The negative health effects of international air travel are well documented but now it seems that the common elderberry can provide some relief. Associate Professor Evelin Tiralongo and Dr Shirley Wee from Griffith's Menzies Health Institute Queensland (MHIQ) have completed a clinical trial showing that an elderberry supplement can provide some protection from cold and flu-like symptoms following long-haul flights. Intercontinental air travel can be stressful and affect a passenger's physical and psychological wellbeing. Whilst jet lag and fatigue remain the best known ...

WASHINGTON --Tamsulosin works no better than placebo on small kidney stones, but does improve passage of more large kidney stones than placebo does. The results of this large clinical trial evaluating tamsulosin versus placebo were published online Friday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Distal Ureteric Stones and Tamsulosin: A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Randomized, Multi-Center Trial (The DUST Trial)"). "Kidney stones bring more than a million Americans a year to emergency departments because they are excruciatingly painful," said lead study author Jeremy Furyk, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio--Gravity data captured by satellite has allowed researchers to take a closer look at the geology deep beneath the Tibetan Plateau. The analysis, published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, offers some of the clearest views ever obtained of rock moving up to 50 miles below the plateau, in the lowest layer of Earth's crust. There, the Indian tectonic plate presses continually northward into the Eurasian tectonic plate, giving rise to the highest mountains on Earth--and deadly earthquakes, such as the one that killed more than 9,000 people in Nepal ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A microbe found in caves produces a compound that inhibits Pseudogymnoascus destructans, the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome in bats, researchers report in the journal Mycopathologia. The finding could lead to treatments that kill the fungus while minimizing disruption to cave ecosystems, the researchers say. The yeast Candida albicans produces the compound: trans, trans-farnesol. Candida species are already present in caves where bats hibernate and have been isolated from the bodies of healthy, hibernating bats, said University of Illinois ...

A clinical study funded by the National Institutes of Health has found that young, single black women in South Africa adhered to a daily pill regimen to prevent HIV infection--an HIV prevention strategy known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. This finding is the first strong indication that this population at substantial HIV risk could accept and reliably adhere to daily PrEP dosing. Men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender women (TGW) in New York and Thailand also successfully adhered to daily dosing. PrEP--which consists of a daily dose of two antiretrovirals, ...

Dr. Michele Rodda describes two new tropical plants species from the Hoya genus, found on the world's third largest island Borneo. The genus is one of the largest and most complex plant groups in Asia. The first to be described in the paper, H. ruthiae, is characterised with its lack of coloured milk-like sap typical for most of the Hoya species, and H. bakoensis - with its strict preference for growing epiphytically (without causing any harm to its host) and rooting inside ant nests. The study is published in the open-access journal PhytoKeys. Collected by Ruth Kiew ...

URBANA, Ill. - Controlled burning is widely used to maintain biodiversity and enhance regeneration of important deciduous tree species such as oak and hickory, but a recent University of Illinois study found that this practice also increases the growth of an aggressive species of invasive grass. Microstegium vimineum (also called Japanese stiltgrass or Nepalese browntop) is an abundant non-native grass in southern Illinois where the study was conducted. "We found that fire promotes the recruitment and growth of M. vimineum, particularly under moist soil conditions," ...

Although much progress has been made in combating the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, to halt new infections and end the pandemic, a combination of non-vaccine and vaccine prevention modalities will be needed. Even with these tools, significant implementation gaps must be closed, including the targeted deployment of proven prevention methods to the populations that need them most, says Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Fauci addressed a special session at the 8th International ...

Irvine, Calif., July 21, 2015 - The 11 percent decrease in climate change-causing carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. between 2007 and 2013 was caused by the global financial recession - not the reduced use of coal, research from the University of California Irvine, the University of Maryland, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis shows. Experts have assumed that the drop in emissions reflected a shift toward natural gas, which produces roughly half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy as coal and was made cheap by the hydraulic fracturing ...

Only one in three older Americans have their diabetes under control as measured by guidelines set by the American Diabetes Association, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests. Some argue that ADA guidelines may be too stringent for some older adults. But even using less stringent measures, the researchers found, there are still many older Americans whose diabetes is not well managed, a condition that can lead to multiple long-term health problems ranging from kidney disease to blindness. In a report published in the July issue of Diabetes ...

Most of us think of infants as tiny beings whose main business is to sleep, suck and cry, without much awareness of what is happening around them. It may come as somewhat of a surprise, then, to know that newborn brains are full of feverish activity and that they are already gathering and processing important information from the world around them. At just two days after birth, babies are already able to process language using processes similar to those of adults. SISSA researchers have demonstrated that they are sensitive to the most important parts of words, the edges, ...

One of the most basic yet important surgical skills to keep a patient alive and intact may be closing wounds. It seems that doctors will now get the job done with more ease thanks to new, nontoxic surgical glue that instantly seals a bleeding wound and helps it heal without a scar or inflammation. Inspired by nature's wonders, Korean scientists at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) have developed a light-activated, mussel protein-based bioadhesive (LAMBA) that works on the same principles as mussels attaching to underwater surfaces and insects maintaining ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- When the HOPE VI community revitalization project in the disadvantaged Birmingham, Ala., neighborhood of Ensley reached the phase of building walking and biking paths, green spaces, and improved lighting in 2010, two things happened, according to a new study: First, residents developed specific expectations that leisure exercise would become more plausible, and then they followed through and got out there. Before the neighborhood's revitalization, launched in 2006 with funding from the federal program Housing Opportunities for People ...

