Last week, Newswise.com was experiencing some intermittent server issues, causing slow response times and long delays on pageloads. It was frustrating for all of us, including you, dear user.
After a lot of hard work and some expert diagnostics, the site is working at normal speed and the issues seem to be resolved.
Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work out the kinks. And thanks for using Newswise!
Monday, October 19, 2009
Last Week's Site Issues Resolved
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Tamiflu Metabolite Measured in Japanese Sewage Discharge, River Water
Tamiflu Metabolite Measured in Japanese Sewage Discharge, River Water - This story, posted to Newswise on Monday, September 29, has attracted quite a lot of attention, particularly as the H1N1 flu virus continues to affect concerns about the upcoming flu season.
Tamiflu is arguably the most popular over-the-counter treatment, and is considered a viable option to at least speed up recovery if you've already come down with the flu. One potential complication, however, is that trace amounts of Tamiflu's active ingredient, oseltamivir carboxylate (OC), is now showing up in treated sewage and river water.
From the article:
"[I]n the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP), researchers measured oseltamivir carboxylate (OC), the active metabolite of the popular anti-influenza drug Tamiflu (oseltamivir phosphate), in samples of sewage discharge and river water collected near Kyoto City during Japan’s 2008–2009 flu season."
The results indicate the potential damage these trace amounts of OC could cause:
"...the peak drug concentrations observed in this study may be high enough to promote the emergence of drug-resistant influenza strains in waterfowl exposed to OC-contaminated waterways."
Researchers continue to examine the possibility of drug-resistant viruses, so watch Newswise for the results of those future studies. Follow our Feature News Channels on Drug-Resistant Superbugs and a Breaking News Channel on H1N1 Influenza. read the full article...
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Babies with Position-Related Head Flattening May Have Higher Rate of Ear Infections
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Newswise Client Tutorials: Changes to the Contribution Form
Hello there, Journalists, Bloggers, Clients and friends of Newswise! As I wrote a few weeks ago, we've undergone many changes here at Newswise with the launch of our revamped website. With a lot of valuable user-feedback, we've made some improvements and we hope you're enjoying the new site.
For some additional info, I've asked my cohorts in Member Services to come up with some tips for our clients on how to navigate some of the new features on the article contribution form. Working together with my colleague, Andy Roy, we've put together this list of brief tutorials geared specifically toward our clients. If you are not a Newswise member and you have any questions about joining, you can reach us at info at newswise dot com, or use our contact form.
HTML tags: You are now allowed to use HTML tags when you contribute a release. This means you can apply styling such as bold and italics, for example. Perhaps most importantly, you can include tags to create a link in the body of your article. The HTML must be entered manually; simply copying and pasting from Word or other types of documents will cause the HTML formatting to be lost or corrupted. If you don't choose to put in the HTML to activate a url yourself, we will activate it for you as usual.
Tip: HTML code to create a link looks like this:
Save as Draft: If your release is awaiting approval or you just aren't ready to commit it to go live on our site, you may choose to save it as a draft and return to complete it later. You can access drafts through the "Manage Articles" link in the left-hand navigation bar, or in the "Tools" drop-down menu at the top.
Tip: Navigate to your "Manage Articles" page from either of these two locations:
Submit your article: Once you have finished your submission click the "Submit and View" button at the bottom of the page. This submits your article for review by Newswise staff, and it will bring you to a confirmation screen showing you a sample of what your release will look like. Keep in mind that some formatting will not be done on your release until Newswise editors review it; for example, your contact info will not yet appear in its usual place to the right of the article under "contact info".
Also, on the confirmation screen for your article, there is now a button labeled "Return to Edit", which takes you back to the article to make changes. If you do this right away, before Newswise editors have reviewed the story, your changes will be live immediately. However, if you edit the article after it has been reviewed by Newswise editors, your changes will create a replacement article. More info about replacements is explained next.
Editing a reviewed article (replacements): Once your article has been submitted, our editor will review it and release it at the time you specified. If you need to make edits after our editor has reviewed it, you will notice some html tags in your article
Tip: When you submit a replacement, it goes into a queue for Newswise editors to review the changes. In the meantime, you will not see your changes live on the article yet. Only after we review the replacement article will your changes overwrite the existing article.
Release Time: Our release times are now on a 12-hour clock, not 24, as it was before. Midnight is now 12AM instead of 00:00, and noon is 12PM instead of 12:00.
Embedding Images/Audio/Video: We've moved the "add image and multimedia" option to the bottom of the contribution form. To add images or multimedia such as audio and video, click the "Add Images and Multimedia" button, which will take you to a new screen. Follow the instructions to add image and multimedia files, captions and credits, and when you are done, select "Save as Multimedia" at the bottom.
Tip: Multimedia options are only available with certain levels of membership. If you have any questions about your options or wish to add multimedia to your membership, contact us at member@newswise.com
Tags (keywords): Tags should no longer be pasted in; they should be entered one tag at a time. You must then select your tag from the drop-down list. Adding appropriate tags will help your article appear in more searches on our site and on the web.
