A simple new computerised game could help people control their snacking impulses and lose weight. Psychologists at the University of Exeter and Cardiff University have today published a study that shows that participants lost an average of 0.7kg and consumed around 220 fewer calories a day whilst undergoing the week of training. With 64% of adults in the UK overweight or obese, the research opens up exciting possibilities that 'brain training' techniques specifically targeting problematic behaviours - such as overeating and drinking alcohol - might help people to take ...

A federal preschool program did more than improve educational opportunities for poor children in Mississippi during the 1960s. The program also gave a political and economic boost to the state's civil rights activists, according to a Penn State historian. A key provision of the federal Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which paved the way for several federal anti-poverty programs, was aimed at empowering the poor and sidestepping black disenfranchisement in the south, according to Crystal Sanders, an assistant professor of history and African American studies. Sanders ...

A new test can accurately diagnose Ebola virus disease within minutes, providing clinicians with crucial information for treating patients and containing outbreaks. Researchers from Harvard Medical School, Partners In Health and Boston Children's Hospital have shown that a new commercially developed rapid diagnostic test performed at bedside was as sensitive as the conventional laboratory-based method used for clinical testing during the recent outbreak in Sierra Leone. The results are published in The Lancet. While the West African Ebola epidemic has slowed since its ...

The class of antidepressants known as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), taken to curb menopausal symptoms, may boost bone fracture risk, suggests research published online in the journal Injury Prevention. The heightened risk seems to last for several years, the findings show, prompting the researchers to suggest that shorter treatment length may be preferable. Further studies are warranted to see if the same association is found at lower doses of these drugs, they say. SSRIs have become the third most frequently prescribed class of drug in the US, and ...

Recent changes to regulations on the transport of pets across Europe may have increased the threat of introducing rabies from rescue dogs into countries considered free of the disease, suggests research published in Veterinary Record. In 2012 the European Union (EU) changed its requirements for the non-commercial movement of cats, dogs, and ferrets across the borders of EU and European Economic Area countries. Up to that point, countries free of rabies virus - the UK, Ireland, Malta, Sweden and Norway - had required an additional blood test to be carried out a month ...

Women in developed countries still find it very difficult to get an abortion in early pregnancy, despite facing fewer legal constraints than in other parts of the world, concludes an analysis of the available evidence, published in the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care. Inadequate local service provision, negative attitudes towards abortion, and too few training opportunities for healthcare professionals all hinder access, say the researchers. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that for every 100 live births in the developed world, there ...

Proposed amendments to India's abortion law are "contradictory" and need "urgent redrafting" to prevent women from making ill informed decisions and risking their lives with illegal terminations, writes a senior doctor in The BMJ this week. Nikhil Datar, a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at Cloudnine Group of hospitals & Lifewave Hospital in Mumbai, explains that India legalised abortion in 1971 by passing the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MPT) Act. This allows termination of pregnancy until only 20 weeks' gestation. Except for when a woman's life is at ...

A new test can accurately predict within minutes if an individual has Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), according to new research published in The Lancet. The study is the first to show that a point-of-care EVD test (ReEBOV Antigen Rapid Test; Corgenix) is faster than and as sensitive as a conventional laboratory-based molecular method used for clinical testing during the recent outbreak in Sierra Leone. This new rapid diagnostic test (RDT) could cut back on the lengthy process usually required to confirm if a patient has EVD, help identify case contacts, and ultimately curb ...

Washington, DC (June 25, 2015) -- Experts have identified strategies for using electronic health records to improve care for patients with chronic kidney disease. The guidance, which will appear in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN), may help clinicians and hospitals better manage individual patients with chronic conditions and identify groups of patients most likely to benefit from different treatment strategies. Well-designed electronic health records (EHRs) can help clinicians monitor and care for patients with long-term ...

Schizophrenia, which affects 2 million to 3 million people in the U.S., causes hallucinations, delusions and disorganization. Left untreated, the disease can cause a significant loss in quality of life, including unemployment and estrangement from loved ones. But many people with schizophrenia can control the disorder and live without symptoms for several years if they consistently take prescribed antipsychotic medication, typically a daily pill. The problem is that many people don't continue taking their medication once their symptoms improve. Now, a UCLA study has ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Jun. 26, 2015) -- Researchers at the University of Kentucky's Sanders-Brown Center on Aging have completed a study that revealed differences in the way brain inflammation -- considered a key component of AD-- is expressed in different subsets of patients, in particular people with Down syndrome (DS) and AD. People with Down syndrome have a third copy of Chromosome 21, and that chromosome is the same one responsible for the production of a molecule called amyloid precursor protein. Amyloid overproduction can lead to brain plaques that are a cardinal feature ...

A new NASA supercomputer simulation of the planet and debris disk around the nearby star Beta Pictoris reveals that the planet's motion drives spiral waves throughout the disk, a phenomenon that causes collisions among the orbiting debris. Patterns in the collisions and the resulting dust appear to account for many observed features that previous research has been unable to fully explain. "We essentially created a virtual Beta Pictoris in the computer and watched it evolve over millions of years," said Erika Nesvold, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore ...

