NPR Topics: Health & Science

Stem Cells Used In Woman's Windpipe Transplant

The pioneering operation used a section of windpipe engineered in a laboratory with adult human stem cells. Engineering new tissues and organs from stem cells has long been sought as a solution to overcome a chronic shortage of donor organs.

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Tom Daschle for Secretary of Department of Health and Human Services. Host Madeleine Brand talks to Senior Washington Editor Ron Elving about this selection.

Want to cut down on your utility bills? You may want to take a second look at your Wii, Play Station and X-Box. A video game console can suck up as much energy as two refrigerators.

While there is still a market for cigarettes — nearly 1 in 5 American adults smokes — that number has been steadily decreasing. So tobacco companies are investing in technology and research that could create a safer cigarette.

For decades, tobacco companies advertised on TV, radio, billboards and magazine pages. When the 1998 tobacco settlement put an end to that, they began targeting smokers online and in person. Now the industry spends twice as much on marketing as it did 10 years ago.

Images were sent between a NASA probe and Earth in the first test of an internet-like data transmission system for space

A balloon-borne experiment in Antarctica detected a high number of energetic electrons from space that may be the signature of dark matter

A trick that exploits the difference in temperature between seawater near the surface and deep down could supply the world with cheap green power

Hunting for a planet that can support life? There's more to it than looking for Earth's distant twin, says

The discovery that female macaques are far chattier than males helps bolster the theory that human language evolved to forge social bonds

Current estimates for head and neck cancer survival are largely inaccurate because they widely disregard many of the most common diseases such patients have in addition to their primary cancer, says Jay Piccirillo, M.D., a head and neck specialist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

They've made electronics that can bend. They've made electronics that can stretch. And now, they've reached the ultimate goal -- electronics that can be subjected to any complex deformation, including twisting. Northwestern University's Yonggang Huang and the University of Illinois' John Rogers have improved their so-called "pop-up" technology to create circuits that can be twisted. Such electronics could be used in places where flat, unbending electronics would fail, like on the human body.

A team of researchers from the Netherlands and the University of Florida has found that plants that range beyond their normal distribution because of warming climates may have advantages over native plants. Global warming-induced biological invasions may represent an additional threat to biodiversity.

Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have gained new insights into regulation of one of the body's enzyme workhorses called calpains.

Brown University physicists have completed the most detailed study of the swimming patterns of a microbe, showing for the first time how its movement is affected by drag and a phenomenon called Brownian motion. The findings appear online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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California joins effort to fight global warming by saving rainforests

Mongabay: California has joined the battle to fight global warming through rainforest conservation. In an agreement signed yesterday at a climate change conference in Beverly Hills, California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger pledged financial assistance and technical support to help reduce deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia. The Memorandum of Understanding commits the California, Illinois and Wisconsin to work with the governors of six states and provinces within Indonesia and Brazil to help ...

Mongabay: But proposed legal changes may sound more like a development model for oil palm expansion rather than an affirmation of indigenous rights to some. Malaysia's government will for the first time grant ownership rights of land farmed by indigenous people, reports the Associated Press. Jaafar Jantan, a spokesman for the government's Orang Asli Affairs Department, said that some 20,000 Orang Asli families will obtain permanent ownership of 50,000 hectares of rural land currently ...

Reuters: Politicians actually listened when experts told them to protect Canada's boreal forest, a potent weapon against global warming, and the plan for this vast green area could work on some of the world's other vital places, scientists told Reuters. Bigger than the Amazon and better than almost anywhere else on the planet at keeping climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere, the boreal forest stretches across 1.4 billion acres (566.6 million hectares) from Newfoundland to ...

Telegraph: Under the European emissions trading scheme (EU ETS), energy intensive industries - that are responsible for half the region's emissions - are given an allowance for the amount of carbon dioxide they produce. A certain number of these "carbon credits" are given to each of the 12,000 companies in the scheme and then traded in a "cap and trade" scheme that ensures companies that want to pollute more have to pay and industries that cut emissions are rewarded. However so far the ...

