News Releases from Johns Hopkins

June 29, 2009. Eighty percent of nonprofit organizations are experiencing fiscal stress according to a survey released today by Johns Hopkins University, and close to 40 percent of them reported that this stress was “severe” or “very severe.” Theaters and orchestras were particularly hard hit, with nearly 75 percent of the former and half of the latter reporting “severe” or “very severe” stress.

June 24, 2009. Cooperative learning methods have been found to be most effective in raising the math scores of middle and high school students, according to a comprehensive research review by the Johns Hopkins University School of Education's Center for Research and Reform in Education.

June 22, 2009. Reporters working on stories about how racial politics may affect President Obama’s campaign for health care reform should consider Lester Spence, an assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. “While talking about racial disparities in outcomes and in care is important and necessary, it is far from sufficient,” Spence said. “What we should do is identify the specific ways that race works and will work in the upcoming effort.”

May 29, 2009. During tough times when states and local school districts face huge budget challenges, the National Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University is urging state and local school officials to tap federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) dollars to continue offering high-quality summer learning programs for poor children.

May 28, 2009. The Ethisphere Institute, a New York-based think-tank established to advance best practices in business ethics and corporate social responsibility, has named The Johns Hopkins Hospital to its 2009 list of the business world's most ethical companies and institutions.

May 27, 2009. Jonathan A. Bagger has been elected to the Board of Directors for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI).

May 27, 2009. A TV industry- and celebrity-driven cancer research project has chosen scientists at Johns Hopkins for two of five multi-institutional "dream teams" financed by "Stand Up to Cancer " grants totaling more than $6 million.

May 26, 2009. Reporters who are looking for expert perspectives on Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, should consider Johns Hopkins University Adam Segal, director of the Hispanic Voter Project, and Joel Grossman, professor of political science.

May 25, 2009. A full third of American adults, 69 million men and women over age 40, are up to 12 times more likely to have a serious fall because they have some form of inner-ear dysfunction that throws them off balance and makes them dizzy, according to Johns Hopkins experts.

May 20, 2009. Johns Hopkins Medicine's patient safety program has earned second place in Healthcare Informatics magazine's eighth annual Innovator Awards.

May 18, 2009. Research from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center exposes alarming gaps in training hospital residents in "first response" emergency treatment of staged cardiorespiratory arrests in children, while at the same time offering a potent recipe for fixing the problem.

May 15, 2009. Jack P. Greene, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus in the Humanities in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University, has been selected as one of 33 fellows at the National Humanities Center for the 2009-2010 academic year.

May 15, 2009. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have discovered one way to stop malaria parasite growth, and this new finding could guide the development of new malaria treatments.

May 14, 2009. Research from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center reveals that the drug most commonly used in type 2 diabetics who don't need insulin works on a much more basic level than once thought, treating persistently elevated blood sugar — the hallmark of type 2 diabetes — by regulating the genes that control its production.

May 13, 2009. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, will address seniors graduating from The Johns Hopkins University's schools of Arts and Sciences and Engineering at their diploma ceremony at 1:45 p.m. on Thursday, May 21.

May 13, 2009. A "smart" polymer that automatically releases medicine into the bloodstream and a super-thin flexible microchip share the honor as the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory's top invention for 2008.

May 12, 2009. The Johns Hopkins University has announced a new master of arts in global security studies degree to be offered at its Washington, D.C. Center near Dupont Circle.

May 12, 2009. If two people have the same genetic disease, why would one person go blind in childhood but the other later in life or not at all? For a group of genetic diseases — so-called ciliary diseases that include Bardet-Biedl syndrome, Meckel-Gruber syndrome, and Joubert syndrome — the answer lies in one gene that is already linked to two of these diseases and also seems to increase the risk of progressive blindness in patients with other ciliary diseases.

May 10, 2009. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, along with an international team of collaborators, have identified common genetic changes associated with blood pressure and hypertension.

May 10, 2009. A team of researchers from the United States, the Netherlands and Iceland has identified three genes containing common mutations that are associated with altered kidney disease risk.

