arizona – Page 2 – Shamskm: A site to exchange knowledge and solutions

Doctors Wary of Studies Funded by Pharmaceutical Industry, Study Shows

By Guest PostOctober 8, 2012General, Healthaaron kesselheim, arizona, biomedical research, christopher robertson, clinical trial, doctor, fda, federal budget, good drug, good science, high quality, method, methodological rigor, nih, pharmaceutical company, physician, quality, research, trust, university

Physicians are about half as willing to prescribe drugs tested in pharmaceutical-industry funded trials than those in NIH-funded studies, a new study finds.

Physicians are less likely to trust the results of clinical trials when they know those trials were funded by pharmaceutical companies, regardless of the quality of the research, a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows.

The study, led by Dr. Aaron Kesselheim of the Harvard Medical School in Boston and co-authored by University of Arizona associate professor of law Christopher Robertson, evaluated physicians’ confidence in the results of drug trials conducted with a high, medium or low level of methodological rigor. It then looked at how their confidence in those same results changed when a trial’s funding source was revealed as either the National Institutes of Health or a company in the pharmaceutical industry, versus when no funding source was disclosed. (more…)

UA Study: Cartels Squeezing Information Flow by Pressuring, Killing Journalists

By Guest PostOctober 2, 2012Media, Politicsarizona, border, cartel, celeste gonzalez bustamante, ciudad juarez, el paso, gunpoint, jeannine relly, kidnapped, knight award, maquiladoras, mexican journalist, newspaper

Two UA journalism professors have interviewed Mexican journalists along to U.S.-Mexico border to determine how drug cartels affect news reporting in the area.

Two researchers in the University of Arizona School of Journalism have traveled the length of the U.S.-Mexico border interviewing 39 Mexican journalists to find out how the drug cartels are affecting what news people receive. (more…)

New Book Explores Water along Devil’s Highway

By Guest PostAugust 19, 2012Environmentarizona, armchair explorer, bill broyles, borderland explorers, borrego tank, cactus, desert aficionados, desert flats, devils highway, elcamino del diablo, gary paul nabhan, gayle harrison hartmann, gold seekers, high tanks, lava flows, mary charlotte thurtle, mexico border, natural watering holes, rock basin, sand dunes, thomas e sheridan, tinajas altas, water

Written by an expert cast of UA affiliates, “Last Water on the Devil’s Highway: A Cultural and Natural History of Tinajas Altas” is perfect for desert aficionados and armchair explorers wishing to learn more about southwestern Arizona.

The University of Arizona Press, in collaboration with the University of Arizona Southwest Center, has announced the release of “Last Water on the Devil’s Highway: A Cultural and Natural History of Tinajas Altas.“

Written by an expert cast of UA affiliates and well-known Tucsonans, this book is perfect for desert aficionados and armchair explorers wishing to learn more about the High Tanks, the iconic natural watering holes of southwestern Arizona.

The Devil’s Highway – El Camino del Diablo – crosses hundreds of miles and thousands of years of Arizona and Southwest history. This heritage trail follows a torturous route along the U.S. Mexico border through a lonely landscape of cactus, desert flats, drifting sand dunes, ancient lava flows and searing summer heat. (more…)

Where Have All the Hummingbirds Gone?

By Guest PostJune 8, 2012Environment, Natureamy mckinney, arizona, billy barr, broad tailed hummingbirds, bumblebees, central america, crested butte, david bertelsen, david inouye, food resources, glacier lily, global warming, higher latitudes, hummingbirds, hummingbirds fly, male hummingbirds, mountain meadows, mountain summer, national science foundation, nectar, nickolas waser, North America, paul caradonna, saran twombly, united states, university of maryland

Glacier lilies and broad-tailed hummingbirds out of sync

The glacier lily as it’s called, is a tall, willowy plant that graces mountain meadows throughout western North America. It flowers early in spring, when the first bumblebees and hummingbirds appear.

Or did.

