CINCINNATI -- New research presents strong evidence that the "synergistic" effect of early-life exposure to both outdoor traffic-related pollution and indoor endotoxin causes more harm to developing lungs than one or the other exposure alone.

Researchers from the University of Michigan determined that only 663,000 of the approximately 3.9 million Americans with hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection received antiviral therapy between 2002 and 2007. Treatment rates appear to be declining, in part because only half of the patients know they are infected.

A recent metobolomics study by researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond found that impaired peroxisomal oxidation of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) is associated with the progression of nonalcoholic fatty liver (NAFL) to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).

Washington, D.C. -- The community-associated strain of the deadly superbug MRSA -- an infection-causing bacteria resistant to most common antibiotics -- poses a far greater health threat than previously known and is making its way into hospitals, according to a study in the December issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases.

The web browser Opera 10.10 has been released as a stable version, and it has a number of new features to enhance the browsing experience, including "Unite", which is a group of applications for sharing music, photos and other files.

A team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Stanford University has developed a way to simulate blood flow on the computer to optimize surgical designs. It is the basis of a new tool that may help surgeons plan for a life-saving operation called the "Fontan" surgery, which is performed on babies born with severe congenital heart defects.

A first-of-its-kind consensus statement on diabetes surgery is published online today in the Annals of Surgery. The report illustrates the findings of the first international consensus conference -- Diabetes Surgery Summit (DSS) -- where an international group of more than 50 scientific and medical experts agreed on a set of evidence-based guidelines and definitions that are meant to guide the use and study of gastrointestinal surgery to treat type 2 diabetes. The document is considered to...

Current research suggests that a common oral bacterium may exacerbate autoimmune disease. The related report by Nichols et al, "Unique Lipids from a Common Human Bacterium Represent a New Class of TLR2 Ligands Capable of Enhancing Autoimmunity," appears in the December 2009 issue of The American Journal of Pathology.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin told reporters last week that “Android and Chrome will likely converge over time”. Both open source operating systems use Linux and Webkit browser code. The operating systems are very similar in nature and both may eventually end up on notebooks some day.

Census of Marine Life scientists have inventoried an astonishing abundance, diversity and distribution of deep sea species that have never known sunlight - creatures that somehow manage a living in a frigid black world down to 5,000 meters (~3 miles) below the ocean surface. With images captured by deep-towed cameras, sonar and other vanguard technologies, animals known to thrive in an eternal watery darkness now number 17,650, a diverse collection of species ranging from crabs to shrimp to...

Visual Tool for Blind Spots in the UniverseInformation field theory enables astronomers, medical practitioners and geologists to look into places where their measuring instruments are blind. In order to infer missing data in an astronomical measurement with more than just imagination, physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics have formulated a theory of spatial perception called information field theory.The distribution of matter, for example, in a section of the universe can...

Alien beings on faraway planets may not have noticed, but it’s been 35 years since human beings made the first deliberate effort to send them a message. In 1974, the astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, both working at Cornell University at the time, used the world’s biggest and most powerful radiotelescope to transmit the one-of-a-kind 3-minute message. It consisted of 1,679 bits — ones and zeroes — and was cleverly designed to produce a simple image revealing something about the size...

Using historical data on the relationship between temperature and conflict in Africa, researchers have estimated the effect of rising temperatures due to global warming. They concluded that the incidence of African civil war could increase 55 percent by 2030, resulting in an additional 390,000 battle deaths if future wars are as deadly as recent ones.

With Bt crop acreage increasing worldwide, incorporating enhanced understanding of observed patterns of field-evolved resistance into future resistance management strategies can help to minimize the drawbacks and maximize the benefits of current and future generations of transgenic crops.

Falls among elderly people are significantly associated with several classes of drugs, including sedatives often prescribed as sleep aids and medications used to treat mood disorders, according to a new study.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has sailed seamlessly through the Nov. 21 flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus and started transmitting uncalibrated temperature data and images of the rippling terrain. These data and images will be processed and analyzed in the coming weeks. They will help scientists create the most-detailed-yet mosaic image of the southern part of the moon's Saturn-facing hemisphere and a contiguous thermal map of one of the intriguing "tiger stripe" features, with the highest...

A new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society says that western lowland gorillas living in a large swamp in the Republic of Congo -- part of the "mother lode" of more than 125,000 gorillas discovered last year -- are becoming increasingly threatened by growing humans activity in the region.

In a provocative new study, a scientist argues that rising carbon dioxide emissions -- the major cause of global warming -- cannot be stabilized unless the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day.

A novel approach to classify the gender of six-week-old turkey poults could save millions of male chicks from being killed shortly after birth, according to researchers. Their use of infrared spectroscopy to determine the gender of young birds shows that it is a fast and accurate method.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has contributed to the discovery of the youngest brown dwarf ever observed -- a finding that, if confirmed, may solve an astronomical mystery about how these cosmic misfits are formed.