May 8, 2009. To the casual observer, the student seemed absolutely normal. Though she often made mistakes in spelling and math, those were usually ascribed to carelessness. After all, the girl — known here as "AH" to protect her anonymity — was a top student in history at The Johns Hopkins University.

May 8, 2009. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, along with colleagues from Aga Khan University and Save the Children, have conducted the first global review of potential maternal interventions to avert stillbirths.

May 8, 2009. You'd never know it to watch him now — master of instant recall and quick-fingered wizard with the signaling button — but senior Scott Menke is not exactly a lifelong Jeopardy fan.

May 7, 2009. Whatever dark energy is, explanations for it have less wiggle room following a Hubble Space Telescope observation that has refined the measurement of the universe's present expansion rate to a precision where the error is smaller than five percent.

May 7, 2009. Michael M. Kaiser, President of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, is the 2009 recipient of the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music in America.

May 6, 2009. Of dozens of candidates potentially involved in increasing a person's risk for the most common type of Alzheimer's disease that affects more than 5 million Americans over the age of 65, one gene that keeps grabbing Johns Hopkins researchers' attention makes a protein called neuroglobin.

May 1, 2009. If you're looking for an expert to put the career and legacy of David Souter into perspective — as well as someone who can talk about what happens next and how the high court will likely change — consider Johns Hopkins University Professor Joel Grossman.

May 1, 2009. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have found that a chemical commonly used in the production of such medical plastic devices as intravenous (IV) bags and catheters can impair heart function in rats.

May 1, 2009. MicroRNAs are single-stranded snippets that, not long ago, were given short shrift as genetic junk. Now that studies have shown they regulate genes involved in normal functioning as well as diseases such as cancer, everyone wants to know: What regulates microRNAs?

April 28, 2009. Statement from Johns Hopkins about swine flu safety.

April 28, 2009. Adam Riess was among 72 scientists elected today to membership in the National Academy of Sciences at the organization's 146th annual meeting, held in Washington, D.C.

April 27, 2009. After a divorce or break-up, parents need to be very cautious about bringing new love interests into their homes, according to Andrew Cherlin, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

April 23, 2009. A team of researchers from Duke University, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School and other institutions has identified cellular components in mosquitoes and in humans that dengue virus uses to multiply inside these hosts after infecting them.

April 23, 2009. Once again, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has retained its top-tier ranking in U.S. News & World Report's edition on the best graduate schools in the nation.

April 23, 2009. President Ronald J. Daniels and three Johns Hopkins University faculty members are among the 210 fellows elected to the 229th class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

April 23, 2009. Darryn Waugh, chair and professor in the Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, discusses the interaction between global climate change and ozone depletion, which is caused in part by past and current use of CFCs, or chloroflourocarbons. Listen to the podcast.

April 22, 2009. Having both lungs replaced instead of just one is the single most important feature determining who lives longest after having a lung transplant, more than doubling an organ recipient's chances of extending their life by over a decade, a study by a team of transplant surgeons at Johns Hopkins shows.

April 22, 2009. Supporting a cause is central to the mission of most nonprofit organizations in the United States, but a lack of resources often forces lobbying and advocacy to the backburner, according to a roundtable of leaders and experts gathered by the Johns Hopkins University Nonprofit Listening Post Project.

April 22, 2009. According to JH researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the media ignores the health consequences of drinking and driving among young celebrities.

April 20, 2009. Six faculty members in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University are among the 180 artists, scholars and scientists who have been named 2009 Guggenheim Fellows by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

April 17, 2009. Nurse researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing (JHUSON) are helping to make cancer a word, not a sentence, for over 1.4 million Americans of every age, race, ethnicity, and income diagnosed with some form of cancer each year.

April 16, 2009. A report on the research from investigators at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center published online in the Journal of Neuroimmunology expands on a 2008 report from the same team showing that mothers of autistic children tested positive for fetal brain antibodies.

April 15, 2009. One cell... one initial set of genetic changes — that's all it takes to begin a series of events that lead to metastatic cancer. Now, Johns Hopkins experts have tracked how the cancer process began in 33 men with prostate cancer who died of the disease.