We hope these tips are helpful. If you have any additional questions or you are having trouble contributing a story, you can reach Andy at andy@newswise.com, or by phone at 434-296-9417. read the full article...
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Newswise 2.0 Website Update News
Welcome friends, fans, media types, researchers, science nerds, bloggers, journalists, and John Q. Publics; Welcome to Newswise 2.0.
It's been a little over a week since we launched the new, revamped Newswise.com, and overall, things have been a huge success. There's a lot of enhancements to site navigation, including drop-down menus across the top of the site for easy access to browse news articles, and to locate various tools, resources, and support. The site is also highly optimized for SEO, so that should help users find our articles more quickly in search engines.
As with any new web site launch, we've had a few bugs and hiccups. The new search tool doesn't accept special characters, for example. Also, some users running Internet Explorer 7 or earlier are having some issues with their login, and certain pages not displaying. We recommend using Mozilla Firefox, or at least upgrading to version 8 of Internet Explorer if you're having issues.
Some users have noticed that there's not currently a "printer-friendly" link on the article page view. If you wish to print an article, you can automatically print it in a printer-friendly format by just selecting file>print from the broswer's menu. Your print-out should be a single column of only the article body, and some users are finding that this seems to take up more pages than necessary. We're working on improving the printer-friendly format, and should have fix soon.
If you have any questions, suggestions, or concerns, please use our Contact Form, and someone will respond to you as soon as possible.
Thanks for bearing with us as we go through this transition while we work on improving the Newswise 2.0 experience for you. Your support and patience is much appreciated.
All the best,
Thom and the rest of the Newswise Staff
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Study Reveals Major Genetic Differences Between Blood and Tissue Cells
Study Reveals Major Genetic Differences Between Blood and Tissue Cells
New research reveals there may be some critical variations in the DNA of blood versus tissue samples, particularly when it comes to researching and treating disease.
McGill University researchers in Montreal, while searching for a genetic cause for Abdominal Aortic Aneurisms (AAA), found that a gene found in tissue samples did not match perfectly with patients' blood DNA. It all came down to the BAK gene, a gene which controls cell death.
Dr. Bruce Gottlied explains: "In multi-factorial diseases other than cancer, usually we can only look at the blood. Traditionally when we have looked for genetic risk factors for, say, heart disease, we have assumed that the blood will tell us what's happening in the tissue. It now seems this is simply not the case.
"From a genetic perspective, therapeutic implications aside, the observation that not all cells are the same is extremely important. That's the bottom line," he added. "Genome-wide association studies were introduced with enormous hype several years ago, and people expected tremendous breakthroughs. They were going to draw blood samples from thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals, and find the genes responsible for disease.
"Unfortunately, the reality of these studies has been very disappointing, and our discovery certainly could explain at least one of the reasons why."
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Newswise Blog Update
Exciting things on the horizon for Newswise! We've stepped up our presence in the social media, including several Twitter feeds, here, here, here, and here.
Coming soon - a whole new look to the Newswise website - with better navigation, search engine, sharing and recommending links, and eventually, a place for the blog on our domain!
If you are interested in getting a look at the new site while we beta test, please contact me at thom at newswise dot com.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Earth Perhaps Not Such a Benevolent Mother After All
Some refer to that idea as the Gaia hypothesis, named for the ancient Greek goddess of Earth. The Gaia hypothesis suggests that the planet behaves as a kind of giant organism, with its complex systems finely tuned to compensate when one system gets out of kilter.
But Peter Ward, a University of Washington paleontologist, says that it is the Gaia view that is out of kilter. Ward has looked closely at conditions that existed during numerous mass extinction events in Earth's history to draw the conclusion that the Earth maybe isn't such a hospitable, harmonious nurturing mother after all.
In a new book, he suggests the planet ultimately is inhospitable to life, and that life itself might be the primary reason. Rather than Gaia, he invokes the darker Medea from Greek mythology.
"The Medea hypothesis says life is already shutting down Earth as a habitable planet. Not just the diversity of life, but the actual biomass," Ward said. "Life keeps evolving, and there are unintended, often negative, consequences."
"The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?" was published in April by Princeton University Press. In the 208-page book, Ward argues that humans have to use engineering to manage their environment or face potential extinction if the Earth is left to manage itself.
"The engineering I'm talking about is not girders and sky shields. It's engineering microbes to take over food production and energy production," he said.
Microbes have undergone evolution, a sort of natural engineering, throughout Earth's history, he said, and humans have the ability to guide such changes to clean the environment, for example, or regulate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Like Gaia, Medea is a mythological character, though she is decidedly much darker in nature. Medea was married to Jason at the time he pursued the Golden Fleece but, according to legend, he left her and in revenge she killed their two children.
Ward, a UW professor of biology and of Earth and space sciences, says numerous mass extinctions show that our planet behaves in somewhat the same way. For example:
**The evolution of oxygen-producing organisms twice plunged Earth into ice ages as carbon dioxide, crucial for photosynthesis, was stripped from the atmosphere.
