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COLUMBIA, Mo. – From Barack Obama’s controversial pastor to Sarah Palin’s “secret religion”, religious values have continued to play a dominant role in the presidential election since John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic elected to president in 1960. Hoping to answer the question of which political party has a monopoly on the “best” values and how religion affects these values, Kennon Sheldon, a University of Missouri professor, compared the “extrinsic” values (financial success, status, appearance) with “intrinsic” values (growth, intimacy, helping) of self-declared Democrats and Republicans in four different samples. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2008 ozone hole – a thinning in the ozone layer over Antarctica – is larger both in size and ozone loss than 2007 but is not as large as 2006.

Ozone is a protective atmospheric layer found in about 25 kilometres altitude that acts as a sunlight filter shielding life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet rays, which can increase the risk of skin cancer and cataracts and harm marine life. This year the area of the thinned ozone layer over the South Pole reached about 27 million square kilometres, compared to 25 million square kilometres in 2007 and a record ozone hole extension of 29 million square kilometres in 2006, which is about the size of the North American continent. Read the rest of this entry »

Acoording to a new researchers at Duke Children’s Hospital it has been found that reading of books help the children to loose weight .

The Duke researchers asked obese females ages 9 to 13 who were already in a comprehensive weight loss program to read an age-appropriate novel called Lake Rescue (Beacon Street Press). It was carefully crafted with the help of pediatric experts to include specific healthy lifestyle and weight management guidance, as well as positive messages and strong role models.

Six months later, the Duke researchers found the 31 girls who read Lake Rescue experienced a significant decrease in their BMI scores (-.71%) when compared to a control group of 14 girls who hadn’t (+.05%), explained Alexandra C. Russell, MD, a fourth-year medical student at Duke who led the study and presented the findings at the Obesity Society’s annual scientific meeting.

“As a pediatrician, I can’t count the number of times I tell parents to buy a book that might provide useful advice, yet I’ve never been able to point to research to back up my recommendations,” says Sarah Armstrong, MD, director of Duke’s Healthy Lifestyles Program where the research took place. “This is the first prospective interventional study that found literature can have a positive impact on healthy lifestyle changes in young girls.” Read the rest of this entry »

Batavia, IL and Upton, NY—The world’s largest computing grid is ready to tackle mankind’s biggest data challenge from the earth’s most powerful accelerator. Today, three weeks after the first particle beams were injected into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid combines the power of more than 140 computer centers from 33 countries to analyze and manage more than 15 million gigabytes of LHC data every year.

The United States is a vital partner in the development and operation of the WLCG. Fifteen universities and three U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories from 11 states contribute their power to the project.

“The U.S. has been an essential partner in the development of the vast distributed computing system that will allow 7,000 scientists around the world to analyze LHC data, complementing its crucial contributions to the construction of the LHC,” said Glen Crawford of the High Energy Physics program in DOE’s Office of Science. DOE and the National Science Foundation support contributions to the LHC and to the computing and networking infrastructures that are an integral part of the project.

U.S. contributions to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid are coordinated through the Open Science Grid, a national computing infrastructure for science. The Open Science Grid not only contributes computing power for LHC data needs, but also for projects in many other scientific fields including biology, nanotechnology, medicine and climate science.

“Particle physics projects such as the LHC have been a driving force for the development of worldwide computing grids,” said Ed Seidel, director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure. “The benefits from these grids are now being reaped in areas as diverse as mathematical modeling and drug discovery.”

“Open Science Grid members have put an incredible amount of time and effort in developing a nationwide computing system that is already at work supporting America’s 1,200 LHC physicists and their colleagues from other sciences,” said Open Science Grid Executive Director Ruth Pordes from DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Dedicated optical fiber networks distribute LHC data from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland to eleven major “Tier-1″ computer centers in Europe, North America and Asia, including those at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. From these, data is dispatched to more than 140 “Tier-2″ centers around the world, including twelve in the United States.

“Our ability to manage data at this scale is the product of several years of intense testing,” said Ian Bird, leader of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid project. “Today’s result demonstrates the excellent and successful collaboration we have enjoyed with countries all over the world. Without these international partnerships, such an achievement would be impossible.”

