Gourmet pizza in school? According to a new Food and Brand Lab pilot study, published in Appetite, chef-made meals can increase participation in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) by 9% and overall selection and consumption of vegetables by 16%! Chefs Move to Schools (CMTS), an initiative of Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, pairs chefs with schools in order to provide nutrition instruction to students and culinary advice to interested school food service workers. A CMTS event was held in an Upstate New York high school (of 370 students) and researchers David ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Parents with children at home should use ventilation when cooking with a gas stove, researchers from Oregon State University are recommending, after a new study showed an association between gas kitchen stove ventilation and asthma, asthma symptoms and chronic bronchitis. "In homes where a gas stove was used without venting, the prevalence of asthma and wheezing is higher than in homes where a gas stove was used with ventilation," said Ellen Smit, an associate professor in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at OSU and one of the study's ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Every day, organ transplant patients around the world take a drug called rapamycin to keep their immune systems from rejecting their new kidneys and hearts. New research suggests that the same drug could help brain tumor patients by boosting the effect of new immune-based therapies. In experiments in animals, researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School showed that adding rapamycin to an immunotherapy approach strengthened the immune response against brain tumor cells. What's more, the drug also increased the immune system's "memory" ...

A University of Texas at Arlington research team says recently identified radiation detection properties of a light-emitting nanostructure built in their lab could open doors for homeland security and medical advances. In a paper to be published in the Oct. 1 issue of Optics Letters, UT Arlington Physics Professor Wei Chen and his co-authors describe a new method to fabricate transparent nanoscintillators by heating nanoparticles composed of lanthanum, yttrium and oxygen until a transparent ceramic is formed. A scintillator refers to a material that glows in response ...

Washington, DC, September 29, 2014 – Infections with the intestinal superbug C. difficile nearly doubled from 2001 to 2010 in U.S. hospitals without noticeable improvement in patient mortality rates or hospital lengths of stay, according to a study of 2.2 million C. difficile infection (CDI) cases published in the October issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). In this retrospective study from The University of Texas College of Pharmacy, researchers ...

VIDEO: Researchers record no brain activity when a baby rat vigorously moves its left hindlimb while awake. Click here for more information. A University of Iowa study has found twitches made during sleep activate the brains of mammals differently than movements made while awake. Researchers say the findings show twitches during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep comprise a different class of movement and provide further evidence that sleep twitches activate circuits throughout ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) —A 2004 California law mandating specific nurse-to-patient staffing standards in acute care hospitals significantly lowered job-related injuries and illnesses for both registered nurses and licensed practical nurses, according to UC Davis research published online in the International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health. The study is believed to be the first to evaluate the effect of the law on occupational health. "We were surprised to discover such a large reduction in injuries as a result of the California law," said study lead author ...

Boulder, Colorado, USA – Massive flooding in Colorado in September 2013, and the concomitant landslides and debris flows, caused widespread damage across the Front Range. In the October issue of GSA Today, Jeffrey Coe, Jason Kean, Jonathan Godt, Rex Baum, and Eric Jones at the U.S. Geological Survey; David Gochis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Gregory Anderson of the Boulder Mountain Fire Protection District present insights on hazard assessment gained from this extraordinary debris-flow event. Between 9 and 13 September 2013, more than 1,100 debris ...

MADISON, Wis. — Mountain pine beetles get a bad rap, and understandably so. The grain-of-rice-sized insects are responsible for killing pine trees over tens of millions of acres in the Western U.S. and Canada over the last decade. But contrary to popular belief, these pests may not be to blame for more severe wildfires like those that have recently swept through the region. Instead, weather and topography play a greater role in the ecological severity of fires than these bark-boring beetles. New research led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Washington ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) —Short questionnaires used to identify patients at risk for depression are linked with antidepressant medications being prescribed when they may not be needed, according to new research from UC Davis Health System published in the September-October issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. Known as "brief depression symptom measures," the self-administered questionnaires are used in primary care settings to determine the frequency and severity of depression symptoms among patients. Several questionnaires have been developed to ...

Chemical fingerprints of the element nitrogen vary by extremes in materials from the molecules of life to the solar wind to interstellar dust. Ideas for how this great variety came about have included alien molecules shuttled in by icy comets from beyond our solar system and complex chemical scenarios. New experiments using a powerful source of ultraviolet light have shown that no extra-solar explanation is needed and the chemistry is straight forward, scientists from the University of California, San Diego, Hebrew University and UCLA report in the early online edition ...

BOSTON – Over the past several decades, brain stimulation has become an increasingly important treatment option for a number of psychiatric and neurological conditions. Divided into two broad approaches, invasive and noninvasive, brain stimulation works by targeting specific sites to adjust brain activity. The most widely known invasive technique, deep brain stimulation (DBS), requires brain surgery to insert an electrode and is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of Parkinson's disease and essential tremor. Noninvasive techniques, ...

Over the past few years, a class of compounds called ADEPs (cyclic acyldepsipeptides) has emerged as a promising new weapon in the fight against drug-resistant bacteria. The compounds work by attaching themselves to a cellular enzyme called ClpP, which bacterial cells use to rid themselves of harmful proteins. With an ADEP attached, ClpP can't function properly, and the bacterial cell dies. Now, scientists from Brown University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown new details of how ADEPs bind to the ClpP complex in the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. ...

