An 'exhausted' army of immune cells may not be able to fight off infection, but if its soldiers fight too hard they risk damaging the very body they are meant to be protecting, suggests new research from the University of Cambridge. Inside our bodies are billions of immune cells known as T cells that protect us from infection, fighting off attacks from invading bacteria and viruses, and also from cancer. One teaspoon full of blood alone is believed to have around 5 million T cells. But these cells can also do harm, mistaking our own cells for invaders and attacking them, ...

Pink salmon that begin life in freshwater with high concentrations of carbon dioxide, which causes acidification, are smaller and may be less likely to survive, according to a new study from UBC. The risks of ocean acidification on marine species have been studied extensively but the impact of freshwater acidification is not well understood. The study is one of the first to examine how rising carbon dioxide levels caused by climate change can impact freshwater fish. "Most of the work on acidification has been in the ocean, yet 40 per cent of all fish are freshwater. ...

June 29, 2015 - For hikers, football players, endurance athletes, and a growing range of elite and recreational exercisers, the best approach to preventing potentially serious reductions in blood sodium level is to drink when thirsty, according to an updated consensus statement on exercise-associated hyponatremia (EAH). The recommendations appear in the June issue of the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, published by Wolters Kluwer. "Using the innate thirst mechanism to guide fluid consumption is a strategy that should limit drinking in excess and developing hyponatremia ...

ANN ARBOR--Employees seeking to boost their productivity at work should take a nap--yes, sleeping on the job can be a good thing. A new University of Michigan study finds that taking a nap may be an effective strategy to counteract impulsive behavior and to boost tolerance for frustration. Napping, the researchers say, can be a cost-efficient and easy strategy to increase workplace safety. In other words, employers may find their employees more productive when the workplace has nap pods in the workplace or extended break times are offered. It's becoming increasingly ...

Maybe it sounds like a cow and bull story, but researchers in Egypt are developing a biometric identification system for cattle that could reduce food fraud and allow ranchers to control their stock more efficiently. The system described in the International Journal of Image Mining uses the unique features of a prominent part of the animal to identify the beasts. No, it's not hoof prints or an udder body part - it's the bovine muzzle, no pair of which are exactly alike, according to computer scientist Hamdi Mahmoud of BeniSuef University, in Cairo. Meat products are currently ...

June 29, 2015 - In recent years, a large majority of US plastic surgeons have adopted fat grafting techniques as part of their approach to facelift surgery, reports a study in the July issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). Fat grafting--transferring small amounts of the patient's own fat in strategic areas--"has become a common technique utilized by most surgeons today performing facial rejuvenation," according to the new research by Dr. Sammy Sinno, a plastic surgeon at New York ...

As yet another music streaming service comes online to rival the countless available outlets for so many different genres, a new approach to classifying music to make archiving, sorting and music discovery easier is published in the International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies. Rare is the musical artist described as genre-defying. Most singers and musicians tend to stick to a particular genre, whether electronic dance music, reggae, classical, folk, jazz, rock or Indian genres such as Bhangra and Ghazal, or any of hundreds of other categories. Listeners ...

SAN DIEGO, Calif., June 29 -- Research conducted at San Diego State University shows that societal acceptance of working mothers is at an all-time high. Researchers analyzed data from nearly 600,000 respondents from two nationally representative surveys --one of U.S. 12th graders and the other of adults -- taken between 1976 and 2013. The goal was to understand how attitudes towards women's work and family roles have changed in the U.S. since the 1970s. They found that millennials are significantly more accepting of working mothers than previous generations were at ...

Los Angeles, CA (June 29, 2015) US adults and adolescents are now significantly more accepting of mothers who work fulltime, but a growing minority from younger generations believe that wives should mind the household and husbands should make decisions for the family, according to new research out today in the Psychology of Women Quarterly (a SAGE journal). "Students are more accepting of mothers working, but a growing minority believes that men should be the rulers of the household or more believe that women should work, but still have less power at home," wrote researchers ...

An editorial by primary care researchers at Plymouth University Peninsula Schools of Medicine and Dentistry, and published today, Monday 29 June 2015 in the British Journal of General Practice, analyses the GP role in the sickness certification process and the new Fit for Work scheme and suggests that GPs are key to supporting individuals to maintain the hope and belief that they can work, "rather than adding to the numbers of individuals off work on long term sickness who may have been able to work." The Fit for Work Scheme will be introduced in most regions in England ...

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have discovered what regulates an enzyme that is central to the growth of cancer tumours. This could be of great value to future cancer treatment. Danish researchers from the University of Copenhagen have discovered what controls the enzyme that aids the growth of cancer tumours. These findings could be of great value to cancer treatments and has just been published in the renowned journal, Nature Communications. The enzyme is called ADAM17 and it aids growth in cells. "ADAM17 is very important to the growth of cancer ...

The Food Safety and Technology Research Centre under the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has developed a new method for rapid authentication of edible oils and screening of gutter oils. Authentication of edible oils has been a long-term issue in food safety, and becomes particularly important with the emergence and widespread use of gutter oils in recent years. However, the conventional analytical approach for edible oils is not only labor intensive and time consuming, but also fails to provide a versatile ...

