New research indicates that the embryos of women who are overweight or obese at the time they conceive display distinct differences in early development compared to embryos from women of a healthy weight. The results of the study, published today in the journal Human Reproduction, provide strong evidence for a direct link between what mothers eat and the ability of their fertilised eggs to divide and grow. The researchers claim this could potentially have long-term health implications for any children born from these embryos. The four key findings of the study, which ...

Just as soldiers on sentry duty constantly adjust their behaviour to match the current threat level, dwarf mongoose sentinels exhibit flexible decision-making in relation to predation risk, new research from the University of Bristol has shown. Biologists Julie Kern and Dr Andy Radford found that decisions about when to go on duty, what position to adopt and how long to remain on post were all affected by information about the likelihood of danger. Sentinels altered their behaviour depending on both environmental conditions, such as wind speed and social signals, such ...

Human communication has long been associated with an unlikely companion, the homing pigeon; but how these pigeons find their way home is still largely a mystery. 'There is widespread agreement that pigeons are able to determine and maintain flight (compass) directions based on solar and magnetic cues,' says Hans-Peter Lipp from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Kwazulu-Natal University, South Africa. However, another piece of the puzzle - how the bird determines its position, known as the map sense - was unclear. Dissatisfied with the current theories - that pigeons ...

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 12, 2014 -- Porcelain crabs can adapt to a warming climate but will not have energy for much else beyond basic survival, according to new research published today from San Francisco State University. The findings have grim long-term implications for intertidal zone crabs as well as the myriad species that depend on them, and could be an indicator of how other intertidal organisms may respond to a rapidly changing climate. The study is detailed in an article published in the Journal of Experimental Biology and is the first to explore intertidal zone ...

(TORONTO, Canada - Nov. 13, 2014) - Prostate cancer researchers have developed a genetic test to identify which men are at highest risk for their prostate cancer to come back after localized treatment with surgery or radiotherapy. The findings are published online today in Lancet Oncology. Study co-leads Dr. Robert Bristow, a clinician-scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, and Dr. Paul Boutros, an investigator at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, report that the gene test provides a much-needed quick and accurate tool to determine with greater precision ...

Rare mutations that shut down a single gene are linked to lower cholesterol levels and a 50 percent reduction in the risk of heart attack, according to new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Broad Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, and other institutions. The gene, called NPC1L1, is of interest because it is the target of the drug ezetimibe, often prescribed to lower cholesterol. The study appears Nov. 12 in The New England Journal of Medicine. Everyone inherits two copies of most genes -- one copy ...

A study in which more than 43,000 children were evaluated for head trauma offers an unprecedented picture of how children most frequently suffer head injuries, report physicians at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine. The findings also indicate how often such incidents result in significant brain injuries, computerized tomography (CT) scans to assess head injuries, and neurosurgery to treat them. In children ages 12 and younger, falls were the most common cause of head injuries. In children ...

Philadelphia, PA, November 12, 2014 - Critical care is defined by life-threatening conditions, which require close evaluation, monitoring, and treatment by appropriately trained health professionals. Cardiovascular care bears these same requirements. In fact, cardiovascular disease will soon surpass even human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the leading cause of mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the latest issue of Global Heart, researchers discuss the challenges of delivering critical care in resource-limited countries. According to Guest Editors Vanessa Kerry, MD, ...

What time is it? The answer, no matter what your initial reference may be -- a wristwatch, a smartphone, or an alarm clock -- will always trace back to the atomic clock. The international standard for time is set by atomic clocks -- room-sized apparatuses that keep time by measuring the natural vibration of atoms in a vacuum. The frequency of atomic vibrations determines the length of one second -- information that is beamed up to GPS satellites, which stream the data to ground receivers all over the world, synchronizing cellular and cable networks, power grids, and ...

(Santa Barbara, California) -- The world is gaining weight and becoming less healthy, and global dietary choices are harming the environment. Those are among the findings of a paper co-authored by David Tilman, a professor in the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and Michael Clark, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, where Tilman also is a professor. In "Global Diets Link Environmental Sustainability and Human Health," published today in the journal Nature, the researchers find that rising incomes and urbanization around the world are ...

MINNEAPOLIS - Taking vitamin B12 and folic acid supplements may not reduce the risk of memory and thinking problems after all, according to a new study published in the November 12, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study is one of the largest to date to test long-term use of supplements and thinking and memory skills. The study involved people with high blood levels of homocysteine, an amino acid. High levels of homocysteine have been linked to memory loss and Alzheimer's disease. "Since homocysteine ...

A protein that may partly explain why human brains are larger than those of other animals has been identified by scientists from two stem-cell labs at UC San Francisco, in research published in the November 13, 2014 issue of Nature. Key experiments by the UCSF researchers revealed that the protein, called PDGFD, is made in growing brains of humans, but not in mice, and appears necessary for normal proliferation of human brain stem cells growing in a lab dish. The scientists made their discovery as part of research in which they identified genes that are activated to ...

U.S. Army soldiers hospitalized with a psychiatric disorder have a significantly elevated suicide risk in the year following discharge from the hospital, according to research from the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers (Army STARRS). The yearly suicide rate for this group, 263.9 per 100,000 soldiers, was far higher than the rate of 18.5 suicides per 100,000 in the Regular Army for the same study period, the study found. The researchers looked at data from the 12 months following a hospital discharge for more than 40,000 anonymous, Regular Army ...

