Medical researchers say that a smoking ban in Pueblo, Colo., led to a 41 percent drop in heart-attack hospitalizations three years after the ban. The new study is considered the best and longest-term research to show such a link.
In other biomedical news, a study has found that common drug interactions may have dangerous consequences for older Americans. University of Chicago Medical Center researchers reported that more than 2 million older adults take medicine in combinations that could cause serious problems.
Elevated blood sugar levels may be to blame for at least some of the normal age-related cognitive decline older people experience, another study suggests. Glucose regulation tends to worsen with age.
Gastric bypass surgery can reverse diabetes in overweight teens, researchers at six U.S. medical centers have found. Eleven obese teens in a study group who had gastric bypass surgery were able to stop taking medication for diabetes within a year of the surgery.
And research has found that teens who live within walking distance of places that sell alcohol are more likely to binge-drink and drive under the influence.
DNA evidence has become a mainstay of forensic science, but it isn't perfect. Among other things, samples can be contaminated and or may languish untested on evidence shelves for years. And some worry that the technology may violate privacy laws.
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In environmental news, state and federal officials warned people living near a massive spill of coal ash in eastern Tennessee, which took place three days before Christmas, that water samples in the area contain high levels of arsenic. And residents are concerned about the long-term health effects of the spill, one of the worst in U.S. history.
In other news, a new report led by the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that the country may face the consequences of climate change much sooner than previously estimated.
But there was some good news about coral reefs that were damaged by the Indian Ocean tsunami four years ago. They seem to have recovered faster than anticipated, according to reports. Scientists initially thought it could take a decade for them to rebound.
And writing on the origin of speciation, science writer Scott LaFee notes that no one knows yet just how diverse life is on Earth. "Thousands of new species are identified each year," he says. "In a study of just 19 trees in Panama, 1,000 of the 1,200 beetle species found were not previously known."
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Long before the early inhabitants of North America cultivated such crops as corn and beans, they gathered and roasted the bulbs of wild onions and other plants, according to a Texas archaeologist.
In other news, research suggests that human ancestors in southern Africa made stone hand axes 1.6 million years ago, nearly twice as long ago as such tool-making was previously thought to have occurred.
And, in China, scientists say they may have found the largest collection of dinosaur fossils ever discovered. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences say they have unearthed more than 7,000 dinosaur bones since last spring in Shandong province. Most date to the late Cretaceous period.
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A NASA report cited a number of design flaws involved in the Columbia space shuttle disaster that happened nearly six years ago. Due to the poor design of their pressure suits, all seven astronauts blacked out almost immediately once the spacecraft started breaking up during re-entry, officials said. All perished in the crash.
The U.S. space agency's future is also in question, with the impending advent of a new presidential administration. The New York Times also looked at the controversy surrounding the Ares I rocket that is designed to replace the nation's aging space shuttles.
Meanwhile, several geologists reported finding evidence of something big and unusual happening in waters near the New York area around 300 B.C. They say a large meteorite may have landed in the Atlantic, generating a tsunami.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Just when you thought you could scratch bird flu off your list of things to worry about in 2009, the deadly H5N1 virus has resurfaced in poultry in Hong Kong for the first time in six years, reinforcing warnings that the threat of a human pandemic isn't over.
India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and mainland China also experienced new outbreaks in December. ... The new cases come after a two-year decline in the number of confirmed human deaths from H5N1 bird flu and as fewer countries are reporting outbreaks among poultry.
A United Nations report released in October credits improved surveillance and the rapid culling of potentially infected poultry for helping to contain and even prevent outbreaks in many countries. Yet H5N1 has continued to "at the very least smolder, and many times flare up" since the chain of outbreaks began in 2003, said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
For centuries, grist-grinders and sailors have exploited the wind. Now, New York developers, homeowners and city leaders might be coming around.
A handful of buildings are already drawing electricity from wind turbines, which typically resemble table fans, or mounted airplane propellers. Unlike some of the skyscraping versions that dot rural hillsides, small turbines supply power directly to homes without first sending it through a utility company's lines.
One major sticking point in the city is that densely packed buildings tend to scatter breezes, making it tough to capture steady gusts. Although this and other kinks need to be addressed before the widespread rollout of small turbines is possible, there are signs of gains.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
As long as there are hockey players, there will be niche markets for false teeth. But the real news about the future of dentures is that there isn't much of one. Toothlessness has declined 60 percent in the United States since 1960. Baby boomers will be the first generation in human history typically to go to their graves with most of their teeth.
And now comes tooth regeneration: growing teeth in adults, on demand, to replace missing ones.
