Montreal, June 3, 2015 -- For many, summer holidays mean hitting the highway -- but nothing puts a damper on a road trip like an accidental collision with a deer. For Jochen Jaeger, a professor in Concordia University's Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, improving roadkill prevention is best approached through experimentation. In a study recently published in the Journal of Environmental Management, Jaeger and a group of co-authors from international universities show that protecting animals from speeding vehicles doesn't have a one-size-fits-all solution. ...

Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes are a way to model autonomous robots' behavior in circumstances where neither their communication with each other nor their judgments about the outside world are perfect. The problem with Dec-POMDPs (as they're abbreviated) is that they're as complicated as their name. They provide the most rigorous mathematical models of multiagent systems -- not just robots, but any autonomous networked devices --under uncertainty. But for all but the simplest cases, they've been prohibitively time-consuming to solve. Last ...

The first feeding study of tropical Australia's Irukandji box jellyfish has found that they actively fish. They attract larval fish by twitching their extended tentacles, highlighting their nematocyst clusters (stinging structures) and using them as lures. It's an impressive feat by any standards, but particularly so for an animal that doesn't have a defined brain. The laboratory-based study of Carukia barnesi, the tiny but deadly Irukandji jellyfish, was conducted at James Cook University (JCU) in Cairns, Australia, and has been published in the online journal PLOS ONE. ...

WASHINGTON - Contrary to popular belief, cyberbullying that starts and stays online is no more emotionally harmful to youngsters than harassment that only occurs in-person and may actually be less disturbing because it's likelier to be of shorter duration and not involve significant power imbalances, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire analyzed data from the Technology Harassment Victimization Study, funded by the National Institute of Justice. They focused on telephone interviews conducted ...

Blood clots often form when lipid-rich plaques on the inner surface of arteries rupture and platelets aggregate at the site of injury. Cardiologists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have now compared the effects of two new platelet aggregation inhibitors. Blood clots that form in arteries - so-called arterial thrombosis -are among the most common causes of heart attack and stroke. They are particularly prone to develop when 'atherosclerotic plaques', fatty deposits that build up within the inner lining of major arteries, fracture and break. Circulating ...

Published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, the treatment, which involves targeting tiny blood and lymphatic vessels inside the kidneys, is shown to improve renal function and slow progression of disease in mice. Polycystic kidney disease (PKD) is a genetic disorder where fluid filled cysts grow in kidneys and destroy normal renal tissue. It is the world's most common inherited kidney disease, affecting between 1 in 400 and 1 in 1000 people worldwide - around 12.5 million individuals. A rarer form of the disease, which occurs in about one in every ...

The hippocampus plays a crucial role in memory formation. However, it is not yet fully understood in what way that brain structure's individual regions are involved in the formation of memories. Neuroscientists at the Collaborative Research Center 874 at RUB have recreated this process with the aid of computer simulations. Their findings challenge the model of memory forming in the hippocampus established to date. Their results have been published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. Unique anatomy of the hippocampus The hippocampus' importance for memory forming ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - New findings suggest that a gene called IDH1 might be prognostic marker for a rare form of brain cancer. Patients in this study who had a mutated IDH gene lived an average of 7.9 years after diagnosis versus 2.8 years for patients with unaltered IDH. The IDH study was done as part of the phase III clinical trial RTOG 9813, which involved 301 patients with anaplastic astrocytoma. The duel-arm trial evaluated the effectiveness of radiation therapy plus either of two chemotherapy drugs: temozolomide and nitrosourea. "We found that IDH status is not only ...

After reviewing outcomes from thousands of cases, researchers at Johns Hopkins report that patients with blocked neck arteries who undergo carotid stenting to prop open the narrowed blood vessels fare decidedly worse if their surgeons re-inflate a tiny balloon in the vessel after the mesh stent is in place. Although the overall risk of stroke and death is low in patients who undergo carotid stenting, the common practice of "ballooning" the vessel after the wire mesh is inserted can double the risk of death and stroke during or shortly after the procedure, according to ...

Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) has recently returned to the headlines as new cases have been exported to Korea and China. Experts are concerned that MERS cases continued to be detected in Saudi Arabia throughout the past year, and there appears to be little reduction in the number of cases since its first discovery three years ago. As the month of Ramadan approaches, with 1 million pilgrims expected to arrive in Saudi Arabia in June and July 2015, MERS remains a threat to global health security. The Lancet today publishes a new Seminar on MERS, outlining the current ...

PITTSBURGH -- A single dose of an FDA-approved intravenous nutrition source may be able to significantly reduce the toxicity and increase the bioavailability of platinum-based cancer drugs, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon University biologists published in Scientific Reports. Platinum-based drugs, including cisplatin, carboplatin and oxyplatin, have been used to treat cancer for more than 35 years. While they remain among the most prescribed and most potent chemotherapy drugs, they also cause serious side effects, including kidney damage. Many of the side effects ...

These days, cooking dinner requires no more thought than turning a knob on a stovetop, but for early humans the notion that - simply by applying heat or fire - foods could be transformed into something both tastier and easier to digest demanded huge cognitive insight - insights often believed to be limited to humans. New evidence, however, suggests that, when it comes to cooking, humans may need to make more room at the table. A new study, co-authored by Felix Warneken, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, and Alexandra Rosati '05, currently ...