It is generally assumed that marriage has a positive influence on health and life expectancy. But does this "marriage bonus" also apply to the health indicator of body weight? Researchers at the University of Basel and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development have investigated this question in cooperation with the market research institute GfK. Specifically, they compared the body mass index of married couples with that of singles in nine European countries. The results of their study have now been published in the journal Social Science & Medicine. Numerous studies ...

Ann Arbor -- While the number of graduates from family or adult nurse practitioner programs continues to rise, student applications to pediatric nurse practitioner and neonatal nurse practitioner programs are falling. Yet there is capacity in PNP and NNP training programs and unmet demand for graduates. Researchers determined that most of the child-focused programs have vacancies in each class, even when some class sizes have already been scaled back due to the downward trend in applications. Their findings are based on telephone surveys of directors at all PNP and ...

Human impact on Earth produces a unique kind of biosphere Changes to life may be the greatest for the past half billion years Earth may be entering a new kind of planetary state Human beings are pushing the planet in an entirely new direction with revolutionary implications for its life, a new study by researchers at the University of Leicester has suggested. The research team led by Professor Mark Williams from the University of Leicester's Department of Geology has published their findings in a new paper entitled 'The Anthropocene Biosphere' in The Anthropocene ...

A new study of 33 Kepler stars with solar-like oscillations to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The 33 Kepler stars have been selected for their solar like oscillations and a set of basic parameters have been determined with high precision showing that stars even older than 11 billion years have Earth-like planets. According to lead author of the article Victor Silva Aguirre from the Stellar Astrophysics Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark: " Our team has determined ages for individual host stars before with similar levels of accuracy, ...

Marijuana is the most prevalent drug in the U.S. Approximately 70% of the 2.8 million individuals who initiated use of illicit drugs in 2013 reported that marijuana was their first drug. Despite extensive research examining potential links between marijuana use and other drug use, the literature is currently lacking data regarding which illicit marijuana users are most likely to engage in use of other illicit drugs. A new study, published in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse by researchers affiliated with New York University's Center for Drug Use and HIV ...

Using the Subaru Telescope, researchers at the Special Astrophysical Observatory in Russia and Kyoto University in Japan have found evidence that enigmatic objects in nearby galaxies - called ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) - exhibit strong outflows that are created as matter falls onto their black holes at unexpectedly high rates. The strong outflows suggest that the black holes in these ULXs must be much smaller than expected. Curiously, these objects appear to be "cousins" of SS 433, one of the most exotic objects in our own Milky Way Galaxy. The team's observations ...

New research from the University of Exeter has shown that the sexually antagonistic gene for resistance to the pesticide DDT, which increases fitness in female flies but simultaneously decreases fitness in male flies, helps to maintain genetic variation. The findings contribute to the understanding of evolutionary dynamics and have important implications for pest management. The researchers used a genetic model and multiple experimentally evolving populations of the fly Drosophila melanogaster to test whether sexual conflict can maintain genetic variation. Their findings ...

University of Southampton scientists have discovered a link between coronary heart disease and osteoporosis, suggesting both conditions could have similar causes. In one of the first studies of its kind to use a special scanning technique, researchers found that people with a history of heart disease had substantially lower cortical volumetric bone mineral density in their wrist bone (the distal radius) than those without. Using a state-of-the-art technique called 'high resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography', researchers from Southampton's Medical Research ...

MELBOURNE, FLA. -- A new study led by Florida Institute of Technology Professor Ningyu Liu has improved our understanding of a curious luminous phenomenon that happens 25 to 50 miles above thunderstorms. These spectacular phenomena, called sprites, are fireworks-like electrical discharges, sometimes preceded by halos of light, in earth's upper atmosphere. It has been long thought that atmospheric gravity waves play an important role in the initiation of sprites but no previous studies, until this team's recent findings, provided convincing arguments to support that idea. ...

New research identifies the types of investors who are vigilant about corporate fraud, but finds that most of those investors are tracking the wrong red flags - meaning the warning signs they look for are clear only after it's too late to protect their investment. The work was performed by researchers at North Carolina State University, George Mason University, the University of Virginia and the University of Cincinnati. "Individual investors get hurt if they own stock in fraudulent companies that cook the books, such as Enron," says Dr. Joe Brazel, a professor of accounting ...

This news release is available in Spanish. A technique to increase the flow of blood from the umbilical cord into the infant's circulatory system improves blood pressure and red blood cell levels in preterm infants delivered by Cesarean section, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. The study, published online in Pediatrics, was conducted by researchers at the Neonatal Research Institute at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women and Newborns in San Diego, and Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, Calif. It was supported by NIH's Eunice Kennedy ...

Boston, MA -- Longer secondary schooling substantially reduces the risk of HIV infection--especially for girls--and could be a very cost-effective way to halt the spread of the virus, according to researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In a study in Botswana, researchers found that, for each additional year of secondary school, students lowered their risk of HIV infection by 8 percentage points about a decade later, from 25% to about 17% infected. "These findings confirm what has been fiercely debated for more than two decades--that secondary schooling ...

Longer secondary schooling substantially reduces the risk of contracting HIV, particularly for girls, according to new research from Botswana published in The Lancet Global Health journal. The researchers estimate that pupils who stayed in school for an extra year of secondary school had an 8 percentage point lower risk of HIV infection about a decade later, from about 25% to about 17% infected. The study, which also shows expanding secondary schooling to be a very cost effective HIV prevention measure, used a recent school policy reform as a 'natural experiment' to ...