A small imaging study suggests prenatal exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the toxic air pollution caused in part by vehicle emissions, coal burning and smoking, may be bad for children's brains and may contribute to slower processing speeds and behavioral problems, including attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder (ADHD) symptoms, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry. PAHs are caused by the incomplete combustion of organic materials. In addition to outdoor air pollution, sources of indoor air pollution caused by PAHs can be cooking, ...

A variety of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) interventions helped to reduce suicide attempts and nonsuicidal self-injury acts in a randomized clinical trial of women with borderline personality disorder who were highly suicidal, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry. DBT is a multicomponent therapy for individuals at high risk for suicide and for those with multiple severe mental disorders, particularly those who have marked impulsivity and an inability to regulate emotions. The components of DBT include individual therapy, group skills training, ...

Magnetic nanoparticles can open the blood-brain barrier and deliver molecules directly to the brain, say researchers from the University of Montreal, Polytechnique Montréal, and CHU Sainte-Justine. This barrier runs inside almost all vessels in the brain and protects it from elements circulating in the blood that may be toxic to the brain. The research is important as currently 98% of therapeutic molecules are also unable to cross the blood-brain barrier. "The barrier is temporary opened at a desired location for approximately 2 hours by a small elevation of the temperature ...

BETHESDA, MD, USA and VIENNA, AUSTRIA - Two of the world's largest professional societies of human geneticists have issued a joint position statement on the promise and challenges of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), a new procedure to test blood drawn from pregnant mothers for Down syndrome and other chromosomal disorders in the fetus. The document addresses the current scope of and likely future improvements in NIPT technology, ways it may best fit with existing prenatal screening tools and protocols, options and priorities in its implementation, and associated social ...

This news release is available in French. Montreal, March 25, 2015 -- "Create a password" is a prompt familiar to anyone who's tried to buy a book from Amazon or register for a Google account. Equally familiar is that red / yellow / green bar that rates the new password's strength. But when those meters give the go-ahead to passwords like Password1+, their effectiveness is called into question. New research from Concordia University exposes the weakness of password strength meters, and shows consumers should remain sceptical when the bar turns green in order to create ...

From AGU's blogs: Q&A with journalist-turned-geologist Rex Buchanan After decades as a science reporter, interim director of the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) Rex Buchanan now finds himself at the epicenter of a media frenzy. Read parts one and two of a three-part series featuring an interview between Buchanan and University of California, Santa Cruz, science journalism student, Kerry Klein, in The Plainspoken Scientist. From Eos.org: Changing of the Guard: Satellite Will Warn Earth of Solar Storms This summer, Earth gets a new guardian--the Deep Space Climate ...

ATLANTA--Medication used to treat patients with type II diabetes activates sensors on brain cells that increase hunger, causing people taking this drug to gain more body fat, according to researchers at Georgia State University, Oregon Health and Science University, Georgia Regents University and Charlie Norwood Veterans Administration Medical Center. The study, published on March 18 in The Journal of Neuroscience, describes a new way to affect hunger in the brain and helps to explain why people taking a class of drugs for type II diabetes gain more body fat. Type II ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered a control switch for the unfolded protein response (UPR), a cellular stress relief mechanism drawing major scientific interest because of its role in cancer, diabetes, inflammatory disorders and several neural degenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The normal function of the UPR pathway is to protect cells from stress but it can also trigger their death if the ...

An international team of researchers led by the University of Oklahoma has discovered a strong association between the lifestyles of indigenous communities and their gut microbial ecologies (gut microbiome), a study that may have implications for the health of all people. Under the direction of Cecil Lewis, co-director of the Laboratories of Molecular Anthropology and Microbiome Research in the OU College of Arts and Sciences, the team presents an in-depth analysis of the gut microbiome of the Matses, an Amazonian hunter-gatherer community, which is compared with that ...

Results from the first phase 1 trial of an Ebola vaccine based on the current (2014) strain of the virus are today published in The Lancet. Until now, all tested Ebola virus vaccines have been based on the virus strain from the Zaire outbreak in 1976. The results suggest that the new vaccine is safe, and provokes an immune response in recipients, although further long-term testing will be needed to establish whether it can protect against the Ebola virus. A team of researchers, led by Professor Fengcai Zhu, from the Jiangsu provincial center for disease prevention and ...

People who have suffered serious head injuries show changes in brain structure resembling those seen in older people, according to a new study. Researchers at Imperial College London analysed brain scans from over 1,500 healthy people to develop a computer program that could predict a person's age from their brain scan. Then they used the program to estimate the "brain age" of 113 more healthy people and 99 patients who had suffered traumatic brain injuries. The brain injury patients were estimated to be around five years older on average than their real age. Head ...

Boston, Mass. - March 25, 2015 - Nonprofit Global Oncology, Inc. (GO) today announced the launch of the Global Cancer Project Map, a first-of-its-kind online resource and virtual information exchange for connecting the global cancer community. Developed by GO in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Center for Global Health, the Map enables worldwide access to cancer projects and expertise to improve cancer practices and patient outcomes, especially in low-resource settings. Find the Global Cancer Project Map here: http://gcpm.globalonc.org. The Map was ...

