as her companion hustled toward a grazing one-ton beast for a closer shot with his own camera.
Seconds later, as if on cue, the buffalo lowered its head, pawed the ground and charged, injuring, as it turns out, Ms. Hayes. "We were about 30, 35 feet, and I zoomed in on him, but that wasn't far enough, because they are fast," she recounted later in a YouTube video displaying her bruised and cut legs.
The national parks' history is full of examples of misguided visitors feeding bears, putting children on buffalos for photos and dipping into geysers despite signs warning of scalding temperatures. But today, as an ever more wired and interconnected public visits the parks in rising numbers--July was a record month for visitors at Yellowstone--rangers say that technology often figures into such mishaps.
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from Science News
BOSTON -- A new gel may provide a cheap means of stanching blood flow on the battlefield or in any other situation where there isn't time for stitches. Estimates suggest that the gel would cost less than $10 per application, a fraction of the cost of other gels in use today, researchers reported August 23 at the American Chemical Society's fall meeting.
The new blood-clotting material is a hydrogel, a Jell-O-like mixture of water and a fibrous polymer, in this case acrylamide decorated with positively charged nitrogen-containing groups.
Experiments with blood plasma reveal that the gel kicks into gear a blood-clotting protein known as factor VII, a key player in the cascade of events that leads to coagulation, said biomedical engineer Brendan Casey of the University of Maryland in College Park.
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from Nature News
The Newtonian constant of gravitation--known in the finely tuned business of metrology as 'big G'--has come a long way since British physicist Henry Cavendish first measured the gravitational attraction of Earth in 1798. Although G derived from Cavendish's measurements had an uncertainty of about 1%, modern measurements have tightened that to just a couple of tens of parts per million.
But the relentless honing of G may have hit a stumbling block. Two recent experiments are in striking disagreement with earlier findings, and the overall uncertainty in the value of the constant may be set to increase.
In Newton's equations of gravity, G represents the size of the gravitational force. The constant is involved in the quest to unify the theories of gravity and quantum mechanics, and efforts to determine G have contributed to progress in areas of experimental physics: elements of the apparatus first developed to measure the constant, for example, are now used in gravitational-wave detectors. But for some researchers, measuring G is an end in itself.
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from BBC News Online
Charles Darwin may have been wrong when he argued that competition was the major driving force of evolution. He imagined a world in which organisms battled for supremacy and only the fittest survived.
But new research identifies the availability of "living space," rather than competition, as being of key importance for evolution. Findings question the old adage of "nature red in tooth and claw." The study conducted by PhD student Sarda Sahney and colleagues at the University of Bristol is published in Biology Letters.
The research team used fossils to study evolutionary patterns over 400 million years of history. Focusing on land animals--amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds--the scientists showed that the amount of biodiversity closely matched the availability of "living space" through time.
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from National Geographic News
On August 20, for the third time in about a year, amateur astronomers spotted a fireball above Jupiter's atmosphere.
The discovery suggests the planet gets walloped more often than previously thought, say astronomers, some of whom are calling for a global "volunteer army" of backyard Jupiter watchers.
The recent flash follows on the heels of July 2009 and June 2010 fireballs over the gas giant planet. Astronomers speculate that the August 20 flash was caused by a relatively small meteoroid burning up completely in Jupiter's upper cloud deck.
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from New Scientist
On 4 June this year, under the sweltering Florida sun, hundreds of rocket-watchers cluster around the swampy fringes of Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. At 2:45 pm they get what they are waiting for: the rocket on the launch platform fires up its engines and roars into the sky. Seconds later, it is a mere flicker of light in the deep blue above, and 10 minutes after lift-off it reaches Earth orbit. By all accounts, a flawless flight.
Most rocket launches these days are routine affairs, but this one was special. It was not ordered by NASA or the US air force, and the rocket had not been built by Boeing or Lockheed Martin, the two giants of US aerospace.
This was the first launch of a rocket called Falcon 9, built from scratch by an 8-year-old outfit called SpaceX. The launch wasn't just a triumph for SpaceX: it was also a giant step towards a space age in which agile start-ups will play a leading part. At least, that's the plan.
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from Popular Science
Since last April, 19 cancer patients whose liver tumors hadn't responded to chemotherapy have taken an experimental drug. Within weeks of the first dose, it appeared to work, by preventing tumors from making proteins they need to survive. The results are preliminary yet encouraging. With a slight redesign, the drug might work for hundreds of diseases, fulfilling the promise that wonder cures like stem cells and gene therapy have failed to deliver.
The biotech company Alnylam announced in June that its drug ALN-VSP cut off blood flow to 62 percent of liver-cancer tumors in those 19 patients, by triggering a rarely used defense mechanism in the body to silence cancerous genes. Whereas conventional drugs stop disease-causing proteins, ALN-VSP uses RNA interference (RNAi) therapy to stop cells from making proteins in the first place, a tactic that could work for just about any disease.
"Imagine that your kitchen floods," says biochemist and Alnylam CEO John Maraganore. "Today's medicines mop it up. RNAi technology turns off the faucet."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Faced with a crisis more than a decade ago in which thousands of people were sickened from salmonella in infected eggs, farmers in Britain began vaccinating their hens against the bacteria. That simple but decisive step virtually wiped out the health threat.
