Research

The story of a 24-year-old Georgia graduate student fighting a flesh-eating disease has prompted a microbiologist with the Veterans Affairs Maryland Health Care System to speak out about the infection. Aimee Copeland lost most of her left leg after the flesh-eating bacteria necrotizing faciitis is believed to have entered a cut on her leg, according to the Associated Press, which reports she may also have to have her fingers amputated. The waterborne bacteria Aeromonas hydrophila is believed to have caused the infection.

No one likes to get stuck with a needle. But it's the only way doctors can get blood to test for diabetes, anemia and numerous other health problems. Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing say there is a much less invasive and painless means of detecting illnesses in patients — spit. Like blood, spit contains proteins, hormones, enzymes and DNA that can be used to test for and combat disease. It is easy and inexpensive to collect and analyze, making it ideal for research.

North County High School freshman Jack Andraka stood on the auditorium stage, speaking about the invention that earned him the $75,000 grand prize at the recent Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Behind him stood Dr. Anirban Maitra, a professor in the Johns Hopkins University's department of pathology who gave Jack use of his lab to craft his invention, a cheap and effective "dipstick-sensor" method of testing blood or urine to identify early-stage pancreatic cancer and other diseases.

Who doesn't love a tree? Apparently, criminals. Researchers have found that leafier places in Baltimore tend to have lower crime rates than those with few or no trees. A new study looking across Baltimore City and Baltimore County has found that with few exceptions, the frequency of crimes reported in a particular block or neighborhood goes down as the tree cover gets thicker. Just a 10 percent increase in leaf canopy was associated with a 12 percent drop in crime, it concluded. The study, published online in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning, supports arguments by advocates that environmental factors, and not just more police, can fight crime.

If all goes as planned, sometime this morning a spacecraft will blast off from its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and ride a fiery plume of contrails upward through the pre-dawn darkness to begin a two-week journey to the International Space Station and back. But the flight won't be just another NASA resupply mission. Instead, the Falcon 9 rocket and its unmanned Dragon cargo capsule built by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - SpaceX for short - will be the first commercially owned and operated vehicle ever to rendezvous with the station's orbiting astronauts.

Four trucks laden with 100 slot machines arrived early Wednesday morning at the nearly completed casino at Arundel Mills mall. For the next two hours, workers wheeled banks of the gleaming new machines, one by one, inside on hand trucks. Installation of the first set of slots moved Maryland Live! Casino, the state's largest, another step closer to its scheduled opening in three months. That's progress for Maryland's lackluster gambling program, which has yet to be fully implemented more than three years after voters approved five slots locations statewide.

D. CARLETON GAJDUSEK, 85 Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher D. Carleton Gajdusek, who studied brain diseases and infections that lie dormant for years before attacking the body, died Dec. 12 in Tromsoe, Norway. The American scientist, who spent about two decades at the National Institutes of Health, shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on so-called "slow viruses." The infectious agents include one implicated in mad-cow disease.

This letter is in response to The Sun's editorial on medical marijuana ("Go slow," Jan. 3). Recently, a medical marijuana panel commissioned by the Maryland legislature recommended two divergent proposals. One recommends dispensaries allow doctors to recommend marijuana to patients, and the other allows research institutions to test the efficacy of marijuana on human test subjects. The Sun supports the latter view. I find the support of this viewpoint to be quite frankly absurd. Marijuana has been one of the most researched drugs in the 20th century.

University professors and scientists who conduct research financed by the taxpayers should have to give up their rights to privacy on matters regarding their work ("Bill would shield academic research," Feb. 5). If they want to keep what they do private, they should work for a privately held company. It seems like a conflict of interest for Del. Samuel I. "Sandy" Rosenberg to sponsor a bill to protect their rights since he is an adjunct professor at two state law schools and therefore has a vested interest in the issue.

A study requested by the Maryland Technology Development Corp. found that stem cell research in the state supports 514 local jobs with an average salary of $64,000. The economic impact study by Sage Policy Group Inc., released Monday, also said that Maryland's Stem Cell Research Fund helps generate $71.3 million in business sales in the state. The corporation administers the research fund. The analysis also found that Maryland's stem cell industry was able to return nearly $3 million to state and local government through support of income generation, retail activity and property tax payments.

