BOSTON, MA - Healthcare spending is at an all-time high in the U.S., yet young African-American men see little benefit, according to Boston Medical Center (BMC) researchers' Viewpoint commentary published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The researchers note that black men have a life expectancy nearly five years less than white men. While heart disease and cancer contribute to this decreased life expectancy, homicide also plays a large role. From ages 1 to 14, homicide is either the second or third leading cause of death ...

As obesity rates rise, so does the incidence of type 2 diabetes (T2D). In obese individuals and those with obesity-induced T2D, there is an accumulation of immune cells within adipose tissue that results in a low level of chronic inflammation. Gut microbial populations are also altered in these individuals. Weight loss, either through diet or gastric bypass, improves TD2-associated symptoms and shifts the gut microbiota. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation reports that a population of T cells known as mucosal-associated invariant T (MAIT) cells is altered ...

Fast Facts: U.S. adults with a history of using some nonaddictive psychedelic drugs had reduced likelihood of psychological distress and suicidal thoughts, plans, and attempts, according to data from a nationwide survey. While these psychedelic drugs are illegal, a Johns Hopkins researcher and study author recommends reconsidering their status, as they may be useful in treating depression. Some people have serious adverse reactions to these drugs, which may not stand out in the survey data because they are less numerous than positive outcomes. A history of ...

Fast Facts: Medicine-loaded nanoparticles show promise for humans needing corneal transplants. Tiny nanoparticles may be solution for medicine compliance. Animal study gives patients, family members and clinicians hope for more easily managing medicine after eye surgery. There are about 48,000 corneal transplants done each year in the U.S., compared to approximately 16,000 kidney transplants and 2,100 heart transplants [1] [2]. Out of the 48,000 corneal transplants done, 10 percent of them end up in rejection, largely due to poor medication compliance. This ...

More than 300 years ago, three African-born slaves died on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. No written records memorialized their fate, and their names and precise ethnic background remained a mystery. For centuries, their skeletons were subjected to the hot, wet weather of the tropical island until they were unearthed in 2010 during a construction project in the Zoutsteeg area of the capital city of Philipsburg. Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of Copenhagen have extracted and sequenced tiny bits of DNA remaining ...

Caltech scientists, inspired by a chemical process found in leaves, have developed an electrically conductive film that could help pave the way for devices capable of harnessing sunlight to split water into hydrogen fuel. When applied to semiconducting materials such as silicon, the nickel oxide film prevents rust buildup and facilitates an important chemical process in the solar-driven production of fuels such as methane or hydrogen. "We have developed a new type of protective coating that enables a key process in the solar-driven production of fuels to be performed ...

People of differing competence tend to give each other's views equal weight, preventing them from making the best group decisions, finds new UCL-led research. This suggests that people with similar levels of competence make the best decision-making groups, as otherwise the tendency to assume equal competence can give undue weight to the opinions of less capable members. The new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigated how pairs of people with differing competence weighted their own judgements against each other's. Researchers ...

This news release is available in German. Reproduction at old age involves risks that may impact one's own life and may impose reduced biological fitness on the offspring. Such evidence, previously obtained in humans and other taxa under laboratory conditions, has now been confirmed by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen together with colleagues from the UK and New Zealand for the first time in free-living animals. In a long-term study on a population of house sparrows they found that offspring of older parents themselves produced ...

Nearly three out of four Chinese adults have poor cardiovascular health, with poor diet and growing rates of obesity compounding the risks associated with continuing high rates of smoking, according to a new survey published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The 2010 China Noncommunicable Disease Surveillance Group collected cardiovascular health data from a nationally representative sample of more than 96,000 men and women in the general Chinese population. According to estimates derived from the survey results, just 0.2 percent of Chinese men and ...

People in a society are bound together by a set of connections - a social network. Cooperation between people in the network is essential for societies to prosper, and the question of what drives the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental one. What we know about other people in a network informs how much we are willing to cooperate with them. By conducting a series of online experiments, researchers explored how two key areas of network knowledge effect cooperation in decision-making: what we know about the reputation and social connections of those ...

A new study suggests that increases in atmospheric CO2 could intensify extreme droughts in tropical and subtropical regions -- such as Australia, the southwest and central United States, and southern Amazonia -- at much a faster rate than previously anticipated, explains University of Texas at Austin professor Rong Fu in a commentary in the March 9 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Fu, a professor at the university's Jackson School of Geosciences, writes about a new study by William K.M. Lau of the University of Maryland and Kyu-Myong Kim of the ...

Once green, the Sahara expanded 5,500 years ago, leading ancient herders to follow the rain and grasslands south to eastern Africa. But about 2,000 years ago, their southward migration stalled out, stopped in its tracks, archaeologists presumed, by tsetse-infested bush and disease. As the theory goes, the tiny tsetse fly altered the course of history, stopping the spread of domesticated animal herding with a bite that carries sleeping sickness and nagana, diseases often fatal for the herder and the herded. Now, isotopic research on animal remains from a nearly 2,000-year-old ...

Despite extensive historical knowledge about the African slave trade - including trends in the volume and demographics of the roughly 12 million people shipped from West and West Central Africa to the New World between 1500 and 1850 - fundamental details about their ethnic and geographical origins remain elusive. Dr. Hannes Schroeder from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum, University of Copenhagen, who led the study, explains: - There are historical records - merchant ledgers, shipping records and the like - but they tend to refer to coastal shipping ...

