EurekAlert!

Penetrating injury rates were more than 20 times higher for persons living in the lowest income neighborhoods compared with those living in the highest income neighborhoods, according to a new study published in the August issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

Movies are becoming more and more digital -- from the shooting to the cut to the showing. At the International Broadcasting Convention IBC in Amsterdam that is taking place from Sept. 10-14, 2010, Fraunhofer movie experts will show programs for easy, digital post-production and safe archiving.

Obese women who have bariatric surgical procedures before pregnancy were three times less likely to develop gestational diabetes than women who have bariatric operations after delivery, according to new research findings published in the August issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

People who sleep less than six hours a night may be three times more likely to develop a condition which leads to diabetes and heart disease, according to researchers at the University of Warwick.

Aurora-A kinase (AurA) is an enzyme that is hyperactive in many cancers and drives tumor cell proliferation. Several AurA inhibitors are currently being tested in clinical trials to see if they slow tumor growth. Now, researchers in the Developmental Therapeutics Program at Fox Chase Cancer Center have identified an activation signal for AurA.

Using sophisticated airborne imaging and structural analysis, scientists at the Carnegie Institution's department of global ecology mapped more than 40,000 termite mounds over 192 square miles in the African savanna. They found that their size and distribution is linked to vegetation and landscape patterns associated with annual rainfall. The results reveal how the savanna terrain has evolved and show how termite mounds can be used to predict ecological shifts from climate change.

Now that astronomers are finding rocky worlds orbiting distant stars, they're asking the next logical questions: do any of those worlds have volcanoes? And if so, could we detect them? Work by theorists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggests that the answer to the latter is a qualified "yes."

Having a sibling, especially a twin, impacts your life. Your twin may be your best friend or your biggest rival, but throughout life you influence each other. However, a recent study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that having an opposite-sex twin may impact you even before you are born: females with a male co-twin score higher on mental rotation task than females with a female co-twin.

On Aug. 26, 2010, Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology electronically published, ahead of print, the results of a study comparing Progeria and typical cardiovascular aging titled "Cardiovascular Pathology in Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria: Correlation With the Vascular Pathology of Aging." The study found that progerin, the abnormal protein that causes Progeria, is also present in the vasculature of the general population and increases with age.

Patients with colon cancer who used multivitamins during and after being treated with post-surgical chemotherapy did not reduce the risk of the cancer returning or their dying from it, according to researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In a study of 1,038 patients with stage III colon cancer, the researchers found that while multivitamin use had no beneficial effect on patients' outcomes, it also did not have a detrimental effect.

Patients who have received a new kidney are significantly more likely to develop transplant renal artery stenosis (TRAS) -- the most common post-transplant vascular complication -- if they are obese or over 50. Researchers studied 360 recipients who had received kidneys from unrelated donors to discover what factors increased the risk of TRAS, where the renal arteries narrow, impeding blood flow to the kidney.

Not drying your hands thoroughly after washing them could increase the spread of bacteria, and rubbing your hands whilst using a conventional electric hand dryer could be a contributing factor. Frequently, people give up drying their hands and wipe them on their clothes instead, but hand hygiene is a key part of infection control and drying hands after washing is a very important part of the process.

Using a moving 3-D computer model based on the skull and teeth of a New Zealand reptile called tuatara, a BBSRC-funded team from the University of Hull, University College London and the Hull York Medical School has revealed how damage to dental implants and jaw joints may be prevented by sophisticated interplay between our jaws, muscles and brain. This research will appear in a future edition of the Journal of Biomechanics.

ESA's GOCE gravity mission has recovered from a glitch that prevented the satellite from sending its flow of scientific data to the ground. News of the recovery comes earlier than expected, thanks to the fervent efforts of a team of experts.

The first entire genome of an Irish individual has been sequenced. The sequence is reported in BioMed Central's open-access journal, Genome Biology, and provides insight into the evolutionary history of this distinct lineage.

Scientists at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid are testing infrared remote sensing technology to evaluate the pollutant emissions associated with motor vehicle traffic which allows for analysis of all the gases of environmental interest with one sole instrument in a sole measurement.

A new study from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet suggests that bipolar disorder -- or manic-depressive disorder -- does not increase the risk of committing violent crime. Instead, the over-representation of individuals with bipolar disorder in violent crime statistics is almost entirely attributable to concurrent substance abuse.

Researchers have developed a new data transmission system that could substantially improve the transmission capacity and energy efficiency of the world's optical communication networks.

A team made up of members of the University of Oviedo and the Complutense University of Madrid have gathered together all findings of the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and the reindeer in the Iberian Peninsula to show that, although in small numbers, these big mammals, prehistoric indicators of cold climates, already lived in this territory some 150,000 years ago.

A brain-scanning study reveals that an oral dose of methylphenidate, commonly known as Ritalin, improves impaired brain function and enhances cognitive performance in people who are addicted to cocaine. The study suggests that methylphenidate, combined with cognitive interventions, may have a role in facilitating recovery from drug addiction.