BOSTON - New research led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) provides the first direct evidence linking traumatic brain injury to Alzheimer's disease and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) -- and offers the potential for early intervention to prevent the development of these debilitating neurodegenerative diseases. TBI can result from repetitive contact sport injuries or from exposure to military blasts, and is one of the most significant risk factors for both Alzheimer's disease and CTE. In a study published today in the online edition ...

Scientists at the University of Basel were able to identify for the first time a molecule responsible for the absorption of starlight in space: the positively charged Buckminsterfullerene, or so-called football molecule. Their results have been published in the current issue of Nature. Almost 100 years ago, astronomers discovered that the spectrum of star light arrived on earth with dark gaps, so-called interstellar bands. Ever since, researchers have been trying to find out which type of matter in space absorbs the light and is responsible for these "diffuse interstellar ...

About 1 in 88 children has an autism spectrum disorder. This represents a 78% increase in the incidence of autism spectrum disorder since 2002 (although some of the increase may be due to improved diagnostic capabilities). Individuals with an autism spectrum disorder may have poor nutrition because they often exhibit selective eating patterns as well as sensory sensitivity that predispose them to restrict their diets. The July 2015 issue of Advances in Nutrition, the international review journal of the American Society for Nutrition, features "Nutritional Status of ...

GeoSpace Greenland's fjords are far deeper than previously thought, and glaciers will melt faster, researchers find West Greenland's fjords are vastly deeper than rudimentary models have shown and intruding ocean water can badly undercut glacier faces. A new study in Geophysical Research Letters explores how this process will raise sea levels faster than expected. Eos.org A University-Government Partnership for Oceanographic Research After 44 years of coordinating the U.S. academic research fleet and facilities, the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Air pollution controls installed at an Oregon coal-fired power plant to curb mercury emissions are unexpectedly reducing another class of harmful emissions as well, an Oregon State University study has found. Portland General Electric added emission control systems at its generating plant in Boardman, Oregon, in 2011 to capture and remove mercury from the exhaust. Before-and-after measurements by a team of OSU scientists found that concentrations of two major groups of air pollutants went down by 40 and 72 percent, respectively, after the plant was ...

A new computational model of how the brain makes altruistic choices is able to predict when a person will act generously in a scenario involving the sacrifice of money. The work, led by California Institute of Technology scientists and, appearing July 15 in the journal Neuron, also helps explain why being generous sometimes feels so difficult. The reason people act altruistically is well contested among academics. Some argue that people are innately selfish and the only way to override our greedy tendencies is to exercise self-control. Others are more positive, believing ...

WASHINGTON, DC - July 15, 2015 - For decades, researchers have worked to improve cacao fermentation by controlling the microbes involved. Now, to their surprise, a team of Belgian researchers has discovered that the same species of yeast used in production of beer, bread, and wine works particularly well in chocolate fermentation. The research was published ahead of print July 6th in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. "Chemical analyses as well as tasting the chocolate showed that the chocolate produced with ...

LAWRENCE -- American media in effort to highlight a diverse set of voices in covering politics generally over-represent the amount of people who contribute to policy making when compared with journalists in South Korea. A University of Kansas researcher made the findings as part of a recent study that examined how government officials were treated in front-page news coverage between the two free-press nations. The article by Jiso Yoon, a KU assistant professor of political science, and co-author Amber Boydstum, an assistant professor of political science at the University ...

AURORA, Colo. (July 15, 2015) - Physicians at the University of Colorado School of Medicine on the Anschutz Medical Campus have published research that suggests a safe and lower-cost way to diagnose and treat problems in the upper gastrointestinal tract of children. The researchers assessed the effectiveness of unsedated transnasal endoscopy (TNE) in evaluating pediatric patients with potentially chronic problems in their esophagus, which is the tube that connects the patient's mouth to the stomach. The research team included Joel A. Friedlander, DO, MA-Bioethics, Jeremy ...

The human genome encodes roughly 20,000 genes, only a few thousand more than fruit flies. The complexity of the human body, therefore, comes from far more than just the sequence of nucleotides that comprise our DNA, it arises from modifications that occur at the level of gene, RNA and protein. In a new study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine show how one of these modifications, which occurs after RNA is translated into proteins, has the power to greatly influence the function of an enzyme called PRPS2, which is required for ...

Athens, Ga. - Researchers from the University of Georgia have determined that various freshwater sources in Georgia, such as rivers and lakes, could feature levels of salmonella that pose a risk to humans. The study is featured in the July edition of PLOS One. Faculty and students from four colleges and five departments at UGA partnered with colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Georgia Department of Public Health to establish whether or not strains of salmonella exhibit geographic trends that might help to explain differences in rates ...

DURHAM, N.C. - Children with even mild or passing bouts of depression, anxiety and/or behavioral issues were more inclined to have serious problems that complicated their ability to lead successful lives as adults, according to research from Duke Medicine. Reporting in the July 15 issue of JAMA Psychiatry, the Duke researchers found that children who had either a diagnosed psychiatric condition or a milder form that didn't meet the full diagnostic criteria were six times more likely than those who had no psychiatric issues to have difficulties in adulthood, including ...

Children with psychiatric problems were more likely to have health, legal, financial and social problems as adults even if their psychiatric disorders did not persist into adulthood and even if they did not meet the full diagnostic criteria for a disorder, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry. Neuropsychiatric disorders among young people ages 10 to 24 are a leading cause of disease burden globally. Unlike many chronic physical health problems, most psychiatric disorders are first diagnosed in childhood, which allows the disorder to affect a person's ...

