One of Australia's smallest birds has found a cunning way to protect its nest from predators by crying wolf, or rather hawk, and mimicking the warning calls of other birds. Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) found that the tiny brown thornbill mimics the hawk warning call of a variety of birds to scare off predators threatening its nest, such as the larger pied currawong. "It's not superbly accurate mimicry, but it's enough to fool the predator," said Dr Branislav Igic, who carried out the study during his PhD at ANU Research School of Biology. "A ...

A group of former senior editors, writing in The BMJ today, criticise a "seriously flawed and inflammatory attack" by The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on what that journal believes have become overly stringent policies on conflicts of interest. The NEJM was the first major medical journal to introduce conflict of interest policies in 1984. It required all authors to disclose any financial ties to health industries and made conflict of interests more transparent. But recently the NEJM published a series of commentaries and an editorial that attempt to justify ...

Bullying in teenage years is strongly associated with depression later on in life, suggests new research published in The BMJ this week. Depression is a major public health problem with high economic and societal costs. There is a rapid increase in depression from childhood to adulthood and one contributing factor could be bullying by peers. But the link between bullying at school and depression in adulthood is still unclear due to limitations in previous research. So a team of scientists, led by Lucy Bowes at the University of Oxford, carried out one of the largest ...

There is no strong evidence that the popular smoking cessation drug varenicline is associated with increased risks of suicidal behaviours, criminal offending, transport accidents, traffic-related offences, and psychoses, finds a study in The BMJ this week. The findings are based on over 69,000 individuals in Sweden who were prescribed varenicline between 2006 and 2009. Previous reports suggesting a link may not have taken full account of underlying risk factors, say the authors. Varenicline is widely prescribed for the treatment of nicotine dependence, but reports that ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- A long-term study of mother-child pairs in Pakistan has found that the children turn out pretty much the same, whether or not their mothers received treatment for depression during pregnancy. An earlier study of the same population found that the mothers themselves benefited from the treatment, with less depression, and demonstrating related healthy behaviors with their newborns, such as breastfeeding. But those improvements were short-lived. The "Thinking Healthy Programme" is a successful depression intervention evaluated through a randomized trial ...

Washington, DC--Relying on the better-functioning side of the body after a stroke can cause brain changes that hinder rehabilitation of the impaired side, according to an animal study published June 3 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Strokes that occur in one brain hemisphere can result in poor motor function on the opposite side of the body, leading to heavy reliance on the "good" side. This study, led by Soo Young Kim and performed at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Berkeley, found that such compensation produces structural brain changes ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. -- Non-calcified arterial plaque is associated with diabetes, high systolic blood pressure and elevated 'bad' cholesterol levels in asymptomatic individuals, according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology. Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the leading cause of death in men and women worldwide, accounting for 17 million deaths annually. Current treatment strategies focus on cardiovascular risk and serum cholesterol levels rather than direct assessment of extent of disease in the coronary arteries. Plaque that forms in the arterial walls ...

A new study shows that social and sensory overstimulation drives autistic behaviors. The study, conducted on rats exposed to a known risk factor in humans, supports the unconventional view of the autistic brain as hyper-functional, and offers new hope with therapeutic emphasis on paced and non-surprising environments tailored to the individual's sensitivity. For decades, autism has been viewed as a form of mental retardation, a brain disease that destroys children's ability to learn, feel and empathize, thus leaving them disconnected from our complex and ever-changing ...

You might not need to remember those complicated e-mail and bank account passwords for much longer. According to a new study, the way your brain responds to certain words could be used to replace passwords. In "Brainprint," a newly published study in academic journal Neurocomputing, researchers from Binghamton University observed the brain signals of 45 volunteers as they read a list of 75 acronyms, such as FBI and DVD. They recorded the brain's reaction to each group of letters, focusing on the part of the brain associated with reading and recognizing words, and found ...

San Antonio -- June 2, 2015 -- A close-up of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by NASA's ultraviolet instrument surprised scientists by revealing that electrons close to the comet's surface -- not photons from the Sun as had been believed -- cause the rapid breakup of water and carbon dioxide molecules spewing from the surface. Since last August, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has orbited within a hundred miles of the comet in this historic mission. The spectrograph onboard, named Alice, specializes in the far-ultraviolet wavelength band and was developed ...

Menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) given to recently postmenopausal women in the US for up to four years does not improve cognition, but may have some positive benefits for some mood symptoms, according to a study published by Carey Gleason and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, in this week's PLOS Medicine. The researchers reached these conclusions by conducting a randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial (the KEEPS-Cog trial), including 693 recently postmenopausal women living in the US who were randomly assigned to receive either oral estrogen ...

What if your doctor told you that your weight is somewhere between 100 and 400 lbs.? With any ordinary scale every patient can do better at home. Yet, one patient can't: the Milky Way. Even though today we peer deeper into space than ever before, our home galaxy's weight is still unknown to about a factor of four. Researchers at Columbia University's Astronomy Department have now developed a new method to give the Milky Way a more precise physical checkup. The Milky Way consists of roughly 100 billion stars that form a huge stellar disk with a diameter of 100-200 thousand ...

