Fast Facts People with schizophrenia often suffer from cognitive difficulties. Transcranial direct current stimulation of the brain is widely considered safe and is being studied as a treatment for depression. In a Johns Hopkins study of people with schizophrenia, transcranial direct current stimulation led to improvements in short-term memory. Lightly stimulating the brain with electricity may improve short-term memory in people with schizophrenia, according to a new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The ...

DALLAS, May 27, 2015 -- African Americans at lower socioeconomic levels, particularly women and younger adults, are at greater risk of heart disease and stroke than those in higher socioeconomic positions, according to research in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the No. 1 killer of all Americans, but the burden is greater for African Americans. According to the American Heart Association 2014 Statistical Update, nearly half of all African American adults have some form of CVD, and they are twice as likely as white adults ...

MINNEAPOLIS - New research suggests people with multiple sclerosis (MS) may have double the risk of dying early compared to people without MS, with those younger than 59 at a three times higher risk. The study is published in the May 27, 2015, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "Despite studies that show MS survival may be improving over time, the more than 2.5 million people affected worldwide by this disabling disease still face a risk of dying earlier, specifically those who are diagnosed younger," said study ...

PITTSBURGH, May 27, 2015 - As the U.S. Supreme Court considers the legality of tax subsidies to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), an investigation by the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, the RAND Corporation and Express Scripts provides an unprecedented look at prescription data gleaned from over a million initial enrollees. The analysis is published online as a Web First article by Health Affairs and will also appear in the journal's June issue. The study found that among people who enrolled in individual marketplaces, ...

It's both the bane of many parents and what has been called a major national vulnerability: the inability of many children to understand mathematics. Understanding that problem and developing strategies to overcome it is the research focus of Nicole McNeil, Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, and the researchers in her lab. A new paper by McNeil and Emily Fyfe, a former Notre Dame undergraduate who's now a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University, examines if the labels educators use to identify patterns ...

KNOXVILLE--Not every encounter between predator and prey results in death. A new study co-authored by a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, professor suggests that prey emit warning cues that can ultimately lead to both their survival and that of their predators. The hypothesis addresses a 150-year-old mystery of evolution on how warning signals of animals and plants arise and explains animals' instinctive avoidances of dangerous prey. The study is published this month in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. It is available online at http://tinyurl.com/njdq5og. "People ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Teenage girls like and feel more similar to women in appearance-focused jobs such as models and actresses, though they find female CEOs and military pilots to be better role models, according to a new study by researchers at Oregon State University. For the study, 100 girls and 76 boys ages 14 to 18 were shown photographs of model Heidi Klum, actress Jennifer Aniston, CEO Carly Fiorina and military pilot Sarah Deal Burrow. Klum and Aniston represented the appearance-focused careers and Fiorina and Deal Burrow represented the non-appearance focused careers. Girls ...

Philadelphia - While advances in technology have made multigene testing, or "panel testing," for genetic mutations that increase the risk of breast or other cancers an option, authors of a review published today in the New England Journal of Medicine say larger studies are needed in order to provide reliable risk estimates for counseling these patients. The international consortium of authors, including researchers at the Basser Center for BRCA at the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center, acknowledges that panel testing can make a useful contribution to predicting ...

Boulder, Colo., USA - Salt rock behaves as a fluid and can play a pivotal role in the large-scale, long-term collapse of the world's continental margins. However, the precise way in which this occurs is laced in controversy; nowhere is this controversy more apparent than along the Brazilian continental margin, where the origin of a feature called "the Albian Gap" has generated much heated debate over several decades. In this new, open-access GSA Bulletin article, Christopher A-L. Jackson and colleagues enter this debate, critiquing the geological and geophysical evidence ...

Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered that a tiny single-celled parasite may have a greater-than expected impact on honey bee colonies, which have been undergoing mysterious declines worldwide for the past decade. In this week's issue of the journal PLOS ONE, (see http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0126330), the scientists report that a microsporidian called Nosema ceranae, which has been known to infect adult Asiatic and European honey bees, can also infect honeybee larvae. They also discovered that honey bee larvae infected with the microsporidian have reduced ...

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have described a new method for detecting liver cancer metastases in mice. The approach uses over-the-counter probiotics genetically programmed to produce signals easily detectable in urine when liver cancer metastases are present. The results of the new study, published in the May 27 issue of Science Translational Medicine, indicate that genetically-programmed probiotics may be useful for detecting liver cancer metastases early-on in the progression of the disease. ...

A rigorous analysis of more than 3,000 antimalarials purchased in Enugu, Nigeria found 9.3% to be of poor quality, according to new research published in PLOS ONE. Researchers found 1.2% of the samples to be falsified and 1.3% to be degraded, but raised bigger concerns about 6.8% being of substandard manufacture, leaving patients at risk of not receiving the correct treatment dose and potentially contributing to the development of resistance to the main drug used to treat malaria. The drug quality team of the Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy (ACT) Consortium ...

