Cold Spring Harbor, NY – It's one of those ideas that seems to make perfect sense: the bigger the brain, the more intelligent the creature. While it is generally true, exceptions are becoming increasingly common. Yet the belief persists even among scientists. Most biologists, for example, assume that rats, with larger brains, are smarter than mice. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) scientists now challenge this belief. They compared mice and rats and found very similar levels of intelligence, a result that could have powerful implications for researchers studying ...

WASHINGTON - Children who are emotionally abused and neglected face similar and sometimes worse mental health problems as children who are physically or sexually abused, yet psychological abuse is rarely addressed in prevention programs or in treating victims, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association. "Given the prevalence of childhood psychological abuse and the severity of harm to young victims, it should be at the forefront of mental health and social service training," said study lead author Joseph Spinazzola, PhD, of The Trauma ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. – A fundamental theory about how our thymus educates our immune police appears to be wrong, scientists say. It's known that stem cells come out of the bone marrow and travel to the tiny thymus gland behind the breastbone to learn to become one of two CD4T cell types: one leads an attack, the other keeps the peace. One widely held concept of why they become one or the other is that, despite coming from the same neighborhood and going to the same school, they are exposed to different things in the thymus, said Dr. Leszek Ignatowicz, immunologist at ...

Rockville, MD – The Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health is committed to examining the details of individual disasters and public health crises. With the recent arrival of Ebola in the United States, the journal is launching a special issue on the virus. The journal will serve as an educated and authoritative voice on the virus, risk and threat level, potential of outbreak, preparation and response for the public and media. The Journal of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, began covering events in their entirety via special issues this ...

NEW YORK, NY (October 8, 2014)—For benign gynecologic conditions, robot-assisted surgery involves more complications during surgery and may be significantly more expensive than conventional laparoscopic surgery, according to a study by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC). The results were published online today in Obstetrics & Gynecology. Robot-assisted surgery was first widely used for radical prostatectomy. For procedures such as prostatectomy, where there were previously no minimally invasive options, robot-assisted laparoscopy often offered ...

This news release is available in French. Montreal & Vancouver, October 8, 2014 — From the words for colours to how to tie a shoelace, kids have lots to learn — and for the most part, they depend on others to teach it to them. But whether deliberately or inadvertently, other people sometimes misinform. So at what age can kids tell trustworthy teachers from confident tricksters? A new study published in PLOS ONE by psychology researchers from Concordia University and the University of British Columbia shows that by the age of five, children become wary ...

HOUSTON – (Oct. 8, 2014) – Managers can promote creativity in employees by "empowering leadership" and earning employees' trust, according to a new study by Rice University and American University. The researchers investigated, for the first time, the complex effect of the interaction among empowering leadership, uncertainty avoidance and trust on creativity. They collected supervisors' ratings of employee creativity in two separate studies in China: one with employees of an energy-saving light bulb design and manufacturing company and the other with the employees ...

Gay and bisexual youth who are supported by their family and feel comfortable talking to them about their lifestyle are less likely to become involved in high-risk sexual behaviors, according to a recent Rutgers study. Published in the Journal of Marital & Family Therapy, the Rutgers School of Social Work study, Condoms and connection: Parents, gay and lesbian youth and HIV risk, found that positive family relationships and open dialogue led to an increase in safe sex practices, including the use of condoms, while disrupted family relationships resulted in risky sexual ...

Johns Hopkins and other cancer researchers report that a very short course of a chemotherapy drug, called cyclophosphamide, not only can prevent a life-threatening immune response in some bone marrow transplant recipients, but also can eliminate such patients' need for the usual six months of immune suppression medicines commonly prescribed to prevent severe forms of this immune response. Patients receive cyclophosphamide for two days after their bone marrow transplant, in addition to two other chemotherapy drugs given before the transplant. Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer ...

The spread of diseases from land animals to sea otters and other marine mammals is aided and abetted by gelatinous, sticky polymers produced by seaweed, reports a research team headed by a UC Davis veterinary infectious-disease expert. These large, complex molecules form slimy biofilms and bind water-borne organic matter into larger particles, in which disease-causing microorganisms can become embedded and introduced to the marine food chain, the researchers discovered. Using the parasite Toxoplasma gondii as a model, they showed how these sticky polymers increase the ...

Rochester, MN, October 7, 2014 – Numerous randomized clinical trials have shown the effectiveness of the two major forms of smoking cessation treatment – behavioral support and medication - in helping smokers quit. Researchers have now demonstrated that this approach can successfully translate to the "real world" and that a combination of the two treatments offers almost a threefold chance of success over attempts to quit without using a cessation aid. Their findings are published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. "Randomized clinical trials have a high internal ...

There is evidence that hunter-gatherers are optimal foragers whose behaviour is influenced by costs associated with foraging, and therefore for example rising the costs of ammunition could potentially help conserving wild animals. However, there has been a paucity of studies on whether the behaviour of bushmeat hunters, like that of consumers, is cost sensitive moneywise. In Ecuador, ammunition prices rose unexpectedly by 300 per cent in early 2009, because of a tax imposed by the national Government. This happened right when Anders Sirén, then postdoc researcher ...

