Hydraulic fracturing is an important technological advance in the extraction of natural gas and petroleum from black shales, but wastewater produced along with shale gas and petroleum following fracking is extremely saline and contains high concentrations of barium.

The flu virus infects up to one-fifth of the U.S. population each year and kills thousands of people, many of them elderly. A new study explains why the flu vaccine is less effective at protecting older individuals, the people it is supposed to protect. 

Flu vaccines, which contain proteins found in circulating viral strains, offer protection by eliciting the production of antibodies -- proteins that help the immune system identify pathogens and protect against infectious disease. While vaccination is considered the most effective method for preventing influenza, it is less effective in the elderly. But until now, the molecular mechanisms underlying this decrease in vaccine efficacy were unknown.

Soap and water have been mainstays in the prevention of infection for open fractures but a new study finds that it is actually less effective than just using saline water.

The finding could lead to significant cost savings, particularly in developing countries where open fractures are common. 

(Boston)-- Healthcare consumers, policy and insurance organizations rely heavily on hospital ranking reports, but how accurate are they? Do differences in patient preferences for life-sustaining treatments that exist between different hospitals affect how hospitals are ranked?

The climate is complex and nothing shows that more than when numerical models are forced to stop predicting the past and have to actually project what could happen in the future.

But the past can at least inform if models are really wrong and an analysis of fossil corals and mollusk shells from the Pacific Ocean reveals there is no link between the strength of seasonal differences and El Niño, a complex but irregular climate pattern with large impacts on weather - but the top nine climate models in use today simplistically associate exceptionally hot summers and cold winters with weak El Niños, and vice versa.

Taste buds vary widely in humans, which is one reason why some kids prefer sweet or salty treats and others do not, but it may also be the reason that some kids need more sugar to get that same sweet taste.  

Conventional measures of age usually define people as 'old' at one chronological age, often 65. In many countries around the world, age 65 is used as a cutoff for everything from pension age to health care systems, as the basis of a demographic measure known as the 'old-age dependency ratio,' which defines everyone over 65 as depending on the population between ages 20 and 65.

In new study in the journal Population and Development Review, IIASA researchers Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov provide new measures to replace the old-age dependency ratio.

A leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, colon cancer is famously resistant to treatment. There are many reasons for this, but one has to do with a group of persisting cancer cells in the colon that cause relapses. Conventional therapies against them are mostly ineffective. EPFL scientists have now identified a biological mechanism that can be exploited to counteract colon cancer relapses. The approach activates a protein that is lost in the persisting cancer cells. The researchers were able to reactivate it using vitamin A, thus eliminating the cancer cells and preventing metastasis. The study is published in Cancer Cell, and introduces a new way to treat colon cancer.

When you think of it, all of the natural gas harvested by hydraulic fracturing is natural but groups that once embraced it as clean energy have now turned on it and have sought to use its biological origins against it, with manufactured videos of flaming tap water and such that have nothing to do with fracking.

Scientists revealed mayor players in the severe muscle damage caused by sepsis, or septicemia, which explains why many patients suffer debilitating muscle impairment long-term after recovery. They propose a therapeutic approach based on mesenchymal stem cell transplantation, which has produced encouraging results and has proved successful in restoring muscle capacity in animals.