WASHINGTON — Which is more likely to convince a smoker to quit? The words, "Warning: cigarettes cause cancer" beneath the image of an open mouth with a cancerous lesion and rotten teeth, or the same image with the words, "Warning: Quitting smoking reduces the risk of cancer"? The answer depends on how confident you are in your ability to quit, according to a study led by researchers at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center and published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research. The research, which involved 740 participants and three D.C. area institutions, ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Aggressive children are less likely to become violent criminals or psychiatrically troubled adults if they receive early intervention, says a new study based on more than two decades of research. These findings from researchers at Duke, Pennsylvania State and Vanderbilt universities and the University of Washington are based on the Fast Track Project, a multi-faceted program that is one of the largest violence-prevention trials ever funded by the federal government. Beginning in 1991, the researchers screened nearly 10,000 5-year-old children in Durham, ...

AUDIO: New research shows that schizophrenia isn't a single disease but a group of eight genetically distinct disorders, each with its own set of symptoms. The finding could be a first... Click here for more information. New research shows that schizophrenia isn't a single disease but a group of eight genetically distinct disorders, each with its own set of symptoms. The finding could be a first step toward improved diagnosis and treatment for the debilitating psychiatric illness. The ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Amid conflicting reports about the need for vitamin E and how much is enough, a new analysis published today suggests that adequate levels of this essential micronutrient are especially critical for the very young, the elderly, and women who are or may become pregnant. A lifelong proper intake of vitamin E is also important, researchers said, but often complicated by the fact that this nutrient is one of the most difficult to obtain through diet alone. It has been estimated that only a tiny fraction of Americans consume enough dietary vitamin E to meet ...

Bethesda, MD (Sept. 15, 2014) — The treatment of Crohn's disease is evolving. To help gastroenterologists better identify and manage their Crohn's disease patients, the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) has created a clinical decision tool to guide GIs in their decision-making process. The "Identification, Assessment, and Initial Medical Treatment in Crohn's Disease Clinical Decision Support Tool," published in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the AGA, synthesizes gastroenterologist's understanding of the disease with data from recent studies to create ...

TORONTO, Sept. 12, 2014 – High-dose opioid prescribing increased by 23 per cent in Canada between 2006 and 2011, despite clinical guidelines recommending that most patients should avoid high-doses of these drugs, according to new research. Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) found that rates of high-dose opioid dispensing across Canada increased from 781 units per 1,000 people in 2006 to 961 units per 1,000 people in 2011. "We found that high-dose prescribing was widespread across the country, but the prevalence ...

The bluetongue virus, which causes a serious disease that costs the cattle and sheep industries in the United States an estimated $125 million annually, manages to survive the winter by reproducing in the insect that transmits it, report veterinary scientists at the University of California, Davis. The findings solve a century-old mystery and are particularly significant as global climate change brings more moderate winter temperatures around the world. The new study appears Sept. 12 in the journal PLOS ONE. "By conducting this epidemiological study on a commercial ...

The image of the Eastern Pacific Ocean and the two storms was taken at 8 a.m. EDT (5 a.m. PDT) on September 12. It shows that Tropical Depression 16E (TD16E) is about 10 times smaller in comparison to Tropical Storm Odile, located to its east. NOAA manages the GOES-West satellite but the image was created by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The National Hurricane Center noted that TD16E is unable to intensify because of its close proximity to Tropical Storm Odile. Forecaster Pasch at NOAA's National Hurricane Center ...

When it comes to a happy marriage, a new Rutgers study finds that the more content the wife is with the long-term union, the happier the husband is with his life no matter how he feels about their nuptials. "I think it comes down to the fact that when a wife is satisfied with the marriage she tends to do a lot more for her husband, which has a positive effect on his life," said Deborah Carr, a professor in the Department of Sociology, School of Arts and Science. "Men tend to be less vocal about their relationships and their level of marital unhappiness might not be ...

Tropical Depression 15W intensified during the early morning hours of September 12 and became a tropical storm re-named "Kalmaegi." NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead as the storm intensified. The MODIS instrument, known as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Storm Kalmaegi approaching the Philippines on Sept. 12 at 4:45 UTC (12:45 a.m. EDT). The image showed tightly-curved bands of thunderstorms over the northern and southern quadrants of the storm that were wrapping into a ...

The sixth tropical depression of the Atlantic Ocean hurricane season formed in the central Atlantic Ocean yesterday, and today, September 12, it strengthened into Tropical Storm Edouard. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite flew over Edouard and provided forecasters with an infrared view of what's happening within the strengthening storm. When Suomi NPP passed over Edouard on September 12 at 04:37 UTC (12:37 a.m. EDT), the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite or VIIRS instrument aboard captured an infrared image of the storm. The infrared data shows temperature, an indicated ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Sept. 12, 2014 — Physicians envision a future in which genomic data from patients is heavily used to manage care — but experts have questioned the accuracy and reliability of these analyses. Now, a study by 150 researchers in 12 countries finds real strength and agreement across RNA genomic sequencing techniques and laboratories — as well as ways to improve what little variability exists to set a new high standard. The results of the study were published in Nature Biotechnology in three separate research articles. These results should provide assurance ...

