ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

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• Training your brain to prefer healthy foods
• New way to diagnose malaria by detecting parasite's waste in infected blood cells
• Changing global diets is vital to reducing climate change, researchers say
• Antarctic sea level rising faster than global rate
• Wine only protects against cardiovascular disease in people who exercise, study finds
• Drinking tea reduces non-cardiovascular mortality by 24 percent, study finds
• Energy drinks can cause heart problems, study suggests
• Efficacy of new gene therapy approach for toxin exposures shown in mouse study
• Giant balloon may soon rise over the desert, carrying aloft cutting-edge telescope
• Green hotels lower environmental impact, increases profits
• Possible bacterial drivers of IBD identified
• Drug shows promise against Sudan strain of Ebola in mice
• Good nutrition can help prevent, control type 2 diabetes
• Together, humans and computers can figure out plant world
• Atmospheric mercury review raises concerns of environmental impact

Training your brain to prefer healthy foods Posted: 01 Sep 2014 09:34 AM PDT It may be possible to train the brain to prefer healthy low-calorie foods over unhealthy higher-calorie foods, according to new research.

New way to diagnose malaria by detecting parasite's waste in infected blood cells Posted: 31 Aug 2014 12:03 PM PDT A technique that can detect malarial parasite's waste in infected blood cells has been developed by researchers. "There is real potential to make this into a field-deployable system, especially since you don't need any kind of labels or dye. It's based on a naturally occurring biomarker that does not require any biochemical processing of samples" says one of the senior authors of a paper.

Changing global diets is vital to reducing climate change, researchers say Posted: 31 Aug 2014 12:02 PM PDT Healthier diets and reducing food waste are part of a combination of solutions needed to ensure food security and avoid dangerous climate change, say the team behind a new study.

Antarctic sea level rising faster than global rate Posted: 31 Aug 2014 12:02 PM PDT A new study of satellite data from the last 19 years reveals that fresh water from melting glaciers has caused the sea level around the coast of Antarctica to rise by 2cm more than the global average of 6cm. Researchers detected the rapid rise in sea-level by studying satellite scans of a region that spans more than a million square kilometers. The melting of the Antarctic ice sheet and the thinning of floating ice shelves has contributed an excess of around 350 gigatonnes of freshwater to the surrounding ocean.

Wine only protects against cardiovascular disease in people who exercise, study finds Posted: 31 Aug 2014 09:52 AM PDT Wine only protects against cardiovascular disease (CVD) in people who exercise, according to results from the a study. Evidence suggesting that mild to moderate consumption of wine protects against cardiovascular disease has been accumulating since the early 1990s. In particular, retrospective studies have found that wine increases levels of HDL, the "good" cholesterol. But until now there has been no long-term, prospective, randomised study comparing the effects of red and white wine on HDL cholesterol and other markers of atherosclerosis.

Drinking tea reduces non-cardiovascular mortality by 24 percent, study finds Posted: 31 Aug 2014 09:52 AM PDT Drinking tea reduces non-cardiovascular mortality by 24 percent, reveals a study in 131,000 people. "Tea has antioxidants which may provide survival benefits. Tea drinkers also have healthier lifestyles so does tea drinking reflect a particular person profile or is it tea, per se, that improves outcomes -- for me that remains an open question. Pending the answer to that question, I think that you could fairly honestly recommend tea drinking rather than coffee drinking and even rather than not drinking anything at all," one researcher said.

Energy drinks can cause heart problems, study suggests Posted: 31 Aug 2014 09:52 AM PDT Energy drinks can cause heart problems according to research. "So-called 'energy drinks' are popular in dance clubs and during physical exercise, with people sometimes consuming a number of drinks one after the other. This situation can lead to a number of adverse conditions including angina, cardiac arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) and even sudden death," researchers report.

Efficacy of new gene therapy approach for toxin exposures shown in mouse study Posted: 29 Aug 2014 02:53 PM PDT Gene therapy may offer significant advantages in prevention and treatment of botulism exposure over current methods, new research shows. "We envision this treatment approach having a broad range of applications such as protecting military personnel from biothreat agents or protecting the public from other toxin-mediated diseases such as C. difficile and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli infections," said the lead researcher.

Giant balloon may soon rise over the desert, carrying aloft cutting-edge telescope Posted: 29 Aug 2014 02:53 PM PDT In a few days, a balloon-borne telescope sensitive to the polarization of high-energy "hard" X rays will ascend to the edge of the atmosphere above Fort Sumner, N.M., to stare fixedly at black holes and other exotic astronomical objects. It will be carried aloft by a stratospheric balloon that will expand to a sphere large enough to hold a 747 jetliner the float height of 120,000 feet, three times the height at which commercial aircraft fly and on the edge of Earth's atmosphere. Launching the balloon is not child's play.

Green hotels lower environmental impact, increases profits Posted: 28 Aug 2014 03:47 PM PDT Hotels certified in the sustainable building program Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, helps the environment and boosts revenue for the hotel, according to a new study.

Possible bacterial drivers of IBD identified Posted: 28 Aug 2014 02:00 PM PDT A handful of bacterial culprits have been identified that may drive inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, using patients' own intestinal immune responses as a guide.

Drug shows promise against Sudan strain of Ebola in mice Posted: 28 Aug 2014 11:26 AM PDT A potential antibody therapy for Sudan ebolavirus (SUDV), one of the two most lethal strains of Ebola, has been developed by researchers. A different strain, the Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV), is now devastating West Africa. First identified in 1976, SUDV has caused numerous Ebola outbreaks (most recently in 2012) that have killed more than 400 people in total.

Good nutrition can help prevent, control type 2 diabetes Posted: 28 Aug 2014 10:53 AM PDT Investigators have identified specific foods and dietary patterns that are beneficial in preventing and controlling diabetes, through a comprehensive review of recent randomized clinical trials and observational studies of diabetes and nutrition.

Together, humans and computers can figure out plant world Posted: 28 Aug 2014 08:53 AM PDT Recent research applying bioinformatics and biometrics to the study of plant form and function is presented in a special issue of a journal. The methods presented in the issue include automated classification and identification, a new online pollen database with semantic search capabilities, geometric morphometrics, and skeleton networks, and present a picture of a renaissance in morphometric approaches that capitalize on recent technological advances.

Atmospheric mercury review raises concerns of environmental impact Posted: 28 Aug 2014 08:52 AM PDT The cycling of mercury through soil and water has been studied as it impacts atmospheric loadings, researchers report. Recent studies that show increasing levels of mercury in the ocean's upper levels, along with news reports of Arkansas lakes as a hotspot for mercury in fish, have heightened awareness of the potential harm mercury poses.

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