PITTSBURGH, May 27, 2015 - Cuts in federal support and unreliable funding streams are creating a hostile work environment for scientists, jeopardizing the future of research efforts and ultimately clinical medicine, according to leaders of the nation's top academic medical centers in today's online issue of Science Translational Medicine. Led by Arthur S. Levine, M.D., the University of Pittsburgh senior vice chancellor for the health sciences and John and Gertrude Petersen Dean of Medicine, medical school deans from 18 institutions reviewed the financial challenges ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Engineers at MIT and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) have devised a new way to detect cancer that has spread to the liver, by enlisting help from probiotics -- beneficial bacteria similar to those found in yogurt. Many types of cancer, including colon and pancreatic, tend to metastasize to the liver. The earlier doctors can find these tumors, the more likely that they can successfully treat them. "There are interventions, like local surgery or local ablation, that physicians can perform if the spread of disease in the liver is confined, ...

Given the aging of the population and the low birthrate both in Japan and elsewhere, healthcare professionals are in short supply and unevenly distributed, giving rise to a need for alternatives to humans for performing simple tasks. Although increasing numbers of medical institutions have introduced electronic medical records, a variety of issues remain unresolved, such as the inconvenience of data recording and the high costs associated with data input. The use of robots to support medical care data management and the delivery of resources at the medical front--thus ...

A breakthrough in machine learning has also brought about a "game changer" for the science of metabolomics - and will hasten the development of diagnostic and predictive tests for Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes and numerous other conditions, leading to improved prevention and treatment. University of Alberta computing science PhD graduate Siamak Ravanbakhsh published his research in the scientific journal PLOS ONE on an automated process that increases the speed and accuracy of producing a person's metabolic profile from a sample of biofluid such as blood serum or cerebrospinal ...

A major international randomized clinical trial has found that HIV-infected individuals have a considerably lower risk of developing AIDS or other serious illnesses if they start taking antiretroviral drugs sooner, when their CD4+ T-cell count--a key measure of immune system health--is higher, instead of waiting until the CD4+ cell count drops to lower levels. Together with data from previous studies showing that antiretroviral treatment reduced the risk of HIV transmission to uninfected sexual partners, these findings support offering treatment to everyone with HIV. The ...

(Boston)--Reductions in federal support and clinical revenue not only jeopardize biomedical research at academic medical centers, but may ultimately impact clinical medicine according to an opinion piece in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Biomedical research is crucial to the US national agenda and academic medical centers--the provenance for much of this research - are at particular risk, according to the authors. Persistent constraints on federal funding threaten to undermine this, and decreasing clinical revenue due to increasingly constrained reimbursement ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- Do microbes grow differently on the International Space Station than they do on Earth? Results from the growth of microbes collected by citizen scientists in Project MERCCURI indicate that most behave similarly in both places. "While this data is extremely preliminary, it is potentially encouraging for long-term manned spaceflight," said David Coil, Ppoject scientist in the microbiology lab of Jonathan Eisen at the University of California, Davis. "With this part of Project MERCCURI we hoped to shed light on how microbes associated with the normal, ...

From AGU's blogs: Should NASA be Studying the Earth? Joseph R. Dwyer, a Professor at the Department of Physics and the Space Science Center in the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire, shares his thoughts about whether NASA should be studying the Earth in a blog post on The Bridge. From Eos.org: Musical Composition Conveys Climate Change Data A student at the University of Minnesota communicates climate change science in an innovative way. From AGU's journals: Dynamics of the Earth's Surface in the Eastern Tibetan ...

When you're blasting though space at more than 98 percent of the speed of light, you may need driver's insurance. Astronomers have discovered for the first time a rear-end collision between two high-speed knots of ejected matter. This discovery was made while piecing together a time-lapse movie of a plasma jet blasted from a supermassive black hole inside a galaxy located 260 million light-years from earth. The finding offers new insights into the behavior of "light saber-like" jets that are so energized that they appear to zoom out of black hole at speeds several times ...

Cleveland . . . A new relative joins "Lucy" on the human family tree. An international team of scientists, led by Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, has discovered a 3.3 to 3.5 million-year-old new human ancestor species. Upper and lower jaw fossils recovered from the Woranso-Mille area of the Afar region of Ethiopia have been assigned to the new species Australopithecus deyiremeda. This hominin lived alongside the famous "Lucy's" species, Australopithecus afarensis. The species will be described in the May 28, 2015 issue of the international ...

Ovarian cancer cells can lock into survival mode and avoid being destroyed by chemotherapy, an international study reports. Professor Sean Grimmond, from The University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience, said ovarian cancer cells had at least four different ways to avoid being destroyed by platinum-based chemotherapy treatments. "One way involves breaking and rearranging big groups of genes - the chromosomes," Professor Grimmond said. "This is fundamentally different to other cancers where the disease is driven by smaller but more gradual changes ...

Is it possible to tap into the signalling in the brain to figure out where you will go next? Hiroshi Ito, a researcher at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), can now say yes. Ito has just published a description of how this happens in this week's edition of Nature. Ito and his colleagues, including his supervisors, 2014 Nobel Laureates May-Britt and Edvard Moser, sampled a specific neural pathway to figure out if it is the location of the mechanism that enables animals to code their plan to get from ...

The latest generation of genomic testing offers a chance for significant improvements in patient care, disease prevention, and possibly even the cost-effectiveness of healthcare. A new report recommends that Congress act to incentivize the development of the massive data systems that doctors and regulators will need to make these tests safe and effective for patients. A team of three leading researchers in law, bioethics, and medical genetics believes the solution lies in bolstering existing regulatory oversight with a systematic, ongoing program of postmarket data ...