from the Guardian (UK)
A team of Japanese astronomers using telescopes on Hawaii say they have seen the oldest galaxy yet discovered. The team calculates that the galaxy is 12.91bn light years away, and their research will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. The scientists with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan used the Subaru and Keck telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea.
A light year is the distance that light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (9.66 trillion kilometres). Seeing distant galaxies is in effect looking back in time.
Richard Ellis of the California Institute of Technology, an influential expert in cosmology and galaxy formation, said the latest work was more convincing than some other claims of early galaxies. He said the Japanese claim was more "watertight," using methods that everyone can agree on. But he said it was not much of a change from a similar finding by the same team last year.
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from Nature News
Why are there no more woolly mammoths? The last isolated island populations of these huge beasts disappeared about 4,000 years ago--well after the Pleistocene extinction that wiped out much of the world's megafauna--but what triggered their demise remains a frustrating mystery. According to the latest study to contribute to the ongoing debate, the last mammoths disappeared after a long, slow decline in numbers rather than because of a single cause.
Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) once roamed over cold, dry grasslands in the Northern Hemisphere called mammoth steppe. Their remains are especially common in Beringia, the bridge of land that connects eastern Russia and western Alaska. Now, palaeoecologist Glen MacDonald at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues have tracked the pattern of the Beringian mammoth's extinction. Their results are published today in Nature Communications.
MacDonald and his colleagues combined a geographical database of mammoth finds with radiocarbon dates for mammoth specimens, prehistoric plants and archaeological sites to follow how woolly mammoth ranges expanded and contracted during the past 45,000 years.
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from NPR
The details sound like something out of a bad science-fiction movie. A freezer storing human brains for research went on the fritz, and nobody at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center knew for days. Two separate alarms that should have alerted staff to the problem failed to sound late last month.
By the time one of the managers at the federally funded repository opened the affected freezer May 31, the temperature was well above freezing and 150 brains had begun to thaw. The Boston Globe first reported on the mishap, which looks like a painful blow to autism research.
Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Carlos Pardo-Villamizaro told the Globe the damage to the brains in the autism collection could slow research on the disorder by 10 years. About one-third of the brains in the malfunctioning freezer (one of 24 at the bank) were from people who had been diagnosed with autism, said Adriana Bobinchock, a spokeswoman at McLean Hospital, site of the brain bank. "Yes, this is a significant loss, but there's still a lot available for autism research," she told Shots.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
White. Pink. Blue. Yellow. On restaurant tables everywhere, the colors of the sweetener packets instantly identify the contents. Sugar. Saccharin. Aspartame. Sucralose.
Reaching for one to pour into a cup of coffee or tea can sometimes feel like sweetener roulette, with the swirl of confusing, conflicting assertions about which are safe and which are not.
Alissa Kaplan Michaels, for one, never picks pink. She still associates saccharin with cancer. The Food and Drug Administration sought to ban it in the 1970s, because rats that gorged on the chemical developed bladder cancer.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- Here in the shortgrass prairie, where being stuck in the ways of the Old West is a point of civic pride, scientists are building a machine that will, in effect, look into the future.
This month, on a barren Wyoming landscape dotted with gopher holes and hay bales, the federal government is assembling a supercomputer 10 years in the making, one of the fastest computers ever built and the largest ever devoted to the study of atmospheric science.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research's supercomputer has been dubbed Yellowstone, after the nearby national park, but it could have been named Nerdvana. The machine will have 100 racks of servers and 72,000 core processors, so many parts that they must be delivered in the back of a 747. Yellowstone will be capable of performing 1.5 quadrillion calculations--a quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros--every second. That's nearly a quarter of a million calculations, each second, for every person on Earth. In a little more than an hour, Yellowstone can do as many calculations as there are grains of sand on every beach in the world.
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from Science News
Ordinary baking flour isn't the most electrifying substance, but spilling a box of the stuff yields a jolt of voltage that has scientists excited about their prospects for sensing catastrophic events like earthquakes and industrial accidents.