Chronic disease and mental health issues disproportionately affect low-income African-Americans, Latinos and Hispanics, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Two new studies by the UCLA Center for Culture, Trauma and Mental Health Disparities shed light on the causes and impacts of this disparity. The first study, published online by the journal Psychological Trauma, analyzed certain types of negative experiences that may affect low-income African-Americans and Latinos. It found five specific environmental factors, which the researchers call "domains," ...

Every time you put on bug spray this summer, you're launching a strike in the ongoing war between humans and mosquitoes -- one that is rapidly driving the evolution of the pests. Scientists studying mosquitoes in various types of environments in the United States and in Russia found that between 5 and 20 percent of a mosquito population's genome is subject to evolutionary pressures at any given time -- creating a strong signature of local adaptation to environment and humans. This means that individual populations are likely to have evolved resistance to whatever local ...

Tens of millions of Americans -- an estimated 1 to 2 percent of the population -- will suffer at some point in their lifetimes from obsessive-compulsive disorder, a disorder characterized by recurrent, intrusive, and disturbing thoughts (obsessions), and/or stereotyped recurrent behaviors (compulsions). Left untreated, OCD can be profoundly distressing to the patient and can adversely affect their ability to succeed in school, hold a job or function in society. One of the most common and effective treatments is cognitive-behavioral therapy, which aims to help patients ...

URBANA, Ill. -- When children participated in a program designed to reduce sibling conflict, both parents benefited from a lessening of hostilities on the home front. But mothers experienced a more direct reward. As they viewed the children's sessions in real time on a video monitor and coached the kids at home to respond as they'd been taught, moms found that, like their kids, they were better able to manage their own emotions during stressful moments. "Parenting more than one child is stressful, and until now, there have been few ways to help parents deal with their ...

In a paper that crystalizes knowledge from a variety of experiments and theoretical developments, scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan have demonstrated that the quantum spin Hall effect--an effect known to take place in solid state physics--is also an intrinsic property of light. Photons have neither mass nor charge, and so behave very differently from their massive counterparts, but they do share a property, called spin, which results in remarkable geometric and topological phenomena. The spin--a measure of the intrinsic angular momentum--can ...

Pressure ulcers affect more than 2.5 million Americans annually and patients who have spinal cord injuries that impair movement are more vulnerable to ulcer development. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have devised a computational model that could enhance understanding, diagnosis and treatment of pressure ulcers related to spinal cord injury. The research publishing this week in PLOS Computational Biology, shows the results of virtual clinical trials that demonstrated that in order to effectively treat the lesions, anti-inflammatory measures ...

Antibiotic resistance, and multi-drug resistance, is a major public health threat. A new study publishing in PLOS Computational Biology finds conditions where restricting certain antibiotics may increase the frequency of multiple drug resistance. Uri Obolski and Prof. Lilach Hadany and colleagues used a mathematical model and electronic medical records data to show that drug restriction may also lead to results opposite of those desired. Restriction might facilitate the spread of resistant pathogens, due to ineffective treatment with antibiotics that have high resistance ...

This news release is available in Japanese. Researchers studying poppy plants -- the natural source of pain-relieving alkaloids, such as morphine and codeine -- have identified a fusion gene that facilitates important, back-to-back steps in the plant's morphine-producing pathway. These findings, which build upon recent efforts to engineer the morphine biosynthesis pathway in yeast, complete the metabolic pathway for morphine and pave the way for cheaper, safer routes to producing the economically important drug without the need for cultivating poppy fields. For about ...

This news release is available in Japanese. Researchers have figured out a way to pump more light farther along an optical fiber, offering engineers a potential solution to the so-called "capacity crunch" that threatens to limit bandwidth on the Web. These findings, which represent a step toward a faster and vaster Internet, show that silica fibers -- the hair-like wires that form the basis of fiber-optic communication -- can handle a lot more data than researchers had originally estimated. Normally, information traveling through an optical fiber is subject to nonlinear ...

The relentless flow of a glacier may seem unstoppable, but a team of UK and US researchers have shown that during some calving events - when an iceberg breaks off into the ocean - the glacier moves rapidly backward and downward, causing the characteristic glacial earthquakes which until now have been poorly understood. This new insight into glacier behaviour should enable scientists to measure glacier calving remotely and will improve the reliability of models that predict future sea-level rise in a warming climate. The research is published today in Science Express. ...

Scientists at the University of York and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Australia have made a key genetic discovery in poppies, paving the way for more effective painkillers. The discovery, published in the latest issue of Science, reveals the long sought after gene that is seen as a critical gateway step in the synthesis of the morphinan class of alkaloids, which include the painkiller drugs morphine and codeine. The gene, called STORR, is only found in poppy species that produce morphinans. The STORR gene evolved when two other genes encoding oxidase and reductase enzymes ...

Electrical engineers have broken key barriers that limit the distance information can travel in fiber optic cables and still be accurately deciphered by a receiver. Photonics researchers at the University of California, San Diego have increased the maximum power -- and therefore distance -- at which optical signals can be sent through optical fibers. This advance has the potential to increase the data transmission rates for the fiber optic cables that serve as the backbone of the internet, cable, wireless and landline networks. The research is published in the June 26 issue ...

PITTSBURGH--Scientific controversies, from problems replicating results - such as with the now debunked association between autism and MMR vaccines - to researcher misconduct and sensationalism, have led to speculation of "trouble at the lab," as the Economist put it. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands recently convened top scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology and other leading institutions to examine ways to return to ...