London/Zurich, May 13, 2015: Children in European countries tend to report higher levels of satisfaction with their friendships while children in African countries tend to be happier with their school lives. Children in northern European countries are particularly dissatisfied with their appearance and self-confidence. Most of the 50,000 children in the 15 countries rated their satisfaction with life as a whole (on a scale from zero to ten) positively, but the percentage of children with very high well-being (10 out of 10) varied from around 78% in Turkey and 77% in Romania ...

The time needed to genetically sequence the bacteria causing tuberculosis (Mtb) from patient samples has been reduced from weeks to days using a new technique developed by a UCL-led team. This could help health service providers to better treat disease, control transmission of this infection, and monitor outbreaks. Tuberculosis (TB) disease rates in some parts of London are as high as in Sub-Saharan Africa, and drug-resistant strains are becoming increasingly common. These require specific treatments, and if doctors know that a bug is resistant they can start therapy ...

A new study published today in the journal Addiction has compiled the best, most up-to-date evidence on addictive disorders globally. It shows that almost 5% of the world's adult population (240 million people) have an alcohol use disorder and more than 20% (1 billion people) smoke tobacco. Getting good data on other drugs such as heroin and cannabis is much more difficult but for comparison the number of people injecting drugs is estimated at around 15 million worldwide. The "Global Statistics on Addictive Behaviours: 2014 Status Report" goes further in showing that ...

Roughly 1 in 4 women having breast conserving surgery (BCS) return to the surgical suite for further resection because of cancerous tissue left behind due to unclear margins. Investigators at the Optics in Medicine Lab at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering and Norris Cotton Cancer Center, led by Brian W. Pogue, PhD and Keith Paulsen PhD, with first author and PhD candidate David M. McClatchy III, devised a novel approach to perform near infrared (NIR) optical measurements of resected breast tissue after the margins have had their traditional marking by the surgeon ...

(Boston)--Repetitive head injuries that occur during contact sports and military service may accelerate the aging process by increasing the build-up of beta-amyloid in the brain, leading to worse disease and an increased likelihood of developing dementia. In particular, boxers fared the worst among athletes and military veterans with a history of head injuries. These findings, which currently appear online in the journal Acta Neuropathologica, is the first to establish the age-dependent deposition of beta-amyloid in chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and may lead ...

URBANA, Ill -- Wetlands created 20 years ago between tile-drained agricultural fields and the Embarras River were recently revisited for a new two-year University of Illinois research project. Results show an overall 62 percent nitrate removal rate and little emission of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. "Slowing down the rate of flow of the water by intercepting it in the wetland is what helps to remove the nitrate," says Mark David, a University of Illinois biogeochemist in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. "The vegetation that ...

The act of identifying a perpetrator does not just involve memory and thinking, but also constitutes a moral decision. This is because, by the act of identifying or not identifying someone, the eyewitness runs the risk of either convicting an innocent person or letting a guilty person go free. In an article published recently in Archives of Scientific Psychology, Spring et al. (2015) discuss two studies in which children and adolescents of different ages watched a film involving a potential wrong-doing: throwing a lit birthday cake into a wastebasket, either with or without ...

A new study published today in the journal Addiction has compiled the best, most up-to-date evidence on addictive disorders globally. It shows that almost 5% of the world's adult population (240 million people) have an alcohol use disorder and more than 20% (1 billion people) smoke tobacco. Getting good data on other drugs such as heroin and cannabis is much more difficult but for comparison the number of people injecting drugs is estimated at around 15 million worldwide. The "Global Statistics on Addictive Behaviours: 2014 Status Report" goes further in showing that ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Tinnitus is the most common service-related disability for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Often described as a ringing in the ears, more than 1.5 million former service members, one out of every two combat veterans, report having this sometimes debilitating condition, resulting in more than $2 billion dollars in annual disability payments by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Tinnitus is largely a mystery, a phantom sound heard in the absence of actual sound. Tinnitus patients "hear" ringing, buzzing or hissing in their ears much like ...

Transgenic Huntington's disease monkeys show similarity to humans with Huntington's in their progressive neurodegeneration and decline of motor control, scientists from Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, report. These findings are promising for developing a preclinical, large animal model of Huntington's disease for assessing new therapeutics, which could ultimately provide better treatment options, including altering the course of the disease. In this first multiyear study on a transgenic nonhuman primate model for Huntington's, lead author ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Lemur girls behave more like the guys, thanks to a little testosterone, according to a new study. Males rule in most of the animal world. But when it comes to conventional gender roles, lemurs -- distant primate cousins of ours -- buck the trend. It's not uncommon for lady lemurs to bite their mates, snatch a piece of fruit from their hands, whack them in the head or shove them out of prime sleeping spots. Females mark their territories with distinctive scents just as often as the males do. Males often don't take their share of a meal until the females ...

BROOKLYN, New York -- Researchers have demonstrated a new metal matrix composite that is so light that it can float on water. A boat made of such lightweight composites will not sink despite damage to its structure. The new material also promises to improve automotive fuel economy because it combines light weight with heat resistance. Although syntactic foams have been around for many years, this is the first development of a lightweight metal matrix syntactic foam. It is the work of a team of researchers from Deep Springs Technology (DST) and the New York University ...

The sun was just beginning to rise as two men headed down to the beach to board a small inflatable boat. Searching for abalone was on their agenda for the day. Their excitement was difficult to contain as they surveyed the coastline looking for sand ridges -- an important clue that abalone may be near. The two men, David Witting and Bill Hagey, share a passion for finding the now rare white abalone and understanding the movement and feeding behaviors of all abalone species. David Witting, a NOAA Fisheries biologist, has been engaged in efforts to restore abalone populations ...