Scientists have known for years that materials including rock, crystals and adhesives like ordinary office tape can produce an electrical signal as they fracture or crack under a load. It's also known that before a granular material can flow, the space it takes up has to enlarge--think of a traffic jam in which another lane opens up and cars begin to move again. The voltage measured in the flour may be a signal of this 'dilation,' which indicates flow is about to happen.
"We've known about dilation and that there's an electrical signal when things fail, but nobody has put these two together before," says chemical engineer Joseph McCarthy of the University of Pittsburgh, who wasn't involved in the work. "This is a really, really interesting observation."
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Your immune system protects you from bacteria and viruses, but you need specialized cells to protect you from your immune system. Overaggressive immune responses can cause everything from autoimmune diseases to organ rejection. Now, scientists have identified a new group of these specialized cells that seem to keep the immune system in check--at least in the short term.
The cells are a type of regulatory T cells, or Tregs. Researchers already know that Tregs serve as a mute button for the immune system. Last year, a team in the United States and another in Italy reported that infusions of Tregs forestall an often-fatal complication of bone marrow and stem cell transplants called graft-versus-host disease, in which immune cells in the transplant attack the recipient's cells. And several groups are planning clinical trials to determine whether Tregs curb the rejection of transplanted organs such as kidneys. To turn down the immune system, Tregs often latch onto a protein called TIM-3 on the surface of helper T cells--which orchestrate immune counterattacks against a pathogen--killing the helper T cell in the process.
Like the helper T cells they target, the newly identified Tregs have TIM-3 on their surface. Researchers led by transplant immunologist Terry Strom of Harvard Medical School in Boston found the new Tregs in abundance in mice that had recently received skin grafts. The cells gathered in the lymph nodes near the grafts and wriggled into the transplants themselves. In the culture dish, the TIM-3 sporting Tregs were better at shutting down immune cells than were ordinary Tregs, the researchers report online today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
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from the Salt Lake Tribune
Bozeman Pass, Mont. -- A gray-whiskered former fly-fishing guide waded through a horse pasture whacking weeds for his neighbor, the rumbling machine in his hands slicing thistles and sparing a robust tangle of grass and wildflowers, while on mountain ridges all around him, the trees silently died. Beetles.
Here, along the pine-scented exurban glory of Trail Creek, Lester DuChane and his sparse neighbors are the latest Westerners to watch their green valley turn red and fade to gray as swarms of rice-grain-size beetles eat the Rocky Mountain forest. He cannot figure out why the government never launched an aggressive counterattack against an epidemic, which has swept through neighboring ranges almost since he settled here in 1994.
"They say they're working on it," DuChane sneered, remembering his pleas with Gallatin National Forest rangers. "It's the government. It ain't doing anything." His is a complaint echoed by Western politicians, who think government land managers heaped disaster on the region by letting forests grow so thick that the trees cannot get enough water and sunlight to defend themselves from the pests.
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from Nature News
The pressurized, cylindrical chamber fits in the palm of Margaret Murnane's hand. Yet out of one end of the device comes an X-ray beam that packs almost as much punch as the light generated by massive particle accelerators.
Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, both physicists at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, a joint institute of the University of Colorado and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, have reported the first tabletop source of ultra-short, laser-like pulses of low energy, or 'soft', X-rays.
The light, capable of probing the structure and dynamics of molecules, was previously available only at large, billion-dollar national facilities such as synchrotrons or free-electron lasers, where competition for use of the equipment is fierce. But the report by Murnane, Kapteyn and their colleagues, published in the 8 June issue of Science, suggests that the devices might soon lie within the grasp of a university laboratory budget. "For us, it's incredible that we can do this at all in a tabletop system," says Murnane. "Three years ago, people would have said 'only large facilities can do that'."
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Only one person ever has been cured of an HIV infection, and a presentation about the man at a scientific meeting in Sitges, Spain, last week has caused an uproar about the possibility that he's still infected.
Timothy Brown, initially referred to as "the Berlin patient" until he went public about his cure, received unusual blood transplants 5 years ago to treat his leukemia. The blood came from a donor who had mutant cells resistant to HIV. Following the procedure, Brown stopped taking antiretrovirals (ARVs), the virus never returned, and his doctors reported that he had been cured.
