half in Biological News

More than half of Texas physicians do not always recommend HPV vaccine to girls

PHILADELPHIA - The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommends the human papillomavirus vaccination for all 11- and 12-year-old girls, but results of a recent survey showed that more than half of Texas physicians do not follow these recommendations. The survey was published in Can...

Commercial ships spew half as much particulate pollution as world's cars

Globally, commercial ships emit almost half as much particulate pollution into the air as the total amount released by cars, according to a new study. Ship pollutants affect both the Earth's climate and the health of people living along coastlines. The study is the first to provide a global es...

Dark chocolate: Half a bar per week to keep at bay the risk of heart attack

Maybe gourmands are not jumping for joy. Probably they would have preferred bigger amounts to sup-port their passion. Though the news is still good for them: 6.7 grams of chocolate per day represent the ideal amount for a protective effect against inflammation and subsequent cardiovascular disease...

NOAA report states half of US coral reefs in 'poor' or 'fair' condition

Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Nearly half of U.S. coral reef ecosystems are considered to be in "poor" or "fair" condition according to a new NOAA analysis of the health of coral reefs under U.S. jurisdiction. The report issued today, The State of Coral Reef Ecosystems of the United States and Pacifi...

Researchers find origin of 'breathable' atmosphere half a billion years ago

COLUMBUS , Ohio -- Ohio State University geologists and their colleagues have uncovered evidence of when Earth may have first supported an oxygen-rich atmosphere similar to the one we breathe today. The study suggests that upheavals in the earth's crust initiated a kind of reverse-greenhouse ef...

Scientists warn that species extinction could reduce productivity of plants on Earth by half

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) An international team of scientists has published a new analysis showing that as plant species around the world go extinct, natural habitats become less productive and contain fewer total plants a situation that could ultimately compromise important benefits that humans ...

Second opinion yields treatment changes for half of patients

More than half of breast cancer patients who sought a second opinion from a multidisciplinary tumor board received a change in their recommended treatment plan, according to a new study from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. A multidisciplinary tumor board includes a network...

Nearly half of people who need cholesterol treatment don't get it

Even though treatment for cholesterol disorders can reduce the risk of heart and blood vessel disease by about 30 percent over five years, many at-risk people aren't getting adequate treatment, according to researchers from Wake Forest University School of Medicine and colleagues reporting in Circu...

Number Of Babies Born Prematurely Nears Historic Half Million Mark In U.S.

Some 12.3 percent of all babies -- 499,008 infants -- were born prematurely (less than 37 weeks gestation) in 2003, according to the report released by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). That's up from 12.1 percent (or about 480,000 babies) in 2002 -- and an increase of more than 30 ...

Measuring hormone cuts antibiotic use in half in pneumonia patients

Measuring a hormone in the blood can help doctors greatly reduce the number of days pneumonia patients have to take antibiotics to cure their infection, according to a study to be presented at the American Thoracic Society International Conference on May 24. In the study, pneumonia patients whose...

Highest ever winter water temperatures recorded

...ies, aquaculture, coastal communities and more," Dr Cresswell says. The Leeuwin Current forms north of Australia and flows right around the western half of the country, meeting its better known cousin, the East Australian Current (EAC), at Tasmania. The exact location of this meeting point varies both ...

NIH stimulus funding supports Emory biomedical scientists

...ovide additional educational opportunities for students. Emory has received half of all the NIH ARRA grants awarded to Georgia academic institutions thus fa...ulmonary fibrosis, or scarring of the lung, is difficult to treat and kills half of the people with the disease within three years. Vitamin D, which is lack...

First human gets new antibody aimed at hepatitis C virus

...ot respond to antiviral drugs, liver transplantation is the only option. HCV is the leading indication for liver transplantation, diagnosed in about half of the 6,000 liver transplants done each year in the United States. Transplantation can be a life-saving treatment; however, in nearly all cases the p...