“When the LHC starts running at full speed, it will produce enough data to fill about six CDs per second,” said Michael Ernst, director of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Tier-1 Computing Center. “As the first point of contact for LHC data in the United States, the computing centers at Brookhaven and Fermilab are responsible for storing and distributing a great amount of this data for use by scientists around the country. We’ve spent years ramping up to this point, and now, we’re excited to help uncover some of the numerous secrets nature is still hiding from us.”

Physicists in the U.S. and around the world will sift through the LHC data torrent in search of tiny signals that will lead to discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. Through their distributed computing infrastructures, these physicists also help other scientific researchers increase their use of computing and storage for broader discovery.

“Grid computing allows university research groups at home and abroad to fully participate in the LHC project while fostering positive collaboration across different scientific departments on many campuses,” said Ken Bloom from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, manager for seven Tier-2 sites in the United States.
Source : Brookhaven National Laboratory via EureAlert!

NASHVILLE, Tenn.–Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.

The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal Brain and Cognition.

“We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking ‘out of the box’,” Folley said. “We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated brain activity.”

One possible explanation the researchers offer for the musicians’ elevated use of both brain hemispheres is that many musicians must be able to use both hands independently to play their instruments.

“Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and integrating competing information from both hemispheres,” Folley said. “Instrumental musicians often integrate different melodic lines with both hands into a single musical piece, and they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s one of the hallmarks of spring: a swarm of bees on the move. But how a swarm locates a new nest site when less than 5% of the community know the way remains a mystery. Curious to find out how swarms cooperate and are guided to their new homes, Tom Seeley, a neurobiologist from Cornell University, and engineers Kevin Schultz and Kevin Passino from The Ohio State University teamed up to find out how swarms are guided to their new home and publish their findings on October 3rd 2008 in The Journal of Experimental Biology, http://jeb.biologists.org.

According to Schultz there are two theories on how swarms find the way. In the ’subtle guide’ theory, a small number of scout bees, which had been involved in selecting the new nest site, guide the swarm by flying unobtrusively in its midst; near neighbours adjust their flight path to avoid colliding with the guides while more distant insects align themselves to the guides’ general direction. In the ’streaker bee’ hypothesis, bees follow a few conspicuous guides that fly through the top half of the swarm at high speed. Read the rest of this entry »

A new study shows that the DNA of so-called “good bacteria” that normally live in the intestines may help defend the body against infection.

The findings, available Oct. 2 online in the journal Immunity, are reported by Yasmine Belkaid, Ph.D., and her colleagues in the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health.

A person normally has 300 to 500 species of beneficial bacteria, known as commensals, in their intestines. These bacteria are not harmful and, in fact, help an individual maintain his or her digestive health. Typically, the immune system does not attack gut commensals, even though they are bacteria.

Read the rest of this entry »

Images of the brain’s fastest signals reveal an electromagnetic marker that predicts a patient’s response to a fast-acting antidepressant, researchers have discovered.

“Such biomarkers that identify who will benefit from a new class of antidepressants could someday minimize trial-and-error prescribing and speed delivery of care for what can be a life-threatening illness,” said Carlos Zarate, M.D., of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program.

In the new study at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, depressed patients showed increasing activity in a mood-regulating hub near the front of the brain while viewing flashing frightful faces – the more the increase, the better their response to an experimental fast-acting medication called ketamine. By contrast, healthy contr Read the rest of this entry »

Arctic sea ice extent during the 2008 melt season dropped to the second-lowest level since satellite measurements began in 1979, reaching the lowest point in its annual cycle of melt and growth on Sept. 14, according to researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Preliminary data also indicate 2008 may represent the lowest volume of Arctic sea ice on record, according to the researchers. The declining Arctic sea ice is due to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases that have elevated temperatures across the Arctic and strong natural variability in Arctic sea ice, according to scientists.