April 14, 2009. Johns Hopkins University research scientists Joyce Epstein and James McPartland are among 44 scholars who were recently named American Educational Research Association Fellows.

April 14, 2009. The APL-built and -operated twin STEREO observatories have made the first 3-D measurements of solar explosions, known as coronal mass ejections, enabling scientists to see their size and shape, and image them as they travel approximately 93 million miles from the sun to Earth.

April 13, 2009. 2009 marks a double anniversary for Johns Hopkins Nursing: 25 years for the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing (JHUSON), and 120 years of nursing education at Johns Hopkins.

April 10, 2009. The Johns Hopkins University School of Education will host a summit and roundtable discussion on Learning, Arts, and the Brain on Wednesday, May 6, at 8:30 a.m. at Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum.

April 10, 2009. Psychiatrists and critical care specialists at Johns Hopkins have begun to tease out what there is about a stay in an intensive care unit (ICU) that leads so many patients to report depression after they go home.

April 8, 2009. Lung experts from Johns Hopkins and elsewhere are calling on physicians to suspend the routine use of potent heartburn medications in asthmatics solely to temper recurrent attacks of wheezing, coughing and breathlessness.

April 8, 2009. A team of Johns Hopkins scientists reports uncovering a much-sought molecular path that nerve cells (neurons) use to communicate with their neighboring cells, the astrocytes. The team also shows how failure of this system could leave the brain and spinal cord vulnerable in disease.

April 7, 2009. Led by a Johns Hopkins University researcher, a new study from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope hints that planets around stars cooler than our sun might possess a different mix of potentially life-forming, or "prebiotic," chemicals.

April 6, 2009. A small, pilot study in 50 people in Japan suggests that eating two and a half ounces of broccoli sprouts daily for two months may confer some protection against a rampant stomach bug that causes gastritis, ulcers and even stomach cancer.

April 6, 2009. A cancer scientist from Johns Hopkins has convinced an international group of colleagues to delay their race to find new cancer biomarkers and instead begin a 7,000-hour slog through a compendium of 50,000 scientific articles already published to assemble, decode and analyze the molecules that might herald the furtive presence of pancreatic cancer.

April 2, 2009. Hopkins, the seven-part ABC network news documentary filmed entirely at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and aired in late summer of 2008, is among the 2008 winners of the 68th Annual Peabody Awards for electronic media.

April 2, 2009. Writing in a recent issue of the journal Neuron, JH researchers demonstrate that nerve cells in a special region of the brain's visual cortex are able to "grab onto" figure-ground information from visual images for several seconds, even after the images themselves are removed from our sight.

April 2, 2009. Pat Bernstein, founder and chair of the financial literacy program Stocks in the Future, discusses the program and how it inspires middle school students to improve their overall academic performance by learning about the world of finance. Listen to the podcast.

April 2, 2009. When it comes to weight loss, what you drink may be more important than what you eat, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

March 30, 2009. Mothers of multiples have 43 percent increased odds of having moderate to severe depressive symptoms nine months after giving birth compared to mothers of single-born children, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

March 26, 2009. Three researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have been named early career scientists by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

March 24, 2009. Britt Ehrhardt, a Master of Health Science (MHS) student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the 2008 recipient of the Bloomberg School's Dean's Alumni Advisory Council Scholarship, has been named as one of 18 Luce Scholars by the Henry Luce Foundation.

March 23, 2009. In regions that have been devastated by hurricanes and other natural disasters, public officials should pursue a new direction in infrastructure projects, one that focuses on more durable designs and a greater sensitivity to the surrounding environment, a Johns Hopkins researcher says.

March 23, 2009. Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered a new energy-making biochemical twist in determining the lifespan of yeast cells, one so valuable to longevity that it is likely to also functions in humans.

March 23, 2009. A buildup of chemical bonds on certain cancer-promoting genes, a process known as hypermethylation, is widely known to render cells cancerous by disrupting biological brakes on runaway growth. Now, Johns Hopkins scientists say the reverse process — demethylation — which wipes off those chemical bonds may also trigger more than half of all cancers.