Abnormal brain circuits may prevent movement disorder

...y in people with the genetic mutation who never develop symptoms could eventually pave the way towards new treatments for dystonia patients. There are half a million people in the United States alone. The brains of people with inherited dystonia are normal at autopsy and the exact cause of their movement ...

Understanding how weeds are resistant to herbicides

...oing on in every one of them simultaneously. There's a camera that monitors the light for each of these wells simultaneously and so in one seven and a half hour run you generate a million reads." Tranel explained that although more traditional herbicide resistance research takes years, it's more gene-s...

Sustainable agriculture at the ESA Annual Meeting

...lin-Kramer shows that increases in predators didn't always result in fewer aphids in the croplands, but she points out that agents of control are only half of the equation and sources of the pests themselves must also be considered. In the absence of predators, pest levels would likely rise even more dram...

New hope for fisheries

...hat our oceans are not a lost cause. The encouraging result is that exploitation rate the ultimate driver of depletion and collapse is decreasing in half of the ten systems we examined in detail. This means that management in those areas is setting the stage for ecological and economic recovery. It's on...

Drug-proof zebrafish reveal secrets of addiction

...rmal in all other ways. As amphetamine is experienced as pleasurable, amphetamine response was determined by measuring whether fish chose to move to a half of the tank where the drug had been given out. By comparing these drug-proof nad mutants to fish with a normal response, Webb and her colleagues di...

Parasites ready to jump

...ction of the genomes of most higher organisms. Indeed, it is estimated that these mobile elements, which include one or more genes, make up as much as half of the genetic material. "This demonstrates", says Frstemann, "that it is not always possible to tame these "selfish" genetic elements, although highl...

Global curbs on overfishing are beginning to work

...a lost cause," Dr Worm says. "The encouraging result is that the exploitation rate the ultimate driver of depletion and collapse is decreasing in half of the 10 systems we examined in detail. This means that management in those areas is setting the stage for ecological and economic recovery. It's onl...

A crystal ball for brain cancer?

...ncer. The powerful drug shrinks tumors by choking off their blood supply. half of patients don't respond to the therapy, though, exposing them to unnecess...ts who had undergone surgery and radiation therapy to remove glioblastoma. half of the patients received infusions of Avastin every two weeks. All underwe...

All-in-1 nanoparticle: A Swiss Army knife for nanomedicine

...ers fill up the space of the egg white. Using ions allowed the researchers to build a 2- to 3-nanometer gold shell that's thin enough to allow about half of the quantum dot's fluorescence to pass through. "All the traditional techniques use premade gold nanoparticles instead of gold ions," Gao said. "...

Researchers develop 'brain-reading' methods

...dog or a cat." Unlike most research that has focused on specific areas of the brain, Hanson and his team looked at the pattern of activity across a half million points in the brain. Interestingly, the patterns of neural networks involved in each of the eight tasks on the surface appear very similar. Th...

Most older long-term cancer survivors have poor health habits

...can Cancer Society, the research indicates that greater efforts are needed to encourage elderly cancer survivors to live healthier lives. More than half of the estimated 11 million cancer survivors in the United States are aged 65 years or older. There are relatively few studies looking at older cance...

Humans lend a hand to critically endangered waterbird

...il (NERC), the new study was carried out in Western Siem Pang Important Bird Area (IBA), northern Cambodia, where 160-200 of the birds survive around half of the global population. Working in partnership with BirdLife International, the researchers found that the ibis prefer to forage in open and acce...

Common allergy drug reduces obesity and diabetes in mice

...tiple sclerosis and certain cancers. "Now we're seeing that Tregs may be needed to prevent metabolic abnormalities as well," says Mathis. She adds, half joking, "As an immunologist, I always thought that type 2 diabetes was a pretty boring condition. After these findings, I'm starting to change my mind...

DOE-funded research projects win 46 R&D 100 Awards for 2009

...ages simultaneously and combine them into one. Because the system combines two alignment sensors into one, it cuts the cost of alignment components in half and saves space. It has no moving parts and provides huge advantages in stability and repeatability over conventional alignment systems. Los Al...

