About 300 million years ago, volcanic ash buried a tropical forest located in what is now Inner Mongolia, much like it did the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

This preserved forest has given researchers the unusual opportunity to examine an ecosystem essentially frozen in place by a natural disaster, giving them a detailed look at ancient plant communities and a glimpse at the ancient climate.

This ancient, tropical forest created peat, or moist, acidic, decaying plant matter. Over geologic time, the peat deposits were subjected to high pressure and became coal, which is found in the area.

The volcano appears to have left a layer of ash that was originally 39 inches (100 centimeters) thick.

‘This ash-fall buried and killed the plants, broke off twigs and leaves, toppled trees, and preserved the forest remains in place within the ash layer,’ the authors, led by Jun Wang of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China, wrote in an article published Monday (Feb. 20) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The ash layer dated to about 298 million years ago, early in the Permian Period, when the supercontinent Pangea was coming together.

The researchers examined three sites […]

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In Boston, a construction worker, ravaged by burns, successfully underwent a total face transplant. In San Antonio, surgeons have injected a glue-like substance that hardens and prevented the bursting of a woman’s brain aneurysm. And in my own institution, researchers have shown that stem cells from a patient’s own heart can help regenerate tissue and repair damage caused by a heart attack.

Every day the headlines are filled with breath-taking reports about the advances in American medicine. But even as it leads the planet in medical and scientific accomplishments, the United States also has some downright shameful disparities in its health care, and one of the worst is in the area of infant mortality.

Every year about 30,000 babies in our nation, a disproportionate number of them African Americans, die before reaching their first birthday.

U.S.: Laggards of industrial world

Last year, the infant mortality rate in the United States was an estimated 6.06 deaths per 1,000 live births, just ahead of Croatia, but lagging behind all of industrialized Europe and Asia.

For African Americans, the rate is worse. In 2007, the most recent year that a comparison is available, there were 13.3 deaths per 1,000 live births for African Americans, compared to 5.6 for […]

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Unpasteurized milk, touted as the ultimate health food by some, is 150 times more likely to cause food-borne illness outbreaks than pasteurized milk, and such outbreaks had a hospitalization rate 13 times higher than those involving pasteurized dairy products, a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds.

The survey found 121 outbreaks linked to dairy products in which it was known whether the milk was pasteurized or unpasteurized (also called ‘raw’). Of those, 60% were caused by raw milk and 39% by pasteurized milk.

‘When you consider that no more than 1% of the milk consumed in the United States is raw, it’s pretty startling to see that more of the outbreaks were caused by raw milk than pasteurized,’ says Barbara Mahon, senior author on the paper and deputy director of enteric diseases at CDC.

The 13-year review, published in this month’s edition of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, is one of the largest done to date. It also found that states where the sale of raw milk is legal have twice as many outbreaks as states where it is illegal.

Pennsylvania is in the midst of a campylobacter outbreak linked to raw milk from a dairy in Chambersburg, Pa., that […]

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Weeks of intense campaigning in the early nominating states have left the leading Republican presidential candidates increasingly dependent on millions of dollars spent on their behalf by outside ‘super PACs,

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NEW YORK — Billions of engineered nanoparticles in foods and pharmaceuticals are ingested by humans daily and new Cornell research warns they may be more harmful to health than previously thought.

A research collaboration led by Michael Shuler, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Chemical Engineering and the James and Marsha McCormick Chair of Biomedical Engineering, studied how large doses of polystyrene nanoparticles - a common, FDA-approved material found in substances from food additives to vitamins - affected how well chickens absorbed iron, an essential nutrient, into their cells. The results were reported online Feb. 12 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

According to the study, high-intensity, short-term exposure to the particles initially blocked iron absorption, whereas longer-term exposure caused intestinal cell structures to change, allowing for a compensating uptick in iron absorption.

The researchers tested both acute and chronic nanoparticle exposure using human gut cells in petri dishes as well as live chickens and reported matching results. They chose chickens because these animals absorb iron into their bodies similarly to humans, and they are also similarly sensitive to micronutrient deficiencies, explained Gretchen Mahler, Ph.D. ’08, the paper’s first author and former Cornell graduate student and postdoctoral associate.

The researchers used […]

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