March 22, 2009. Having identified 10 common variants of genes that modify the timing of the contraction of the heart, known as the QT interval, scientists in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in collaboration with an international contingent of researchers, now provide new insight about the underpinnings of the QT interval which, when prolonged or shortened, predisposes to sudden cardiac death.

March 20, 2009. The "are you driving yet?" talk should become part of every pediatrician's regular physical exam for teenagers, Hopkins Children's experts say.

March 18, 2009. At a time when we could all use a refresher course in financial literacy, 220 seventh- and eighth-graders in Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Washington, D.C., are determining which health food company will be added to their investment portfolio during the next school year.

March 18, 2009. Johns Hopkins engineers have invented a method that could be used to help figure out how cancer cells break free from neighboring tissue, an "escape" that can spread the disease to other parts of the body.

March 18, 2009. Millions more patients could benefit from taking statins, drugs typically used to prevent heart attacks and strokes, than current prescribing guidelines suggest, Johns Hopkins doctors report in a new study.

March 17, 2009. Miriam Alexander, MD, MPH, director of the General Preventive Medicine Residency Program and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health, has been named president of the American College of Preventive Medicine (ACPM).

March 16, 2009. Two of the world's leading experts in cardiac surgery will be in Pavia, Italy, tomorrow to attend the signing ceremony of a three-year collaboration agreement between Johns Hopkins Medicine International and San Matteo Hospital.

March 13, 2009. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have for the first time identified a molecular pathway that triggers an immune response in multiple mosquito species capable of stopping the development of Plasmodium falciparum — the parasite that causes malaria in humans.

March 13, 2009. Diane E. Griffin, MD, PhD, was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame. Griffin is professor and Alfred and Jill Sommer Chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

March 12, 2009. President Ronald J. Daniels sent a broadcast e-mail message today alerting Johns Hopkins University faculty, students and staff to President Obama's nomination of Kristina M. Johnson, the university's provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, as under secretary of the Department of Energy.

March 11, 2009. A new variation in kidney paired donation (KPD) — pioneered and developed at Johns Hopkins — could theoretically generate an endless number of transplants, researchers report.

March 11, 2009. A dozen states significantly improved their high school graduation rates between 2002 and 2006, while the rest of the nation lagged behind, according to a report by researchers at the new Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University.

March 10, 2009. Johns Hopkins patient safety experts say it's high time for diagnostic errors to get the same attention from medical institutions and caregivers as drug-prescribing errors, wrong-site surgeries and hospital-acquired infections.

March 10, 2009. An unlikely brew of seaweed and glow-in-the-dark biochemical agents may hold the key to the safe use of transplanted stem cells to treat patients with severe peripheral arterial disease (PAD), according to a team of veterinarians, basic scientists and interventional radiologists at Johns Hopkins.

March 9, 2009. President Barack Obama announced on March 6 his intent to nominate Esther Brimmer, a scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), to serve as assistant secretary of State for International Organizations.

March 9, 2009. Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing (JHUSON) associate professor Cheryl Dennison, Dr. Cheryl Dennison PhD, RN, ANP has been awarded a research project grant (R21) of $451,000 from the National Institute of Nursing Research to evaluate a nurse-led heart failure care transition intervention for African Americans.

March 9, 2009. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Washington University School of Medicine have identified a key to eye development — a protein that regulates how the light-sensing nerve cells in the retina form.

March 5, 2009. Scientists at the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have used "personalized genome" sequencing on an individual with a hereditary form of pancreatic cancer to locate a mutation in a gene called PALB2 that is responsible for initiating the disease.

March 3, 2009. Higher social class and heavier body size are known risk factors for breast cancer. While these factors primarily work independently, for postmenopausal women social resources may moderate the influence of body size on breast cancer risk, according to a study led by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

February 26, 2009. Titan's vast dune fields, which may act like weather vanes to determine general wind direction on Saturn's biggest moon, have been mapped by scientists who compiled four years of radar data collected by the Cassini spacecraft.

February 25, 2009. The availability of healthy food choices and your quality of diet is associated with where you live, according to two studies conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

February 25, 2009. A widely heralded Johns Hopkins safety initiative to reduce bloodstream infections in intensive care units (ICUs) was implemented in 30 states starting Feb. 1 and could save an estimated $3 billion dollars and 30,000 lives annually.

