Dinosaurs ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years, then disappeared so completely that to find even a partially complete skeleton of a single multi-ton animal is rare. Meanwhile, the Virginia Museum of Natural History has scores of fossils of Tanytrachelos ahynis, a 12 to 18-inch reptile that also lived millions of years ago, at the same time as the earliest dinosaurs.

Tanytrachelos is a long-necked reptile that was related to the perhaps better-known nine-foot (up to t

“Mobile phones are more widely utilised across all strata of society, in terms of income and education, than the PC,” says Ben Anderson of the University of Essex, UK. “Government departments may want to think in terms of text messages rather than Web pages,” if they want a more inclusive communication channel.

Anderson is giving an example from the results of the e-Living IST project, which was completed at the end of June 2004. The project attempted to find out if social be

When college students come home for the holidays after a few months of independent living, the entire family has to adjust to a different person walking in the door, says a Purdue University expert on family processes.

“Every time a student goes off to college, the family system changes,” says Charles “Chuck” Calahan, assistant clinical professor of family studies. “Families need to revisit their relationships to adjust to the new dynamics.” The process of separation starts when

Study appears in the November issue of the Journal of American Dietetic Association

The popular DASH diet, established by the National Institutes of Health as a way to lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, may have health benefits that go beyond its stated purpose of lowering people’s risk of heart disease, according to research published in the November issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.
Researchers at Pennington Biomedical Research Center

It’s difficult to define

While children and adults have similar intellectual definitions of bullying, they may differ when applying them in reality, says a U of T researcher. “There are complexities that can interfere with how we view bullying incidents,” says Professor Faye Mishna of the Faculty of Social Work. “While we’re identifying important strategies and tips on how to deal with bullying problems, it’s important to also acknowledge how confusing it can be

New research shows that almost 3 percent of patients who went to hospital emergency rooms with chest pain – but who weren’t initially diagnosed with heart problems – went on to have heart attacks or other heart-related events within a month.

The study, by Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center researchers and colleagues from seven other medical centers, will be reported in the December issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine and is currently available on-line. “Not all

Study shows weight-based REBETOL dosing in combination with PEG-INTRON significantly improves viral clearance in African-American patients with most-difficult-to-treat form of hepatitis C. WIN-R study provides important insights on improving hepatitis C treatment among African-Americans.

Twice as many African-American patients infected with the most difficult-to-treat form of chronic hepatitis C successfully cleared the virus when given a weight-based dose of REBETOL® (ribavirin,

Ball State University kicks off its 2004-05 season of E3 Electronic Field Trips with “Into the Canyon”—the first-ever, live educational broadcast from the Grand Canyon’s South Rim.

The Electronic Field Trip, developed by Ball State’s Teachers College in partnership with the National Parks Foundation and the National Parks Service and sponsored by Best Buy Children’s Foundation, will air at 6:30 p.m. EST Nov. 8

As the sun sets over one of the greatest natural wonders

Overactivity of protein kinase C (PKC), an enzyme that is implicated in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, markedly impairs higher brain functions in animals, according to a Yale study published Oct. 29 in Science.

The research adds to mounting evidence that excessive activity of PKC may underlie the distractibility, impaired judgment, impulsivity, and disturbed thinking seen in bipolar disorder (also known as manic depressive illness), and in schizophrenia.

The study

UK legislation on analgesic packs: before and after study of long term effect on poisonings BMJ Online First

Selling paracetamol and other painkillers in smaller pack sizes has slashed rates of suicide and damage to the liver from paracetamol poisoning, concludes a study on bmj.com this week. Suicides from overdoses of paracetamol or aspirin dropped nearly a quarter in the three years following new legislation in 1998, which cut pack sizes and limited how many tablets a retailer was

Lack of physical activity is costly not just to people’s health but to their wallets as well, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that sedentary lifestyles can lead to higher medical costs, which they say are borne by consumers and employers in the form of health insurance premiums, member co-insurance and taxes to foot the bill for public health insurance. The findings, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, add to a growing body of evidence that physical

For elderly women, the location of body fat is more important than total fat amount in predicting future heart attacks, according to researchers from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and colleagues.

“In the over-70 age group, overall obesity did not predict heart attack risk,” said Barbara J. Nicklas, Ph.D., lead researcher. “It didn’t matter how much fat the older woman had – what mattered was where that fat was stored.”

The researchers found that int

New findings from researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center in collaboration with Wake Forest University School of Medicine have shown that there is hope for individuals suffering a life-long history of reading problems. Using brain imaging technology the research group showed how the adult dyslexic brain responds to a specific phonological-based reading intervention program responsible for reading skill improvement. Published in the October 28 issue of the Journal Neuron, this is the

There is new scientific evidence to support the time-honored advice to students cramming for exams to get themselves a good night’s sleep after studying. Researchers who analyzed brain activity in sleeping volunteers who had learned to navigate through a computer-generated virtual town have discovered evidence that spatial memories are consolidated during deep sleep.

Also, the researchers say that they have shown for the first time that the activity level in the brain’s learnin

Babies who are breastfed have a lower risk of developing childhood leukemia, according to a new analysis of 14 studies by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

The paper, to be published November in the journal Public Health Reports, found that breastfeeding was linked to lower risks of both acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common of the childhood cancers, and acute myeloblastic leukemia (AML).

“Our paper is the first to systematically r

On 25 October 2004, the Initiative for Science in Europe (ISE) was officially launched at an ISE conference in Paris, France.
The launch marked the coming together of some 35 European scientific organizations to structure and give greater weight to the input of the scientific community into science policy-making and to promote the European Research Council (ERC).

ISE is an independent and informal platform for organizations committed to the scientific and technological develop