A new report on severe sporting injuries among high school and college athletes shows cheerleading appears to account for a larger proportion of all such injuries than previously thought.

The latest annual report from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill-based National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research shows high school cheerleading accounted for 65.1 percent of all catastrophic sports injuries among high school females over the past 25 years.

According to the report, almost 95,200 female students take part in high school cheerleading annually, along with about 2,150 males. College participation numbers are hard to find since cheerleading is not an NCAA sport. The report also notes that according to the NCAA Insurance program, 25 percent of money spent on student athlete injuries in 2005 resulted from cheerleading.

Some obese individuals do not appear to have an increased risk for heart disease, while some normal-weight individuals experience a cluster of heart risks, according to two reports in the August 11/25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

"The prevalence of obesity is increasing worldwide, and this epidemic is accompanied by a high incidence of type 2 diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease," the authors write as background information in one of the articles. Research indicates that in addition to overall obesity, the way body fat is distributed may influence risk for heart disease and diabetes. For instance, individuals with fat within the abdominal cavity—estimated by measuring waist size—appear to be at higher risk for insulin resistance (a pre-diabetic condition that occurs when the body fails to respond to the hormone insulin) and for having an unhealthy cardiovascular risk profile.

The traditional view of individual brain areas involved in perception of different sensory stimuli, with one brain region involved in hearing and another involved in seeing, has been thrown into doubt in recent years.

A new study published in BMC Neuroscience shows that, in monkeys, the region involved in hearing can directly improve perception in the visual region, without the involvement of other structures to integrate the senses.

Ruins of a Roman temple from the second century CE have recently been unearthed in the Zippori National Park in Israel. Above the temple are foundations of a church from the Byzantine period.

The discovery indicated that Zippori, the Jewish capital of the Galilee during the Roman period, had a significant pagan population which built a temple in the heart of the city center. The central location of the temple which is positioned within a walled courtyard and its architectural relation to the surrounding buildings enhance our knowledge regarding the planning of Zippori in the Roman era.

Scientists from the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD) and UCSF have identified a key regulatory factor that controls development of the human vascular system, the extensive network of arteries, veins, and capillaries that allow blood to reach all tissues and organs.

The research, published in the latest issue of Developmental Cell, may offer clues to potential therapeutic targets for a wide variety of diseases, such as heart disease or cancer, that are impacted by or affect the vascular system.

Researchers in laboratory of GICD Director Deepak Srivastava, MD, found that microRNA (miR-126), a tiny RNA molecule, is intimately involved in the response of blood vessels to angiogenic signals. Angiogenesis, the process of vascular development, is a tightly regulated and well-studied process.A cascade of genes orchestrate a series of events leading to formation of blood vessels in an embryo.

Researchers have discovered a central molecular switch in fruit fly embryos that opens new avenues for studying the causes of birth defects and cancer in humans. Writing about their study in the Aug. 12 Developmental Cell, scientists at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center determined the switch to be a main tuning mechanism for instructing cells whether to form sensory nerves or blood cells in different parts of the body.

How do you know when a scientific problem is finished? Biologists have been cracking open the cell and studying its molecular insides for a very long time now. How much more is there to learn? Perhaps it seems obvious that we are still missing much: we can't cure cancer very well, for example. On the other hand, one could ask, what's really keeping us from curing cancer, a lack of basic understanding or insufficiently developed technology? Nowhere is this problem of defining a scientific endpoint more obvious than in the community of scientists who are focused on some of the most basic questions in cellular and molecular biology - the community of yeast biologists. Yeast biologists now have to figure out what human biologists will be asking in the decades to come: what does it mean to solve a cell? Are there any big questions left in molecular biology?

There have been many cultural changes so far in 2008. Some of these changes are in response to the rapid increase in the price of oil and other commodities. Some of these changes have been due to technological innovations. In both cases new behavior patterns are being established that will, to some degree become permanent and will create new dynamics in certain industries. Today we take a look at some of the predictions made here last January.

Shopping

The predicted shopping trends were written with a long term view. What is interesting is that the high price of gasoline has accelerated the speed of implementation of some of the forecasts. On shopping, this column forecast:

“Shopping behavior will noticeably change……purchases will go down per capita. This will due to belt tightening but also due to the effect of the explosive growth that on-line sales will now have on off-line sales.”

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory say they have devised an inexpensive way to produce plastic sheets containing billions of nanoantennas that collect heat energy generated by the sun and other sources.

They say this technology is the first step toward a solar energy collector that could be mass-produced on flexible materials.

Traditional solar cells rely on a chemical reaction that only works for up to 20 percent of the visible light they collect. Scientists have developed more complex solar cells with higher efficiency, but these models are too expensive for widespread use.

Neither snap judgements nor sleeping on a problem are any better than conscious thinking for making complex decisions, according to new research that the researchers say debunks a controversial 2006 research result asserting that unconscious thought is superior for complex decisions, such as buying a house or car.

If anything, the new study suggests that conscious thought leads to better choices.

Since its publication two years ago by a Dutch research team in the journal Science, the earlier finding had been used to encourage decision-makers to make "snap" decisions (for example, in the best-selling book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell) or to leave complex choices to the powers of unconscious thought ("Sleep on it", Dijksterhuis et al., Science, 2006).