This news release is available in Spanish. Elderly people are regarded as traditional consumers, but the AZTI study reveals that there are more and more elderly people who are happy to accept new foods. However, these consumers insist that the new proposals should be similar to or evoke traditional products and flavours and, at the same time, be health-enhancing, have the right nutrient profile for their age, and be flavoursome. To come up with new foods adapted to the needs of the population over 65, AZTI –in collaboration with the ADIMEN group of sociologists ...

By swabbing oil from a gland located at the end of a seabird's tail and analyzing the sample with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, researchers have developed a way to measure wildlife's exposure to plastics. The minimally invasive technique will prove useful for detecting plastics exposure at population and species levels. Such monitoring is increasingly important as annual plastics production continues to rise—production has increased from less than 2 tons per year in the 1950s to nearly 280 million tons in 2011. "We're excited about this new method we've ...

Across Europe, the population of common birds has declined rapidly over the last 30 years, while some of the less abundant species are stable or increasing in number. The findings, which come from a 30-year data set of 144 bird species, are worrisome because the most common species of birds provide most of the benefits for humans, for example by controlling agricultural pest species, dispersing seeds, and simply providing beautiful birdsongs. "It is becoming increasingly clear that interaction with the natural world and wildlife is central to human wellbeing, and significant ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Whooping cough, a highly contagious bacterial infection, can be serious and even fatal in newborns, but less than half of birthing hospitals in Michigan included prevention information on websites, says a new University of Michigan analysis that appears in the American Journal of Infection Control. The majority of Michigan birthing hospitals (64%) had no information about Tdap vaccination to prevent whooping cough in babies; among those that did have information, it typically required searching for the term pertussis or whooping cough. "Newborns ...

The physics community has spent three decades searching for and finding no evidence that dark matter is made of tiny exotic particles. Case Western Reserve University theoretical physicists suggest researchers consider looking for candidates more in the ordinary realm and, well, more massive. Dark matter is unseen matter, that, combined with normal matter, could create the gravity that, among other things, prevents spinning galaxies from flying apart. Physicists calculate that dark matter comprises 27 percent of the universe; normal matter 5 percent. Instead of WIMPS, ...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — For the first time, toddlers with autism have demonstrated significant improvement after intensive intervention by parents rather than clinicians, according to a new Florida State University study published online in the journal Pediatrics. "We've come up with a treatment model that can teach parents to support their child's learning during everyday activities, and we've documented that the children improved their developmental level, social communication skills and autism symptoms," said Amy Wetherby, director of the Autism Institute at Florida ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel...November 4 2014 -- With the world facing a shortage of oncologists, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers have determined that preclinical study of oncology may increase the number of students entering the field and may make them more empathetic and concerned about ethical issues of treatment. The study was published in the journal, Academic Medicine, and led by Dr. Leeat Granek, an assistant professor and health psychologist in BGU's Department of Public Health and Prof. Samuel Ariad, head of the Oncology Department at Soroka University ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel...November 4, 2014 -- In the largest MRI study to date, researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Carnegie Mellon University have shown that the brain anatomy in MRI scans of people with autism above age six is mostly indistinguishable from that of typically developing individuals and, therefore, of little clinical or scientific value. The study, "Anatomical Abnormalities in Autism?" was just published in the prestigious Oxford journal Cerebral Cortex. "Our findings offer definitive answers regarding several scientific controversies ...

NEW ORLEANS (November 4, 2014)—Starting with a simple DNA swab taken from fang marks on people bitten by snakes, an international research team correctly identified the species of the biting snake 100 percent of the time in a first-of-its-kind clinical study, according to data presented today at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene's (ASTMH) Annual Meeting. The study, conducted at three medical facilities in Nepal, found that if snake DNA could be isolated from the bite wound, the test identified the species of snake responsible every time. "These ...

Philadelphia, PA (November 4, 2014) — Obesity in a pregnant woman may increase the risk that her children will be born with congenital abnormalities of the kidney and urinary tract, according to a study that will be presented at ASN Kidney Week 2014 November 11¬–16 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA. Congenital abnormalities of the kidney and urinary tract (CAKUT) are diagnosed in up to 1% of pregnancies and account for 20% to 30% of prenatal abnormalities. Because maternal obesity has been linked with congenital malformations in ...

NEW ORLEANS (November 4, 2014)—Across a broad swath of the southern United States, residents face a tangible but mostly unrecognized risk of contracting Chagas disease—a stealthy parasitic infection that can lead to severe heart disease and death—according to new research presented today at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) Annual Meeting. Chagas disease (American trypanosomiasis) is typically spread to people through the feces of blood-sucking triatomine bugs sometimes called "kissing bugs" because they feed on people's ...

WASHINGTON, DC – November 4, 2014 – Filoviruses like Ebola "edit" genetic material as they invade their hosts, according to a study published this week in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. The work, by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Galveston National Laboratory, and the J. Craig Venter Institute, could lead to a better understanding of these viruses, paving the way for new treatments down the road. Using a laboratory technique called deep sequencing, investigators set out to ...

