Focus: Hidden - Maryland

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Study in JAMA Internal Medicine examines a nearly invisible population of shut-ins for ways to treat the infirm, assist the rest.

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NanoMRI is a scanning technique that produces nondestructive, high-resolution 3-D images of nanoscale objects, and promises to become a powerful tool. Producing images with near-atomic resolution, however, is difficult and time-consuming. Striving to overcome this limitation, researchers have developed a parallel measurement technique, which they report in Applied Physics Letters. Information that normally would be measured sequentially -- one bit after another -- can now be measured at the same time with a single detector.

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There’s more than one way to gain a sense of control. The traditional view of a life in control is one in which an individual has taken actions to ensure success in both the near and long terms. “Secondary control,” has been given short shrift in both the scientific literature and the attitudes of Western societies. Secondary control can be described as a mindset in which one accepts and adapts to the fact that much of life can’t be bent to human will.

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Researchers report that statins inhaled as a spray can treat symptoms of asthma. The findings support that statins should be explored as a new class of inhaler therapy for asthma.

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With the use of e-cigarettes on the rise, especially among young people, research to uncover the health effects of e-cigs is becoming increasingly important. In a new study published ahead of print in AJP-Lung, researchers find that e-cig solution and vapors—even those that are nicotine-free—damage lung health.

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Reporting on their study with lab-grown human cells, researchers at The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland say that blocking a second blood vessel growth protein, along with one that is already well-known, could offer a new way to treat and prevent a blinding eye disease caused by diabetes.

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New research has led to FDA approval of the use of a drug to treat the effects of radiation exposure following a nuclear incident. The drug, Neupogen, is the first ever approved for the treatment of acute radiation injury.

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Family Health Centers of Baltimore (FHCB) presents the inaugural Dr. Lewis H. Richardson, JR., Community Fellowship Award to honor Cyrus J. Lawyer, III, M.D., Ph.D., FACOG, for “outstanding contributions in shaping the health and wellness of thousands of infants and children in Baltimore,” said Paula B. McLellan, CEO for Family Health.

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Retired Air Force dentist Thomas R. Schneid, DMD, was named as the new Executive Dean of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) Postgraduate Dental College. USU President Charles L. Rice, M.D., made the announcement following a nationwide search.

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Play a flute in Carnegie Hall, and the tone will resonate and fill the space. Play that same flute in the Grand Canyon, and the sound waves will crash against the rock walls, folding back in sonic chaos. The disparity is clear – to the modern listener, the instrument belongs in an auditorium. "Distinct echoes would be totally unforgivable in today's performance spaces," says Steven J. Waller, an archaeo-acoustician. “But, in the past, people sought echoes."

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Psychoacoustics identifies five basic types of emotional speech: angry, fearful, happy, sad and neutral. In order to fully understand what’s happening with speech perception, a research team at the University of Texas at Austin studied how depressed individuals perceive these different kinds of emotional speech in multi-tonal environments. They will present their findings at the 169th ASA meeting, held this week in Pittsburgh.

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Johns Hopkins experts lead an international group that has issued an ambitious five-year agenda to tackle some of the most complex ethical issues involved in ensuring the global population has enough sustainably produced safe and nutritious food.

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The work of the IAC began in 2010 with the formation of the International Affairs Working Group. Since that time, the group has successfully collaborated to form four AMP International Affiliate Organizations, support more than a dozen conferences outside the U.S. with AMP speakers, and further expand AMP’s educational initiatives to Europe, Asia, and other continents beyond North America.

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Astronomers have spent decades trying to determine the oddball behavior of an aging star nicknamed "Nasty 1" residing in our Milky Way galaxy. Looking at the star using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers had expected to see a bipolar outflow of twin lobes of gas from the star. The astronomers were surprised, however, to find a pancake-shaped disk of gas encircling the star. The vast disk is nearly 1,000 times the diameter of our solar system.

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The American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced today that it has selected applied physicist Robert G.W. Brown as its new Chief Executive Officer.

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NIBIB-funded researchers have developed a highly sensitive imaging technique for non-invasive screening of lymph nodes for metastatic cancer. The new imaging technique – so far tested in mice – offers a rapid tool to noninvasively identify cancer’s spread at its earliest stages.