**The evolution of the first true animals caused extinction of most stromatolites, layers of microbes living in sediment in the oceans' intertidal zones. The result was somewhat more complex life forms, but a vastly smaller volume of living matter.
**The evolution of the first forests 400 million years ago is considered one of the great events in Earth history. But tree roots pushed into subsurface rocks, exposing them to increased weathering. The weathered elements again stripped carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and plunged the Earth into a 90 million-year ice age.
"The irony is that we have way too much carbon dioxide right now, but we should stash it in a bank because we're going to need it," Ward said. "The end of life as we know it is when we reach just 10 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."
Currently, carbon dioxide is at 380 parts per million and rising, creating a greenhouse effect that most climate scientists say will greatly increase temperatures around the world, with some severe consequences. For example, with the melting of mountain and polar ice sheets, the world's most-productive agricultural land will be submerged and humans will struggle to find food, Ward said.
He noted that throughout Earth's history, carbon has been stripped from the atmosphere and stored in trees, rocks, even the oceans. He said those processes will continue until atmospheric carbon dioxide drops to 10 parts per million, a point at which no plants can live. Once plants are gone, within 20 million years the oxygen will plummet to 1 percent of the total atmosphere and life as we know it will end.
"Then you've gotten to a point where it will be forever impossible to get diversity of life back. It will be forever impossible to regain an oxygen-rich atmosphere. That's not Gaia. It's the opposite of Gaia," he said.
He notes that of 15 mass extinction events in Earth's history, only the one 65 million years ago that brought an end to the age of dinosaurs was likely caused by a comet or asteroid crashing into the planet's surface. The others all resulted from Earth's own processes.
"There's no Gaia. There's just this dumb, blind life. It tries out all kinds of new things that are good for new kinds of life but are detrimental to everything else that exists. The innovations lead to disaster," Ward said.
He added that, contrary to recently popular beliefs, the planet likely would not somehow "heal itself" if all humans were suddenly removed. Instead, he said, humans are the key to saving the planet and, in the end, are perhaps the only true Gaian force.
"We're not renting. We're the owners, but there can be a cost to the rest of nature of our ownership," Ward said. "There is an easy fix – the only fix is intelligence. Knowing that there is a problem is what will get us out of it. We're the only ones who can put our hands on the controls." read the full article...
Friday, May 15, 2009
Weird Science News: Rachel Maddow Describes Fire Ant Research in Texas
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Monday, May 11, 2009
Your Brain On--and Off--Caffeine
Ever miss your daily cup of coffee and subsequently get a pounding headache? According to reports from consumers of coffee and other caffeinated products, caffeine withdrawal is often characterized by a headache, fatigue, feeling less alert, less energetic and experiencing difficulty concentrating. Researchers from the University of Vermont College of Medicine and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine sought to investigate the biological mechanisms of caffeine withdrawal in a paper published recently in the online edition of the scientific journal Psychopharmacology. They looked at brain electrical activity and blood flow during caffeine withdrawal to examine what was taking place physiologically during acute caffeine abstinence, including the likely mechanism underlying the common "caffeine withdrawal headache."
The group examined caffeine's effects in a double-blind study, which involved the administration of caffeine and placebo capsules. Each participant's response to the caffeine or placebo was measured using three different measures -- brain electrical activity via electroencephalogram (EEG); blood flow velocity in the brain via ultrasound; and participants' self-reports of subjective effects via questionnaires. The team demonstrated that stopping daily caffeine consumption produces changes in cerebral blood flow velocity and quantitative EEG that are likely related to the classic caffeine withdrawal symptoms of headache, drowsiness and decreased alertness. More specifically, acute caffeine abstinence increased brain blood flow, an effect that may account for commonly reported withdrawal headaches. Acute caffeine abstinence also produced changes in EEG (increased theta rhythm) that has previously been linked to the common withdrawal symptom of fatigue. Consistent with this, volunteers reported increases in measures of "tired," "fatigue," "sluggish" and "weary." Overall, these findings provide the most rigorous demonstration to date of physiological effects of caffeine withdrawal.
The researchers also discovered a provocative and somewhat unexpected finding -- that there were no net benefits associated with chronic caffeine administration.
"In addition to looking at caffeine withdrawal, this rigorous design also permitted comparison of chronic caffeine maintenance with chronic placebo maintenance, which provides unique information about the extent to which there are net beneficial effects of daily caffeine administration," said Stacey Sigmon, Ph.D., research associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont and first author on the study. "In contrast to what most of us coffee lovers would think, our study showed no difference between when the participant was maintained on chronic placebo and when the participant was stabilized on chronic caffeine administration. What this means is that consuming caffeine regularly does not appear to produce any net beneficial effects, based on the measures we examined."
Co-authors on the study, which was a collaboration between Sigmon and Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, include Griffiths, as well as Ronald Herning, Warren Better and Jean Cadet of the National Institute on Drug Abuse's Molecular Neuropsychiatry section.
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