[New Orleans, USA, 4 November 2014] Presented today at the 63rd annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASMTH), results of a multi-centre clinical trial in Africa, launched in 2008, to test the efficacy and tolerability of Artesunate-Mefloquine fixed-dose combination (ASMQ FDC) in children under 5 years of age with uncomplicated falciparum malaria showed that ASMQ FDC is as safe and efficacious as Artemether-Lumefantrine (AL) FDC – Africa's most widely adopted treatment. The Phase IV, open-label, randomized, controlled, non-inferiority ...

Career and family, often seen as competing parts of life, can actually complement each other, and when young people's goals for the future encompass family and career, the outcome is more likely to be success in both arenas, according to Penn State researchers. "I'm really interested in career development, but also how that interacts with family life," says Bora Lee, postdoctoral scholar, human development and family studies. "I was interested in how adolescents weighed their goals within work and family domains." The researchers used selected records from a larger ...

New York | Heidelberg, 4 November 2014 -- Through the ages, women have suffered greatly because of wars. Consequently, to protect themselves and their offspring, our female ancestors may have evolved survival strategies specific to problems posed by warfare, says Michelle Scalise Sugiyama of the University of Oregon in the US. Her findings, based on the comprehensive analysis of traditional stories from across the world, are published in Springer's journal Human Nature. The work is of interest because research to date has focused on the problems warfare poses for men, and ...

This news release is available in German. Children and chimpanzees often follow the group when they want to learn something new. But do they actually forego their own preferences in order to fit in with their peers? In direct comparisons between apes and children, a research team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and Jena University has found that the readiness to abandon preferences and conform to others is particularly pronounced in humans – even in two-year-old children. Interestingly, the number of peers presenting ...

Forestry experts of the French Institute for Agricultural Research INRA together with technicians from NEIKER-Tecnalia and the Chartered Provincial Council of Bizkaia felled radiata pine specimens of different ages in order to find out their resistance to gales and observe the force the wind needs to exert to blow down these trees in the particular conditions of the Basque Country. This experience is of great interest for the managers of forests and will help them to manage their woodlands better and incorporate the wind variable into decisions like the distribution ...

A University of Tennessee, Knoxville, study finds that nonprofit organizations aiming to protect biodiversity show little evidence of responding to economic signals, which could limit the effectiveness of future conservation efforts. The study is published this week in the academic journal Ecology and Evolution and can be read at http://bit.ly/1t8fT24. The relationship between economic conditions and conservation efforts is complicated. On the one hand, funding for conservation depends on a booming economy, which swells state coffers and increases membership dues, ...

Only forty per cent of the notable increase in autism cases that has been registered during the past few decades is due to causes that are as yet unknown. The majority of the increase – a total of sixty per cent – can now be explained by two combined factors: changes in the diagnostic criteria and in the registration to the national health registers. This is shown by a new study of disease prevalence among all individuals born in Denmark in the period 1980-1991, a total of 677,915 individuals. The results have recently been published in the medical journal ...

If you can uniformly break the symmetry of nanorod pairs in a colloidal solution, you're a step ahead of the game toward achieving new and exciting metamaterial properties. But traditional thermodynamic -driven colloidal assembly of these metamaterials, which are materials defined by their non-naturally-occurring properties, often result in structures with high degree of symmetries in the bulk material. In this case, the energy requirement does not allow the structure to break its symmetry. In a study led by Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences ...

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have managed to reconstruct the early stage of mammalian development using embryonic stem cells, showing that a critical mass of cells – not too few, but not too many – is needed for the cells to being self-organising into the correct structure for an embryo to form. All organisms develop from embryos: a cell divides generating many cells. In the early stages of this process, all cells look alike and tend to aggregate into a featureless structure, more often than not a ball. Then, the cells begin to 'specialise' into ...

Los Angeles, CA (November 4, 2014) How does an individual's happiness level reflect societal conditions? A new article out today in the first issue of Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences (PIBBS) finds that similar to how GDP measures the effectiveness of economic policies, happiness can and should be used to evaluate the effectiveness of social policies. Authors Shigehiro Oishi and Ed Diener examined research evaluating the effectiveness of policy related to unemployment rate, tax rate, child care, and environmental issues to determine if it's possible ...

Los Angeles, CA (November 4, 2014) The growing disparity in economic inequality has become so stark that even Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve chairwoman, recently expressed concern. Interestingly, new research has discovered that American citizens desire an unequal, but more equal distribution of wealth and income. Lower levels of this "unequality" are associated with decreased unethical behavior and increased motivation and labor productivity. This study is published today in the inaugural issue of Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences (PIBBS). "People ...

Los Angeles, CA (November 4, 2014) With so much attention to curriculum and teaching skills to improve student achievement, it may come as a surprise that something as simple as how a classroom looks could actually make a difference in how students learn. A new analysis finds that the design and aesthetics of school buildings and classrooms has surprising power to impact student learning and success. The paper is published today in the inaugural issue of Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences (PIBBS). Surveying the latest scientific research, Sapna Cheryan, ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 4, 2014 – University of Utah engineers have developed a new type of carbon nanotube material for handheld sensors that will be quicker and better at sniffing out explosives, deadly gases and illegal drugs. A carbon nanotube is a cylindrical material that is a hexagonal or six-sided array of carbon atoms rolled up into a tube. Carbon nanotubes are known for their strength and high electrical conductivity and are used in products from baseball bats and other sports equipment to lithium-ion batteries and touchscreen computer displays. Vaporsens, ...