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A novel two-drug combination has the potential to target and restore a defective protein underlying cystic fibrosis (CF), according to two phase III clinical trials conducted at 187 medical centers around the world, including Johns Hopkins.

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In a report on what is believed to be the first small clinical trial of its kind, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center say they have safely used immune cells grown from patients’ own bone marrow to treat multiple myeloma, a cancer of white blood cells.

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Engineers at Virginia Tech have taken the first steps toward building a novel dynamic sonar system inspired by horseshoe bats that could be more efficient and take up less space than current man-made sonar arrays. They are presenting a prototype of their "dynamic biomimetic sonar" at the 169th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America held May 18-22, 2015 in Pittsburgh.

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Maryland Carey Law launches new business fellowship program for law students and new graduates.

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Gun violence restraining orders (GVROs) are a promising strategy for reducing firearm homicide and suicide in the United States, and should be considered by states seeking to address gun violence, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of California, Davis, argue in a new report.

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A multidisciplinary team led by Johns Hopkins researcher Venu Raman, Ph.D., with notable contributions from Guus Bol, Farhad Vesuna and Phuoc Tran of Johns Hopkins, has identified a new therapy for lung cancer, the most common cancer worldwide.

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Playing natural sounds such as flowing water in offices could boosts worker moods and improve cognitive abilities in addition to providing speech privacy, according to a new study from researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. They will present the results of their experiment at the 169th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held May 18-22, 2015 in Pittsburgh.

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Researchers have held tremendous interest in liquid metal electronics for many years, but a significant and unfortunate drawback slowing the advance of such devices is that they tend to require external pumps that can't be easily integrated into electronic systems. So a team of North Carolina State University researchers set out to create a reconfigurable liquid metal antenna controlled by voltage only, which they describe this week in the Journal of Applied Physics.

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Graphene takes an important step toward commercial applications like wearable wireless devices and sensors connected to the "Internet of Things"

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HHMI has selected 26 researchers from 19 institutions to become HHMI investigators. These researchers were selected for their individual scientific excellence from a group of 894 eligible applicants. The initiative represents an investment in basic biomedical research of $153 million over the next five years.

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Researchers at the University of Colorado suggest that the portion of the brain devoted to hearing can become reorganized even with early-stage hearing loss, and may play a role in cognitive decline. They have applied fundamental principles of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to forge new connections, to determine the ways it adapts to hearing loss, as well as the consequences of those changes, and their findings will be presented at ASA’s 169th meeting.

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Babytalk, which includes higher-pitched voices and a wider range of pitches, is sometimes known as "motherese," partly because most research on parent-child interactions has traditionally focused on the mother's role. Scientists study this common behavior because they want to understand what role such speech patterns play in children’s language acquisition. But in an era of increased paternal involvement, researchers are investigating whether fathers modify their speech in the same way mothers do.

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Sending teen girls periodic text messages reminding them to follow through on their clinic appointments for periodic birth control injections can go a long way toward improving timing and adherence to contraception in an age group that is notoriously noncompliant, according to a small study from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

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WHAT: Press Event Webcasts | Research from the ASA 169th Meeting DATE: Tuesday, May 19 TIME: "Noise and Health" @ 11:00 a.m. EDT; "New Discoveries in Acoustics" @ 2:00 p.m. EDT ONLINE REGISTRATION: http://www.aipwebcasting.com ONSITE LOCATION: Smithfield Room, Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown Hotel

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Modern lifestyles have made our bones lighter weight than our hunter-gatherer ancestors. A study of the bones of hundreds of humans who lived during the past 33,000 years in Europe finds the rise of agriculture and a corresponding fall in mobility drove the change, rather than urbanization, nutrition or other factors.

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Two studies from Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers add to preliminary evidence that high-dose radiation treatment, called stereotactic body radiotherapy, appears to be safe and as effective as standard radiation treatment for certain patients with pancreatic cancer whose tumors are advanced but have not spread.

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The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Institute for International Programs will lead a five-year, $17-million program to help the Canadian government measure the impact of its maternal and child health programming around the world.