February 25, 2009. Tuition for full-time undergraduates at The Johns Hopkins University will increase 3.8 percent next fall, the smallest percentage growth in 35 years for the university's two largest undergraduate schools.

February 23, 2009. In an unprecedented appeal to America's public and private leadership and to the American people, leaders of organizations representing tens of thousands of American nonprofit organizations today called for a reinvigorated and empowered partnership between government and the nonprofit, or "citizen sector," to address our country's social, economic, and environmental problems and improve the quality of community life.

February 20, 2009. Certain men age 75 to 80 are unlikely to benefit from routine prostate specific antigen (PSA) testing, according to a Johns Hopkins study published in the April 2009 issue of The Journal of Urology.

February 19, 2009. A Johns Hopkins engineer is trying to coax human stem cells to turn into networks of new blood vessels that could someday be used to replace damaged tissue in people with heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses.

February 19, 2009. A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found an association between increasing levels of indoor particulate matter pollution and the severity of asthma symptoms among children.

February 19, 2009. New results from a multicenter study led by Johns Hopkins show that patients who got an experimental clot-busting treatment for a particularly lethal form of stroke were not only dramatically more likely to survive but also continued to shed lingering disabilities six months later.

February 18, 2009. Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and Duke University Medical Center have linked mutations in two genes, IDH1 and IDH2, to nearly three-quarters of several of the most common types of brain cancers known as gliomas.

February 18, 2009. There is more than one way to make a dwarf galaxy, and NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer has found a new recipe. It has, for the first time, identified dwarf galaxies forming out of nothing more than pristine gas likely leftover from the early universe.

February 17, 2009. Like state and local governments and private businesses, America's 1.4 million nonprofit organizations have many major "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects on hold because of the credit crisis, according to a new survey by the Johns Hopkins University Nonprofit Listening Post Project.

February 17, 2009. Platelets, tiny and relatively uncharted tenants of the bloodstream known mostly for their role in blood clotting, turn out to also rally sustained immune system inflammatory responses that play a critical role in organ transplant rejection, according to a new report from Johns Hopkins scientists.

February 16, 2009. Surgical teams at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis and Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City successfully completed Saturday the first six-way, multihospital, domino kidney transplant.

February 13, 2009. President William R. Brody sent a broadcast e-mail message to Johns Hopkins University faculty, students and staff on Friday, Feb. 13, regarding actions being taken in response to the impact of the national economic situation on the university. Read the text of that message.

February 12, 2009. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the American Legacy Foundation have estimated that truth®, the nations' largest youth smoking prevention campaign, saved $1.9 billion or more in health care costs associated with tobacco use.

February 9, 2009. The Johns Hopkins' Brain Science Institute is underwriting the Center for Translational Imaging (CTI). The new enterprise aims to channel expertise from Hopkins' various imaging-dedicated centers into creating a surge, university-wide, in the understanding and use of imaging techniques for neuroscience research.

February 9, 2009. Antiretroviral drug therapy in an HIV-positive man or women can alone help prevent the transmission of HIV to an uninfected partner, regardless of counseling, the patient's use of condoms or other safe-sex practices, AIDS experts at Johns Hopkins report.

February 9, 2009. Johns Hopkins environmental engineer, Ed Bouwer, explains the difference between absolute and relative risk, concepts detailed in his book The Illusion of Certainty: Health Benefits and Risks, co-authored with Erik Rifkin. Listen to the podcast.

February 9, 2009. Reading programs focused on changing daily teaching practices do more to improve children's reading skills than programs focused on textbooks and technology, according to a comprehensive research review by the Johns Hopkins University School of Education's Center for Research and Reform in Education.

February 9, 2009. The 2009 Foreign Affairs Symposium kicked off this week with the theme global leadership in the 21st century.

February 9, 2009. A Johns Hopkins study reveals that older black women who spend time with young children in the classroom are not only more active than similar women who don't volunteer, but seem to stay active.