Many of us are familiar with electrolytic splitting of water from their school days: if you hold two electrodes into an aqueous electrolyte and apply a sufficient voltage, gas bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen are formed. If this voltage is generated by sunlight in a solar cell, then you could store solar energy by generating hydrogen gas.This is because hydrogen is a versatile medium of storing and using "chemical energy". Research teams all over the world are therefore working hard to develop compact, robust, and cost-effective systems that can accomplish this challenge. ...

For the first time, a researcher at the University of Waterloo has theoretically demonstrated that it is possible to detect a single nuclear spin at room temperature, which could pave the way for new approaches to medical diagnostics. Published in the journal Nature nanotechnology this week, Amir Yacoby from the University of Waterloo, along with colleagues from University of Basel and RWTH Aachen University, propose a theoretical scheme that could lead to enhanced Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) imaging of biological materials in the near future by using weak magnetic ...

TORONTO, ON -- "Cloudy for the morning, turning to clear with scorching heat in the afternoon." While this might describe a typical late-summer day in many places on Earth, it may also apply to planets outside our solar system, according to a new study by an international team of astrophysicists from the University of Toronto, York University and Queen's University Belfast. Using sensitive observations from the Kepler space telescope, the researchers have uncovered evidence of daily weather cycles on six extra-solar planets seen to exhibit different phases. Such phase ...

In a new study published in the Protein & Cell, Chen-Yu Zhang's group at Nanjing University reports that small non-coding RNAs in maternal food can transfer through placenta to regulate fetal gene expression. MicroRNAs (miRNA) are a class of noncoding RNAs with lengths of approximately 22 nucleotides that bind to target messenger RNAs to inhibit protein translation. In previous studies, the same group has found that plant miRNAs can enter into the host blood and tissues via the route of food-intake. The food-derived exogenous miRNAs are absorbed, packaged into microvesical ...

WASHINGTON, DC -- May 12, 2015-- A multidisciplinary group of US-based researchers has shown that the mixture of species found within natural bacterial communities in the environment can accurately predict the presence of contaminants such as uranium, nitrate, and oil. The findings, published this week in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, show that the rapid sequencing of microbiomes in place at environmental sites can be used to monitor damage caused by human activity. "This approach might be a general way for us to see anthropogenic ...

Nerve cells that produce dopamine for the purpose of transmitting signals to other cells affect numerous crucial brain functions. This becomes evident in diseases such as Parkinson's and schizophrenia, where dopamine transmission in the brain is impaired. In collaboration with researchers from Bonn, RUB scientists at the Mercator Research Group "Structure of Memory" have now identified in what way a specific form of this important cell is generated and which networks it forms in the course of brain development. In the process, the researchers discovered a data highway of ...

Amsterdam, May 12, 2015 - Wearable E-skin that can measure heart rate and blood pressure, and paper diagnostic machines the size of a credit card that can give instant readings on blood and saliva samples are two new bio-sensing technologies presented at Elsevier's 4th International Conference on Bio-Sensing Technology in Lisbon, Portugal on 12 May 2015. Bio-sensors can detect and analyze data to give patients information on their heart rate and blood pressure, blood sugar and hormone levels, and even test whether they are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--MAY 11, 2015--Scientists have discovered a way to regrow bone tissue using the protein signals produced by stem cells. This technology could help treat victims who have experienced major trauma to a limb, like soldiers wounded in combat or casualties of a natural disaster. The new method improves on older therapies by providing a sustainable source for fresh tissue and reducing the risk of tumor formation that can arise with stem cell transplants. The new study, published in Scientific Reports, is is the first to extract the necessary bone-producing ...

First there were canaries in coal mines, now there are microbes at nuclear waste sites, oil spills and other contaminated environments. A multi-institutional team of more than 30 scientists has found that statistical analysis of DNA from natural microbial communities can be used to accurately identify environmental contaminants and serve as quantitative geochemical biosensors. This study was sponsored by ENIGMA, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science "Scientific Focus Area Program" based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). "Changes ...

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University combined finely crafted nanoparticles with one of nature's potent disrupters to prevent the spread of triple-negative breast cancer in mouse models. The highly aggressive cancer subtype is difficult to manage and, currently, the FDA has no approved targeted treatments. But striking results from a new study, published in the journal Cancer Research make the researchers optimistic they have a potential game-changer for triple negative cancer and more. "There are multiple targets within a cell," said William Schiemann, professor ...

Pregnant women who exercise can significantly lower the risk of undergoing Caesarean sections and giving birth to large babies, a University of Alberta study has found. Prenatal exercise has been suggested to be a means to prevent childhood obesity through a "normalization" in birth weight (ie. reducing the risk of having a large baby at birth). University of Alberta researchers conducted a meta-analysis to analyze 28 randomized control studies encompassing 5,322 women that looked at the influence of maternal exercise on baby outcomes. "We found that women who exercised ...

In a study that compared three sites within the Dja Conservation Complex in Cameroon, Africa, investigators found that the presence of a conservation research project acts as a deterrent to chimpanzee and gorilla poachers, and community awareness and involvement in research lead to an increased value of apes and intact forests to local people, thus limiting hunting practices. The results provide evidence that the mere existence of research programs exerts a positive impact on the conservation of wildlife in their natural habitats. "It's important to recognize the effectiveness ...