The lily, a plant that grows best on subalpine slopes, is fast becoming a hothouse flower. In Earth’s warming temperatures, its first blooms appear some 17 days earlier than they did in the 1970s, scientists David Inouye and Amy McKinney of the University of Maryland and colleagues have found. (more…)

Climate Change Boosts Then Quickly Stunts Plants, Decade-long Study Shows

By Guest PostApril 12, 2012Environmentarizona, atmosphere, bruce hungate, climate change, ecologist, ecosystem feedback, elevation, george koch, global warming, grassland ecosystem, great basin desert, greenhouse, national science foundation, nau, nitrogen gas, northern arizona university, nsf, nutrient cycle, paul dijkstra, plant communities, san francisco peaks, saran twombly, warming environment, zhuoting wu

*Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long*

Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long, according to new research results.

The findings, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, show that plants may thrive in the early stages of a warming environment but then begin to deteriorate quickly.

“We were really surprised by the pattern, where the initial boost in growth just went away,” said scientist Zhuoting Wu of Northern Arizona University (NAU), a lead author of the study. “As ecosystems adjusted, the responses changed.” (more…)

‘Mount Sharp’ on Mars Links Geology’s Past and Future

By Guest PostApril 1, 2012Sciencearizona, bob sharp, curiosity, edward stolper, gale crater, geological sciences, grand canyon, john grotzinger, ken edgett, life magazine, liquid water, mars, michael malin, mount rainier, mount sharp, NASA, robert p sharp, san diego, seattle, spacecraft

One particular mountain on Mars, bigger than Colorado’s grandest, has been beckoning would-be explorers since it was first sighted from orbit in the 1970s. Scientists have ideas about how it took shape in the middle of ancient Gale Crater and hopes for what evidence it could yield about whether conditions on Mars have favored life.

No mission to Mars dared approach it, though, until NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, which this August will attempt to place its one-ton rover, Curiosity, at the foot of the mountain. The moat of flatter ground between the mountain and the crater rim encircling it makes too small a touchdown target to have been considered safe without precision-landing innovations used by this mission. (more…)

Asteroid 2011 AG5 – A Reality Check

By Guest PostMarch 2, 2012Sciencearizona, asteroid 2011 ag5, cassegrain reflector telescope, catalina mountains, don yeomans, earth interception, gravitational influence, mars, mount lemmon, near earth object, orbit, space rock, spaceguard, torino impact hazard scale, tucson

Asteroid 2011 AG5 has been receiving a lot of attention lately because of a very unlikely scenario which would place it on an Earth-interception course 28 years from now. Here is a scientific reality check of this relatively nondescript space rock which is currently ranked a “1” on the 1 to 10 Torino Impact Hazard Scale

As of Feb. 26, 2012, asteroid 2011 AG5 is one of 8,744 near-Earth objects that have been discovered. It is approximately 460 feet (140 meters) in size and its orbit carries it as far out as beyond Mars’ orbit and as close to the sun as halfway between Earth and Venus. It was discovered on Jan. 8, 2011, by astronomers using a 60-inch Cassegrain reflector telescope located at the summit of Mount Lemmon in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, Arizona. (more…)

Five U.S. Urban Counties Lead ‘Terror Hot Spots’ List, but Rural Areas Not Exempt: Research

By Guest PostJanuary 31, 2012General, Politicsarizona, bianca bersani, domestic actors, extreme right wing, gary lafree, homeland security, hot spots, left wing terrorism, los angeles, lubbock county, manhattan, maricopa, massachusetts, metropolitan, miami dade county, nebraska, new york, perpetrator, profile, radical environmental groups, religious, rural areas, san francisco, start, terrorism, terrorist attack, texas, university of maryland, us counties, Washington

*N.Y., L.A., Miami, San Francisco, D.C. Top List; Maricopa, Ariz. Rising*

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Nearly a third of all terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2008 occurred in just five metropolitan U.S. counties, but events continue to occur in rural areas, spurred on by domestic actors, according to a report published today by researchers in the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland.

The research was conducted at Maryland and the University of Massachusetts-Boston. (more…)

Tag Archives: arizona