Short stressful events may improve working memory

... in a maze until they could complete it correctly 60-70 percent of the time. When the rodents reached this level of accuracy for two consecutive days, half were put through a 20-minute forced swim, which served as acute stress, and then were put through the maze again. Results showed that the stressed ...

When children have breathing problems

...ymptoms in the industrial areas included in the study affect between a quarter and a third of all children. In the suburbs and in the countryside only half as many children tend to be affected and even in the city centre only around one or two per cent more children are affected than in the relatively unp...

Early initiation of Arctic sea-ice formation

....5 million years ago, about a million years earlier than previous estimates based on ice-raft debris evidence only. This appears to have been followed half a million years later by the onset of seasonal sea-ice formation in offshore areas of the central Arctic, and about 24 million years before major ice-...

Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology increases impact, international reach

...nd the increase in its impact factor to 2.217 in 2008 ranks JVIR in the top half of 90 radiology, nuclear medicine and medical imaging journals, according t... average article in a journal is cited. Additionally, JVIR ranks in the top half of 56 journals in the field of peripheral arterial disease, and its five-ye...

UA pharmacy research shows prescribers miss potentially dangerous drug pairs

...rmacy has found that medication prescribers correctly identified fewer than half of drug pairs with potentially dangerous drug-drug interactions. These ... identified only one of the four pairs as contraindicated. Moreover, for half of the 14 drug pairs, more than one-third of the respondents answered that ...

Hush little baby... Linking genes, brain and behavior in children

...the left frontal cortex are characterized as temperamentally "easy" and are easily calmed down. Conversely, infants with greater activity in the right half of the frontal cortex are temperamentally "negative" and are easily distressed and more difficult to soothe. In this study, Louis Schmidt from McMa...

Happier, healthier, more productive hens on omega-3?

...a-3 "Goldenlay" diet, fed from 16 weeks, with a standard diet. In the second year all hens will be fed on the "Goldenlay" diet from 16 weeks but with half transferred to a standard diet at 35 weeks. This will allow the researchers to find out if an omega-3 diet has direct welfare and bone benefits in l...

M2SYS Technology to Offer Desktop Biometric Technology to Kronos Customers

...ol labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity. Tens of thousands of organizations in 60 countries - including more than half of the Fortune 1000(R) - use Kronos time and attendance, scheduling, absence management, HR and payroll, hiring, and labor analytics applications. To ...

New theory gives more precise estimates of large-scale biodiversity

... increase (the direness) of estimates of loss at smaller scales." Losing half of a small biome, for example, will have a worse impact than people think, while losing half of a large area would turn out better, he said. Harte, who spends his su...

New study ranks 'hotspots' of human impact on coastal areas

...al marine habitats. Halpern explained that a large portion of the world's coastlines experience very little effect of what happens on land nearly half of the coastline and more than 90 percent of all coastal waters. "This is because a vast majority of the planet's landscape drains into relatively few...

Sustainable bioenergy project has global launch

...rporation. The first stage of the project is a series of five meetings scheduled around the world beginning in Malaysia in November 2009. In the first half of 2010 meetings will take place in the Netherlands, South Africa, Brazil and the United States. An 11-person organizing committee will oversee the me...

Mystery of bat with an extraordinary nose solved

...ly as the "Rhinolophus paradoxolophus," meaning paradoxical crest), and it's roughly 9 millimeters in length nose. The typical horseshoe bat's nose is half that long, said Rolf Mueller, an associate professor with the Virginia Tech mechanical engineering department and director for the Bio-inspired Techno...

Two dietary oils, two sets of benefits for older women with diabetes

...otal body fat over both diet periods, typically showing effects in the last half of each 16-week period. The BMI levels of the women taking CLA dropped on average by about half a point, and their total body fat decreased by an average of 3.2 percent, r...