Credit: wiki commons/Ricardo Liberato

No matter where in the world you find yourself, hospitals are filled with bacteria and viruses and potential infections for patients. Constanza Correa and her colleagues believe they have found a simple, and very old, fix that could greatly reduce inpatients’ chances of infection—replacing bedrails with copper.

Copper definitely wipes out microbes. “Bacteria, yeasts and viruses are rapidly killed on metallic copper surfaces, and the term “contact killing” has been coined for this process,” wrote the authors of an article on copper in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. That knowledge has been around a very long time. The journal article cites an Egyptian medical text, written around 2600-2000 B.C., that cites the use of copper to sterilize chest wounds and drinking water.

Cassandra D. Salgado, MD (who, besides being a hospital epidemiologist and associate professor of medicine, is also the medical director for infection prevention at the Medical University of South Carolina) explains:

…that the antimicrobial effect of copper-alloy surfaces is a result of the metal stealing electrons from the bacteria […]

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Credit: Johns Hopkins University

Hurricane Sandy left Lower Manhattan completely dark, eerily bereft of the electricity that keeps New York City buzzing 24 hours a day. Across town, 34,000 people living in the Rockaways, an exposed spit of land that acts as a barrier island, were left without power for weeks when the storm hit in October 2012.

On the heels of that devastation comes a new study that says New York City is among the cities most sensitive to increasing hurricane intensity, making it more likely that major hurricanes will cut off power to even more people, fueled in large part by climate change.

In a Johns Hopkins University study published this week in the journal Climatic Change, researchers used a computer model to show how power grids in coastal cities are likely to see more power outages from hurricanes in the coming decades. Climate change is expected to make hurricanes increasingly intense and damaging as […]

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A Norfolk, Virginia house facing the threat of sea rise,

Amanda Armstrong schedules her life around the tides. For the past year and a half, she’s had to navigate rising waters that saturate the lawn of her red brick house in Norfolk, Virginia, and sometimes fill a puddle out front with crabs and fish.

“We call it our little aquarium,” Armstrong, 40, said from outside the home along the Lafayette River that she rents with her family, where wetlands plants have sprouted up from the frequent doses of salt water.

Climate change is beginning to take a toll on real estate in the coastal city, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southeast of Richmond, as insurance costs soar and residents resort to putting their homes on stilts or opening up space underneath for the water to flow through. While most of the U.S. is in a housing rebound, prices in Norfolk fell 2.2 percent in October, according to the Virginia Beach-based

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Their job is to protect and serve – but it seems some police officers interpret this as an excuse to enjoy too many extra servings at the lunch table.

A study has revealed US cops have the highest rates of obesity among any profession in the country.

Along with firefighters and security guards, nearly 41 per cent of boys in blue are obese, according to a study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Social workers, clergy and counsellors come in second, with 35.6 per cent having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more – the standard definition of obese used by the study.

Home health aides and massage therapists are third at 34.8 per cent.

Surprisingly sedentary professions such as truckers, bus drivers and crane operators, come in only fifth in a group with garbage collectors on nearly 32.8 per cent.

The slimmest workers are economists, scientists and psychologists, of whom 14.2 per cent are classed as obese.

Police officers, firefighters and security guards could do with taking it […]

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The surface of the Greenland ice sheet. A new study uses NASA data to provide the first detailed reconstruction of how the ice sheet and its many glaciers are changing. The research was led by University at Buffalo geologist Beata Csatho.

Existing computer models may be severely underestimating the risk to Greenland’s ice sheet — which would add 20 feet to sea levels if it all melted — from warming temperatures, according to two studies released Monday. (emphasis added)

Satellite data were instrumental for both studies — one which concludes that Greenland is likely to see many more lakes that speed up melt, and the other which better tracks large glaciers all around Earth’s largest island.