New Rochelle, NY, August 18, 2014—While much attention has focused on the link between violent video game playing and aggression among youths, a new study finds significantly increased signs of depression among preteens with high daily exposure to violent video games. The details and implications of this important new study are described in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking website. Susan R. Tortolero, ...

A UK study published in the American Journal of Human Biology has found that smoking during pregnancy has discernible effects on the growth of a woman's future grandkids. With non-smoking mothers, if a paternal grandmother smoked during pregnancy, her granddaughters tended to be taller and both her granddaughters and grandsons tended to have greater bone mass and lean (muscle) mass. If a maternal grandmother smoked during pregnancy, her grandsons became heavier than expected during adolescence, with increased lean mass, grip strength and cardiovascular fitness. When ...

New research in gorillas that were affected by an Ebola virus outbreak shows that disease can influence reproductive potential, immigration and social dynamics, and it highlights the need to develop complex models that integrate all the different impacts of a disease. This approach requires long-term monitoring of wildlife populations to understand the responses of populations to emerging changes in the environment, according to the Journal of Animal Ecology study. "Along with the decrease in survival and in reproduction, Ebola outbreak perturbed social dynamics in ...

Beverly, MA, August 18, 2014 – Investigators from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have successfully transplanted hearts from genetically engineered piglets into baboons' abdomens and had the hearts survive for more than one year, twice as long as previously reported. This was achieved by using genetically engineered porcine donors and a more focused immunosuppression regimen in the baboon recipients, according to a study published in The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, an official publication ...

In a world warmed by rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, precipitation patterns are going to change because of two factors: one, warmer air can hold more water; and two, changing atmospheric circulation patterns will shift where rain falls. According to previous model research, mid- to high-latitude precipitation is expected to increase by as much as 50%. Yet the reasons why models predict this are hard to tease out. Using a series of highly idealized model runs, Lu et al. found that ocean warming should cause atmospheric precipitation bands to shift toward ...

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a common affliction, affecting almost 30 percent of Americans, with a significant number suffering from its most severe form, called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis or NASH, which can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer. In recent years, NASH has become the leading cause of liver transplantation. Development of effective new therapies for preventing or treating NASH has been stymied by limited small animal models for the disease. In a paper published online in Cancer Cell, scientists at the University of California, San Diego ...

It's time to question the common belief that patients receiving intensive blood pressure treatment are prone to falling and breaking bones. A comprehensive study in people ages 40 to 79 with diabetes, led by Karen Margolis, MD, of HealthPartners Institute for Education and Research in the US, found no evidence supporting this belief. The study¹ appears in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer. Evidence from various clinical trials shows that cardiovascular events such as strokes can be prevented by treating high blood pressure (hypertension). ...

August 18, 2014: An international team of conservationist scientists and practitioners has published new research showing the precarious state of the world's primary forests. The global analysis and map are featured in a paper appearing in the esteemed journal Conservation Letters and reveals that only five percent of the world's pre-agricultural primary forest cover is now found in protected areas. Led by Professor Brendan Mackey, Director of the Climate Change Response Program at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, the authors are experts in forest ecology, ...

There is nothing like a head cold to make us feel a little dazed. We get things like colds and the flu because of changes in our immune system. Researchers have a good idea what causes immune system changes on Earth—think stress, inadequate sleep and improper nutrition. But the results of two NASA collaborative investigations—Validation of Procedures for Monitoring Crewmember Immune Function (Integrated Immune) and Clinical Nutrition Assessment of ISS Astronauts, SMO-016E (Clinical Nutrition Assessment)—recently published in the Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research ...

New York, NY—August 18, 2014—The web can be an opaque black box: it leverages our personal information without our knowledge or control. When, for instance, a user sees an ad about depression online, she may not realize that she is seeing it because she recently sent an email about being sad. Roxana Geambasu and Augustin Chaintreau, both assistant professors of computer science at Columbia Engineering, are seeking to change that, and in doing so bring more transparency to the web. Along with their PhD student, Mathias Lecuyer, the researchers have developed XRay, a new ...

A new species of the Boophis rappiodes group is described from the hidden streams of Ankarafa Forest, northwest of Madagascar. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys. The new species Boophis ankarafensis is green in colour with bright red speckling across its head and back, but what truly distinguishes this species is a high genetic divergence and different call with a triple click, compared to the usual double. All individuals were detected from the banks of two streams in Ankarafa Forest. The new species represents the only member of the B. ...

When it comes to understanding America's coastal fisheries, anecdotes are gripping – stories of a choking algae bloom, or a bay's struggle with commercial development. But when it comes to taking action, there's no beating big data. In this week's edition of Estuaries and Coasts, a Michigan State University doctoral student joins with others to give a sweeping assessment to understand how human activities are affecting estuaries, the nation's sounds, bays, gulfs and bayous. These are places where freshwater flows into the oceans, and the needs of the people blend with ...

This news release is available in German. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics (MPI-IE) in Freiburg re-activated expression of an ancient gene, which is not normally expressed in the mammalian immune system, and found that the animals developed a fish-like thymus. To the researchers surprise, while the mammalian thymus is utilized exclusively for T cell maturation, the reset thymus produced not only T cells, but also served as a maturation site for B cells – a property normally seen only in the thymus of fish. Thus the model ...