BBC: Earth observation scientists have made a last-minute plea to Gordon Brown to put the UK's weight behind Europe's environmental monitoring project, GMES. The 2bn-euro venture will build a full picture of the state of the planet from satellite and ground-based data. But despite the UK's oft-stated claim to lead the world on climate policy, it has so far been lukewarm on GMES. Three leading scientists have now sent a letter to the PM urging him to back GMES at a critical ...

ScienceDaily: When Ohio State glaciologists failed to find the expected radioactive signals in the latest core they drilled from a Himalayan ice field, they knew it meant trouble for their research. But those missing markers of radiation, remnants from atomic bomb tests a half-century ago, foretell much greater threat to the half-billion or more people living downstream of that vast mountain range. It may mean that future water supplies could fall far short of what's needed to keep that ...

ScienceDaily: During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama proposed an economic plan that would create 5 million jobs in environmental industries. These so-called "green collar" jobs do, in fact, present the next frontier for U.S. manufacturing, says a new report from Duke University. Highlighting the direct linkages between low-carbon technologies and U.S. jobs, Duke researchers say U.S. manufacturing is poised to grow in a low-carbon economy. Their report, "Manufacturing Climate Solutions," ...

Climate Biz: Properly deployed information and communications technology (ICT) could cut U.S.-based carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 22 percent by 2020, according to new research. ICT could also save the country up to $240 billion in gross energy and fuel costs, according to the Boston Consulting Group and The Climate Group. The organizations unveiled the U.S. addendum to a previously released report called "SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age," which used a ...

Associated Press: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger opened his international climate change summit on Tuesday by upstaging himself with an even bigger political star -- President-elect Barack Obama. Schwarzenegger, a Republican whose efforts to combat global warming in California have generated worldwide acclaim, wants to show that governments can balance environmental protection and economic growth. He hopes his summit will influence negotiations over a new climate treaty during a U.N. gathering in Poland ...

Reuters: Economic revival in the former Soviet bloc has been the main driver in pushing up industrialised nations' greenhouse gas emissions since 2000, despite plans to cut them, UN data showed on Monday. "Emissions trends...continue to be a cause of concern," Yvo de Boer, head of the Climate Change Secretariat, told a news conference in Bonn that was also broadcast on the Internet. "Since 2000 they have been clearly on the rise." Emissions by 40 industrialised nations grew by 2.3 ...

Reuters: Coal-fired power plants might adopt technology with potential to help fight climate change faster if they used it to capture about half of their greenhouse gas pollution instead of almost all of it, experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said Monday. US power utilities have balked at calls for them to add carbon dioxide capturing equipment to their coal-fired power plants for storage underground because it is costly, unproven, and makes the plants less ...

EurActiv: The five percent decrease in industrialised countries' CO2 emissions between 1990 and 2006 was mainly due to economic decline in Eastern and Central Europe in the 1990s, but the overall trend has been upward since 2000, according to UN data. "The picture is somewhat different for countries which have ratified the Kyoto Protocol," as their emissions fell by 17% in the same period, said Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Yvo de ...

Agence France-Presse: Obama said in a surprise video message to an international conference on climate change hosted by five US state governors here that he would show new leadership on the issue as soon as he takes office in January. The president-elect also addressed his message directly to delegates at United Nations climate change talks in Poland next month. "While I won't be president at the time of your meeting and while the United States has only one president at a time, I've asked members of ...

Mongabay: The Coalition for Rainforest Nations -- a group of 40 tropical countries seeking compensation in the form of carbon credits for protecting their forest cover -- will ask the United Nations at next month's climate conference in Poland to establish a single body to coordinate forest carbon trading, reports Reuters from a workshop on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) meeting in Milan, Italy. Currently the process for establishing "carbon conservation" ...

Mongabay: Colombian officials have re-iterated their claim that cocaine use in rich countries is driving deforestation in Colombia, reports The Guardian. Speaking to a conference of police officers in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos Calderon said that 133,000 hectares of rainforest are cleared each year for coca cultivation. Coca is the raw ingredient for cocaine production. "Colombia has lost more than two million hectares of rainforest in the last ...