But new research presented on 8 June at the International Workshop on HIV & Hepatitis Virus "challenge[s] these results," asserts Alain Lafeuillade of the General Hospital in Toulon, France, a well known HIV/AIDS cure researcher. Lafeuillade issued a press release, "The So Called HIV Cured 'Berlin' Patient Still Has Detectable HIV in His Body," that questions whether Brown was reinfected and may still be infectious to other people. Lafeuillade also posted a blog item, "The Weird Story of the Berlin Patient," raising similar questions.
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from Science News
When Lewis and Clark started exploring the West, they didn't know much about what lay beyond St. Louis. Neither, at first, did astronomers know much about cosmic realms beyond Uranus.
But just as 19th century explorers filled in huge blanks on the American map, so did 20th century skywatchers flesh out a much greater map--of frontiers far beyond the solar system, out across the entire Milky Way. Now, in the last few years, cosmic cartography has again redrawn modern science's picture of the galaxy, from the inside out.
Surprising new findings from this endeavor begin at the Milky Way's heart, where astronomers recently spotted a tendril of gas streaming toward the galaxy's central black hole. Next year, scientists will have a ringside seat for the first time as the matter swings perilously close to its doom.
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from National Geographic News
Bacteria can use minerals in soil as electrical grids, which helps the microbes generate chemicals they need to survive, a new study says. The process involves different bacterial species trading electrons--negatively charged subatomic particles.
Electrons are key to all life-forms, from microbes to people. For instance, the human body constantly swaps electrons from one compound to another to help assemble and dismantle vital chemicals, such as natural sugars. Scientists had known that different species of microorganisms can work together by trading electrons, helping each species process food sources they couldn't otherwise digest easily.
These cooperative interactions were known to happen either via direct contact or by piggybacking electrons on molecules spread through the microbes' surroundings. But the new work is the first to show that microbes can use conductive minerals as "wires" for boosting their electrical transfers.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
HIV's rapid mutation rates can lead to the evolution of drug resistance in HIV-positive patients receiving antiretroviral therapy, but naturally occurring resistance mutations can also accumulate to establish highly resistant HIV strains, according to new models published today (June 7) in PLoS Computational Biology. If true, the models suggest new interpretation for why HIV drug therapy can fail right off the bat.
"The paper is interesting, and may be important for getting scientists to think about evolution of drug resistance," said Andrew Read, an evolutionary biologist at Pennsylvania State University who did not participate in the study. "The mechanism of drug resistance seems straightforward, but it's not." Even relatively simple questions, like whether drug resistance can be avoided by cycling between two different drugs, randomly assigning the drugs, or giving all patients both, have yet to be answered, added Read, who studies the evolution of malaria drug resistance.
Scientists have been debating the relative contributions of pre-existing mutations and mutations that arise after therapy begins to HIV drug resistance since the mid-1990s, explained Robert Shafer, who studies mechanisms of evolved HIV drug resistance at Stanford University but was not involved in the project. It's generally understood that a multi-drug regimen works to prevent resistance from becoming established by forcing the HIV virus to acquire several mutations--raising the "genetic barrier" to resistance--and making it highly unlikely that viruses carry enough mutations before therapy, said Shafer.
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Among the many apartment buildings in the London borough of Hackney, the nine-story structure on the corner of Provost Street and Murray Grove stands out, its exterior a mix of white and gray tiles rather than the usual brick. But it's what's underneath the tiles that makes the 29-unit building truly different. From the second floor up, it is constructed entirely of wood, making it one of the tallest wooden residential buildings in the world.
In other technology news, this is the era of Big Data, in which more and more information about our lives--where we shop and what we buy, indeed where we are right now--is stored on computers. Big Data probably knows more about us than we ourselves do, but is there stuff that Big Data itself doesn't know it knows? Big Data is watching us, but who or what is watching Big Data?
A solar-powered plane landed in Morocco last week after flying from Spain, completing the second leg of its pioneering journey. Solar Impulse landed in Rabat--19 hours after taking off from Madrid. The plane is the size of a jumbo jet and is powered by 12,000 solar cells turning four electrical motors. Made of carbon fiber, the plane is the size of an Airbus A340 but only weighs as much as an average family car.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a telescope at the South Pole that detects the subatomic particles known as neutrinos, has measured the highest-energy neutrino oscillations yet. IceCube was designed primarily to study neutrinos streaming from astrophysical objects such as supernovae and x-ray bursts. But the detection of neutrino oscillations--the transformation of one type of neutrino into another--represents new scientific territory for the experiment.
