Mexico's staggering homicide rate has taken a toll on the mortality rate for men -- and it could be even worse than the statistics indicate, a new study from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health suggests.

Improvements in living standards and in the availability of health care helped boost life expectancy throughout Latin America during the second half of the 20th century. But that trend slowed in the early 2000s and began reversing after 2005 due to the rising homicide rate in Central America and Mexico. In Mexico, that rate more than doubled from 9.5 per 100,000 deaths in 2005 to 22 per 100,000 by 2010.

Using paroxetine--a medication prescribed to treat conditions including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder--during the first trimester of pregnancy may increase newborns' risk of congenital malformations and cardiac malformations. That's the conclusion of a recent analysis published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

Boulder, Colo., USA - Apatite has recently gained considerable attention as a mineral with many uses within the Earth and planetary sciences. Apatite chemistry has recently given new insight into a wide range of geological processes and tools, such as magmatism, metasomatism, planetary geochemistry, and geochronology. In their open-access Geology article, Emilie Bruand and colleagues expand the utility of apatite by presenting a novel way to fingerprint magma chemistry and petrogenesis using apatite inclusions within robust titanite and zircon.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- A new Sandia National Laboratories accelerator called Thor is expected to be 40 times more efficient than Sandia's Z machine, the world's largest and most powerful pulsed-power accelerator, in generating pressures to study materials under extreme conditions.

"Thor's magnetic field will reach about one million atmospheres, about the pressures at Earth's core," said David Reisman, lead theoretical physicist of the project.

Though unable to match Z's 5 million atmospheres, the completed Thor will be smaller -- 2,000 rather than 10,000 square feet -- and will be considerably more efficient due to design improvements that use hundreds of small capacitors instead of Z's few large ones.

Methane is increasing in the atmosphere, though poor understanding of the sources has led to rampant speculation by environmental groups.

By compiling previously reported measurements made at a total of 733 northern water bodies - from small ponds formed by beavers to large lakes formed by permafrost thaw or ice-sheets - researchers are able to more accurately estimate emissions over large scales. 

A gene believed to suppress the growth and spread of cancer has the opposite effect in some forms of colorectal cancer, researchers have found. 

Sprouty2 is the gene and the new paper studied it in cancer cell models, mouse models and human biopsy samples. Using different molecular methods, the researchers found that the gene functions differently in colorectal cancer than in other types of cancers. Sprouty2 is known to block molecular circuits to prevent cancer cells from growing and spreading to other parts of the body. However, the researchers found that in colorectal cancer, Sprouty2 may increase the metastatic ability of cancer cells instead of suppress it. They believe this occurs when the gene is up-regulated, or supercharged.