Scientists have created microbe-sized beads that can utilize energy in the environment to self-propel upstream by purely physical means. Life is hard to define, but metabolism, mobility and replication are three commonly agreed elements. The beads are not alive, but they meet two of these three requirements. "Living systems change their behavior according to their environment," said Jeremie Palacci, a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. "So the question was, can we design a particle that can sense its environment with no neural system or ...

Contrary to popular belief, more healthy kids' meals were ordered after a regional restaurant chain added more healthy options to its kids' menu and removed soda and fries, researchers from ChildObesity180 at Tufts University Friedman School reported today in the journal Obesity. Including more healthy options on the menu didn't hurt overall restaurant revenue, and may have even supported growth. Researchers examined outcomes before and after the Silver Diner, a full-service family restaurant chain, made changes to its children's menu in order to make healthier items ...

PHILADELPHIA - The Lariat device, which has been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for soft tissue approximation (placement of a suture) during surgical procedures, is associated with a significant incidence of death and urgent cardiac surgery during its frequent off-label use to prevent stroke in patients with the irregular heartbeat known as atrial fibrillation. Following a systematic review of case reports and an FDA safety database, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are calling for formal controlled ...

More than 60 percent of children developed sleepwalking when both their parents were sleepwalkers in a study among children born in the Canadian province of Quebec, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics. Sleepwalking is a common childhood sleep disorder that usually disappears during adolescence, although it can persist or appear in adulthood. Sleep terrors are another early childhood sleep disorder often characterized by a scream, intense fear and a prolonged period of inconsolability. The two disorders (also known as parasomnias) share many of ...

A slight majority of concussions happened during youth football games but most concussions at the high school and college levels occurred during practice, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics. Football is a popular youth sport with approximately 3 million youth athletes, 1.1 million high school athletes and 100,000 college athletes playing tackle football each year. A report on concussion by the Institute of Medicine highlighted the need for more extensive data on incidence in athletes from youth to college. Thomas P. Dompier, Ph.D., A.T.C., of ...

Policy changes in California to make the food and beverages that compete with school meal programs more healthy for students appear to have improved childhood overweight/obesity prevalence trends, although improvement was better among students attending schools in socioeconomically advantaged neighborhoods, according to an article published online by JAMA Pediatrics. Many school districts have adopted policies to regulate so-called competitive food and beverages (CF&Bs) because of childhood obesity. California has enacted among the most comprehensive CF&B policies in ...

In the history of continental drift, India has been a mysterious record-holder. More than 140 million years ago, India was part of an immense supercontinent called Gondwana, which covered much of the Southern Hemisphere. Around 120 million years ago, what is now India broke off and started slowly migrating north, at about 5 centimeters per year. Then, about 80 million years ago, the continent suddenly sped up, racing north at about 15 centimeters per year -- about twice as fast as the fastest modern tectonic drift. The continent collided with Eurasia about 50 million ...

Researchers at the Babraham Institute and the Francis Crick Institute have developed and used a new technique to join the dots in the genomic puzzle. Just as a dot to dot puzzle needs to be completed to visualise the full picture, the researchers' analysis connected regulatory elements called promoters and enhancers and showed their physical interactions over long distances within the mouse and human genomes. The ability to map promoter-enhancer interactions in the human genome has huge potential in understanding the genetic basis of disease. Our development as an embryo ...

Cambridge, MA - States will gain large, widespread, and nearly immediate health benefits if EPA sets strong standards in the final Clean Power Plan, according to the first independent, peer-reviewed paper of its kind, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change. The researchers analyzed three options for power plant carbon standards. The top option in the study prevents an expected 3,500 premature deaths in the US every year, with a range of 780 to up to 6100. It also averts more than a thousand heart attacks and hospitalizations annually from air pollution-related ...

Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that defects on an atomically thin semiconductor can produce light-emitting quantum dots. The quantum dots serve as a source of single photons and could be useful for the integration of quantum photonics with solid-state electronics - a combination known as integrated photonics. Scientists have become interested in integrated solid-state devices for quantum information processing uses. Quantum dots in atomically thin semiconductors could not only provide a framework to explore the fundamental physics of how they interact, ...

Using brain tumor samples collected from children in the United States and Europe, an international team of scientists found that the drug panobinostat and similar gene regulating drugs may be effective at treating diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas (DIPG), an aggressive and lethal form of pediatric cancer. The study, published in Nature Medicine, was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and more than 25 nonprofit foundations devoted to finding cures for childhood brain cancer. "Our results provide a glimmer of hope for treating ...

Huntington's disease is caused by a mutation in the Huntington's disease gene, but it has long been a mystery why some people with the exact same mutation get the disease more severely and earlier than others. A closer look at the DNA around the Huntington's disease (HD) gene offers researchers a new understanding of how the gene is controlled and how this affects the disease. These findings set the stage for new treatments to delay or prevent the onset of this devastating brain disease. Huntington's disease is a genetic disorder that gets passed down in families, but ...

Malmö, Sweden, May 4, 2015 -- A team of researchers from Sweden and the United States have examined the potential role of the family environment and neighborhood factors on mental health outcomes in a new study published in Journal of Psychiatric Research. The study includes highly detailed data on over 500,000 children in Sweden and covers a timespan of more than a decade. A total of 542,195 children were tracked for 11 years for incident internalizing (anxiety and mood) and externalizing (ADHD and conduct) disorders. During the course of the study, 4.8 percent ...