February 6, 2009. Johns Hopkins and Ugandan scientists say counting the number of HIV viruses in the blood rather than relying solely on counting the number of circulating HIV-fighting CD4 immune system cells is a far better way to uncover early signs that antiretroviral drugs are losing their punch, and to signal the need to get patients on more potent treatments to keep the disease in check.

February 5, 2009. The microscopic fibers in the protective mucus coatings of the eyes, lungs, stomach or reproductive system naturally bundle together and allow the tiniest disease-causing bugs, allergens or pollutants to slip by. But Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered a way to chemically shrink the holes in the mucus layer's netting so that it will keep out more of the unwanted particles.

February 4, 2009. Increasing greenhouse gases could delay, or even postpone indefinitely the recovery of stratospheric ozone in some regions of the Earth, a Johns Hopkins earth scientist suggests. This change might take a toll on public health.

February 4, 2009. A team of Johns Hopkins experts is offering a free, Web-based tool it developed that calculates and predicts in advance the impact on individual hospitals of a flu epidemic, bioterrorist attack, flood or plane crash, accounting for such elements as numbers of victims, germ-carrying wind patterns, available medical resources, bacterial incubation periods and bomb size.

February 3, 2009. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are one gene closer to understanding schizophrenia and related disorders.

February 3, 2009. The Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus is celebrating Black History Month in February with events organized by the Black Student Union, which is marking its 40th anniversary this year.

February 2, 2009. Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing (JHUSON) associate professor Hae-Ra Han, PhD,Dr. Hae-Ra Han RN has been awarded a $2.7 million research project grant (R01) from the National Cancer Institute to explore tactics to improve cancer screening behaviors among Korean American women.

February 2, 2009. In what is believed to be a first-ever procedure, surgeons at Johns Hopkins have successfully removed a healthy donor kidney through a small incision in the back of the donor's vagina.

February 2, 2009. An article by Abdullah Baqui, MBBS, DrPH, associate professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Department of International Health, and colleagues from the U.S. and Bangladesh, was selected by The Lancet as one of three papers to share the honor of "Paper of the Year."

January 29, 2009. Recent images of Titan from NASA's Cassini spacecraft affirm the presence of lakes of liquid hydrocarbons by capturing changes in the lakes brought on by rainfall.

January 30, 2009. A survey study believed to be one of the first efforts to put hard numbers around long-held beliefs about diversity in medical school faculties has affirmed that awareness and sensitivity to racial and ethnic diversity are believed by most faculty to be poor and even poorer among faculty who are members of underrepresented minorities.

January 30, 2009. A century-old drug that failed in its original intent to treat tuberculosis but has worked well as an antileprosy medicine now holds new promise as a potential therapy for multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases.

January 28, 2009. Charles L. Bennett, a professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, has been chosen by the National Academy of Sciences as the winner of the 2009 Comstock Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking work in cosmology.

January 27, 2009. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., has been awarded $7.3 million for the initial development phase of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) effort to build a "cyber range" to test cyber security technology and protect government computer networks from attacks.

January 27, 2009. Peabody faculty artist Anthony McGill, who received national attention performing with Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero, and Itzhak Perlman at Barack Obama's inauguration, will be the soloist at a Peabody Concert Orchestra performance on Friday, Feb. 6, at 8:00 pm.

January 26, 2009. Results from a large-scale Johns Hopkins study of more than 40 hospitals and 160,000 patients show that when health information technologies replace paper forms and handwritten notes, both hospitals and patients benefit strongly.

January 26, 2009. The Rev. Albert Mosley, a United Methodist minister with degrees from Duke and Yale universities, has become The Johns Hopkins University's new chaplain.

January 22, 2009. The Johns Hopkins Knowledge for the World fund-raising campaign ended Dec. 31 with total commitments of $3.741 billion, creating 92 professorships, generating 550 new scholarships and graduate fellowships, and modernizing teaching, research and patient care facilities at Johns Hopkins campuses at home and around the world.

January 22, 2009. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have discovered how a whole class of commonly used chemotherapy drugs can block cancer growth.

