Immigrants may experience less racism and receive more support when white American citizens believe in a common group identity that embraces everyone regardless of their birthplace, according to new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. In a series of studies, participants who endorsed a common group identity were less racist toward immigrants and more likely to donate their own time and money to help immigrants adapt to their new homes, said lead researcher Jonas Kunst, a doctoral psychology candidate at the University of Oslo and ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Dosing obese teens with vitamin D shows no benefits for their heart health or diabetes risk, and could have the unintended consequences of increasing cholesterol and fat-storing triglycerides. These are the latest findings in a series of Mayo Clinic studies in childhood obesity. Seema Kumar, M.D., a pediatric endocrinologist in the Mayo Clinic Children's Center, has been studying the effects of vitamin D supplementation in children for 10 years, through four clinical trials and six published studies. To date, Dr. Kumar's team has found limited benefit ...

It sheds light on the molecular underpinnings of learning and memory and could form the basis for research into new treatments for age-related cognitive decline, cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia, and other conditions. The researchers altered a gene in mice to inhibit the activity of an enzyme called phosphodiesterase-4B (PDE4B), which is present in many organs of the vertebrate body, including the brain. In behavioural tests, the PDE4B-inhibited mice showed enhanced cognitive abilities. They tended to learn faster, remember events ...

Astronomers have spied a new alien world that they believe strikingly resembles a young Jupiter. Using a new instrument, the Gemini Planet Imager, they spotted 51 Eridani b, still warm and luminous from its formation. But what can this distant exoplanet, orbiting a star approximately 100 light years away, teach us about the solar system Jupiter calls home? "51 Eridani b is so young, it actually 'remembers' its formation in some sense," said Bruce Macintosh, of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University, in an interview ...

New research reveals a distinct association between male intelligence in early adulthood and their subsequent midlife physical performance. The higher intelligence score, the better physical performance, the study reveals. The Center for Healthy Aging and the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, are behind this new study. We would all like to stay independent, as we get older. In order to succeed, we need to be in good physical shape. This includes being able to cope with everyday physical activities such as getting dressed and carrying our own shopping. ...

'Bang! You're Dead', a 1961 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, continues to surprise - but not just with the twist in its tale. Scientists at the University of Cambridge have used the programme to show that young people respond in a similar way to events, but as we age our thought patterns diverge. In a study published today in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, the researchers also report that older people tended to be more easily distracted than younger adults. Age is believed to change the way our brains respond and how its networks interact, but studies looking ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Approximately 31 percent of food produced in the U.S., or 133 billion pounds of food worth $162 billion, was wasted in 2011 according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Now, University of Missouri researchers have found that the type of food wasted has a significant impact on the environment. Although less meat is wasted (on average) compared to fruits and vegetables, the researchers found that significantly more energy is used in the production of meat compared to the production of vegetables. This wasted energy is usually in the form ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- Researchers at UC Davis, in collaboration with colleagues at Jackson Laboratory, have developed a new way to personalize treatments for aggressive bladder cancer. In early proof-of-concept research, the team took bladder tumors from individual patients, identified actionable mutations and grafted the tumors into mice. From there, the researchers simultaneously tested multiple therapies in the tumor models. Treatments that were effective in the models could then be given to patients. The research was published today in the journal PLoS One. "By ...

About 500,000 babies are born premature in the United States each year, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Those infants, born before 37 weeks of gestation, will likely deal with the threat of numerous complications or even death. Accurate data on how those infants fare is important as doctors and parents face difficult decisions. Dr. Michael Malloy, a neonatologist and professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, recently took a closer look at the infant mortality rates of extremely preterm infants. What Malloy found and described ...

New research has found that people with high levels of autistic traits are more likely to produce unusually creative ideas. Psychologists from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and University of Stirling examined the relationship between autistic-like traits and creativity. While they found that people with high autistic traits produced fewer responses when generating alternative solutions to a problem - known as 'divergent thinking' - the responses they did produce were more original and creative. It is the first study to find a link between autistic traits and the ...

Every hospital should have access to regional multidisciplinary teams that can provide expert advice for children and adolescents with concerns about sex development, and provide them and their parents with psychological support, according to a revised Society for Endocrinology guideline on disorders of sex development (DSD) published today in Clinical Endocrinology. Recommendations include: Expert input should be provided in all cases where sex assignment is delayed at birth In adolescents, DSD should be considered in boys and girls with abnormal pubertal progress ...

The death rate among pre-school children in the UK is almost double that of Sweden, with prematurity, congenital abnormalities, and infections all taking a significant toll, finds research published online in Archives of Disease in Childhood. The findings prompt the researchers to call for a stronger focus on prevention to improve the UK's position on the European child mortality league table. The researchers compared causes of death among children under the age of 5 in the UK and Sweden, using nationally collated data spanning the period 2006-2008 to tease out the ...

Rings made of titanium--an increasingly popular alternative to gold and silver--are giving emergency doctors a headache because they are so difficult to prize off swollen fingers, reveals a case study published online in Emergency Medicine Journal. But now help is at hand, thanks to the ingenuity of plastic surgeons. The popularity of titanium rings is growing because the metal is light yet strong, extremely durable, and doesn't cause skin allergies. But a swollen finger caused by ring constriction is a relatively common problem in emergency care. And if not dealt ...