PITTSBURGH—Many double-stranded DNA viruses infect cells by ejecting their genetic information into a host cell. But how does the usually rigid DNA packaged inside a virus' shell flow from the virus to the cell? In two separate studies, Carnegie Mellon University biophysicist Alex Evilevitch has shown that in viruses that infect both bacteria and humans, a phase transition at the temperature of infection allows the DNA to change from a rigid crystalline structure into a fluid-like structure that facilitates infection. The findings, published in Nature Chemical Biology ...

Medical imaging is at the forefront of diagnostics today, with imaging techniques like MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), CT (computerized tomography), scanning, and NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) increasing steeply over the last two decades. However, persisting problems of image resolution and quality still limit these techniques because of the nature of living tissue. A solution is hyperpolarization, which involves injecting the patient with substances that can increase imaging quality by following the distribution and fate of specific molecules in the body but that ...

New York, NY—September 29, 2014—When one sends an email from Boston to Beijing, it travels through submarine optical cables that someone had to install at some point. The positioning of these cables can generate intriguing coiling patterns that can also cause problems if, for instance, they are tangled or kinked. The deployment of a rodlike structure onto a moving substrate is commonly found in a variety of engineering applications, from the fabrication of nanotube serpentines to the laying of submarine cables and pipelines, and engineers for years have been interested ...

PRINCETON, N.J.–While it is largely understood that birth rates plummet when unemployment rates soar, the long-term effects have never been clear. Now, new research from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs shows that recessions result in lower birth rates both in the short and long run. The researchers find that women in their early 20s during the Great Recession are likely to have fewer children in both the short and long term. This result is driven largely by an increase in the number of women who will remain childless ...

LA JOLLA, CA—September 29, 2014—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered that a gene mutation linked to hereditary spastic paraplegia, a disabling neurological disorder, interferes with the normal breakdown of triglyceride fat molecules in the brain. The TSRI researchers found large droplets of triglycerides within the neurons of mice modeling the disease. The findings, reported this week online ahead of print by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, point the way to potential therapies and showcase an investigative strategy ...

Tumours are mosaics of cells that are morphologically and molecularly very different. In this cellular heterogeneity, it is calculated that only 1-2% of the tumour mass is made up of cancer stem cells, which over the past years have been suggested to be responsible for the origin of cancer and for the resistance to conventional chemical therapies. This small percentage of cancer stem cells in a solid tumour makes it difficult to isolate and analyse them, as well as to study the origin of drug resistance. Researchers from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) ...

An expedition from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Carnegie Institute of Science has measured a roughly 40% reduction in the rate of calcium carbonate deposited in Australia's Great Barrier Reef in the last 35 years — a scenario that could damage the reef framework and endanger the entire coral ecosystem. Coral reefs are the most ecologically diverse and productive ecosystem in the ocean, with rich and diverse communities of fish, corals and mollusks making them a major attraction for marine and underwater tourism. Producing almost 50% of the net annual calcium ...

LAWRENCE — Unexpected results from an ongoing experiment in the lab of Kristi Neufeld, co-leader of the Cancer Biology Program at the University of Kansas Cancer Center, led to a potentially important discovery that could have an effect on how cancer researchers test anti-cancer therapies in mice as well as possibly prevent colon cancer in people. Neufeld, associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences, studies the adenomatous polyposis coli protein, which protects against colon cancer. Many of her experiments involve testing mice with APC mutations, which ...

The idea of mapping the brain is not new. Researchers have known for years that the key to treating, curing, and even preventing brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury, is to understand how the brain records, processes, stores, and retrieves information. New Tel Aviv University research published in PLOS Computational Biology makes a major contribution to efforts to navigate the brain. The study, by Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob and Dr. Paolo Bonifazi of TAU's School of Physics and Astronomy and Sagol School of Neuroscience, and Prof. ...

The atmospheric conditions associated with the unprecedented drought in California are very likely linked to human-caused climate change, researchers report. Climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University and colleagues used a novel combination of computer simulations and statistical techniques to show that a persistent region of high atmospheric pressure over the Pacific Ocean--one that diverted storms away from California--was much more likely to form in the presence of modern greenhouse gas concentrations. The result, published today in the Bulletin of ...

PHILADELPHIA – In the second of two papers outlining new gene-therapy approaches to treat a rare disease called MPS I, researchers from Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania examined systemic delivery of a vector to replace the enzyme IDUA, which is deficient in patients with this disorder. The second paper, which is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, describes how an injection of a vector expressing the IDUA enzyme to the liver can prevent most of the systemic manifestations of the disease, including ...

A new study led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher has found that states with higher estimated rates of gun ownership experience a higher incidence of non-stranger firearms homicides – disputing the claim that gun ownership deters violent crime, its authors say. The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found no significant relationship between levels of gun ownership and rates of stranger-on-stranger homicide. But it did find that higher levels of gun ownership were associated with increases in non-stranger homicide rates, ...