But when American regulators created new egg safety rules that went into effect last month, they declared that there was not enough evidence to conclude that vaccinating hens against salmonella would prevent people from getting sick. The Food and Drug Administration decided not to mandate vaccination of hens--a precaution that would cost less than a penny per dozen eggs.
Now, consumers have been shaken by one of the largest egg recalls ever, involving nearly 550 million eggs from two Iowa producers, after a nationwide outbreak of thousands of cases of salmonella was traced to eggs contaminated with the bacteria.
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from the Wall Street Journal
Microbes may be making quick work of a vast oily plume from the Deepwater Horizon spill, according to scientists who made the first direct measurements of deep-sea bacteria feeding on vestiges of the largest accidental offshore oil spill in history.
Their measurements, which so far have not been duplicated by other research groups, indicate the Gulf of Mexico may be rebounding more quickly than many had expected, aided by microscopic clean-up crews of oil-eating bacteria that have evolved among the natural petroleum seeps on the Gulf sea floor.
Yet the finding announced Tuesday also deepens uncertainty over how much of the 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled from the well remains in Gulf waters, where it may threaten marine life. A government assessment earlier this month calculated that about 75% of the oil had been skimmed, evaporated, safely burned or dispersed. Several independent research teams, however, have argued that much of the oil still contaminates Gulf waters.
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from the Philadelphia Inquirer
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- The government will quickly appeal a court ruling that undercut federally funded embryonic stem-cell research, the Obama administration declared Tuesday, but dozens of experiments aimed at fighting spinal cord injuries, Parkinson's disease, and other ailments probably will stop in the meantime.
The White House and scientists said Monday's court ruling was broader than first thought because it would prohibit even the more restricted stem-cell research allowed for the last decade by President George W. Bush's rules.
That initial ruling won't stop all the work that scientists call critical to finding new therapies for devastating diseases. The National Institutes of Health told anxious researchers late Tuesday that if they had already received money this year--$131 million in total--they can keep doing their stem-cell experiments.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
Harvard has found prominent psychology professor Marc Hauser responsible for eight instances of scientific misconduct, involving three published papers and five additional experiments, and the matter is being investigated by the US attorney's office, the university said Friday.
Hauser is the highest profile Harvard professor in recent memory to have his work so discredited. A popular teacher who has collaborated with star scientists in several fields, his research on the human mind and morality has captured the public's imagination through his books and frequent media appearances.
Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith wrote in a letter to the faculty that the experiments "were designed and conducted, but there were problems involving data acquisition, data analysis, data retention, and the reporting of research methodologies and results." In a statement Friday night, Hauser apologized to the university community.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
Stanford University researchers have developed a test to determine whether a patient is likely to conceive a child through in vitro fertilization--a breakthrough that could save women tens of thousands of dollars in fruitless procedures, as well as the heartbreak of failed treatment.
Doctors perform nearly 150,000 in vitro fertilization treatments in the United States each year, but fewer than 1 in 3 results in a live birth. The treatments cost $10,000 to $20,000, with health insurance only rarely covering the expense.
The new test will use data from a woman's first, failed in vitro fertilization treatment to predict her likelihood of success with a second treatment. The test could be available to patients by the end of this year.
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from the Economist
With 500 barrels of hard-set cement now gumming up the Macondo well, a number of inquiries are looking back at the loss of the Deepwater Horizon rig and the subsequent spilling of 5m barrels of oil. How much of the fault is found to lie with the well's design, how much with the way the design was implemented and how much with the way the rig was run will determine how such ventures will be regulated from now on.
It will also settle whether BP, the well's operator, was grossly negligent--a finding that could be worth well over $10 billion in fines and liabilities. Meanwhile, the oil industry is already getting to grips with the question of what to do if such a thing should happen again.
This is in part prudent politics: credible assurances that a future blowout could be better dealt with will be vital to restoring the industry's fortunes in the Gulf of Mexico. It is also a matter of economic self-interest. The costs facing BP would have been far smaller if it had been possible to shut the well down a lot quicker.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
When Dr. Deborah Rhodes orders a diagnostic test that involves radiation, she consults a chart in her office that lists the amount of radiation exposure from each test. She considers the patient's total past exposure, and then carefully weighs the risks and benefits of each test and any alternative approaches she can take.
Two new studies appearing in Tuesday's issue of the journal Radiology suggest more physicians should take this approach. One study found that certain nuclear-based breast imaging exams that involve injecting radioactive material into patients expose women to far higher doses of radiation than regular mammography, increasing their risk of cancer in vulnerable organs beyond the breast, like the kidneys, bladder or ovaries.
Over all, the United States population's annual radiation dose from medical procedures increased sevenfold between 1980 and 2006, a second paper reports.
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from BBC News Online
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system containing at least five planets that orbit a star called HD 10180, which is much like our own Sun. The star is 127 light years away, in the southern constellation of Hydrus.
The researchers used the European Southern Observatory (Eso) to monitor light emitted from the system and identify and characterise the planets. They say this is the "richest" system of exoplanets--planets outside our own Solar System--ever found.
Christophe Lovis from Geneva University's observatory in Switzerland was lead researcher on the study. He said that his team had probably found "the system with the most planets yet discovered." This also highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exoplanet research--the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets," he said.
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