... It turns out that wisdom teeth are prolific sources of the kind of adult stem cells needed to grow new teeth for you. From scratch. In your adult life, as you need them. In the near future. According to the National Institutes of Health.
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from the Scientific American
Roughly 12,900 years ago, massive global cooling kicked in abruptly, along with the end of the line for some 35 different mammal species, including the mammoth, as well as the so-called Clovis culture of prehistoric North Americans. Various theories have been proposed for the die-off, ranging from abrupt climate change to overhunting once humans were let loose on the wilds of North America.
But now nanodiamonds found in the sediments from this time period point to an alternative: a massive explosion or explosions by a fragmentary comet, similar to but even larger than the Tunguska event of 1908 in Siberia.
Sediments from six sites across North America—Murray Springs, Arizona; Bull Creek, Oklahoma; Gainey, Michigan; Topper, South Carolina; Lake Hind, Manitoba; and Chobot, Alberta—yielded such teensy diamonds, which only occur in sediment exposed to extreme temperatures and pressures, such as those from an explosion or impact, according to new research published in Science.
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from New Scientist
When the Large Hadron Collider was switched on last September—and ignominiously switched off a few days later—it was the subject of the kind of media frenzy usually reserved for rock stars and celebrity models.
... Some day, particle physicists will want to upgrade the LHC to an even bigger, better and more expensive model. In fact, they are already working on a successor known as the International Linear Collider. If the public baulks at paying the price, physicists can kiss goodbye to their dreams of teasing apart the laws of nature by smashing together particles at high energies. Given the current economic turmoil, the ILC might never be built.
Perhaps it won't need to be. In laboratories around the world, the outline of an entirely new design of accelerator is being sketched that could revolutionise the economics of particle physics.
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from the BBC News Online
Scientists in China say they believe a group of dinosaur fossils discovered in the east of the country could be the largest collection ever found.
The researchers, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, say they have unearthed 7600 dinosaur bones since March in Shandong province. Most of the bones date back to the late Cretaceous period which is around the time when dinosaurs became extinct.
The scientists hope the find will help to explain why the creatures died out.
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from Nature News
Controlling the spread of mosquitoes using bacteria that halve the insects' lifespan could virtually eliminate the transmission of dengue fever, which kills around 12,500 people a year.
Traditional methods for controlling the spread of mosquito-borne disease, such as using bed nets and draining wetlands, are ineffective for the Aedes aegytpi mosquitoes that spread dengue fever virus because they bite during the day and thrive in urban areas.
Scott O'Neill, a geneticist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and his team has now developed a way to kill the mosquitoes before the dengue virus is mature enough to infect people if they are bitten. ..."We were able to show that when mosquitoes carry these bacteria, their adult lifespan is roughly halved," says O'Neill. The team's findings are published in Science.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
No one knows how many species of animal, plant, fungus and microbe live on Earth. Almost 2 million have been described, but millions more exist. Thousands of new species are identified each year, mostly small or microbial, but also birds, fish and mammals.
...Life abounds—and it abounds in variety. Even before the English naturalist Charles Darwin published his epic 1859 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, scientists and others had pondered the divergence of nature's multitudes, a process now called speciation.
Darwin himself provided no definitive answers. He lived and worked before the discovery of genes and modern understanding of heritability. But his labors provoked new questions and thinking, then and now.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON—Thwarted by President Bush in their efforts to expand federal spending on embryonic stem cell research, Democrats are now debating whether to overturn federal restrictions through executive order or by legislation when they assume full control of the government this month.
Both President-elect Barack Obama and Democratic Congressional leaders have made repealing Bush administration restrictions announced in 2001 a top priority. But they have yet to determine if Mr. Obama should quickly put his stamp on the issue by way of presidential directive, or if Congress should write a permanent policy into statute.
The debate is not academic. Democrats who oppose abortion say such a legislative fight holds the potential to get the year off to a difficult beginning, even though the outcome is certain given solid majorities in both the House and the Senate for expanded embryonic stem cell research.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON (Associated Press)—Seat restraints, pressure suits, and helmets of the doomed crew of the space shuttle Columbia didn't work well, leading to "lethal trauma" as the out-of-control ship lost pressure and broke apart, killing all seven astronauts, a new NASA report says.
At least one crew member was alive and pushing buttons for half a minute after a first loud alarm sounded, as he futilely tried to right Columbia during that disastrous day, Feb. 1, 2003.
In fact, by that time, there was nothing anyone could have done to survive as the fatally damaged shuttle streaked across Texas to a landing in Florida that would never take place.
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