Going without health insurance can delay when people obtain primary and preventative care , potentially resulting in poorer health. Even more gravely, a lack of private health insurance brings an increased risk of death; uninsurance is to blame for some 44,789 adult deaths across the U.S. every year, according to a new study published online today in the American Journal of Public Health . [More]

When you think of Tyrannosaurus rex, a small set of striking physical traits comes to mind: an oversized skull with powerful jaws, tiny forearms and the muscular hind legs of a runner. But, researchers have just unearthed a much smaller tyrannosauroid in China, no more than three meters long, that displays all the same features -- and it predates the T. rex by tens of millions of years.

Military deployment with multiple combat exposures appeared to be a unique risk factor for newly reported hypertension. Specifically, personally witnessing or being exposed to death due to war or disaster was significantly associated with increased likelihood of newly self-reported hypertension both at single and multiple exposures.

More than seventy percent of people who contract Hepatitis C will live with the virus that causes it for the rest of their lives and some will develop serious liver disease including cancer. However, 30 to 40 percent of those infected somehow defeat the infection and get rid of the virus with no treatment. Researchers have now discovered the strongest genetic alteration associated with the ability to get rid of the infection.

Injecting biomaterial gel into a spinal cord injury site provides significantly improved healing, new research has shown. The project indicates that a "practical path" to treatment may be found for spinal injury patients.

Researchers report measuring different friction forces when a carbon nanotube slides along its axis compared to when it slides perpendicular to its axis. The observation could provide a new means for assembling and sorting nanotubes.

In addition to global warming, carbon dioxide emissions cause another, less well-known but equally serious and worrying phenomenon: ocean acidification. Researchers have just demonstrated that key marine organisms, such as deep-water corals and pteropods (shelled pelagic mollusks) will be profoundly affected by this phenomenon during the years to come.

Using information from the longitudinal study of early care and youth development, researchers found that children who spent more time in high-quality child care in the first five years of their lives had better math and reading scores in middle childhood. Researchers also found that low-income children who attended high-quality child care programs before the age of five performed similarly to their affluent peers. These findings have implications for the role of child care in the creation of anti-poverty policies.

Results of the first study evaluating the use of human urine mixed with wood ash as a fertilizer for food crops has found that the combination can be substituted for costly synthetic fertilizers to produce bumper crops of tomatoes without introducing any risk of disease for consumers.

German scientists investigating the complex chemical mixture thought to be present in the early Earth's oceans have found that amino acids can be 'cooked' into many other important chemical building blocks of life when embedded in salt crusts.