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Wind turbines causing cluckus interruptus in prairie chickens, tranquility at a conservation center, better blood pressure monitors with wearables, and a vibrational analysis of graphite tennis rackets are just some of the highlights from the lay-language versions of papers to be presented at the 169th ASA meeting, held May 18-22 in Pittsburgh. Summaries are posted online in the ASA’s Pressroom; many contain sounds, images, and videos. The entire collection can be found at http://acoustics.org/current-meeting.

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Researchers have developed a microfluidic chip that can capture rare clusters of circulating tumor cells, which could yield important new insights into how cancer spreads. The work was funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of the National Institutes of Health.

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Studies have shown that individuals with hearing loss or who are listening to degraded speech – think of a loud room -- have greater difficulty remembering and processing the spoken information than individuals who heard more clearly. Now researchers are investigating whether listening to accented speech similarly affects the brain's ability to process and store information. Their preliminary results suggest that foreign-accented speech, even when intelligible, may be slightly more difficult to recall than native speech.

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The same theory that explains individual differences in human speech has recently been applied to other members of the animal kingdom, including dogs and deer. Now researchers from Syracuse University in New York are working to understand whether individually distinctive vocal characteristics of North Atlantic right whales could be used to identify and track individuals -- a potentially useful tool for studying an endangered species that spends much of its life hidden under the water.

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Washington College names the 2015 winner of its famous Sophie Kerr Prize, this year worth $62,900. Alexander Vidiani filled his Prize portfolio with poems about loss, masculinity, fatherhood and the way we use language to connect with one another.

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The Burmese python's body and organs grow dramatically after it eats and then shrink after the meal is digested. This study is the first to link the extreme body changes directly to changes in gene expression and show how quickly gene expression shifts after the snake eats.

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Leadership of the APS and the Cuban Society of Physiological Science met in Havana to sign an agreement for the exchange of scientific information and resources between the two organizations. This partnership fits as part of APS’s goal of sharing breaking physiological research and will also facilitate more global interactions among Cuban, American and other international physiologists.

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Bo Persson, a scientist at the Jülich Research Center in Germany, and his colleagues have now uncovered new velocity and temperature-dependent properties of rubber friction on asphalt -- bolstering the idea that an important component of friction originates when chains of rubber molecules repeatedly stick to the road, stretch, and then release.

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Medical students, advanced practice nurses, military dentists, and scientists, clinical psychologists, and public health professionals will move from student to alumni status on Saturday, May 16 – Armed Forces Day – as they receive their degrees at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) 36th commencement exercise at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C.

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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have captured for the first time snapshots of fledgling white dwarf stars beginning their slow-paced, 40-million-year migration from the crowded center of an ancient star cluster to the less populated suburbs.

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In what they are calling a surprising finding in a large study of men who completed questionnaires and allowed scientists to review their medical records, Johns Hopkins researchers report that men with a history of asthma were less likely than those without it to develop lethal prostate cancer.

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Fundamental research into the causes and cures of post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome now has its first home base at a major U.S. medical research center with the launch of the Johns Hopkins Lyme Disease Clinical Research Center.

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Secondhand exposure to cannabis smoke under “extreme conditions,” such as an unventilated room or enclosed vehicle, can cause nonsmokers to feel the effects of the drug, have minor problems with memory and coordination, and in some cases test positive for the drug in a urinalysis. Those are the findings of a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine study, reported online this month in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

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If you walk into a dark room, you can still find your way to the light switch. That’s because your brain keeps track of landmarks and the direction in which you are moving. Fruit flies also boast an internal compass that works when the lights go out, scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus have discovered. Their findings suggest that dissecting how fruit flies navigate through the world could help researchers understand how humans and other mammals perform similar tasks.

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Heart disease has topped mortality charts as the No. 1 killer of men and women for many decades, but a novel analysis of American literary fiction by two physicians finds the disorder’s presence in great novels has remained relatively modest.

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Thanks to benefactor Sophie Kerr, a successful novelist and magazine editor in early 20th century New York, one student will take home the largest student literary prize in the nation.