Prepaid debit cards are everywhere these days — and so are their fees. The cards allow you to load cash onto them and are accepted by businesses just like other types of plastic. But you might have to pay a fee to activate the card, make ATM withdrawals, check your balance, talk to customer service or reload money onto the card. Monthly fees can be as high as $14.95, and you could be dinged up to $5.95 if you haven't used the card in a while. "This is sort of a gift card with lots of fees," says Ruth Susswein, a spokeswoman with Consumer Action, which recently published a survey on prepaid card fees.

Ella Johnson thought she was done raising kids. Then one night her daughter, asleep in bed with her 1-year-old son, died of a heart condition, and Johnson suddenly found herself mothering a grieving grandchild who clung to the picture of his dead mother. The mother of three grown children, Johnson had plenty of experience with patching skinned knees and soothing teenage mood swings, but taking on the family's youngest generation brought a new set of worries about how to make ends meet and how to provide the right environment for her grandson, DaQuan'Ta Harper, who is now 12. So she eagerly signed on to a National Institutes of Health research study started this year that provides grandparents around the country with practical advice and support for raising grandchildren.

If you're aiming to be upwardly mobile, living in Maryland might help. The state is one of the best in the country for moving on up, what the study calls positive economic mobility, a new study by the Pew Charitable Trusts concludes. States doing better than average are largely in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, while those doing worse are in the South, according to the report, released Wednesday. Researchers at Pew's ongoing Economic Mobility Project say they're trying to answer a big question: Is the American dream alive and well?

Ice, salt and rigorous shaking can turn an ounce of nondairy creamer into a frozen treat. "It's simple, sweet and a little silly," Garrett Seidman, a junior at the Hannah More School in Reisterstown, said as he sampled a dab of ice-solid French vanilla cream. "But I like it. " Ice cream making was among the demonstrations during the second annual Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) Fair, held last week at the private school for children with autism and other emotional and learning disabilities.

Macy Bokhari felt anonymous at the University of Maryland, College Park, and disconnected from the professors to whom she looked for inspiration. So before her first semester was up, she adjusted her sights to another state university, up the interstate in Catonsville. On Wednesday, Bokhari, now a senior at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, held court in flowing robes of red silk, the formal garb of her native Saudi Arabia. She spoke to a stream of fellow students about her research on the implications of the Arab Spring protests for women's rights in the Middle East.

One day in June 2009, I was seeing patients at my neurology practice in Catonsville when I felt a sudden headache and noted my words seemed to be slurred. I called my wife, a speech-language pathologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and asked if she detected a change in my speech. She urged me to go to the hospital, which turned out to be a very good idea. I had suffered a brain hemorrhage and nearly died that day — on my 24th wedding anniversary. One of my secretaries drove me to the emergency room at St. Agnes Hospital, where I had been chief of neurology for about 10 years.

The article "Fighting to be Made in the USA" (May 20) is another wakeup call for policymakers who want to create jobs for Marylanders. On the one hand, state and local government leaders work to create jobs, on the other, good-paying jobs in manufacturing get exported as we allow our manufacturing base to erode. The future of Maryland manufacturing is in developing next generation manufacturing with customer-focused innovation. Such innovation is directly tied to research and development.

I have a lot of bad habits, including doing entirely too much research on minor purchases ($50 and below) and not enough on major ones --- you know, the kind that come with front and back yards that you hope to live in for years to come. But that's why I'm sharing this offer of a free BuildFax report , which assembles public information about permits that have been issued into one document for users. You can get one of these reports for your home for free through July 31, after which the price returns to $39.99.

Large doses of Vitamin C may moderately reduce blood pressure, Johns Hopkins researchers have found. But the scientists don't recommend people start taking large amounts of the vitamin. Researchers led by Dr. Edgar "Pete" R. Miller, an associate professor in the division of general interal medicine at Hopkins, reviewed and analyzed data from 29 previous  clinical trials and found that taking 500 milligrams of Vitamin C daily, or five times the recommended amount, could lower blood pressure by 3.84 millimeters.

Severely injured patients are more likely to survive if transported by helicopter rather than ambulance, according to new research by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine that adds fuel to the debate over flying patients to receive care. The study, unveiled Tuesday, is the latest in a body of often conflicting research into whether medevac helicopters get patients to hospitals faster, provide better care and increase the chances of saving lives. The use of helicopters has been scrutinized because of the risk of crashes that could kill the very people paramedics are helping.