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Scientists are drawing a tree of life that includes every known species. A tree with about two million branches. "I think it is an amazing step forward for our community if it can be pulled off," said Robert P. Guralnick, an expert on evolutionary trees at the University of Colorado, who is not part of the project.
In other environmental news, the ship formerly known as the Exxon Valdez is floating off India in a kind of high-seas limbo as a court decides whether the vessel that dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's unspoiled Prince William Sound in 1989 can be hacked apart in this graveyard for once-mighty ships. Local environmentalists have petitioned the High Court in the western state of Gujarat to block its entry pending an onboard inspection for toxic chemicals, including mercury, arsenic and asbestos.
Researchers say hundreds of crown-of-thorns starfish found on a beach in southern Japan in January stranded themselves because they were starving. More than 800 were discovered on a 300m stretch of sand on Ishigaki Island. The starfish population "boom" was first identified in 2009, when masses of juveniles were seen feeding on the island's outer coral reef. The coral-eating starfish then took three years to move onto the beach where they perished.
Little is known about the condition of the many tropical glaciers that descend off the three peaks of mounts Baker, Speke and Africa's third highest peak, Mount Stanley. But last month, an expedition led by a London-based Danish photographer returned from Uganda with the best evidence yet that the 43 glaciers are still mostly there, but are in dire condition and can be expected to disappear in a decade or two.
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Working with a small band of astronomers for the past couple of months, NASA has come up with a plan to re-purpose an ex-spy telescope that had been declared surplus by another U.S. agency.
In other space news, Pluto and its newest moons may tell us a lot about how other worlds orbit distant stars. A new computer simulation not only zeroes in on the masses of two of the moons but predicts that planets orbiting double stars are more widely spaced from one another than are the worlds of single stars such as the sun.
When the Kepler spacecraft finds a giant planet closely orbiting a star, a new study found that there's a one in three chance that it's not really a planet at all. Study results suggest that 35 percent of candidate giants orbiting close to bright stars are impostors, known in the planet-hunting business as false-positives.
Venus put on a show for skywatchers last week, moving across the face of the Sun as viewed from Earth. The transit is a rare astronomical event that will not be seen again for another 105 years. Observers in North and Central America, and the northern-most parts of South America saw the transit begin just before local sunset. The far northwest of America, the Arctic, the western Pacific and east Asia witnessed the entire passage.
It looks as though the Milky Way will collide with its closest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, in 4 billion years. Andromeda is our closest fellow spiral galaxy. Spiral galaxies have flat, rotating, disc-shaped bodies with spiral arms anchored by a supermassive black hole at the center.
Finally, two mysterious bright spots in a distant galaxy suggest that astronomers have found the best evidence yet for a supermassive black hole being shoved out of its home. If confirmed, the finding would verify Einstein's theory of general relativity in a region of intense gravity not previously tested. The results would also suggest that some giant black holes roam the universe as invisible free floaters.
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A nearly complete mammoth skeleton has been found buried on an Iowa farm about 60 miles southwest of Des Moines. The bones were largely undisturbed, which has allowed scientists to gather evidence that could help show what the area was like more than 12,000 years ago, when the animal died.
In other news of the ancient past, a warship submerged for two centuries in the Patuxent River about 20 miles from Washington, D.C., could provide new insight into the War of 1812. Archaeologists are preparing to excavate the wreck.
Researchers say the world's oldest fish traps have been found off coast of Sweden. Wooden fish traps said to be some 9,000 years old have been found in the Baltic Sea. Marine archaeologists from Stockholm's Sodertorn University found finger-thick hazel rods grouped on the sea bed.
