In brief: Harris and Crowell win top awards

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell have won album of the year and Dwight Yoakam has been named artist of the year at the Americana Honors and Awards.

Harris and Crowell tied with husband-wife duo Shovels & Rope as top winners with two awards apiece Wednesday night at Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tenn. Their collaboration “Old Yellow Moon” won album of the year and they also took duo-group of the year.

Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent of Shovels & Rope won song of the year for “Birmingham” and emerging artist of the year.

The Americana Music Association also honored Duane Eddy, Dr. John, songwriter Robert Hunter and Arhoolie Records founder Chris Strachwitz with lifetime achievement awards.

Legless lizard species found in California

BERKELEY, Calif. – Scientists in California have discovered four new and separate species of legless lizards – snakelike animals that burrow into sand or soil.

The University of California, Berkeley said the discovery was made by its reptile and amphibian expert Theodore Papenfuss, along with James Parham of California State University, Fullerton.

Until the discovery, scientists believed there was only one species of legless lizard in the American West.

They found the new species at the end of a runway at Los Angeles International Airport, in a vacant lot in downtown Bakersfield, on the edge of the Mojave Desert and among oil derricks in the lower San Joaquin Valley.

Study: Colonoscopy can cut cancer risk

LOS ANGELES – Getting a colonoscopy is not something most people look forward to – but a new analysis suggests that it’s worth it to follow screening recommendations and have the test done every 10 years (or every five for those at high risk.)

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, Harvard researcher Reiko Nishihara and co-authors assessed colonoscopy use, colorectal cancer cases and colorectal cancer deaths among participants in the multidecade Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study.

Following 88,902 subjects over 22 years, they found that people who underwent endoscopic screenings were less likely to develop colon cancer than people who didn’t. Subjects who had clean colonoscopies, sigmoidoscopies and polypectomies were, respectively, 56 percent, 40 percent, and 43 percent less likely to develop the disease than subjects who were not screened.

The team estimated that 40 percent of the colon cancers that developed over the study period would have been prevented if all participants in the studies had gone in for colonoscopies.