A vaccine that protects against a wide variety of influenza viruses (a so-called universal flu vaccine) is a critical public health goal given the significant rates of illness and death caused by seasonal influenza and the potentially devastating effects of a pandemic influenza strain. Now, researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, have devised a way to induce protective immunity in mice against a wide array of influenza viruses. Instead of trying to predict which influenza virus strains ...

This news release is available in German. In 2003, Europe experienced a record-breaking summer, and many people feel that this summer is headed the same way. In the midst of this heatwave, the scientific journal Nature Geoscience has published a study that can help us to understand such extreme weather conditions. For around two years, an ETH research team has analysed climate data from all over the world in a bid to explain the driving force behind stable high-pressure systems. It has long been known that extremely stable high-pressure systems in the upper troposphere, ...

Researchers at the Babraham Institute and Cambridge Systems Biology Centre, University of Cambridge have shown that yeast can modify their genomes to take advantage of an excess of calories in the environment and attain optimal growth. The ability to sense environmental nutrient availability and act accordingly is a critical process for all organisms. Changing behaviour in response to nutrients can occur at many levels: the activity of proteins can be varied or new genes can be activated to produce a different set of proteins. Research published in the latest issue of ...

A majority of men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender women (TGW) at high risk for HIV infection took anti-HIV medication for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), most of the time, in a multi-site U.S. study examining use of this HIV prevention strategy outside of a clinical trial. The study, called the PrEP Demo Project, was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study findings will be presented by Albert Liu, M.D., of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, at the 8th International ...

Children born with ADNP-related autism syndrome suffer from a heart-breaking combination of ambiguous developmental problems injurious to both their physical health and cognitive functioning. For parents, the mystery surrounding their infants' suffering can be even more agonizing than the syndrome itself, which has no known cure. Recent research from Tel Aviv University and the University of Antwerp is easing some of that agony. Activity-dependent neuroprotective protein (ADNP), discovered by TAU's Prof. Illana Gozes 15 years ago, has now been shown by Prof. Frank Kooy ...

One of the enduring mysteries of the human experience is how and why humans moved from hunting and gathering to farming. From their beginnings humans, like other mammals, depended on wild resources for sustenance. Then between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago, in a transitional event known as the Neolithic Revolution, they began to create and tend domestic ecosystems in various locations around the world, and agriculture was born. Despite decades of research into this major human advancement, scientists still don't know what propelled it. The recent work of a research ...

WASHINGTON, DC - July 21, 2015 - Each year, scientists create an influenza (flu) vaccine that protects against a few specific influenza strains that researchers predict are going to be the most common during that year. Now, a new study shows that scientists may be able to create a 'universal' vaccine that can provide broad protection against numerous influenza strains, including those that could cause future pandemics. The study appears in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. "The reason researchers change the vaccine every year ...

WASHINGTON -- Advertisers hoping to sway consumers might want to rethink running spots within media with violent or sexual themes, and might do better if the ads themselves have a G-rating, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association. Instead, violent and sexual media content may impair advertising's effectiveness and ultimately deter purchasing, the research found. "We found almost no evidence that violent and sexual programs and ads increased advertising effectiveness," said Brad J. Bushman, PhD, professor of communication and psychology ...

Believe it or not: X-ray works a lot better on rocks than on paper. This has been a problem for conservators trying to save historical books and letters from the ravages of time and fungi. They frankly did not know what they were up against once the telltale signs of vandals such as Dothidales or Pleosporales started to spot the surface of their priceless documents Now Diwaker Jha, an imaging specialist from Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen, has managed to adapt methods developed to investigate interiors of rocks to work on paper too, thus getting a ...

HOUSTON -- (July 21, 2015) - Phosphates artificially added to dairy and cereal products appear to cause bigger spikes in blood phosphorus levels than naturally occurring phosphates, potentially putting harmful stress on kidneys. Too much dietary phosphate stiffens blood vessels, enlarges the heart and is bad for bones, but a new study by Houston Methodist researchers suggests it matters where the phosphates come from. The scientists' report will appear in the August 2015 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (early online). "The study suggests people should ...

The negative health effects of international air travel are well documented but now it seems that the common elderberry can provide some relief. Associate Professor Evelin Tiralongo and Dr Shirley Wee from Griffith's Menzies Health Institute Queensland (MHIQ) have completed a clinical trial showing that an elderberry supplement can provide some protection from cold and flu-like symptoms following long-haul flights. Intercontinental air travel can be stressful and affect a passenger's physical and psychological wellbeing. Whilst jet lag and fatigue remain the best known ...

A special type of synthetic sugar could be the latest weapon in the fight against superbugs. A team of scientists from The University of Queensland and Queensland biotechnology company Alchemia have discovered a potential new class of antibiotics inspired by sugar molecules produced by bacteria. New antibiotics to which bacteria are unlikely to develop resistance are urgently needed to combat the rise of superbugs - drug resistant bacteria. The research, led by Professor Matt Cooper and Dr Johannes Zuegg from UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) in partnership ...