PHILADELPHIA - Stem cells are key for the continual renewal of tissues in our bodies. As such, manipulating stem cells also holds much promise for biomedicine if their regenerative capacity can be harnessed. However, understanding how stem cells govern normal tissue renewal is a field still in its infancy. Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are making headway in this area by studying stem cells in their natural environment in an organism. Stem cell populations reside in areas called niches deep within different types of organs. ...

States with more restrictive alcohol policies and regulations have lower rates of self-reported drunk driving, according to a new study by researchers at the Boston University schools of public health and medicine and the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. The research team assigned each state an "alcohol policy score," based on an aggregate of 29 alcohol policies, such as alcohol taxation and the use of sobriety checkpoints. Each 1 percentage point increase in the score was found to be associated with a 1 percent decrease in the likelihood of impaired driving, ...

Final results of the randomized intergroup EORTC, LYSA (Lymphoma Study Association), FIL (Fondazione Italiana Linfomi) H10 trial presented at the 13th International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma in Lugano, Switzerland, on 19 June 2015 show that early FDG-PET ( 2-deoxy-2[F-18]fluoro-D-glucose positron emission tomography) adapted treatment improves the outcome of early FDG-PET-positive patients with stages I/II Hodgkin lymphoma. Dr. John Raemaekers of the Radboud University Medical Center Nijmegen and the Rijnstate Hospital Arnhem, The Netherlands, and EORTC principal ...

HOUSTON - (July 15, 2015) - Three-dimensional structures of boron nitride might be the right stuff to keep small electronics cool, according to scientists at Rice University. Rice researchers Rouzbeh Shahsavari and Navid Sakhavand have completed the first theoretical analysis of how 3-D boron nitride might be used as a tunable material to control heat flow in such devices. Their work appears this month in the American Chemical Society journal Applied Materials and Interfaces. In its two-dimensional form, hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), aka white graphene, looks ...

A University of Toronto research team has discovered new details about a key gene involved in ALS, perhaps humanity's most puzzling, intractable disease. In this fatal disorder with no effective treatment options, scientists (including members of U of T) achieved a major breakthrough in 2011 when they discovered mutations in the gene C9orf72, as the most frequent genetic cause of ALS and frontotemporal dementia. But little was known about how this gene and its related protein worked in the cell. To solve this problem, Professor Janice Robertson and her team at the ...

Sapphirina, or sea sapphire, has been called "the most beautiful animal you've never seen," and it could be one of the most magical. Some of the tiny, little-known copepods appear to flash in and out of brilliantly colored blue, violet or red existence. Now scientists are figuring out the trick to their hues and their invisibility. The findings appear in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and could inspire the next generation of optical technologies. Copepods are tiny aquatic crustaceans that live in both fresh and salt water. Some males of the ocean-dwelling ...

Five years ago this week, engineers stopped the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill -- the largest one in U.S. history, easily displacing the Exxon Valdez spill from the top spot. Now, Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, takes a look at the lessons scientists are learning from these accidents to improve clean-up efforts and, perhaps, prevent spills altogether. C&EN Senior Editor Jyllian Kemsley explains that although both spills were caused by human error, they each posed unique challenges. When the tanker Exxon ...

"No swimming" signs have already popped up this summer along coastlines where fecal bacteria have invaded otherwise inviting waters. Some vacationers ignore the signs while others resign themselves to tanning and playing on the beach. But should those avoiding the water be wary of the sand, too? New research in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology investigates reasons why the answer could be "yes." Sewage-contaminated coastal waters can lead to stomach aches, diarrhea and rashes for those who accidentally swallow harmful microbes or come into contact with ...

A mixture of bitumen and gasoline-like solvents known as dilbit that flows through Prairie pipelines can seriously harm fish populations, according to research out of Queen's University and the Royal Military College of Canada. At toxic concentrations, effects of dilbit on exposed fish included deformities and clear signs of genetic and physiological stress at hatch, plus abnormal or uninflated swim bladders, an internal gas-filled organ that allows fish to control their buoyancy. Exposure to dilbit reduces their rate of survival by impairing their ability to feed and ...

New research conducted at the University of Kansas Medical Center indicates that older adults can improve brain function by raising their fitness level. Jeffrey Burns, M.D., professor of neurology and co-director of the KU Alzheimer's Disease Center, led a six-month trial conducted with healthy adults ages 65 and older who showed no signs of cognitive decline. The results of the study were published on July 9 in the journal PLOS ONE. The randomized controlled trial attempted to determine the ideal amount of exercise necessary to achieve benefits to the brain. Trial ...

In the U.S. and other industrialized nations, testing for infectious diseases and cancer often requires expensive equipment and highly trained specialists. In countries where resources are limited, performing the same diagnostics is far more challenging. To address this disparity, scientists are developing a portable, low-cost "paper machine" for point-of-care detection of infectious diseases, genetic conditions and cancer. Their report appears in the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry. Many modern diagnostic techniques involve analyzing DNA in a patient's blood sample. ...

WASHINGTON (July 15, 2015) -- GW researcher and dermatologist, Adam Friedman, M.D., and colleagues, find that the release of nitric oxide over time may be a new way to treat and prevent acne through nanotechnology. This research, published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, identified that the nanoparticles were effective at killing Proprionobacterium acnes, the gram positive bacteria associated with acne, and even more importantly, they inhibited the damaging inflammation that result in the large, painful lesions associated with inflammatory acne. "Our understanding ...