AUDIO: Twitter has become one of the most popular social media sites among young people, and researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have been looking at Twitter.... Click here for more information. Hundreds of thousands of American youth are following marijuana-related Twitter accounts and getting pro-pot messages several times each day, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found. The tweets are cause for ...

A small, drab and highly inconspicuous moth has been flitting nameless about its special niche among the middle elevations of one of the world's oldest mountain ranges, the southern Appalachian Mountains in North America. A team of American scientists has now identified this new to science species as Cherokeea attakullakulla and described it in a special issue of the open access journal ZooKeys. In all probability, it has been frequenting these haunts for tens of millions of years before the first humans set foot on this continent, all the while not caring in the least ...

The more a child is familiar with logos and other images from fast-food restaurants, sodas and not-so-healthy snack food brands, the more likely the child is to be overweight or obese. And, unfortunately, studies have shown that people who are overweight at a young age, tend to stay that way. A research team that included a Michigan State University professor tested kids on their knowledge of various brands – including their ability to identify items such as golden arches, silly rabbits and a king's crown – and found that those who could identify them the most tended ...

In quantum physics, momentum and position are an example of conjugate variables. This means they are connected by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which says that both quantities cannot be simultaneously measured precisely. Recently, researchers have been developing novel techniques, such as "weak measurement," to measure both at the same time. Now University of Rochester physicists have shown that a technique called compressive sensing also offers a way to measure both variables at the same time, without violating the Uncertainty Principle. In a paper published in ...

HAMILTON, ON, June 27, 2014—Developmental psychologist Daphne Maurer has spent more than four decades studying the complexities of the human mind. As the director of the Visual Development Lab at McMaster University and president of the International Society on Infant Studies, Maurer will present her life's work at the Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies in Berlin July 4th. Over the course of her career she has established a reputation for building new understanding of one of the most challenging and mysterious aspects of human development: how our ...

Humans have a well-documented tendency to see winning and losing streaks in situations that, in fact, are random. But scientists disagree about whether the "hot-hand bias" is a cultural artifact picked up in childhood or a predisposition deeply ingrained in the structure of our cognitive architecture. Now in the first study in non-human primates of this systematic error in decision making, researchers find that monkeys also share our unfounded belief in winning and losing streaks. The results suggests that the penchant to see patterns that actually don't exist may be ...

Alexandria, Va. — "Hello World." Upon hearing that brief message, scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) and followers around the world sent up a collective cheer. Rosetta — the ESA spacecraft currently on a 10-year mission to orbit and land on a comet — awoke in January after a three-year hibernation, and was ready to get to work. The Rosetta spacecraft launched on March 2, 2004, to study Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In August, Rosetta will enter the comet's orbit. By November, scientists will plant a lander on the comet, in the hope of learning more about ...

MADISON, Wis. — For children, stress can go a long way. A little bit provides a platform for learning, adapting and coping. But a lot of it — chronic, toxic stress like poverty, neglect and physical abuse — can have lasting negative impacts. A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers recently showed these kinds of stressors, experienced in early life, might be changing the parts of developing children's brains responsible for learning, memory and the processing of stress and emotion. These changes may be tied to negative impacts on behavior, health, employment ...

Over the last few years, we've seen increasing dissent among liberals and conservatives on important issues such as gun control, health care and same-sex marriage. Both sides often have a difficult time reconciling their own views with their opposition, and many times it appears that liberals are unable to band together under a unifying platform. Why do conservatives appear to have an affinity for obeying leadership? And why do conservatives perceive greater consensus among politically like-minded others? Two studies publishing in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin ...

New research has revealed the causes and warning signs of rare tsunami earthquakes, which may lead to improved detection measures. Tsunami earthquakes happen at relatively shallow depths in the ocean and are small in terms of their magnitude. However, they create very large tsunamis, with some earthquakes that only measure 5.6 on the Richter scale generating waves that reach up to ten metres when they hit the shore. A global network of seismometers enables researchers to detect even the smallest earthquakes. However, the challenge has been to determine which small ...

Climate change is predicted to have major impacts on the many species that call our rocky shorelines home. Indeed, species living in these intertidal habitats, which spend half their day exposed to air and the other half submerged by water, may be subjected to a double whammy as both air and water temperatures rise. Given the reliance of human society on nearshore coastal ecosystems, it is critical that we better understand how climate change will affect them. In a recent study published in Global Change Biology, Northeastern University professor Geoffrey C. Trussell, ...

WASHINGTON – Although planning for Everglades restoration projects has advanced considerably over the past two years, financial, procedural, and policy constraints have impeded project implementation, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council. Timely authorization, adequate funding levels, and creative policy and implementation strategies are needed to achieve restoration benefits and to expedite implementation of the Central Everglades Planning Project. Climate change and the invasion of nonnative plant and animal species further challenge ...

