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An ancient fishery collapses as human intervention pushes a valuable species to evolve into a smaller fish.

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"Minor political parties' inability to gain traction in the United States does not reflect natural facets of our national character," says Gregory P. Magarian, J.D., election law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, home of the 2008 vice presidential debate. "The legal entrenchment of the two major parties has solidified a centrist political order." Magarian is available to discuss general election law and electoral system issues.

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"We are headed into a time when a confluence of changes are going to lead to a perfect storm, making us finally realize that our health care system needs a major overhaul," says Timothy D. McBride, Ph.D., leading health economist and professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis. "As the elderly population doubles between now and about 2030, projections are that we will see at least a doubling of the costs of the federal and state health and retirement programs," he says. "That will likely be when the perfect storm hits."

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John McCain, Elvis Presley, Gloria Steinem and Martin Luther King Jr. took different paths in life, but they were all lucky.

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The New York State Fair's tribute to dairy farmers will end up in the fuel tanks of a college vehicle fleet.

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A new clinical trial at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill using a popular low-dose contraceptive could uncover a more effective treatment for the 5 to 10 percent of women who suffer from premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD).

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The UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) Spam Data Mine reports that a new spam trend using MSNBC began shortly after 3 a.m. this morning. Because the new spam attack is based on the actual emails sent to MSNBC Alert subscribers, it will be nearly impossible to block to the spam without also blocking legitimate MSNBC mail, said Gary Warner, director of Computer Forensics.

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Twenty years later, University of Kentucky professor Thomas R. Lindlof tells the story behind the production and release of the controversial film "The Last Temptation of Christ" in his book "Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars."

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With food and fuel costs far above what they were a year ago, school children can expect to see some changes in menu offerings this academic year, says a nutrition expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Convenience and lower costs are driving even more parents to seek routine health care for their children at retail clinics in their communities, according to the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.

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In a study on fetal alcohol syndrome, researchers were able to prevent the damage that alcohol causes to cells in a key area of the fetal brain by blocking acid sensitive potassium channels and preventing the acidic environment that alcohol produces.

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Birds in the Northeastern United States are moving their breeding ranges north, adding to concerns about the planet's changing climate.

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Milliseconds can mean the difference between triumph and defeat in the world of Olympic sports, leading more trainers and athletes to look toward technology as a tool to get an edge on the competition. A fluids mechanics professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., is using flow measurement techniques to help American swimmers sharpen their strokes, shave seconds from their lap times, and race toward a gold medal in Beijing.

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The Library of Congress's National Recording Registry for 2007 includes the first trans-Atlantic broadcast (London to the U.S.). The 1925 recording is in the holdings of the University of Maryland's Library of American Broadcasting.

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Throughout the month of July, spam messages using fake news headlines have been luring visitors to virus-laden Web sites that will infect the unwary Websurfer with a simple clink on any of the links.

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Many college students with food allergies aren't taking the threat of a reaction seriously enough, or are often in environments where they could not be properly treated during an emergency, says new research from the University of Michigan Health System. And grade-school students are often in school environments where instructors are not trained how to treat an emergency food allergy reaction.

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Study finds that older patients' concerns often go unspoken and unaddressed.

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A new Hubble Space Telescope study of globular clusters outside our Milky Way Galaxy has found evidence that globular clusters are more likely to form in dense areas, where star birth occurs at a rapid rate, instead of uniformly from galaxy to galaxy.

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Lesa Mitchell, vice president of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, recognizes a "significant link" between American universities and innovation in the global marketplace.

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Pete Engardio, senior writer for BusinessWeek, sees Americans remaining at the forefront of innovative R&D and having an opportunity to remain ahead, despite increasingly stiff global competition.

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Do the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics have you inspired to get fit? University of Michigan Health System fitness experts say there are many ways you can get off the couch and get moving without hurting yourself "” even during commercial breaks.

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Food does more than satisfy hunger; it provides fuel for the body and mind, too. So as you make a list of school supplies to buy for the upcoming school year, a University of Michigan dietitian says to consider the items at your local supermarket that can also help prepare your child for the classroom.

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A new study hints that people who have both alcohol problems and sleep problems "“ which often occur together -- might be helped by an epilepsy drug. The small study opens the door for further research on how to help alcohol-dependent people escape the Catch-22 of insomnia and drinking that often stands in the way of recovery.

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Amsterdam, Johannesburg, Singapore, Dublin, and Washington, D.C., are the new gateway cities for global migration patterns. GW Associate Professors of Geography Lisa Benton-Short and Marie Price present contemporary trends and issues in their book Migrants to the Metropolis: the Rise of Immigrant Gateway Cities.

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The University of Kentucky is partnering with Khorog State University in Tajikistan to preserve the endangered language of Shughni, along with its cultural traditions. The language, which has no written tradition, is spoken by approximately 40,000 people in the Pamir Mountains of Eastern Tajikistan and another 20,000 in Afghanistan.

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As gas prices soar, scientists at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University are marketing research that will enable petroleum companies to locate, analyze and process crude oil much faster, cheaper and more accurately.

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If you step into one physics classroom on Florida State University's campus, you may not recognize it as the same course you took in high school or college. Making use of state-of-the-art technology, Associate Professor Simon Capstick is helping his students get a more hands-on, collaborative educational experience -- and actually learn more in the process.

