Individuals with either current or past insomnia are more likely to report a family history of insomnia than are those who have never had the sleep disorder.
- Article Source

As the world warms, the interaction between the Atlantic Ocean and atmosphere may be the recipe for stronger, more frequent hurricanes. Scientists have found that the Atlantic organizes the ingredients for a powerful hurricane season to create a situation where either everything is conducive to hurricane activity or nothing is — potentially making the Atlantic more vulnerable to climate change than the world’s other hurricane hot spots.
- Article Source

Researchers say certain club drugs trigger a chemical chain reaction in the brain similar to what occurs during traumatic brain injury, leading to cell death, memory loss and potentially irreversible brain damage.
- Article Source

Imagine a Brita filter big enough to clean up San Francisco Bay. One researcher has a plan to clean polluted sediment at Hunters Point in San Francisco with activated carbon–the same technology in many water filters. He proposes to sequester dangerous toxins by mixing activated carbon, a type of carbon with a large surface area, into the bay’s contaminated sediment.
- Article Source

People infected with HIV in Thailand die from the disease significantly sooner than those with HIV living in other parts of the world. According to the researchers, the shorter survival time measured in the studies suggests that HIV subtype E, which is the most common HIV subtype in Thailand, may be more virulent than other subtypes of the virus.
- Article Source

European Union forests are expanding and absorbing carbon at a higher than expected rate. Researchers say at least partial credit for nurturing its carbon sink through forest expansion is likely needed by the EU to reach its ambitious post-Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 20% by 2020 from 1990 levels.
- Article Source

A new study finds that even the sickest cancer patients are willing and able to “self-report” symptoms using the Internet, thus supplying key data in real time to their health-care providers.
- Article Source

Researchers using supercomputer simulations have exposed a very violent and critical relationship between interstellar gas and dark matter when galaxies are born — one that has been largely ignored by the current model of how the universe evolved. The findings, published in Science, solve a longstanding problem of the widely accepted model — Cold Dark Matter cosmology — which suggests there is much more dark matter in the central regions of galaxies than actual scientific observations suggest.
- Article Source

Researchers have discovered that blood stem cells are capable of patrolling the body’s organs where they seek out, and respond to, pathogens. They appear to be proactive participants in our innate immune response.
- Article Source

Studies looking into how diet and nutrition affect central nervous system development from birth are now being conducted. Scientists are using noninvasive tools to assess infant, toddler and school-aged children’s psychological, neurological and physiological development, as well as other brain-related functions.
- Article Source