Considering geological time scales, the occurrence of biogenic shale gas in Sweden´s crust is relatively young. An international team of geoscientists (led by Hans-Martin Schulz, German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ) found that biogenic methane in the Alum Shale in South Sweden formed due to deglaciation around 12.000 years ago. Moreover, the formation processes were due to complex interactions between neotectonic activity and the occurrence of a deep biosphere. Applying a new hydrogeochemical modelling approach, the specific methane generation process was unravelled ...

Hyalella azteca are invertebrates that are widely used for sediment and water toxicity studies. Investigators have found that H. azteca collected from sites influenced by agricultural/urban runoff are as much as 2-times less sensitive to pyrethroid insecticides than lab-grown H. azteca. In contrast, the insecticide sensitivities of H. azteca collected from undeveloped sites beyond the influences of agricultural/urban runoff were similar to those of lab-grown populations. The results suggest that standard compliance testing of ambient waters, stormwater, and agricultural ...

In a 4-year study of 178 pre- and 329 postmenopausal women, investigators found that women's sexual functioning was moderately stable over time. The main predictors of changes in sexual functioning and satisfaction were desire and arousal, highlighting their role as the main "players" in women's sexual health. The study also found that despite the potentially impairing effects of menopause and menopausal transition, sexual satisfaction and functioning in postmenopausal women can be improved and sexual problems can show spontaneous remission. "From a clinical standpoint, ...

In contrast to the general population, low body mass index has been associated with premature death in patients with rheumatoid arthritis -- a situation known as the "obesity paradox." A new Arthritis & Rheumatology study shows that weight loss, as opposed to low body mass index per se, is a strong predictor of mortality in these patients. The study also found that the greater the rate of weight loss, the higher the risk of early death. The findings suggest that there isn't a biologically protective role of obesity, and they indicate that patients with rheumatoid arthritis ...

Unique person-specific cues--such as the presence of a specific friend or hearing a specific song--appear to have a robust effect on craving addictive substances, a recent study shows. The study also found that person-specific cues may have a longer effect on craving than more general substance-specific cues, such as the presence of bottles, syringes, or lighters. The study included 132 outpatients beginning treatment for alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, or opiate addiction. Using mobile technologies, participants were questioned 4 times per day relative to craving, substance ...

Young people are just as likely to try electronic cigarettes as smoking, according to a new report from the Propel Centre for Population Health Impact at the University of Waterloo. The findings, published today in Tobacco Use in Canada: Patterns and Trends, reveal that approximately 20 per cent of youth between the ages of 15 and 19 experiment with vaping, the same number who try cigarettes. "E-cigarettes have become increasingly popular among Canadians," said David Hammond, lead author on the report and a professor in the School of Public Health and Health Systems ...

BIOMETRICS - 3-D face analysis ... Law enforcement and national security agencies could benefit from an Oak Ridge National Laboratory technology able to determine a person's age, race and gender with high fidelity. "Normally, computers estimate age by looking for wrinkles or estimate gender by looking at specific two-dimensional distances or 2-D texture," said Ryan Tokola of ORNL's Imaging, Signals and Machine Learning Group. ORNL's system allows users to employ the same set of features to estimate age with an error of less than five years, gender with 89 percent accuracy ...

(New York -- May 4, 2015) -- Patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) have a four-fold increase in their risk of developing intermediate-stage age-related macular degeneration (AMD) compared to people of the same age who are not infected with HIV, according to results from the Longitudinal Study of the Ocular Complications of AIDS (LSOCA) presented today at the 2015 ARVO Annual Meeting in Denver, CO. The results of the study, led by the National Eye Institute-funded Studies of the Ocular Complications of AIDS Research Group, were also published online in ...

Scientists, conservationists and governments could have a new weapon in their struggle to gauge -- and halt -- the devastation of the wildlife trade on populations of prized animals: the very markets where the animals are bought and sold. Species that are disappearing as a result of the pet trade can be identified by changes in their market prices and trade volumes, a study led by researchers at Princeton University found. The researchers studied open-air pet markets on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and found that bird species that increased in price but decreased ...

Bad news, fans of rational political discourse: A study by an MIT researcher shows that attempts to debunk political rumors may only reinforce their strength. "Rumors are sticky," says Adam Berinsky, a professor of political science at MIT, and author of a paper detailing the study. "Corrections are difficult, and in some cases can even make the problem worse." More specifically, Berinsky found in an experiment concerning the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that rebuttals of political rumors about the supposed existence of "death panels" sometimes increased belief in the ...

ANN ARBOR--The main job of pollen is to help seed the next generation of trees and plants, but a new study from the University of Michigan and Texas A&M shows that the grains might also seed clouds. The unexpected findings demonstrate that these wind-carried capsules of genetic material might have an effect on the planet's climate. And they highlight a new link between plants and the atmosphere. Pollen has been largely ignored by atmospheric scientists who study aerosols--particles suspended in the air that scatter light and heat and play a role in cloud formation. "The ...

Since 2014 dulaglutide has been approved alone or in combination with other drugs for the treatment of adults with type 2 diabetes. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether this new drug offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapies. IQWiG found a hint of minor added benefit for the combination with short-acting insulin with or without metformin. In contrast, an added benefit of dulaglutide versus the respective appropriate comparator therapy is not proven for the combination with ...