Scientists have discovered a new inherited form of obesity and type 2 diabetes in humans. A large number of genes are involved in regulating body weight, and there are now over 30 genes known in which people with harmful changes in DNA sequence become extremely overweight. Similarly, there are a number of genes that can, when altered, cause type 2 diabetes. These conditions are inherited through families in exactly the same way as disorders such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease. It is unclear what proportion of severe obesity and type 2 diabetes is caused ...

Geoscientists at the University of Liverpool have used friction experiments to investigate the processes of fault slip. Fault slip occurs in many natural environments - including during earthquakes - when large stress build-ups are rapidly released as two sliding tectonic plates grinds together. In this process a large amount of the energy released can be converted to heat, that leads to frictional melting. Frictional melts, when cooled, preserve in the rock-record as pseudotachylytes; but their influence is much greater than just this. As Professor Lavallée ...

Scientists at the University of Sussex in the UK have unraveled a key process in the bacterium that causes tuberculosis (TB), potentially paving the way for new antibiotics to fight the disease. TB is one of the world's top infectious killers, causing 1.5 million deaths every year. The TB bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is estimated to be present in up to a third of the world's population, although active TB only develops in around one in 10 cases. While TB is curable, antibiotic resistance is on the rise and so a major challenge for scientists is to continually ...

A pair of paleobiologists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego have determined that the world's most numerous and diverse vertebrates ¬- ray-finned fishes - began their ecological dominance of the oceans 66 million years ago, aided by the mass extinction event that killed off dinosaurs. Scripps graduate student Elizabeth Sibert and Professor Richard Norris analyzed the microscopic teeth of fishes found in sediment cores around the world and found that the abundance of ray-finned fish teeth began to explode in the aftermath of the mass die-off of ...

Using the nation's weather radar network, two University of Oklahoma doctoral students have developed a technique for forecasting something other than the weather: the orientation behavior of birds as they migrate through the atmosphere at night. The students have discovered a way to use the latest dual-polarization radar upgrade to measure broad-scale flight orientation of nocturnal migrant birds--a promising development for biologists and bird enthusiasts. The approach to the problem paired Phillip M. Stepanian, a meteorology and electrical engineering student, and ...

A team of researchers led by UCLA electrical engineers has demonstrated a new way to harness light particles, or photons, that are connected to each other and act in unison no matter how far apart they are -- a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. In previous studies, photons have typically been entangled by one dimension of their quantum properties -- usually the direction of their polarization. In the new study, researchers demonstrated that they could slice up and entangle each photon pair into multiple dimensions using quantum properties such as the photons' ...

Researchers have found that parts of the western Solomon Islands, a region thought to be free of large earthquakes until an 8.1 magnitude quake devastated the area in 2007, have a long history of big seismic events. The findings, published online in Nature Communications on Tuesday, suggest that future large earthquakes will occur, but predicting when is difficult because of the complex environment at the interface of the tectonic plates. The team, led by researchers at The University of Texas Austin, analyzed corals for the study. The coral, in addition to providing ...

Partners who become romantically involved soon after meeting tend to be more similar in physical attractiveness than partners who get together after knowing each other for a while, according to new findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Our results indicate that perceptions of beauty in a romantic partner might change with time, as individuals get to know one another better before they start dating," says lead researcher Lucy Hunt of the University of Texas at Austin. "Having more time to get acquainted may ...

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are legal and increasingly popular for individuals wanting to circumvent censorship, avoid mass surveillance or access geographically limited services like Netflix and BBC iPlayer. Used by around 20 per cent of European internet users they encrypt users' internet communications, making it more difficult for people to monitor their activities. The study of fourteen popular VPN providers found that eleven of them leaked information about the user because of a vulnerability known as 'IPv6 leakage'. The leaked information ranged from the websites ...

Almost one in three US adults owns at least one gun, and they are predominantly white married men over the age of 55, reveals research published online in the journal Injury Prevention. Gun owners are are more than twice as likely as non-gun owners to be associated with an active 'social gun culture' where either their family or friends own guns or their social activities involve use of guns, the findings show. Gun death rates in the US have remained high since 2000. In 2013, gun violence killed 33,636 people and injured 84,258 others in the US. Previous research ...

The use of license plate decals for drivers with learner permits doesn't seem to have reduced their crash rate in New Jersey, the first US state to introduce the regulation, finds research published online in the journal Injury Prevention. New Jersey introduced the requirement for license plate decals--red reflective signage advising that the person behind the wheel is still a novice driver--as part of its Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) policy for drivers under 21 in 2010. The regulation covered both drivers with learner permits and those with intermediate licenses. New ...

A new study suggests that massive underreporting may occur within the system set up by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to estimate the incidence of acute hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. In a paper receiving advance online publication in Annals of Internal Medicine, a team led by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (Mass. DPH) describes how less than 1 percent of a group of acute HCV patients participating in a long-term study of the disease had been reported to the CDC, largely ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Most states violate federal Medicaid law because they deny coverage for sofosbuvir, a new and highly effective treatment to cure hepatitis C, according to Lynn E. Taylor, M.D., director of The Miriam Hospital's HIV/Viral Hepatitis Coinfection Program. Taylor's team of researchers examined Medicaid policies for hepatitis C virus treatment using sofosbuvir, more commonly known as Solvadi, and found that most should change policy to improve access to the treatment. The study and its findings were published online in advance of the August issue of the Annals ...