Average sea ice extent during September, a benchmark measurement in the scientific study of Arctic sea ice, was 1.8 million square miles. The record monthly low, set in 2007, was 1.65 million square miles. The third lowest monthly low was 2.15 square miles in 2005, according researchers at the center.

image showing decrease in ice

The 2008 low strongly reinforces the 30-year downward trend in Arctic sea ice extent, said CU-Boulder Research Professor Mark Serreze, an NSIDC senior scientist. The 2008 September low was 34 percent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000 and only 9 percent greater than the 2007 record. Because the 2008 low was so far below the September average, the negative trend in the September extent has been pulled downward, from a minus 10.7 percent per decade to a minus 11.7 percent per decade, he said.

“When you look at the sharp decline we have seen over the past 30 years, a recovery from lowest to second lowest is no recovery at all,” Serreze said. “Both within and beyond the Arctic, the implications of the decline are enormous.”

Conditions in the spring, at the end of the growth season, played an important role in the outcome of this year’s melt, the researchers said. In March 2008, thin first-year ice covered a record high 73 percent of the Arctic basin. While it may appear to be a recovery of the sea ice, the large extent masked an important aspect of sea ice health since thin ice is more prone to melting during the summer. The widespread thin ice in spring 2008 set the stage for extensive ice loss during the melt season, according to the NSIDC researchers.

Through the 2008 melt season, a race developed between the melting of thin ice and gradually waning sunlight, said CU-Boulder Research Associate Walt Meier, a research scientist at NSIDC. Summer ice losses allowed significant solar energy to enter the ocean and heat up the water, melting even more ice from the bottom and sides. Warm oceans store heat longer than the atmosphere does, contributing to melt long after the sunlight has begun to wane, Meier said. In August 2008, the Arctic Ocean lost more ice than any previous August on record.

“Warm ocean waters helped contribute to ice losses this year, pushing the already thin ice pack over the edge,” said Meier. “In fact, preliminary data indicate that 2008 probably represents the lowest volume of Arctic sea ice on record, partly because less multiyear ice is surviving now and the remaining ice is so thin.”

In 2008, summer conditions worked together to save some first-year ice from melting and to “cushion” the thin ice pack from the effects of sunlight and warm ocean waters, preventing the “perfect storm” for ice loss seen in 2007, according to the researchers. Temperatures in 2008 were cooler than in 2007, although still warmer than average.

Cloudier skies also protected the ice from some melt, and wind patterns spread the ice pack out, leading to higher extent numbers, according to CU-Boulder Research Associate Julienne Stroeve, an NSIDC research scientist. The end result was the natural variability of short-term weather patterns provided enough of a “brake” to prevent a new record-low ice extent from occurring, she said.

“I find it incredible that we came so close to beating the 2007 record, without the especially warm and clear conditions we saw last summer,” said Stroeve. “I hate to think what 2008 might have looked like if the weather patterns had set up in a more extreme way.”

The melt season of 2008 reinforces the decline of Arctic sea ice documented over the past 30 years, said CU-Boulder Senior Research Associate Ted Scambos, NSIDC lead scientist. “The trend of decline in the Arctic continues, despite this year’s slightly greater extent of sea ice,” said Scambos. “The Arctic is more vulnerable than ever.”

Bethesda, MD (Oct. 1, 2008) – Patients who undergo a complete negative colonoscopy have a reduced incidence of colorectal cancer, confirms a study published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. However, in the proximal colon, the incidence reduction of colorectal cancer following complete negative colonoscopy differs in magnitude and timing. The reduction of colorectal cancer is observed in about half of the 14 follow-up years and for the most part occurs after just seven years of follow-up. Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology is the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute.

“Our study raises a question about the effectiveness of colonoscopy in usual clinical practice,” said Linda Rabeneck, MD, MPH, of the University of Toronto and Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto and lead author of the study. “Our findings suggest that the effectiveness of colonoscopy is reduced for cancers arising in the proximal colon. Whether this is due to colonoscopy quality, or whether it is due to tumor biology is the key issue that we need to address.”

Findings

The relative rate of colorectal cancer overall and the relative rate of distal (left-sided) colorectal cancer in the study group remained significantly lower than the control population. The relative rate of proximal (right-sided) colorectal cancer was significantly lower than the control population in half of the follow-up years, mainly after seven years of follow-up. Read the rest of this entry »