About 150 million years ago, insects of monstrous size met their doom battling the ancestors of modern birds. The epic struggle ended an era of insect growth spurts that coincided with upticks in the amount of oxygen in the air. Starting with the Cretaceous period, predators kept the sizes of insects down, researchers report online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Well-preserved remains of Shakespeare's original "wooden O" stage, the Curtain theater, where Henry V and Romeo and Juliet were first performed, have been discovered in a yard in east London. The Curtain theater in Shoreditch preceded the Globe on the Thames as Shakespeare's first venue, showcasing several of his most famous plays. But it was dismantled in the 17th century and its precise location lost.
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from BBC News Online
The US team is visiting museums around the world to photograph all of the ant specimens in their collections. They are using a technique that, for the first time, allows microscopic anatomical detail of the insects' bodies to be photographed.
The aim is to make an online catalogue called Antweb, providing a unique tool for scientists who study the insects. It will also allow anyone with access to the internet a detailed glimpse of the diverse world of ants.
Brian Fisher from the California Academy of Sciences is leading the study. He and his colleagues have started their "world ant tour" at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
A freezer malfunction at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital has severely damaged one-third of the world's largest collection of autism brain samples, potentially setting back research on the disorder by years, scientists say.
An official at the renowned brain bank in Belmont discovered that the freezer had shut down in late May, without triggering two alarms. Inside, they found 150 thawed brains that had turned dark from decay; about a third of them were part of a collection of autism brains.
"This was a priceless collection,'' said Dr. Francine Benes, director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, where the brains were housed. "You can't express its value in dollar amounts,'' said Benes, who is leading one of two internal investigations into the freezer failure. The damage to these brains could slow autism research by a decade as the collection is restored, said Carlos Pardo, a neuropathologist and associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
When three U.S. astronomers won the Nobel Prize in physics last year, for discovering that the expansion of the universe was speeding up in defiance of cosmic gravity--as if change fell out of your pockets onto the ceiling--it reaffirmed dark energy, the glibly named culprit behind this behavior, as the great cosmic surprise and mystery of our time.
And it underscored the case, long urged by U.S. astronomers, for a NASA mission to measure dark energy--to determine, for example, whether the cosmos would expand forever or whether, perhaps, there might be something wrong with our understanding of gravity.
In 2019, a spacecraft known as Euclid will begin such a mission to study dark energy. But it is being launched by the European Space Agency, not NASA, with U.S. astronomers serving only as very junior partners, contributing $20 million and some infrared sensors.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
At first glance, the contents of the 15 glass jars in Sam Droege's collection do not look like much--bivalve shells, twigs, a fishhook. But they hint at a story that would fill a vast ornithological library. In fact, they once did.
The jars are the remnants of the federal government's first major study of birds. From 1885 to the 1940s, scientists from the Division of Economic Ornithology in the U.S. Agriculture Department dissected at least 230,000 bird stomachs. The aim was to determine which species were helping farmers and which were harmful.
To do so, the government scientists went out shooting and recruited local hunters to donate birds' innards to science. At the dissection table, the scientists recorded the stomach contents of each bird in meticulous detail--for one mallard duck, a scientist estimated that it had eaten 72,710 seeds from various plants--and preserved many of them in jars at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland.
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from Nature News
For the first time, health officials in West Africa have begun a vaccination campaign to try to control cholera during an active epidemic.
In collaboration with the Ministry of Health in Guinea, the charity Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF; also known as Doctors Without Borders) has been administering the cholera vaccine Shanchol in the region of Boffa, 150 kilometres northwest of the country's capital, Conakry. The programme began in late April, with patients receiving a two-dose oral vaccine. In total, almost 150,000 people received at least one dose of vaccine, and just over 110,000 people received a second dose.
Iza Ciglenecki, project manager for diarrhoeal diseases at MSF, ran the campaign in Guinea. She hopes that the results will lead to more widespread use of the vaccine in epidemics. "Until very recently, no one was using this as an extra tool to control cholera," she says. "We hope to add to the evidence base regarding this vaccine to help develop an intervention criterion for the control of cholera in outbreaks."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
SAN ANTONIO -- Drilling rigs in the midst of cow pastures are hardly a novelty for Texans. But on a warm May day at a site about 30 miles south of San Antonio, a rig was not trying to reach oil or fresh water, but rather something unconventional: a salty aquifer. After a plant is built and begins operating in 2016, the site will become one of the state's largest water desalination facilities.
