WASHINGTON, DC, March 31, 2015 -- People whose sexual identities changed toward same-sex attraction in early adulthood reported more symptoms of depression in a nationwide survey than those whose sexual orientations did not change or changed in the opposite direction, according to a new study by a University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) sociologist. The study, "Sexual Orientation Identity Change and Depressive Symptoms: A Longitudinal Analysis," which appears in the current issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, found that gay, lesbian, and bisexual people ...

This news release is available in French. Domestic violence takes many forms. The control of a woman's reproductive choices by her partner is one of them. A major study published in PLOS One, led by McGill PhD student Lauren Maxwell, showed that women who are abused by their partner or ex-partner are much less likely to use contraception; this exposes them to sexually transmitted diseases and leads to more frequent unintended pregnancies and abortions. These findings could influence how physicians provide contraceptive counselling. Negotiating for contraception A ...

The latest challenges of early breast cancer research include refining classification and predicting treatment responses, according to a report on the 14th St Gallen International Breast Cancer Consensus Conference, published in ecancermedicalscience. The 2015 conference assembled nearly 3200 participants from 134 countries worldwide in Vienna, Austria to decide the consensus of breast cancer care and treatment. Led by Dr Angela Esposito of the European Institute of Oncology, Milan, Italy, the report highlights some of the controversial areas discussed in this important ...

Children who received training grasped concept of Brace principle Analogical comparison is a natural and engaging process for children Findings reveal ways to support children's learning in and out of school EVANSTON, Ill. --- Children love to build things. Often half the fun for them is building something and then knocking it down. But in a study carried out in the Chicago Children's Museum, children had just as much fun learning how to keep their masterpieces upright -- they learned a key elementary engineering principle. "The use of a diagonal ...

More midriff, cleavage and muscle is seen in MTV's popular television docusoaps such as The Real World, Jersey Shore or Laguna Beach than in the average American household. Semi-naked brawny Adonises and even more scantily clad thin women strut around on screen simply to grab the audience's attention. In the process, they present a warped view to young viewers about how they should look. Such docusoaps are definitely more ideal than real, say Mark Flynn of the Coastal Carolina University and Sung-Yeon Park of Bowling Green State University in the US. The findings, which ...

During prenatal development, the brains of most animals, including humans, develop specifically male or female characteristics. In most species, some portions of male and female brains are a different size, and may have a different number of neurons and synapses. However, scientists have known little about the details of how this differentiation occurs. Now, a new study by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM) has illuminated details about this process. Margaret McCarthy, PhD, professor and chairman of the Department of Pharmacology, studied ...

March 31, 2015 - How did former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg succeed in achieving so much of his "comprehensive and far-reaching" public health agenda? Key strategies included harnessing the full authority of the City health department and mobilizing the existing workforce to focus on targeted reforms, according to a study in the March/April issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer. Those strategies might help to make similar public health initiatives work in other cities, suggests the report by ...

ANN ARBOR--New research at the University of Michigan offers evidence that a drug being developed to treat osteoporosis may also be useful for treating osteogenesis imperfecta or brittle bone disease, a rare but potentially debilitating bone disorder that that is present from birth. Previous studies have shown the drug to be effective at spurring new bone growth in mice and in humans with osteoporosis, and a U-M research team believes that it may spur new growth in brittle bone disease patients as well. This would be a significant improvement over current treatments, ...

Until now electric fences and trenches have proved to be the most effective way of protecting farms and villages from night time raids by hungry elephants. But researchers think they may have come up with another solution - the recorded sound of angry predators. The research carried out in southern India by Dr Vivek Thuppil at The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus and Dr Richard G Coss from the University of California, Davis has been published in Oryx - The International Journal of Conservation. Using an infrared sensor playback system elephants triggered the ...

This news release is available in German. Leipzig, Columbia (SC), Munich. The ocean is a large reservoir of dissolved organic molecules, and many of these molecules are stable against microbial utilization for hundreds to thousands of years. They contain a similar amount of carbon as compared to carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), the University of South Carolina and the Helmholtz Centre Munich found answers to questions about the origin of these persistent molecules in a study published in ...

"Planck detects, then Herschel analyzes". That's how Gianfranco De Zotti, professor at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste and at INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Padova, summarizes the rationale of the study just published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. "As Mattia Negrello had already suggested in 2005, it is precisely Planck's low resolution - optimized for the study of the cosmic microwave background but a major limitation for identifying extragalactic sources - which makes the satellite a powerful tool in the search for large-scale structures. ...

In a survey of over 600 young Finns, 76% of respondents listened to music from YouTube every day. YouTube and Spotify were by far the most popular music sources in the study. YouTube was the most frequently used service for music listening and new music discovery. Even active Spotify users visited YouTube often to complement Spotify's incomplete music selection. YouTube was also perceived as the most shareable music source by the Finnish students in their early 20s who participated in the internet-based study. The popularity of YouTube was overwhelming. Nearly everyone ...