DALLAS, June 29, 2015 -- Women who experience traumatic events or develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may have a greater risk of future cardiovascular disease than women with no traumatic history, according to research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. In the first major study of PTSD and onset of cardiovascular disease (both heart attacks and strokes) exclusively in women, researchers examined about 50,000 participants in the Nurses' Health Study II over 20 years. PTSD occurs in some people after traumatic events (such as a natural disaster, ...

DALLAS, June 29 -- For the first time, the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association recommends using a stent retrieval device to remove blood clots in select stroke patients who have clots obstructing the large arteries supplying blood to the brain, according to a new focused update published in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. The optimal initial treatment for a clot-caused (ischemic) stroke remains intravenous delivery of the clot-busting medication tissue plasminogen activator (tPA). When given within a few hours after stroke symptoms, ...

Women with elevated symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder consistent with the clinical threshold for the disorder had 60 percent higher rates of having a heart attack or stroke compared with women who never experienced trauma, according to scientists at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Results appear in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association. In a survey of nearly 50,000 younger and middle-aged women in the Nurses' Health Study II, 80 percent reported experiencing a traumatic ...

BOSTON (June 29, 2015, 4 pm ET) -- Consumption of sugary drinks may lead to an estimated 184,000 adult deaths each year worldwide, according to research published today in the journal Circulation and previously presented as an abstract at the American Heart Association Council on Epidemiology and Prevention in 2013. "Many countries in the world have a significant number of deaths occurring from a single dietary factor, sugar-sweetened beverages. It should be a global priority to substantially reduce or eliminate sugar-sweetened beverages from the diet," said Dariush ...

Children of parents who are frequently in conflict process emotion differently and may face more social challenges later in life compared with children from low conflict homes, according to the author of a new study published in the Journal of Family Psychology. The research study measured brain activity in children who were shown a mix of photos of couples in angry poses, happy poses and neutral poses. Based on questionnaires filled out by their mothers, the children were grouped in either a high conflict or a low conflict group. When children in the high conflict ...

PITTSBURGH, June 29, 2015 - The immune response that occurs in patients with severe asthma is markedly different than what occurs in milder forms of the lung condition, according to researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Those unique features could point the way to new treatments, they said in an article published online today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI). People with severe asthma, in which the airways become inflamed and constrict to impair breathing, do not get better even with high doses of corticosteroids, the mainstay ...

Baltimore, Md., June 29, 2015 - As the South Korean epidemic of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) continues unabated, researchers have raced to find treatments for the deadly virus, which has killed more than 400 people since it was first discovered three years ago in Saudi Arabia. Now, scientists at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., have discovered and validated two therapeutics that show early promise in preventing and treating the disease, which can cause severe respiratory symptoms, and has a death rate of 40 ...

Alexandria, Va., USA - Today, the International and American Associations for Dental Research (IADR/AADR) published a case report on the first application of a 3D printed scaffold for periodontal tissue engineering in a human patient, along with a review of 3D printing for oral and craniofacial tissue engineering. These papers are published in the latest clinical supplement to the Journal of Dental Research, which encompasses all areas of clinical research in the dental, oral and craniofacial sciences, and brings emerging contributions in discovery and translational science ...

The goal for many cancer patients is to reach the five-year, disease-free mark, but new research from UR Medicine's Wilmot Cancer Institute suggests that two years might be a more practical survival goal for people with follicular lymphoma. The difference underscores the fact that about 20 percent of follicular lymphoma patients consistently experience their disease coming back within two years of being treated with the latest therapies--despite the fact that most follicular lymphoma patients can expect to live 20 years. People who relapse early may have a disease with ...

NEW YORK (29 June 2015) -- There has been much recent discussion in the press of the plight of the so-called "sandwich generation," that is, adults who are responsible for the care of children as well as aging parents. The need for simultaneous childcare and eldercare is a reality that can limit families'--particularly women's--opportunities for paying work. A new study by social scientists Emilio Zagheni and Denys Dukhovnov for the first time drills down into US statistics about who is providing this care, and who is receiving it. The study found that in 2012, adults ...

WASHINGTON (June 29, 2015) -- As Liberia rebuilds a health care system decimated by the 2014 Ebola outbreak, understanding precisely how far citizens live from health facilities and its impact on seeking care can help shape new strategies to improve health care delivery and reduce geographic disparities. A new examination of remoteness as a barrier to health care, published online today in the Journal of Global Health, notes that most surveys and policy documents categorize families as living either in an urban or rural setting, and this dichotomy can mask disparities ...

When it comes to the art of persuasion, you can attract more followers if you turn conventional wisdom on its head and stress what you like, not what you do. A new study, to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, finds that people are more likely to conform to others' preferences than conform to others' actions. In other words, people want to like what others like, but they want to have or do what others don't have or don't do. In the study, "Words Speak Louder: Conforming to Preferences More Than Actions," by University ...