"This is another step in what we're trying to do to diversify our water supply," said Anne Hayden, a spokeswoman for the San Antonio Water System.
More projects like San Antonio's could lace the Texas countryside as planners look to convert water from massive saline aquifers beneath the state's surface, as well as seawater from the Gulf of Mexico, into potable water. The continuing drought has made desalination a buzzword in water discussions around the state, amid the scramble for new water supplies to accommodate the rapid population and industry growth anticipated in Texas. But the technology remains energy-intensive and is already causing an increase in water rates in some communities.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON -- When the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee meets on Wednesday to consider President Obama's choice to head the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, three themes are likely to dominate the questioning: waste, waste and earthquakes.
Collegiality and diplomacy may also be mentioned, given that the commission's current chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, has drawn criticism for his aggressive management style. The nuclear industry would, no doubt, prefer more uplifting confirmation hearing topics, like new reactor construction or progress on radical new designs that would make nuclear plants more useful or economical.
But for the first time, the president has chosen a geologist for the post, Allison M. Macfarlane of George Mason University, and her expertise aligns with the pressing concerns facing Congress and the nuclear industry. She is a longtime critic of the idea of burying waste at Yucca Mountain, a volcanic structure about 100 miles from Las Vegas chosen by Congress in the late 1980s, considering its geology too unpredictable. With little new plant construction, the commission's main responsibility these days is assuring the safety of the 104 plants now operating, and what to do with the decades-old problem of waste.
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from BBC News Online
China has announced it will carry out a manned space flight at some point in the middle of June.
A rocket carrying the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft has been moved to a launch pad in the north-west of the country.
According to state news agency Xinhua, it will carry three astronauts--possibly including a woman--to the Tiangong 1 space station module.
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from USA Today
The 30% of working adults who routinely sleep less than six hours a night are four times more likely to suffer a stroke, says a new study. The findings are the first to link insufficient sleep to stroke; they're also the first to apply even to adults who keep off extra pounds and have no other risk factors for stroke, says Megan Ruiter, lead author of the report. It will be presented Monday at the 26th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Boston.
"People know how important diet and exercise are in preventing strokes," says Ruiter, of the University of Alabama in Birmingham. "The public is less aware of the impact of insufficient amounts of sleep. Sleep is important--the body is stressed when it doesn't get the right amount."
The number of people who report eight or more hours of sleep a night has dropped from 38% in 2001 to 28%, says the National Sleep Foundation. A government study in May found 30% of working adults get six hours or less. Experts recommend seven to nine.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Not long ago, a woman in Tacoma, Wash., received a suggestion from Facebook that she "friend" another woman. She didn't know the other woman, but she followed through, as many of us have, innocently laying our cookie-crumb trails through cyberspace, only to get a surprise.
On the other woman's profile page was a wedding picture--of her and the first woman's husband, now exposed for all the cyberworld to see as a bigamist.
And so it goes in the era of what is called Big Data, in which more and more information about our lives--where we shop and what we buy, indeed where we are right now--the economy, the genomes of countless organisms we can't even name yet, galaxies full of stars we haven't counted, traffic jams in Singapore and the weather on Mars tumbles faster and faster through bigger and bigger computers down to everybody's fingertips, which are holding devices with more processing power than the Apollo mission control. Big Data probably knows more about us than we ourselves do, but is there stuff that Big Data itself doesn't know it knows? Big Data is watching us, but who or what is watching Big Data?
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from BBC News Online
Multiple CT scans in childhood can triple the risk of developing brain cancer or leukaemia, a study suggests. The Newcastle University-led team examined the NHS medical records of almost 180,000 young patients. But writing in The Lancet the authors emphasised that the benefits of the scans usually outweighed the risks.
They said the study underlined the fact the scans should only be used when necessary and that ways of cutting their radiation should be pursued. During a CT (computerised tomography) scan, an X-ray tube rotates around the patient's body to produce detailed images of internal organs and other parts of the body.
In the first long-term study of its kind, the researchers looked at the records of patients aged under 21 who had CT scans at a range of British hospitals between 1985 and 2002.
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