PHILADELPHIA--(June 2, 2015)--Senescence, a phenomenon in which cells cease to divide and grow, can be caused by everything from natural DNA damage to treatment with chemotherapy. However, several mechanisms allow for cells to bypass senescence and grow out of control, eventually becoming cancerous. Now, scientists at The Wistar Institute have identified how a specific variant of a key protein complex found in human cells called condensin can reorganize a cell's genetic architecture in such a way as to promote senescence, making it an important facilitator in a cell's ...

A team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has made the first steps towards development of bioartificial replacement limbs suitable for transplantation. In their report, which has been published online in the journal Biomaterials, the researchers describe using an experimental approach previously used to build bioartificial organs to engineer rat forelimbs with functioning vascular and muscle tissue. They also provided evidence that the same approach could be applied to the limbs of primates "The composite nature of our limbs makes building a functional ...

Who says you can't do two things at once and do them both well? A new University of Florida study challenges the notion that multi-tasking causes one or both activities to suffer. In a study of older adults who completed cognitive tasks while cycling on a stationary bike, UF researchers found that participants' cycling speed improved while multi-tasking with no cost to their cognitive performance. Results of the study, which was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging, were published May 13 in the journal PLOS ONE. The discovery was a surprise finding ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A new nationwide study reveals that the kind of cities that attract college graduates has changed since the 1990s. In the 1990s, grads were moving to cities with fast-growing "smart" industries in fields like high tech, the study found. But since 2000, with a less vibrant national economy, college graduates are flocking toward the biggest cities with the biggest labor markets and the best chances of landing a job. In fact, the effect of city population size in attracting college grads was nearly four times as large in the 2000s as it was in the 1990s, ...

(New York, NY, June 1, 2015)-- The Big Apple is one of the most walkable cities in the nation, providing many opportunities for physical activity, and New Yorkers are more likely to exercise regularly than the average U.S. adult. But they are also sitting far more than what is considered healthy. According to a new study published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its journal Preventing Chronic Disease, the average New York City resident sits more than seven hours a day--greatly exceeding the three hours or more per day that is associated with ...

HOUSTON - (June 2, 2015) - Hispanics and women in Texas showed the largest percentage of reductions in rates of uninsured since enrollment began in the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Health Insurance Marketplace, according to a new report released today by the Episcopal Health Foundation and Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. The report found that from September 2013 to March 2015, the percentage of Hispanics without health insurance fell 38 percent (from 39.1 percent uninsured to 24.3 percent), more than any other ethnic group. The percentage of uninsured ...

HOUSTON - (June 2, 2015) - Women who suffer from fibromyalgia benefit from a treatment regimen in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, according to researchers at Rice University and institutes in Israel. A clinical trial involving women diagnosed with fibromyalgia showed the painful condition improved in every one of the 48 who completed two months of hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Brain scans of the women before and after treatment gave credence to the theory that abnormal conditions in pain-related areas of the brain may be responsible for the syndrome. Results of the study ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A new study by University at Buffalo geographers explores how humans altered the arboreal make-up of Western New York forests before European settlers arrived in large numbers. The research looked at land survey data from around 1799-1814, and used this information to model which tree species were present in different areas of Chautauqua County, New York, at that time. The analysis placed hickory, chestnut and oak trees in larger-than-expected numbers near the historical sites of Native American villages, said co-author Steve Tulowiecki, who conducted ...

MAYWOOD, Ill. - Drawing on its Jesuit Catholic heritage, Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine has long understood the importance of reflection in medical education as a key element in physician formation. With physician burnout on the rise, it is all the more integral for students to learn ways to engage better with the challenges faced in the medical profession. Stritch faculty members believe reflection is a fundamental tool to help students process and cope with the tremendous physical, emotional, and mental pressure that can accompany their vocation. These ...

Hamilton, ON (June 2, 2015) - What causes us to lose muscle strength as we age and how exercise can prevent it from happening has never been thoroughly understood, but McMaster University researchers have discovered a key protein required to maintain muscle mass and muscle strength during aging. This important finding means new and existing drugs targeting the protein may potentially be used to preserve muscle function during aging. "We found that the body's fuel gauge, AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), is vital to slow muscle wasting with aging," said Gregory Steinberg, ...

Researchers of the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg have discovered with the help of computer models how gut bacteria respond to changes in their environment - such as a decrease in oxygen levels or nutrient availability. Microorganisms that normally compete or overthrow one another can switch to a cooperative lifestyle when their living conditions change: They even start producing substances to make life easier for the other species, helping them to survive. The entire microbial community then stabilises - and together adapts ...

New Orleans, Louisiana - June 1, 2015 - The skin microbiome is considered our first line of defense against pathogens. Across our bodies, we are covered with a diverse assemblage of bacteria. However, the skin can be a harsh environment for beneficial bacteria to live on due to UV exposure, high salinity, and desiccation stress. Research being presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology found that these suboptimal conditions may cause some bacteria to enter a dormant state, while other bacteria may simply die. In this study, Sarah Cummins ...

New Orleans, Louisiana - June 1, 2015 - Prevalence of a recently discovered serotype of oral bacterium, with a possible link to a number of systemic diseases, was found for the first time in a small cohort of African-American schoolchildren in a southwest Alabama town, according to research being presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. Streptococcus mutans serotype k, first discovered in Japan in 2004, has been linked to a number of systemic diseases, including bacteremia, infective endocarditis and hemorrhagic stroke. "However, the bacteria ...