Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) appear to curtail attempts to have more children after the first signs of the disorder manifest or a diagnosis is made. ASD is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder. Few studies have focused on reproductive stoppage by parents after a child is diagnosed with ASD or symptoms appear. Authors identified patients with ASD born from 1990 through 2003 in California. A total of 19,710 families in which the first birth occurred during the study period were identified. The families included 39,361 individuals (siblings ...

Parents who have a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are about one third less likely to have more children than families without an affected child, according to a study led by a UC San Francisco researcher. The findings, which appear in the June 18 issue of JAMA Psychiatry, stem from the largest study of its kind on further child-bearing after a child has been diagnosed with the disorder. These are the first data to indicate that this is a reproductive decision. " While it has been postulated that parents who have a child with ASD may be reluctant to have more ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A new study from Bradley Hospital has found that bipolar children have greater activation in the right amygdala – a brain region very important for emotional reaction – than bipolar adults when viewing emotional faces. The study, now published online in JAMA Psychiatry, suggests that bipolar children might benefit from treatments that target emotional face identification, such as computer based "brain games" or group and individual therapy. This study is the first ever meta-analysis to directly compare brain changes in bipolar children to bipolar adults, ...

WASHINGTON, June 18, 2014—Your smartphone's display glass could soon be more than just a pretty face, thanks to new technology developed by researchers from Montreal and the New York-based company Corning Incorporated. The team has created the first laser-written light-guiding systems that are efficient enough to be developed for commercial use. They describe their work in a paper published today in The Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal, Optics Express. This revolutionary work could open up new real estate in the phone by embedding the glass with layer upon ...

How do animals use their distinctive patterning to recognize each other? For some birds, recognizing one's own eggs can be a matter of life or death. In a new study, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge show that many birds parasitized by the Common Cuckoo have evolved distinctive pattern signatures on their eggs in order to distinguish them from those laid by a cuckoo cheat. The study reveals that these signatures provide a powerful defense against cuckoo trickery, helping host birds to reject cuckoo eggs before they hatch and destroy the ...

New York, NY—June 18, 2014—In a paper presented—and awarded the prestigious Ken Sevcik Outstanding Student Paper Award—at the ACM SIGMETRICS conference on June 18, Jason Nieh, professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering, and PhD candidate Nicolas Viennot reported that they have discovered a crucial security problem in Google Play, the official Android app store where millions of users of Android, the most popular mobile platform, get their apps. "Google Play has more than one million apps and over 50 billion app downloads, but no one reviews what gets put into ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Researchers have developed a technique that might be used to produce "soft machines" made of elastic materials and liquid metals for potential applications in robotics, medical devices and consumer electronics. Such an elastic technology could make possible robots that have sensory skin and stretchable garments that people might wear to interact with computers or for therapeutic purposes. However, new manufacturing techniques must be developed before soft machines become commercially practical, said Rebecca Kramer, an assistant professor of mechanical ...

Ethnic Tibetan communities in Nepal's highlands are rapidly shrinking as more parents send their children away for a better education and modern careers, a trend that threatens to create a region of graying ghost towns at the top of the world, according to a study that includes Dartmouth College. The findings, which have major social and demographic implications for the Himalayan region, appear in the journal Mountain Research and Development. A PDF of the study is available on request. Taken together, the outmigration of young people, a low birth rate and population ...

The surge in murders of polio vaccination workers in Pakistan has made headlines this year, but little attention has been devoted to the ethical issues surrounding the global health impact of current counterterrorism policy and practice. An essay in the Hastings Center Report reviews the range of harms to population health traceable to counterterrorism operations. It also identifies concerns involving moral agency and responsibility – specifically of humanitarian health workers, military medical personnel, and national security officials and operatives – and it highlights ...

PRINCETON, N.J.—A study that would track the health of 100,000 babies to age 21 has been put on hold following the release of an assessment report issued June 16 by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine (IOM). While the congressionally mandated report endorses several aspects of the proposed study design of the National Children's Study (NCS), the authors – including Sara McLanahan, the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs – are critical of the sampling ...

A recent study evaluating HER2 testing in a large cohort of women with breast cancer found important limitations in the conventional way HER2 testing is performed in the US and internationally. Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center physicians and researchers retested tumor samples from a large group of women and found that 22 out of 530 women had their tumor type incorrectly classified. They reported their findings in a publication titled "Assessing the Discordance Rate between Local and Central HER2 Testing in Women with Locally Determined HER2-Negative Breast ...

Stanford University researchers have devised a noninvasive way to detect heart-transplant rejection weeks or months earlier than previously possible. The test, which relies on the detection of increasing amounts of the donor's DNA in the blood of the recipient, does not require the removal of any heart tissue. "This test appears to be safer, cheaper and more accurate than a heart biopsy, which is the current gold standard to detect and monitor heart-transplant rejection," said Stephen Quake, PhD, professor of bioengineering and of applied physics. "We believe it's likely ...