Adolescence is often a turbulent time, and it is marked by substantially increased rates of depressive symptoms, especially among girls. New research indicates that this gender difference may be the result of girls' greater exposure to stressful interpersonal events, making them more likely to ruminate, and contributing to their risk of depression. The findings are published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "These findings draw our focus to the important role of stress as a potential causal factor in the development ...

The human and environmental dangers posed by a widely used manufacturing technique could be almost eradicated thanks to research led by Plymouth University. Fibre-reinforced polymer matrix composites are painted or sprayed onto products to provide a high-quality finish in transport applications, chemical plants, renewable energy systems and pipelines. But that finishing process causes the vapours of a volatile organic compound – styrene, found in polyesters and vinyl-esters – to be emitted, posing potential health and wellbeing risks to the workforces involved ...

Scientists from the University of Leeds have taken a crucial step forward in bio-nanotechnology, a field that uses biology to develop new tools for science, technology and medicine. The new study, published in print today in the journal Nano Letters, demonstrates how stable 'lipid membranes' – the thin 'skin' that surrounds all biological cells – can be applied to synthetic surfaces. Importantly, the new technique can use these lipid membranes to 'draw' – akin to using them like a biological ink – with a resolution of 6 nanometres (6 billionths ...

VIDEO: The Arctic and the Antarctic are regions that have a lot of ice and acts as air conditioners for the Earth system. This year, Antarctic sea ice reached a record... Click here for more information. Sea ice surrounding Antarctica reached a new record high extent this year, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s. The upward trend in the Antarctic, however, is only about ...

Stretch sensors in our muscles participate in reflexes that serve the subconscious control of posture and movement. According to a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, these sensors respond weakly to muscle stretch caused by one's voluntary action, and most strongly to stretch that is imposed by external forces. The ability to reflect causality in this manner can facilitate appropriate reflex control and accurate self-perception. "The results of the study show that stretch receptors in our muscles indicate more than which limb is moving or how fast; these ...

Just like adjusting a watch, the key to accurately telling evolutionary time is based upon periodically calibrating against a gold standard. Scientists have long used DNA data to develop molecular clocks that measure the rate at which DNA changes, i.e., accumulates mutations, as a premiere tool to peer into the past evolutionary timelines for the lineage of a given species. In human evolution, for example, molecular clocks, when combined with fossil evidence, have helped trace the time of the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans to 5-7 million years ago, and ...

During cell division, chromosomes acquire a characteristic X-shape with the two DNA molecules (sister chromatids) linked at a central "connection region" that contains highly compacted DNA. It was unknown if rearrangements in this typical X-shape architecture could disrupt the correct separation of chromosomes. A recent study by Raquel Oliveira, from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (Portugal), in collaboration with colleagues from the University of California, Santa Cruz (USA), now shows that the dislocation of particular DNA segments perturbs proper chromosome ...

One key to animal survival is bitter taste----the better to avoid ingesting potentially harmful poisons or foods. The evolution of bitter taste has been a hot topic amongst evolutionary biologists, and with more and more DNA data available, a rich area of exploration. Now, professor Maik Behrens, et. al. examined the genetic repertoire of bitter taste receptor genes in chickens and frogs, which represent two extremes. Chickens only have 3 bitter taste receptor genes (Tas2rs), while frogs have more than 50 (humans are somewhere in the middle). They studied the different ...

This news release is available in French. The association between saturated fat and cardiovascular risk has become a hot topic in nutrition. Researchers at the Institute of nutrition and functional foods (INAF) of Université Laval are calling for a review of dietary recommendations on saturated fat (SFA) in relation to cardiovascular disease (CVD). In a Comment paper, published today in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism the authors provide a number of arguments for the urgency to re-assess the association between dietary saturated fat ...

Researchers at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) have managed to generate a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) model that reproduces human colon cancer. With two publications appearing in PLoS One and EMBO Reports, the IRB team also unveil the function of a key gene in the development of the disease. "The breakthrough is that we have generated cancer in an adult organism and from stem cells, thus reproducing what happens in most types of human cancer. This model has allowed us to identify subtle interactions in the development of cancer that are ...

HEIDELBERG, 8 October 2014 – Researchers in Spain have determined how a transcription factor known as Mirror regulates tumour-like growth in the intestines of fruit flies. The scientists believe a related system may be at work in humans during the progression of colorectal cancer due to the observation of similar genes and genetic interactions in cultured colorectal cancer cells. The results are reported in the journal EMBO Reports. Colorectal cancer leads to more than half a million deaths worldwide each year. The disease originates in the epithelial cells of the ...

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 8, 2014 -- Employees who are verbally abused by supervisors are more likely to "act out" at work, doing everything from taking a too-long lunch break to stealing, according to a new study led by a San Francisco State University organizational psychologist. Even if the abuse is meant to be motivational -- like when a football coach berates his team or a drill sergeant shames her cadets -- the abused employees are still more likely to engage in counter-productive work behaviors, said Kevin Eschleman, assistant professor of psychology at SF State. The ...

New research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health finds that large chain restaurants, whose core menu offerings are generally high in calories, fat and sodium, introduced newer food and beverage options that, on average, contain 60 fewer calories than their traditional menu selections in 2012 and 2013. Researchers say this could herald a trend in calorie reduction in anticipation of expected new federal government rules requiring large chain restaurants – including most fast-food places – to post calorie counts on their menus. The appearance ...