It has long been known that patients recently discharged from psychiatric hospitalizations have a significantly elevated suicide risk. However, the rarity of suicide even in this high-risk segment of the population makes it impractical to justify providing intensive post-hospital suicide prevention programs to all recently discharged patients. Targeted programs for patients at especially high suicide risk would be more feasible, but it is difficult for clinicians to predict with good accuracy which patients are at high risk for suicide. A new report published online today ...

Nearly a quarter of all patients who underwent initial breast conservation surgery (BCS) for breast cancer had a subsequent surgical intervention, according to a report published online by JAMA Surgery. Completely removing breast cancer is seen as the best way to reduce recurrence and improve survival. A lack of consensus on an adequate margin width has led to variable rates of reexcision and, as a result, patients undergo repeat or additional surgeries, according to background information provided in the study. Lee G. Wilke, M.D., of the University of Wisconsin School ...

A study that looked at predicting suicides in U.S. Army soldiers after they are hospitalized for a psychiatric disorder suggests that nearly 53 percent of posthospitalization suicides occurred following the 5 percent of hospitalizations with the highest predicted suicide risk, according to a report in JAMA Psychiatry. The suicide rate in the U.S. Army has increased since 2004 and now exceeds the rate among civilians. Still, suicide is a rare outcome even among recently discharged psychiatric patients. A potentially promising approach to assess posthospitalization suicide ...

SEATTLE - Preterm birth is now the leading cause of death for children under 5 worldwide, and a new scientific paper reveals a startling lack of knowledge about what causes it and how to prevent it. Published in the November issue of Science Translational Medicine, "Prevention of Preterm Birth: Harnessing Science to Address the Global Epidemic" shines a light on the urgent need for a larger, coordinated research effort to discover how to identify women at risk of preterm birth and develop prevention interventions. "There are not enough resources dedicated to researching ...

Older women with disordered breathing during sleep were found to be at greater risk of decline in the ability to perform daily activities, such as grocery shopping and meal preparation, according to a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of California, San Francisco. The study was published Nov. 6 in the online edition of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The findings are notable given the aging of the population - an estimated 3.7 million Americans will turn 65 in 2015, and by 2030, 19 ...

In school-age children previously diagnosed with depression as preschoolers, a key brain region involved in emotion is smaller than in their peers who were not depressed, scientists have shown. The research, by a team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, also suggests that the size of the brain's right anterior insula may predict the risk of future bouts of depression, potentially giving researchers an anatomical marker to identify those at high risk for recurrence. The study is published online Nov. 12 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry. There is ...

One of the world's deadliest mosquitoes sustains its taste for human blood thanks in part to a genetic tweak that makes it more sensitive to human odor, according to new research. Researchers report in the journal Nature that the yellow fever mosquito contains a version of an odor-detecting gene in its antennae that is highly attuned to sulcatone, a compound prevalent in human odor. The researchers found that the gene, AaegOr4, is more abundant and more sensitive in the human-preferring "domestic" form of the yellow fever mosquito than in its ancestral "forest" form that ...

Adding tiny amounts of vegetable puree to milk and then rice at the time of weaning makes children more likely to eat vegetables, new University of Leeds research shows. Infants who consumed either milk (breast milk or formula) followed by rice mixed with vegetable puree ate nearly half as many vegetables again as infants who ate just milk followed by baby rice. Professor Marion Hetherington, of the School of Psychology at the University of Leeds, led the study. She said: "We took inspiration from French mothers, as previous studies in this area have shown that they ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- In its first clinical application in pediatric patients, an investigational medication developed and manufactured at UC Davis has been found to effectively treat children with life-threatening and difficult-to-control epileptic seizures without side effects, according to a research report by scientists at UC Davis and Northwestern University. The investigational formulation of allopregnanolone was manufactured by UC Davis Health System's Good Manufacturing Practice Laboratory. Two children were treated with the allopregnanolone formulation, one ...

LA JOLLA, CA - November 12, 2014 - Driving to work becomes routine--but could you drive the entire way in reverse gear? Humans, like many animals, are accustomed to seeing objects pass behind us as we go forward. Moving backwards feels unnatural. In a new study, scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) reveal that moving forward actually trains the brain to perceive the world normally. The findings also show that the relationship between neurons in the eye and the brain is more complicated than previously thought--in fact, the order in which we see things ...

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. - November 12, 2014) An international collaboration has identified frequent mutations in two genes that often occur together in Ewing sarcoma (EWS) and that define a subtype of the cancer associated with reduced survival. The research, conducted by the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital-Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project and the Institut Curie-Inserm through the International Cancer Genome Consortium, appears in the current issue of the scientific journal Cancer Discovery. Mutations in the genes STAG2 and TP53 have previously been ...

Giant otters may have a vocal repertoire with 22 distinct vocalization types produced by adults and 11 neonate vocalization types, according to a study published November 12, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Christina Mumm and Mirjam Knörnschild from University of Ulm, Germany. Giant otters, found in South America, are very social and frequently vocalizing animals. They live in groups that may vary, but generally include a reproductive pair and their offspring, born in different years. Individuals engage in shared group activities and hold different social ...