In December 2006, the USA regulated sodium permanganate, a chemical essential to the manufacture of cocaine. In March 2007, Mexico, the USA's primary source for methamphetamine, closed a chemical company accused of illicitly importing more than 60 tons of pseudoephedrine, a methamphetamine precursor chemical. A study published today by the scientific journal Addiction found that those two events were associated with large, extended reductions in cocaine users and methamphetamine users in the USA -- impacts that have lasted approximately eight years so far.

AURORA, Colo. (Aug. 16, 2016) - Researchers from the University of Colorado School of Medicine have published a new study showing that sleep apnea worsens non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in obese adolescents.

Shikha Sundaram, MD, MSC, associate professor of pediatrics, and her fellow researchers from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus studied 36 adolescents with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), along with 14 lean patients, to assess whether sleep apnea and low nighttime oxygen promoted the progression of the disease. The children eligible for the study were at the Children's Hospital Colorado Pediatric Liver Center between June 2009 and January 2014.

The Venus Table of the Dresden Codex, an ancient Mayan book containing astronomical data, has been studied for 120 years, with some confusion and accuracy. If you can recall the Mayan calendar Doomsday prophecy, it stated that at the end of a 13th period of 400 years, known as Baktuns, on the equivalent of Dec. 21, 2012, we would see the return of mysterious Mayan god Bolon Yokte.

 Bisphenol A (BPA) is a component of some plastics and is found in food containers, plastic water bottles, dental sealants, and thermal receipt paper. In the body, BPA is a mild synthetic estrogen, one of the gigantic class of chemicals called "endocrine disruptors", even if they are 1/20,000th able to bind as well as the actual estrogen.

Environmentalists claim that despite the FDA doing an exhaustive four-year study and finding no effects, even in pregnant mice, despite feeding them 1,000 times as much BPA as a human can get, and affirming that humans process and excrete BPA far more efficiently than rodents, that a magical hormesis effect is still causing problems.

The duration of overweight and obesity in women's adult lives is correlated with cancer risk in a PLOS Medicine longitudinal study.

Move over glass windows, something even more old school than you could be back in fashion. A new paper in Advanced Energy Materials finds that windows made of transparent wood could provide better energy efficiency than glass, while eliminating glare and providing uniform and consistent indoor lighting.  

The process starts with bleaching from the wood all of the lignin, which is a component in the wood that makes it both brown and strong. The wood is then soaked in epoxy, which adds strength back in and also makes the wood clearer. The team has used tiny squares of linden wood about 2 cm x 2 cm, but the wood can be any size, the researchers said.

Indoor trampoline park injuries are an "emerging public health concern," warn doctors in Injury Prevention - because over 6 months, 40 children needed medical treatment at just one trauma center following a visit to one of these venues.

Yes, they looked at results from one business and declare that parents have one more thing to worry about.

They reviewed the medical records of kids under the age of 17 who sought medical treatment at a children's emergency care department between July 2014 and January 2015 for an injury sustained while at an indoor trampoline park.

The closest trampoline park in the hospital catchment area is just under 6 km away; the venue opened in July 2014.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (August 11, 2016) - By identifying new compounds that selectively block mitochondrial respiration in pathogenic fungi, Whitehead Institute scientists have identified a potential antifungal mechanism that could enable combination therapy with fluconazole, one of today's most commonly prescribed fungal infection treatments. The approach could also prevent the development of drug resistance.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have, for the first time, decoded and predicted the brain activity patterns of word meanings within sentences, and successfully predicted what the brain patterns would be for new sentences.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure human brain activation. "Using fMRI data, we wanted to know if given a whole sentence, can we filter out what the brain's representation of a word is--that is to say, can we break the sentence apart into its word components, then take the components and predict what they would look like in a new sentence," said Andrew Anderson, a research fellow who led the study as a member of the lab of Rajeev Raizada, assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Rochester.

Although diseases of the heart and blood vessels (cardiovascular disease, CVD) kill more people worldwide than anything else, with 17.3 million deaths globally, cancer has now overtaken CVD as the main cause of death in 12 European countries.

New data on the burden of CVD in Europe for 2016, which are published today (Monday) in the European Heart Journal [1], show that in the European region (defined as the 53 member states of the World Health Organisation) CVD caused more than four million deaths each year, 45% of all deaths. However, success in preventing and treating the disease has led to large decreases in CVD in a number of countries.