Scientists have discovered that the Lassa virus, which is endemic to West Africa, uses an unexpected two-step process to enter cells. The results, published in today's edition of the journal Science, suggest that the mechanism by which Lassa virus causes infection is more complicated than previously known. An international team of scientists from the Netherlands Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, the University of Kiel in Germany, and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) collaborated on the study, which could lead to new approaches ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and HARTFORD, Conn. – June 27, 2014 – Research published today in the American Journal of Managed Care demonstrates that analysis of patient records using state-of-the-art data analytics can predict future risk of metabolic syndrome. More than a third of the U.S. population has metabolic syndrome, a condition that can lead to chronic heart disease, stroke and diabetes. These conditions combine to account for almost 20 percent of overall health care costs in the U.S. The study was conducted by Aetna (NYSE: AET) and GNS Healthcare Inc. (GNS), a leading provider ...

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down—and so do movie tickets, cell phone minutes and discounts on airline flights. A private South African health plan increased patient use of preventive care such as mammograms and influenza vaccine with a program that incentivized healthy behavior using discounts on retail goods and travel. The study, which was led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the RAND Corporation, was published today in The American Journal of Managed Care. "Even though most people know that preventive care is important, too few people take ...

New research has revealed the causes and warning signs of rare tsunami earthquakes, which may lead to improved detection measures. Tsunami earthquakes happen at relatively shallow depths in the ocean and are small in terms of their magnitude. However, they create very large tsunamis, with some earthquakes that only measure 5.6 on the Richter scale generating waves that reach up to ten metres when they hit the shore. A global network of seismometers enables researchers to detect even the smallest earthquakes. However, the challenge has been to determine which small ...

Researchers from the University of Granada have shown that individual chronotype—that is, whether you are a "morning-type" or an "evening-type", depending on the time of day when your physiological functions are more active—markedly influences driving performance. In fact, evening-types are much worse drivers—they pay less attention—at their "non-optimal" time of day (early in the morning) by comparison with their optimal time (during the evening). However, in this experiment morning-types were more stable drivers than evening-types and drove relatively well both in the ...

Researchers from the University of Granada have discovered that colon cancer survivors are more likely to suffer future lesions related with pain in the back and lower abdomen than healthy individuals of the same gender and age. These patients present a series of abnormalities in the abdominal wall architecture—the site of surgery in oncological treatment. Moreover, they have specific abnormalities in processing chronic pain that may increase their sensitization to any kind of pain in the future. In two articles published in Pain Medicine and the European Journal of ...

A new data analysis technique radically improves monitoring of kidney patients, according to a University of Leeds-led study, and could lead to profound changes in the way we understand our health. The research, published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology, provides a way of making sense out of the huge number of clues about a kidney transplant patient's prognosis contained in their blood. By applying sophisticated "big data" analysis to the samples, scientists were able to crunch hundreds of thousands of variables into a single parameter indicating how a kidney ...

Einstein once observed that "it is harder to crack prejudice than an atom". If he was right, then Hans Rosling is faced with a labour of Hercules. As Professor of International Health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, he finds himself fighting against the cliché that the world is divided between rich and poor. "This neat division simply no longer exists. The statistics reveal a far more complex picture, with more and more people worldwide living in relative prosperity. This means that in health research in particular it is time for a paradigm shift," says Rosling. ...

PITTSBURGH, June 27, 2014 – As hormone levels change during the transition to menopause, the quality of a woman's cholesterol carriers degrades, leaving her at greater risk for heart disease, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health discovered. The first-of-its-kind evaluation, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was done using an advanced method to characterize cholesterol carriers in the blood and is published in the July issue of the Journal of Lipid Research. The results call for further research to evaluate ...

University of Iowa researchers have discovered a new form of neurotransmission that influences the long-lasting memory created by addictive drugs, like cocaine and opioids, and the subsequent craving for these drugs of abuse. Loss of this type of neurotransmission creates changes in brains cells that resemble the changes caused by drug addiction. The findings, published June 22 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, suggest that targeting this type of neurotransmission might lead to new therapies for treating drug addiction. "Molecular therapies for drug addiction are ...

WASHINGTON — A phenomenological study offers detailed insights into homeless, alcohol-dependent patients often stigmatized by the public and policymakers as drains on the health care system, showing the constellation of reasons they are incapable of escaping social circumstances that perpetuate and exacerbate their problems The study, published online yesterday in Annals of Emergency Medicine, was conducted at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, which has a long history of service to the city's indigent population. "One hundred percent of patients enrolled in the study ...

Researchers from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) have discovered more than 40 genes that predict the level of aggressiveness of melanoma and that distinguish it from other cancers with a poor prognosis. The discovery, published in Cancer Cell, will help to identify unique aspects of melanoma that could contribute to determine the risk of developing metastasis in patients with this disease. This study is relevant because it explains why a drug, also described by CNIO, is being used to selectively attack the melanoma tumour cells. Melanoma is one of the ...

WHAT: In a new study published in Nature, scientists describe a new type of tuberculosis (TB) treatment that involves manipulating the body's response to TB bacteria rather than targeting the bacteria themselves, a concept called host-directed therapy. TB remains a major cause of disability and death worldwide as an estimated 8.6 million people fell ill with TB and 1.3 million people died from the disease in 2012, according to the World Health Organization. Although TB is curable, adherence to therapy is difficult as treatment requires taking antibiotic drugs for at least ...