In the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa, whose death toll is approaching 10,000, little information has been available about how the human immune response unfolds after infection. Researchers from Emory and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have now obtained a first look at the immune responses in four Ebola virus disease survivors who received care at Emory University Hospital in 2014, by closely examining their T cells and B cells during the acute phase of the disease. The findings reveal surprisingly high levels of immune activation, and have implications ...

March 9, 2015 PITTSBURGH--To fully understand how nanomaterials behave, one must also understand the atomic-scale deformation mechanisms that determine their structure and, therefore, their strength and function. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, Drexel University, and Georgia Tech have engineered a new way to observe and study these mechanisms and, in doing so, have revealed an interesting phenomenon in a well-known material, tungsten. The group is the first to observe atomic-level deformation twinning in body-centered cubic (BCC) tungsten nanocrystals. ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Children whose parents think they're God's gift to the world do tend to outshine their peers - in narcissism. In a study that aimed to find the origins of narcissism, researchers surveyed parents and their children four times over one-and-a-half years to see if they could identify which factors led children to have inflated views of themselves. Results showed that parents who "overvalued" their children when the study began ended up with children who scored higher on tests of narcissism later on. Overvalued children were described by their parents ...

A new study of Tourette syndrome (TS) led by researchers from UC San Francisco and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has found that nearly 86 percent of patients who seek treatment for TS will be diagnosed with a second psychiatric disorder during their lifetimes, and that nearly 58 percent will receive two or more such diagnoses. It has long been known that TS, which emerges in childhood and is characterized by troublesome motor and vocal tics, is often accompanied by other disorders, especially attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive ...

If advanced biofuels are to replace gasoline, diesel and jet fuel on a gallon-for-gallon basis at competitive pricing, we're going to need a new generation of fuel crops - plants designed specifically to serve as feedstocks for fuels. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have demonstrated the power of a new ally in this effort - proteomics! In a study led by Benjamin Schwessinger, a grass geneticist with JBEI's Feedstocks Division, researchers used advanced proteomic techniques to identify 1,750 unique proteins in shoots ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- The discovery of the "exercise hormone" irisin three years ago and more than 170 related papers about it since have been called into question by recent research showing they were based on flawed testing kits. Previous studies suggested that the hormone irisin -- named for the Greek messenger goddess Iris -- travels from muscle to fat tissue after exercise to tell fat cells to start burning energy instead of storing it. The finding ignited hope and press coverage that irisin could hold the key to fighting diabetes and obesity, perhaps one day taking the ...

In a study that helps to deconstruct how olfaction is encoded in the brain, neuroscientists at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a type of neuron that appears to help tune, amplify and dampen neuronal responses to chemosensory inputs from the nasal cavity. The study, published March 9 in Nature Neuroscience, has applications to understanding the root cause of epileptic seizures, which are frequently centered in the olfactory cortex, the part of the brain that processes the sense of smell. "Our sense of smell is complex and involves ...

A new class of drugs identified and validated by Mayo Clinic researchers along with collaborators at Scripps Research Institute and others, clearly reduces health problems in mice by limiting the effect of senescent cells -- cells that contribute to frailty and diseases associated with age. The researchers say this is a first step toward developing similar treatments for aging patients. Their findings appear today in the journal Aging Cell. "If translatable to humans -- which makes sense as we were using human cells in many of the tests - this type of therapy could keep ...

Irvine, Calif., March 9, 2015 -- Long the stuff of science fiction, the disembodied "brain in a jar" is providing science fact for UC Irvine researchers, who by studying the whole brains of fruit flies are discovering the inner mechanisms of jet lag. To do this, Todd C. Holmes, professor of physiology & biophysics in the UCI School of Medicine, and colleagues used imaging technology to make movies of fruit fly brains kept alive for six days in a petri dish. The scientists captured the activity of individual circadian clocks at single-cell resolution with an extremely ...

More than two years after Washington legalized marijuana, parents and teens may be hazy on the specifics of the law, if the findings of a new study are any indication. University of Washington research, published recently in Substance Use & Misuse, found that only 57 percent of Washington parents surveyed knew the legal age for recreational marijuana use and just 63 percent knew that homegrown marijuana is illegal under the law. And while 71 percent of 10th-graders correctly identified the legal age, fewer than half (49 percent) knew how much marijuana can legally ...

MISSOULA - Researchers at the University of Montana, Princeton University, Stanford University and Rutgers University, among others, are collecting new measurements of tropical forests to gain a better understanding of how they respond to seasonal climate variations. The new information helps predict how the global tropics may react to future climate change. These findings are detailed in a paper titled "Photosynthetic seasonality of global tropical forests constrained by hydroclimate," which was published in Nature Geoscience this month. "A better understanding ...

The relationship between human disease and environmental management has been the subject of extensive research, especially given the recent outbreaks of Ebola, SARS and other zoonotic infectious diseases that transmit from animals to humans. The fieldwork of UC Santa Barbara community ecologist Hillary Young is a good example of researchers' continuing effort to understand exactly how environmental management affects disease emergence. In East Africa, Young examines the direct impacts of human disturbance on landscape and wildlife, as well as a variety of factors affecting ...