Using the assessment tool ForWarn, U.S. Forest Service researchers can monitor the growth and development of vegetation that signals winter's end and the awakening of a new growing season. Now these researchers have devised a way to more precisely characterize the beginning of seasonal greening, or "greenup," and compare its timing with that of the 14 previous years. Such information helps land managers anticipate and plan for the impacts of disturbances such as weather events and insect pests. Three maps detailing greenup in forests and grasslands, agricultural lands, ...

Children who play video games for more than three hours a day are more likely to be hyperactive, get involved in fights and not be interested in school, says a new study. It examined the effects of different types of games and time spent playing on children's social and academic behaviour. The researchers from the University of Oxford found that the time spent playing games could be linked with problem behaviour and this was the significant factor rather than the types of games played. They could find no link between playing violent games and real-life aggression or a child's ...

Sitting with a joystick in the comfort of their chairs, scientists can play "rodeo" on a screen magnifying what is happening under their microscope. They rely on optical tweezers to manipulate an intangible ring created out of liquid crystal defects capable of attaching a microsphere to a long thin fibre. Maryam Nikkhou and colleagues from the Jožef Stefan Institute, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, recently published in EPJ E the results of work performed under the supervision of Igor Muševič. They believe that their findings could ultimately open the door to controlling ...

The Internet brings the world to our fingertips, but it turns out that getting information online also has a startling effect on our brains: We feel a lot smarter than we really are, according to a Yale-led study published March 30 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. In nine different experiments with more than 1,000 participants, Yale psychologists found that if subjects received information through Internet searches, they rated their knowledge base as much greater than those who obtained the information through other methods. "This was a very robust effect, ...

WASHINGTON - Searching the Internet for information may make people feel smarter than they actually are, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. "The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips," said lead researcher Matthew Fisher, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in psychology at Yale University. "It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source. When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly ...

PHILADELPHIA - HIV (human immunodeficiency virus)-positive kidney transplant patients experienced superior outcomes when compared to kidney transplant patients with Hepatitis C and those infected with both HIV and Hepatitis C, according to a study led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and published online in Kidney International. The research team examined outcomes of 124,035 adult kidney recipients transplanted between 1996 and 2013, and found the three-year survival rate of HIV patients (89 percent) was actually very ...

Inhalable particles include all particulate matter with a diameter smaller than 10 micrometers (PM10). In this group a distinction is made between even finer particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) in diameter, which can deeply enter the lung, and ultrafine particles with diameters less than 0.1 micrometers (100 nanometers), which can also enter the blood stream. The research team at Helmholtz Zentrum München led by Prof. Dr. Annette Peters, head of the research program Epidemiology at the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD), and Dr. Alexandra Schneider ...

Scientists at the John Innes Centre have discovered why the first buds of spring come increasingly earlier as the climate changes. Dr Steven Penfield at the JIC found that plants have an ideal temperature for seed set and flower at a particular time of year to make sure their seed develops just as the weather has warmed to this 'sweet spot' temperature. Dr Penfield, working with Dr Vicki Springthorpe at the University of York, found the sweet spot for the model plant Arabidposis thaliana is between 14-15?C. Seeds that develop in temperatures lower than 14?C will almost ...

Saurichthys is a predatory fish characterized by a long thin body and a sharply pointed snout with numerous teeth. This distinctive ray-finned fish lived in marine and freshwater environments all over the world 252-201 million years ago during the Triassic period. Two new species of this extinct fish have been discovered by paleontologists at the University of Zurich, working in collaboration with researchers in Germany and China. The first species, «Saurichthys breviabdominalis», is named for its relatively short body and the second, «Saurichthys rieppeli», ...

Darwin's evolutionary theory predicts survival of the fittest. So why do different survival tactics co-exist, if evolution should always favour the winning strategy? To answer that question scientists at the Universities of Bath and Manchester have been studying a single-celled amoeba, also known as slime mould, which displays certain behaviours that have been labelled as "cheating" or "cooperating". In a study, published in the prestigious journal Current Biology, the team found that cheaters don't necessarily win in terms of overall survival, suggesting that biologists ...

Scientists at the University of Bonn, together with colleagues from China, UK and Poland, have described the oldest evidence of brood care in insects: it is in a female scale insect with her young that is encased in amber as a fossil. The approximately100-million-year-old "snapshot" from the Earth's history shows the six millimetre long tiny insect with a wax cocoon, which protected the eggs from predators and drying out plus associated young nymphs. The researchers are now presenting their results in the respected journal eLIFE. The small female insect with the waxy ...

Face recognition security on smartphones can be significantly improved if users store an 'average' photo of themselves, according to new research by scientists at the University of York. A research team led by Dr David Robertson, of the Department of Psychology's FaceVar laboratory at York, found that combining different pictures of the user, rather than a single 'target' image, leads to much better recognition across all kinds of daily settings. The research is published in the journal PLOS ONE. The researchers examined the performance of the 'face unlock' system ...

Researchers at the Mechanobiology Institute (MBI) at the National University of Singapore have discovered that the inherent 'handedness' of molecular structures directs the behaviour of individual cells and confers them the ability to sense the difference between left and right. This is a significant step forward in the understanding of cellular biology. This discovery was published in Nature Cell Biology on 23 March 2015. Cellular decision making Our bodies are made up of hundreds of different types of cells, each of which performs a unique and highly specialized ...