25.03.2015: Natural wetlands usually emit methane and sequester carbon dioxide. Anthropogenic interventions, in particular the conversion of wetlands for agriculture, result in a significant increase in CO2 emissions, which overcompensate potential decreases in methane emission. A large international research team now calculated that the conversion of arctic and boreal wetlands into agricultural land would result in an additional cumulative radiative forcing of about 0,1 MilliJoule (mJ) per square meter for the next 100 years. The conversion of temperate wetlands into agricultural ...

AURORA, Colo. (March 25, 2015) - Coordinating patient care between hospital clinicians and primary-care physicians is a significant challenge due to poor communication and gaps in information-sharing strategies, according to a study led by physicians at the School of Medicine of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. The inability to share timely information can increase the risk of missed test results and hospital readmissions, according to the study's corresponding author, Christine D. Jones, MD, assistant professor of medicine and director of the Hospital ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- By looking at the molecular aftermath of concussion in an unusual way, a team of researchers at Brown University and the Lifespan health system has developed a candidate panel of blood biomarkers that can accurately signal mild traumatic brain injury within hours using standard, widely available lab arrays. The results appear in a new study in the Journal of Neurotrauma. Many researchers have reported recent progress in identifying possible blood biomarkers for concussion -- an advance sought because diagnosis is currently limited ...

Singapore, 18 March 2015- A multi-disciplinary team of doctors and scientists from Singapore has characterised the genetic changes associated with the spread of colorectal cancer to the liver. This finding is significant in helping to develop personalised diagnostic tests for patients with colorectal cancer based on the genetic changes present in each individual's colon tumour. The research team comprises representatives from National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS), Singapore General Hospital (SGH), Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS), A*STAR's Genome Institute ...

Across a number of faiths and cultures, people tend to date and marry others who share their religious beliefs. Now, new psychology research from New Zealand's University of Otago suggests this phenomenon--known as 'religious homogamy'--is partially a result of inferences about religious people's personalities. The researchers measured how religious and non-religious individuals perceive the 'openness'--a primary dimension of personality associated with intellectual curiosity--of potential religious and non-religious mates. They found that non-religious participants in ...

This news release is available in French. Alberta Pregnancy Outcomes and Nutrition (APrON) is a birth cohort involving over two thousand women and their infants from Calgary and Edmonton that was funded by Alberta Innovates Health Solutions and includes researchers at the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary. The main objective of APrON is to understand the relationship between maternal nutrient status during pregnancy and maternal mental health and child health and development. As part of the project, the APrON team studied the first 600 women in the ...

Lifestyle-related cardiometabolic risk factors cluster already in children in the same way as in adults, according to research from the University of Eastern Finland. A cardiometabolic risk score was used to evaluate cardiometabolic risk in different age groups. The results show that risk factor levels even lower than those generally accepted as risk factor thresholds for type 2 diabetes and atherosclerotic vascular disease are harmful when several risk factors cluster. In addition, a common mutation on the PNPLA3 gene associated with fatty liver in adults was found to ...

CRISPR-Cas9 is a powerful new tool for editing the genome. For researchers around the world, the CRISPR-Cas9 technique is an exciting innovation because it is faster and cheaper than previous methods. Now, using a molecular trick, Dr. Van Trung Chu and Professor Klaus Rajewsky of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch and Dr. Ralf Kühn, MDC and Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), have found a solution to considerably increase the efficiency of precise genetic modifications by up to eightfold (Nature Biotechnology: doi:10.1038/nbt.3198)**. "What ...

Noisy and cramped conditions in trains, planes and airports are discouraging many commuters and business people from working while travelling, new research shows. Sociologist Dr Donald Hislop and psychologist Dr Carolyn Axtell found that the most popular place to work was in vehicles in the car park of a motorway service station. In a paper in the journal Work, Employment and Society, Dr Hislop, of Loughborough University, and Dr Axtell, of the University of Sheffield, say "significant variations" in noise and lack of space "inhibited people's ability to work" on ...

A new study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine revealed that 44 percent of adults with sickle cell disease who report trouble sleeping actually have a clinical diagnosis of sleep disordered breathing, including sleep apnea, which lowers their oxygen levels at night. "Previous research identified pain and sleep disturbance as two common symptoms of adult sickle cell disorder," said Sunil Sharma, M.D., Associate Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University and first author on the study. "We wanted ...

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) periodically releases Assessment Reports in order to inform policymakers and the public about the latest scientific evidence on climate change. The publication of each report is a key event in the debate about climate change, but their reception and coverage in the media has varied widely. A study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, has for the first time analysed how Twitter, TV and newspapers reported the IPCC's climate evidence. Understanding how media coverage varies is important because people's ...

New findings from an international team of archaeological researchers highlight the complexity of geopolitics in Aztec era Mesoamerica and illustrate how the relationships among ancient states extended beyond warfare and diplomacy to issues concerning trade and the flow of goods. The work was done by researchers from North Carolina State University, the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional-Unidad Mérida, El Colegio de Michoacán and Purdue University. The researchers focused on an independent republic ...

DENVER, March 25, 2015 -- The sweet taste and smell of antifreeze tempts children and animals to drink the poisonous substance, resulting in thousands of accidental poisonings in the United States every year. But today researchers will describe a new, nontoxic product based on a common food additive that could address this health issue and help the environment at the same time. The presentation will take place here at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society. The meeting features nearly 11,000 ...