Highlights Most donors and recipients support swapping health information before kidney transplantation, but there was low interest in sharing social information. Both donors and recipients wanted the transplant team involved in information disclosure. Most donors and recipients did not think the recipient had a right to know why a donor was excluded from donating. Approximately 6,000 living donor kidney transplants are performed annually in the United States. Washington, DC (August 13, 2015) -- Both donors and recipients want more information about each ...

Camden and Newark, New Jersey, are perceived as two of the most violent cities in the nation, yet New Jersey's police officers are among the least likely to get shot on the job. Montana, with its serene landscapes and national parks, has among the highest homicide rates for law enforcement officers. Why? Across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, homicides of police officers are linked to the statewide level of gun ownership, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study found that police officers serving in states with ...

DALLAS, August 13, 2015 -- Smartphone applications and wearable sensors have the potential to help people make healthier lifestyle choices, but scientific evidence of mobile health technologies' effectiveness for reducing risk factors for heart disease and stroke is limited, according to a scientific statement from the American Heart Association, published in the association's journal Circulation. The new statement reviewed the small body of published, peer-reviewed studies about the effectiveness of mobile health technologies (mHealth) for managing weight, increasing ...

At home on the sofa, in a hospital bed, or in a care home: where a death takes place is always recorded on the death certificate. Until now, however, this information has never been collated and evaluated. In an Original Article in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztbl Int 112:496-504), Burkhard Dasch and his co-authors analyze for the first time the place of death records for Germany. What they found was that every second person died in a hospital; only one in four died at home. The study evaluated more than 24 000 death certificates ...

Marks on two 3.4 million-year-old animal bones found at the site of Dikika, Ethiopia, were not caused by trampling, an extensive statistical analysis confirms. The Journal of Human Evolution is publishing the results of the study, which developed new methods of fieldwork and analysis for researchers exploring the origins of tool making and meat eating in our ancestors. "Our analysis clearly shows that the marks on these bones are not characteristic of trampling," says Jessica Thompson, an assistant professor of anthropology at Emory University and lead author of the study. ...

MADISON, Wis. -- Koko the gorilla is best known for a lifelong study to teach her a silent form of communication, American Sign Language. But some of the simple sounds she has learned may change the perception that humans are the only primates with the capacity for speech. In 2010, Marcus Perlman started research work at The Gorilla Foundation, where Koko has spent more than 40 years living immersed with humans -- interacting for many hours each day with psychologist Penny Patterson and biologist Ron Cohn. "I went there with the idea of studying Koko's gestures, but ...

MADISON, Wis. -- The crucial genetic mashup that spawned the yeast that brews the vast majority of beer occurred at least twice -- and both times without human help -- according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison study published Aug. 11 in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. Lager yeast, a hybrid that thrives in cold temperatures, is used in lager beer production, which accounts for about 94 percent of the world's beer. And while 15th century Bavarian monks invented lager beer, they probably did not deliberately cause the hybridizations detailed by a team ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., August 13, 2015--A team of researchers has discovered a Jupiter-like planet within a young system that could provide a new understanding of how planets formed around our sun. The new planet, called 51 Eridani b, is the first exoplanet discovered by the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a new instrument operated by an international collaboration headed by Bruce Macintosh, a professor of physics in the Kavli Institute at Stanford University. It is a million times fainter than its star and shows the strongest methane signature ever detected on an alien planet, ...

WASHINGTON - Violent video game play is linked to increased aggression in players but insufficient evidence exists about whether the link extends to criminal violence or delinquency, according to a new American Psychological Association task force report. "The research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy and sensitivity to aggression," says the report of the APA Task Force on Violent Media. The task force's review ...

Recent Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigations into the neurobiology underlying the effects of general anesthesia have begun to reveal the ways different anesthetic agents alter specific aspects of the brain's electrical signals, reflected by EEG (electroencephalogram) signatures. While those studies have provided information that may lead to improved techniques for monitoring the consciousness of patients receiving general anesthesia, until now they have been conducted in relatively young adult patients. Now a series of papers from MGH researchers is detailing ...

You've heard that romance starts in the kitchen and not in the bedroom. Well, researchers at Drexel University finally have the science to support that saying - but not the way you might think. In a new study published online in the journal Appetite, researchers found that women's brains respond more to romantic cues on a full stomach than an empty one. The study explored brain circuitry in hungry versus satiated states among women who were past-dieters and those who had never dieted. The study's first author Alice Ely, PhD, completed the research while pursuing a ...

For the first time, Lawrence Livermore scientists as part of an international team, have discovered the most Jupiter-like planet ever seen in a young star system, lending clues to understanding how planets formed around our sun. Using a new advanced adaptive optics (AO) device on the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) on the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, the team took an image of the planet, which is about twice the size of Jupiter. Called 51 Eridani b, the planet is the first in a wave of discoveries by a new generation of planet-hunting instruments, and could help scientists ...