Getting up later in the morning might gain you more sleep, but it could mean you end up fathering fewer offspring--at least if you are a songbird called the great tit. Ecologists from the United States and Germany have discovered that compared with early birds, late risers are more likely to be cuckolded, meaning that they unknowingly end up raising young in their nest that had been fathered by another male. It appears that in the early morning hours, they're still asleep rather than being awake and defending their mate. The study, published in the British Ecological ...

In a recent study of older adults, those with a reduced ability to identify certain odors had an increased risk of dying during an average follow-up of 4 years. The mortality rate was 45% in participants with the lowest scores on a 40-item smell test, compared with 18% of participants with the highest scores. The study included 1169 Medicare beneficiaries who scratched and sniffed individuals odorant strips and chose the best answer from 4 items listed as multiple-choice. "The increased risk of death increased progressively with worse performance in the smell identification ...

Cat taste receptors respond in a unique way to bitter compounds compared with human receptors, according to research published in the open access journal BMC Neuroscience. The study represents the first glimpse into how domestic cats perceive bitterness in food at a molecular level, and could explain why cats are sometimes such picky eaters. The ability to detect bitter chemicals is thought to have evolved because of its utility in avoiding toxic compounds often found in plants. All cats, from pets to wild tigers, are carnivores that consume little plant material. Domestic ...

Some athletes who take part in endurance exercise such as marathon running, endurance triathlons or alpine cycling can develop irregularities in their heartbeats that can, occasionally, lead to their sudden death. Now, new evidence published in the European Heart Journal [1] today (Wednesday) has shown that doctors who try to detect these heartbeat irregularities (known as arrhythmias) by focusing on the left ventricle of the heart, or on the right ventricle while an athlete is resting, will miss important signs of right ventricular dysfunction that can only be detected ...

One of Australia's smallest birds has found a cunning way to protect its nest from predators by crying wolf, or rather hawk, and mimicking the warning calls of other birds. Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) found that the tiny brown thornbill mimics the hawk warning call of a variety of birds to scare off predators threatening its nest, such as the larger pied currawong. "It's not superbly accurate mimicry, but it's enough to fool the predator," said Dr Branislav Igic, who carried out the study during his PhD at ANU Research School of Biology. "A ...

A group of former senior editors, writing in The BMJ today, criticise a "seriously flawed and inflammatory attack" by The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on what that journal believes have become overly stringent policies on conflicts of interest. The NEJM was the first major medical journal to introduce conflict of interest policies in 1984. It required all authors to disclose any financial ties to health industries and made conflict of interests more transparent. But recently the NEJM published a series of commentaries and an editorial that attempt to justify ...

Bullying in teenage years is strongly associated with depression later on in life, suggests new research published in The BMJ this week. Depression is a major public health problem with high economic and societal costs. There is a rapid increase in depression from childhood to adulthood and one contributing factor could be bullying by peers. But the link between bullying at school and depression in adulthood is still unclear due to limitations in previous research. So a team of scientists, led by Lucy Bowes at the University of Oxford, carried out one of the largest ...

There is no strong evidence that the popular smoking cessation drug varenicline is associated with increased risks of suicidal behaviours, criminal offending, transport accidents, traffic-related offences, and psychoses, finds a study in The BMJ this week. The findings are based on over 69,000 individuals in Sweden who were prescribed varenicline between 2006 and 2009. Previous reports suggesting a link may not have taken full account of underlying risk factors, say the authors. Varenicline is widely prescribed for the treatment of nicotine dependence, but reports that ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- A long-term study of mother-child pairs in Pakistan has found that the children turn out pretty much the same, whether or not their mothers received treatment for depression during pregnancy. An earlier study of the same population found that the mothers themselves benefited from the treatment, with less depression, and demonstrating related healthy behaviors with their newborns, such as breastfeeding. But those improvements were short-lived. The "Thinking Healthy Programme" is a successful depression intervention evaluated through a randomized trial ...

Washington, DC--Relying on the better-functioning side of the body after a stroke can cause brain changes that hinder rehabilitation of the impaired side, according to an animal study published June 3 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Strokes that occur in one brain hemisphere can result in poor motor function on the opposite side of the body, leading to heavy reliance on the "good" side. This study, led by Soo Young Kim and performed at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Berkeley, found that such compensation produces structural brain changes ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. -- Non-calcified arterial plaque is associated with diabetes, high systolic blood pressure and elevated 'bad' cholesterol levels in asymptomatic individuals, according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology. Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the leading cause of death in men and women worldwide, accounting for 17 million deaths annually. Current treatment strategies focus on cardiovascular risk and serum cholesterol levels rather than direct assessment of extent of disease in the coronary arteries. Plaque that forms in the arterial walls ...

A new study shows that social and sensory overstimulation drives autistic behaviors. The study, conducted on rats exposed to a known risk factor in humans, supports the unconventional view of the autistic brain as hyper-functional, and offers new hope with therapeutic emphasis on paced and non-surprising environments tailored to the individual's sensitivity. For decades, autism has been viewed as a form of mental retardation, a brain disease that destroys children's ability to learn, feel and empathize, thus leaving them disconnected from our complex and ever-changing ...

You might not need to remember those complicated e-mail and bank account passwords for much longer. According to a new study, the way your brain responds to certain words could be used to replace passwords. In "Brainprint," a newly published study in academic journal Neurocomputing, researchers from Binghamton University observed the brain signals of 45 volunteers as they read a list of 75 acronyms, such as FBI and DVD. They recorded the brain's reaction to each group of letters, focusing on the part of the brain associated with reading and recognizing words, and found ...