As Tropical Storm Odile continues to affect Mexico's west coast and stir up dangerous surf, NASA's TRMM and Aqua satellites provided forecasters information on clouds and rainfall in the coast-hugging storm. On September 12, A Tropical Storm Watch remained in effect from Manzanillo to Cabo Corrientes, Mexico. Tropical Storm Odile formed on September 10, 2014 in the same area where Norbert formed. Gathering Rainfall and Thunderstorm Height Information The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite flew over tropical storm Odile on September 11, 2014 at ...

Applying analyses designed by City College of New York biologist Mike Hickerson, a team of international researchers is challenging a commonly held view that explains how so many species of birds ended up in the Neotropics, an area rich in rain forest extending from Mexico to the southernmost tip of South America. It is home to the most bird species on Earth. "The unanswered question has been—how did this extraordinary bird diversity originate?" said Dr. Brian Smith, lead author of a paper on the subject published in the journal Nature this week and an assistant curator ...

The central mystery of quantum mechanics is that small chunks of matter sometimes seem to behave like particles, sometimes like waves. For most of the past century, the prevailing explanation of this conundrum has been what's called the "Copenhagen interpretation" — which holds that, in some sense, a single particle really is a wave, smeared out across the universe, that collapses into a determinate location only when observed. But some founders of quantum physics — notably Louis de Broglie — championed an alternative interpretation, known as "pilot-wave theory," which ...

When corn plants come under attack from a pathogen, they sometimes respond by killing their own cells near the site of the attack, committing "cell suicide" to thwart further damage from the attacker. This cell sacrifice can cause very small, often microscopic, spots or lesions on the plant. But up until now it's been difficult to understand how the plant regulates this "spotty" defense mechanism because the response is so quick and localized. Researchers at North Carolina State University have identified a number of candidate genes and cellular processes that appear ...

AUDIO: Professor Peter Piot, Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, explains how he co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976, and gives his views on the current Ebola... Click here for more information. The current Ebola outbreak now requires a "rapid response at a massive global scale", according to experts at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Writing an editorial in Science, Professor Peter Piot, co-discoverer of the virus, says that the ...

A strange thing happened on the way to dealing with climate change: Advances in hydraulic fracturing put trillions of dollars' worth of previously unreachable oil and natural gas within humanity's grasp. The environmental costs – and benefits – from "fracking," which requires blasting huge amounts of water, sand and chemicals deep into underground rock formations, are the subject of new research that synthesizes 165 academic studies and government databases. The survey covers not only greenhouse gas impacts but also fracking's influence on local air pollution, earthquakes ...

Porcine neonatal coccidiosis is a serious parasitic infection of young piglets that severely damages the intestinal mucosa, leading to diarrhoea and reduced nutritional intake. As the infection reduces animal growth, and because secondary infections can result in increased mortality, the disease is responsible for substantial economic losses at affected pig farms. "The developing immune system of neonatal piglets is not yet mature enough to deal with the parasites. For this reason, an infection shortly after birth results in weakened intestinal tissue with appropriate ...

Richard Feynman famously posed the question in 1959: is it possible to see and manipulate individual atoms in materials? For a time his vision seemed more science fiction than science, but starting with groundbreaking experiments in the late 1980s and more recent developments in electron microscopy instrumentation it has become scientific reality. However, damage caused by the electron beam is often an issue in such experiments. The present study focused on single-layer graphene with silicon atoms embedded into the lattice, previously created and studied by the collaborators ...

Cloud computing involves displacing data storage and processing from the user's computer on to remote servers. It can provide users with more storage space and computing power that they can then access from anywhere in the world rather than having to connect to a single desktop or other computer with its finite resources. However, some observers have raised concerns about the increased energy demands of sustaining distributed servers and having them up and running continuously, where an individual user's laptop might be shut down when it is not in use or the resources utilization ...

Thoughts of the family tree may not be uppermost in the mind of a person suffering from a slipped disc, but those spinal discs provide a window into our evolutionary past. They are remnants of the first vertebrate skeleton, whose origins now appear to be older than had been assumed. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, have found that, unexpectedly, this skeleton most likely evolved from a muscle. The study, carried out in collaboration with researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Janelia Farm, USA, is published ...

Switching the polarity of a magnet using an electric field (magnetoelectric memory [MEM] effect), can be a working principle of the next-generation technology for information processing and storage. Multiferroic materials are promising candidates for the MEM effect, due to the coexistence of electric and magnetic orders. On the other hand, the coexistence of spontaneous electric and magnetic polarizations is rare in known materials, which hinders the application potential of the MEM effect. This article briefly reviews a new family of multiferroic materials—hexagonal rare ...

Whatever the origin and condition of extraction of type I collagen fibrils, in vitro as well as in vivo, the radii of their circular circular cross sections stay distributed in a range going from 50 to 100 nm for the most part of them. Jean Charvolin and Jean-Francois Sadoc from the solid state physique laboratory at the Paris-Sud University propose therefore that, once the growth of the fibrils has been triggered by external biological factors, their lateral size be limited by internal physical stresses generated during the growth. Their conjecture is based ...

This paper makes a connection between the quantum group SLq(2), which described knots, and the elementary particles of the standard model. The elements of the fundamental (j = 1/2) representation of SLq(2) are interpreted as creation operators for preons. The preons interact through a preonic vector field defined by elements of the adjoint (j = 1) representation. The leptons and quarks then appear (as required by the electroweak data) as elements of the j = 3/2 representation. Unexpectedly the electroweak quantum numbers of the so defined preons, leptons, and quarks agree ...