January 22, 2009. In the year following Hurricane Katrina, the health of survivors 65 and over declined nearly 4 times that of a national sample of older adults not affected by the disaster, according to a study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

January 22, 2009. Follow along online as Johns Hopkins University Egyptologist Betsy Bryan and her team of students, artists, conservators and photographers return to their investigation of Mut Temple this month, once again focusing their attention on the temple's Sacred Lake.

January 22, 2009. Despite the nation's most severe economic downturn in decades — or perhaps because of it — the Johns Hopkins University schools of Education and Nursing are experiencing strong increases in applications.

January 21, 2009. NASA has tapped the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) to head an investigation of the moon's poles — including a look at how robots and eventually humans could use the moon's natural resources.

January 21, 2009. Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson Jr. is joining the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) as a distinguished visiting scholar.

January 20, 2009. By tweaking a system in the ear that limits how much sound is heard, a global team of researchers has discovered one alteration that shows that the ability of the ear to turn itself down contributes to protecting against permanent hearing loss.

January 19, 2009. A Johns Hopkins study finds that HIV-positive kidney transplant recipients could have the same one-year survival rates for themselves and their donor organs as those without HIV, provided certain risk factors for transplant failure are recognized and tightly managed.

January 16, 2009. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute (JHMRI) have identified, for the first time, the molecular components that enable the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium to infect the salivary glands of the Anopheles mosquito — a critical and final stage for spreading malaria to humans.

January 15, 2009. Lester Spence, an assistant professor of political science at The Johns Hopkins University has drafted a list of his favorite big ideas for the next President.

January 15, 2009. APL is part of a multiagency team honored by the Department of Homeland Security for developing a technology to help aerial law-enforcement personnel inspect bridges, buildings and other important structures.

January 15, 2009. Jacquelyn C. Campbell, PhD, RN, FAAN, professor at the Johns Hopkins University Nursing, has been selected to join a group of 25 experts in global health research who will advocate for greater U.S. investment in global health research.

January 14, 2009. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health faculty members Adnan A. Hyder, MD, PhD, MPH, and Mathuram Santosham, MD, MPH, have been selected to join a group of 25 experts in global health research who will advocate for greater U.S. investment in global health research.

January 13, 2009. Zimbabwe's cholera crisis, which has caused more than 1,900 deaths, is a "manmade disaster" caused by President Robert Mugabe's government, according to a January 13 report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), co-authored by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researcher Chris Beyrer, MD, MPH '90.

January 12, 2009. Experiments at Johns Hopkins have found that the gradual maturing of embryonic cells into cells as varied as brain, liver and immune system cells is apparently due to the shut off of several genes at once rather than in individual smatterings as previous studies have implied.

January 12, 2009. A Johns Hopkins transplant surgeon has found strong evidence that women over 45 are significantly less likely to be placed on a kidney transplant list than their equivalent male counterparts, even though women who receive a transplant stand an equal chance of survival.

January 12, 2009. In experiments that pave the way for tiny mobile surgical tools activated by heat or chemicals, Johns Hopkins researchers have invented dust-particle-size devices that can be used to grab and remove living cells from hard-to-reach places without the need for electrical wires, tubes or batteries.

January 9, 2009. The Center for Africana Studies at the Johns Hopkins University will be marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People with a history conference, Friday, Feb. 6 and Saturday, Feb. 7 on the Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St. in Baltimore.

January 8, 2009. Following a successful confirmation review, NASA has given the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) the go-ahead to continue development of the Radiation Belt Storm Probes, or RBSP mission.

January 8, 2009. Reporting in the January 1 issue of Science, neuroscientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have discovered that the birth of new cells, which depends on brain activity, also depends on a protein that is involved in changing epigenetic marks in the cell's genetic material.

January 5, 2009. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine now report that digitalis-based drugs like digoxin may hold new promise as a treatment for cancer.

January 5, 2009. Johns Hopkins and other researchers report what is believed to be the first direct evidence in lab animals that the erectile dysfunction drug sildenafil amplifies the effects of a heart-protective protein.

January 6, 2009. Pterosaurs have long suffered an identity crisis. Pop culture heedlessly — and wrongly — lumps these extinct flying lizards in with dinosaurs. Even paleontologists assumed that because the creatures flew, they were birdlike in many ways, such as using only two legs to take flight.