WASHINGTON (Aug. 18, 2014) — Methods used to demonstrate the impact of faculty development programs have long been lacking. A research report from the George Washington University (GW) introduces a new model to demonstrate how faculty development programming can affect institutional behaviors, beyond the individual participant. "Faculty development is essential for helping medical education faculty meet the demands of their roles as teachers, scholars, administrators, and leaders," said co-author Ellen Goldman, MBA, Ed.D., associate professor of clinical research and ...

Until battery cost is cut down to $100 per kilowatt hour, the majority of U.S. consumers for battery electric vehicles (BEV) will be better off by choosing an electric vehicle with a range below 100 miles, according to a new study in the Articles in Advance section of Transportation Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The research suggests reconsideration of the R&D goal that battery electric vehicles should have a driving range similar to that of conventional vehicles. It also implies that the focus of policy ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Researchers at Rhode Island Hospital, Veterans Affair Medical Center in Providence and University of Rhode Island have found that a free fatty acid, made up of compounds similar to those naturally made in the body, may be as effective at fighting certain infections as antibiotics. The study is published online in advance of print in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. "More and more bacteria are developing resistance to commonly used antibiotics," said Leonard Mermel, D.O., medical director of the department of epidemiology and infection control ...

While the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 is typically blamed on human, design and construction errors, a new Significance paper points to 2 other unfavorable factors outside human control: there were a greater number of icebergs than normal that year, and weather conditions had driven them further south, and earlier in the year, than was usual. The paper also notes that iceberg discharge from glaciers is increasing, with more heavy iceberg years since the 1980s than before, and increasing global warming will likely cause this trend to continue. "As use of the Arctic ...

Members of the brown argus butterfly species that moved north in response to recent climate change have evolved a narrower diet dependent on wild Geranium plants, UK researchers report. However, butterflies that did not move north have more diverse diets, including plants such as Rockrose that are abundant in southern parts of the UK. So although rapid evolutionary changes have allowed the brown argus to move north and track the warming climate, they have led to a more restricted diet. This increased specialization may limit this butterfly's continued spread north, ...

While media attention has been focused recently on coronavirus cases in the Arabian peninsula and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, experts note that another threat lies in the spread of Chikungunya fever, an illness that is transmitted by mosquitoes and can cause fever, joint and muscle pain, headaches, and rashes. While it does not often cause death, the symptoms can be severe and disabling, with no treatment available. The potential for worldwide spread of Chikungunya virus is much higher than the risk of dissemination of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Practicing hatha yoga three times a week for eight weeks improved sedentary older adults' performance on cognitive tasks that are relevant to everyday life, researchers report. The findings involved 108 adults between the ages of 55 and 79 years of age, 61 of whom attended hatha yoga classes. The others met for the same number and length of sessions and engaged in stretching and toning exercises instead of yoga. At the end of the eight weeks, the yoga group was speedier and more accurate on tests of information recall, mental flexibility and task-switching ...

Researchers from Aarhus University, Denmark, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, have developed a new approach to measure the combined exposure of species to both climate and land use change. This new metric was used to assess the risk to species in the face of combined rates of climate and land use for the US from 2001 to 2051. Their results, which have just been published in Nature Climate Change, highlight areas expected to be most vulnerable to losses in biodiversity and ecosystem function due to the individual or combined effects of climate and land use ...

Scientists from the Biogerontology Research Foundation (BGRF), a UK-based charity founded to support ageing research and address the challenges of a rapidly ageing population, propose a new concept for signalome-wide analysis of changes in intracellular pathways, called OncoFinder, which allows for accurate and robust cross-platform analysis of gene expression data. This new technique will allow scientists to derive useful information from and compare the hundreds of thousands of data sets obtained using legacy equipment as well as data sets obtained from biological samples ...

New simple and effective methods are needed to better evaluate the outcomes of repair using nerve conduits in vivo. Ultrasound is a common noninvasive clinical detection modality that has been used in many fields. However, ultrasound has only rarely been used to observe implanted nerve conduits in vivo. Hongkui Wang and co-workers from Affiliated Hospital of Nantong University report the first use of ultrasound to noninvasively observe the changes in chitosan nerve conduits implanted in rats over time. The ultrasound imaging clearly showed whether there are unsatisfactory ...

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) containing various growth factors can promote nerve regeneration. An inside-out vein graft can substitute nerve autograft to repair short nerve defects. It is hypothesized that an inside-out vein graft filled with platelet-rich plasma shows better effects in the repair of short sciatic nerve defects. In a study reported on the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 14, 2014), an inside-out vein autograft filled with platelet-rich plasma was used to bridge a 10 mm-long sciatic nerve defect in rats. At 6 and 8 weeks, the sciatic nerve function ...

A specialized subset of lung cells can shake flu infection, yet they remain stamped with an inflammatory gene signature that wreaks havoc in the lung, according to a study published in The Journal of Experimental Medicine. Seasonal flu is caused by influenza virus, which can infect a variety of cell types in the lung. Infected cells are typically destroyed by the virus itself or by immune cells that attack infected cells. The resulting inflammation can linger on long after the virus has been eliminated leading to persistent symptoms and, in some cases, severe tissue damage. Club ...