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Nearly half of women treated for breast cancer did not know that their odds of being alive after five years are roughly the same whether they undergo mastectomy or breast conserving surgery. Minority women were even less likely to be aware of this important factor of their treatment decision, according to a study from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

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In 2007, 273 plant species in the state of Kentucky were considered endangered or threatened and an additional 57 were listed under special concern. Capturing nearly all the state's flowers in peril, "Rare Wildflowers of Kentucky" hopes to spread awareness and promote environmental preservation.

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The University Transportation Center for Alabama, headquartered at The University of Alabama, is conducting a pilot study to assess the impact of installation of lap/shoulder seat belts on a limited number of Alabama school buses.

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Tests implemented since No Child Left Behind's passage may have helped with accountability issues in education, but they have had little effect on improving learning in children.

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GW professors examiner who reads the more than 112 million blogs worldwide, the politics of these readers, and how much they participate in American politics in their paper "Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics."

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Bullies in the schoolyard now have a new place to wield their punches "“ cyberspace. "Cyberbullying," as it's now called, is like regular bullying except it's done online through sites like Facebook and MySpace and the use of cell phones, says Dr. Vivian Wright of the University of Alabama.

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Teenage subcultures featured in the majority of American teenage movies and TV shows such as "Mean Girls", "The Hills", and "Gossip Girl" have led some to assume that all social aspects of middle and high school are negative. That's not the case, said Dr. Natalie Adams of the University of Alabama.

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"No Child Left Behind," the Bush administration's education package, will continue no matter who wins the November presidential election. Its focus, however, will likely shift to early intervention programs.

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Research shows that whether a child has been read aloud to on a regular basis is the single biggest predictor of a child's success in learning to read, says University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Associate Professor of education Kathleen Martin, Ph.D.

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Amb. David Shinn and Joshua Eisenman have released their research on China-Africa relations, identifying areas where China and the United States have important differences in their approach to Africa and recommendations of key issues where Beijing and Washington can cooperate in a manner that will benefit Africans.

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This sequence of Hubble Space Telescope images offers an unprecedented view of a planetary game of Pac-Man among three red spots clustered together in Jupiter's atmosphere.

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A system of checks and balances in government is usually regarded as a good thing, except when it comes to the probability that a nation will stop its use of government-sanctioned torture, according to a Florida State University study.

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At Florida State University, the collective strength of biomedical research and the scientists who lead it has earned a $2 million High-End Instrumentation (HEI) grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The one-year award will help FSU buy a state-of-the-art robotic electron microscope to advance cutting-edge studies of HIV/AIDS, heart disease, hypertension and cancer.

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Scientists at Georgia Tech have developed a potential new treatment against cancer that attaches magnetic nanoparticles to cancer cells, allowing them to be captured and carried out of the body. The treatment, which has been tested in the laboratory and will now be looked at in survival studies, is detailed online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

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A new vision screening device, already shown to give an early warning of eye disease, could give doctors and patients a head start on treating diabetes and its vision complications, a new study shows. It captures images of the eye to detect metabolic stress and tissue damage that occur before the first symptoms of disease are evident.

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Mergers and acquisitions destroy leadership continuity in target companies' top management teams for at least a decade following a deal, according to a Virginia Commonwealth University study published in the July/August issue of the Journal of Business Strategy.

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A report released today by the U-M C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health finds childhood obesity is now the No. 1 health concern for kids in 2008, topping smoking and drug abuse. The poll also reveals that bullying, Internet safety and teen pregnancy rank among the nation's top health concerns for kids.

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Using an engineered common cold virus, UCLA researchers delivered a genetic payload to prostate cancer cells that allowed them, using Positron Emission Tomography (PET), to locate the diseased cells as they spread to the lymph nodes, the first place prostate cancer goes before invading other organs.

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In a new study published in Pediatrics, Paul T. Shattuck, Ph.D., professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis, found that families with similar demographics and nature of their children's special needs have different out-of-pocket health expenditures depending on the state in which they live. He notes that wealthier states tend to have a lower average extra cost for caring for a child with special needs. "At the low end, families in Massachusetts paid an average of $560 for out-of-pocket medical expenses," he says.

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An analysis of yearly vehicle deaths compared to gas prices found death rates drop significantly as people slow down and drive less. If gas remains at $4 a gallon or higher for a year or more, traffic fatalities could drop by more than 1,000 per month nationwide, according new findings by a University of Alabama at Birmingham researcher.

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Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study the dimmest stars in open star cluster NGC 6791, astronomers uncovered three different age groups. Two of the populations are burned-out stars called white dwarfs. One group of these low-wattage stellar remnants appears to be 6 billion years old, another appears to be 4 billion years old. The ages are out of sync with those of the cluster's normal stars, which are 8 billion years old.

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Nearly one-third of women reported pronounced asymmetry between their breasts after breast cancer surgery, and that perceived disfigurement greatly affects a woman's quality of life after treatment, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

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The game of baseball was designed to make a lefty the "Natural," according to David A. Peters, Ph.D., the McDonnell Douglas Professor of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, and uber baseball fan. Peters is a mechanical engineer who specializes in aircraft and helicopter engineering and has a different approach to viewing America's Favorite Pastime.