More than 5 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer's disease, the affliction that erodes memory and other mental capacities, but no drugs targeting the disease have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since 2003. Now a paper by an MIT professor suggests that a revamped way of financing Alzheimer's research could spur the development of useful new drugs for the illness. "We are spending tremendous amounts of resources dealing with this disease, but we don't have any effective therapies for it," says Andrew Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – A study of one of the world's largest and most colorful bird families has dispelled a long-held notion, first proposed by Charles Darwin, that animals are limited in their options to evolve showiness. The study – the largest of its kind – was published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The natural world is full of showstoppers – birds with brilliant colors, exaggerated crests and tails, intricate dance routines, or virtuosic singing. But it's long been thought that these abilities are the result of trade-offs. For a species to excel in one ...

Washington, DC—As more people are diagnosed with diabetes and other hormone conditions, a growing shortage of endocrinologists could force patients to wait longer to see a doctor, according to a new Endocrine Society workforce analysis published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). Endocrinologists are specially trained physicians who diagnose diseases related to the glands. They specialize in treating diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, thyroid disorders, adrenal diseases, and a variety of other conditions related to hormones. The analysis found ...

Scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have made the first structural observations of liquid water at temperatures down to minus 51 degrees Fahrenheit, within an elusive "no-man's land" where water's strange properties are super-amplified. The research, made possible by SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser and reported June 18 in Nature, opens a new window for exploring liquid water in these exotic conditions, and promises to improve our understanding of its unique properties at the more natural temperatures and ...

Scientists at the University of East Anglia have made a breakthrough in the race to solve antibiotic resistance. New research published today in the journal Nature reveals an Achilles' heel in the defensive barrier which surrounds drug-resistant bacterial cells. The findings pave the way for a new wave of drugs that kill superbugs by bringing down their defensive walls rather than attacking the bacteria itself. It means that in future, bacteria may not develop drug-resistance at all. The discovery doesn't come a moment too soon. The World Health Organization has warned ...

Korean research team revealed conflicting climate change patterns between the middle latitude areas of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in relation to glacial and interglacial cycles which have been puzzled for the past 60 years. Doctor Kyoung-nam Jo from the Quaternary Geology Department of the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources(KIGAM) revealed a clue for solving the riddle of past global climate change in his paper titled 'Mid-latitudinal interhemispheric hydrologic seesaw over the past 550,000 years' which was featured in the journal Nature. This ...

During evolutionary diversification of vertebrate limbs, the number of toes in even-toed ungulates such as cattle and pigs was reduced and transformed into paired hooves. Scientists at the University of Basel have identified a gene regulatory switch that was key to evolutionary adaption of limbs in ungulates. The study provides fascinating insights into the molecular history of evolution and is published by Nature today. The fossil record shows that the first primitive even-toed ungulates had legs with five toes (=digits), just like modern mice and humans. During their ...

VIDEO: New Danish genetics research explains the high incidence of type 2 diabetes in the Greenlandic population. The ground-breaking findings have just been published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.... Click here for more information. A spectacular piece of detective work has mapped a special gene variant among Greenlanders which plays a particularly important role in the development of type 2 diabetes. The results have been published in Nature and can be ...

Seemingly ordinary, water has quite puzzling behavior. Why, for example, does ice float when most liquids crystallize into dense solids that sink? Using a computer model to explore water as it freezes, a team at Princeton University has found that water's weird behaviors may arise from a sort of split personality: at very cold temperatures and above a certain pressure, water may spontaneously split into two liquid forms. The team's findings were reported in the journal Nature. "Our results suggest that at low enough temperatures water can coexist as two different ...

Rust – iron oxide – could revolutionise solar cell technology. This usually unwanted substance can be used to make photoelectrodes which split water and generate hydrogen. Sunlight is thereby directly converted into valuable fuel rather than first being used to generate electricity. Unfortunately, as a raw material iron oxide has its limitations. Although it is unbelievably cheap and absorbs light in exactly the wavelength region where the sun emits the most energy, it conducts electricity very poorly and must therefore be used in the form of an extremely thin film in ...

Lung cancer causes more deaths in the U.S. than the next three most common cancers combined (colon, breast, and pancreatic). The reason for the striking mortality rate is simple: poor detection. Lung cancer attacks without leaving any fingerprints, quietly afflicting its victims and metastasizing uncontrollably – to the point of no return. Now a new device developed by a team of Israeli, American, and British cancer researchers may turn the tide by both accurately detecting lung cancer and identifying its stage of progression. The breathalyzer test, embedded with a "NaNose" ...

LA JOLLA, CA—June 18, 2014 —Biologists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered a crucial process that regulates the development of blood vessels. The finding could lead to new treatments for disorders involving abnormal blood vessel growth, including common disorders such as diabetic retinopathy and cancer. "Essentially we've shown how the protein SerRS acts as a brake on new blood vessel growth and pairs with the growth-promoting transcription factor c-Myc to bring about proper vascular development," said TSRI Professor Xiang-Lei Yang. "They act as the ...

DALLAS – June 18, 2014 – Chronic tissue inflammation is typically associated with obesity and metabolic disease, but new research from UT Southwestern Medical Center now finds that a level of "healthy" inflammation is necessary to prevent metabolic diseases, such as fatty liver. "There is such a thing as 'healthy' inflammation, meaning inflammation that allows the tissue to grow and has overall benefits to the tissue itself and the whole body," said Dr. Philipp Scherer, Director of the Touchstone Center for Diabetes Research and Professor of Internal Medicine and Cell ...