Parents who physically neglect their boys may increase the risk that they will raise violent adolescents, according to Penn State sociologists. In a study of currently incarcerated male adolescents, physical neglect during childhood arose as the strongest predictor of violent behavior, said William McGuigan, associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State Shenango. Researchers are just beginning to acknowledge the powerful role of neglect in influencing adolescent violence, he added. "One of the problems with studying neglect is that it is ...

New research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) shows that the blood-fat lowering drug fenofibrate is as effective in women with type 2 diabetes as in men with type 2 diabetes. The research is by the Fenofibrate Intervention and Event Lowering in Diabetes (FIELD) study investigators in Australia, New Zealand and Finland, led by Professor Anthony Keech from the Clinical Trials Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia, and Associate Professor Michael d'Emden, Endocrine Research Unit, Royal Brisbane Hospital, ...

Single use, disposable acupuncture needles were introduced in the late 1970s, prompted by concerns about the risk of infection of reusable needles. Since that time, they have gradually been adopted worldwide. In clinical practice it is often difficult for the acupuncturist to insert a long needle into tissue, because long fine needles are prone to buckling. Acupuncturists have therefore either resorted to larger needles, which can be more painful for the patient, or to holding the needle shaft during insertion, which poses an infection risk, and contravenes World Health ...

Current evidence suggests that the characteristics of an area in which a person lives can negatively affect their cardiovascular health. This includes, for example, the density of fast food outlets; levels of violence, noise, and pollution; drug use; and building disrepair. But few studies have looked at the potential health enhancing effects of positive local neighbourhood characteristics, such as perceived neighbourhood social cohesion, say the authors. They therefore tracked the cardiovascular health of over 5000 US adults with no known heart problems over a period ...

Two Ebola virus commentaries being published online first: Opinion: Ebola-stricken American volunteers deserve special treatment American missionary workers stricken with the deadly Ebola virus while aiding infected patients in West Africa deserve special treatment, according to a commentary being published early online in Annals of Internal Medicine. As the number of Ebola virus cases surpasses 1,600 in four African countries, public attention has focused on the two infected Americans who were airlifted out of Liberia to receive a highly experimental treatment in ...

Induced earthquakes generate significantly lower shaking than tectonic earthquakes with comparable magnitudes, except within 10 km of the epicenter, according to a study to be published online August 19 in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA). Within 10 km of the epicenter, the reduced intensity of shaking is likely offset by the increased intensity of shaking due to the shallow source depths of injection-induced earthquakes. Using data from the USGS "Did You Feel It?" system, Seismologist Susan Hough explored the shaking intensities of 11 earthquakes ...

Tampa, FL (Aug. 18, 2014) -- A new therapy developed by researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) Morsani College of Medicine and Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) may help reduce the life-threatening complications of interventional cardiovascular disease treatment. The researchers demonstrated in a rat model that the novel molecular therapy could selectively inhibit blood vessel re-narrowing and simultaneously promote vessel healing following a medical procedure using a balloon catheter to open narrowed or blocked arteries. Their preclinical study ...

Doctors in hospitals and emergency rooms around the world should be prepared to recognize Ebola virus infection and isolate patients if necessary, infectious disease specialists recommend. However, concerns that Ebola will spread beyond West Africa to Europe and North America are unfounded because of the way Ebola is transmitted and because of highly developed hospital infection control practices, they say. A description of the virus, the current outbreak and recommendations for management of infected patients appear today in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The lead ...

U.S. hospitalizations and deaths from heart disease and stroke dropped significantly in the last decade, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. "Interestingly, these improvements happened in a period when there were no real 'miracle' clinical advancements," said Harlan Krumholz, M.D., S.M., lead author of the "most comprehensive report card to-date" on America's progress in heart disease and stroke prevention and treatment. "Rather, we saw consistent improvements in the use of evidence-based treatments and medications and an increase ...

The cholesterol-lowering drug fenofibrate cuts cardiovascular disease risks by 30 per cent in women with type-2 diabetes, a new University of Sydney study reveals. "The finding is good news for women," says the study's chairman, University of Sydney Professor, Tony Keech. "The study shows that fenofibrate reduced the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, or having a stroke or other adverse cardiovascular event by 30 per cent in women and 13 per cent in men." The leading cause of death in women, cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a constellation of ailments affecting ...

A substantial number of older patients with limited life expectancy continue to receive routine screenings for prostate, breast, cervical and colorectal cancer although the procedures are unlikely to benefit them. The authors are Trevor J. Royce, M.D., M.S., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues. An aim of Healthy People 2020 is to increase the proportion of individuals who receive cancer screening consistent with the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's (USPSTF) evidence-based guidelines. And there is general agreement that routine cancer screening ...

Racial and ethnic minorities who receive implantable devices to treat heart failure derive the same substantial survival benefit from these therapies as white patients, new UCLA-led research shows. While the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association jointly recommend the use of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) and cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) devices for all eligible patients, minorities have not been well represented in clinical trials of the devices, and previous studies had shown that African American and Hispanic patients ...

It could be a fun party trick – put your cell phone down on a table and watch it fade into the woodwork – or part of a lifesaving technology used by industry or the military. Researchers have developed a technology that allows a material to automatically read its environment and adapt to mimic its surroundings. The technology is described in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Cunjiang Yu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston and lead author of the paper, said the optoelectronic ...

A new NOAA nationwide analysis shows that between 1996 and 2011, 64,975 square miles in coastal regions--an area larger than the state of Wisconsin--experienced changes in land cover, including a decline in wetlands and forest cover with development a major contributing factor. Overall, 8.2 percent of the nation's ocean and Great Lakes coastal regions experienced these changes. In analysis of the five year period between 2001-2006, coastal areas accounted for 43 percent of all land cover change in the continental U.S. This report identifies a wide variety of land cover ...

BATON ROUGE – LSU Sociology Professor Samuel Stroope is the lead author of a new study, "Neighborhood Ethnic Composition and Problem Drinking among Older Mexican American Men," that will appear in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health. Stroope – and co-authors at Baylor University and the University of Texas Medical Branch – found that older Mexican-American men are less likely to engage in problem drinking as residents of neighborhoods with a higher proportion of Mexican-Americans. The study used data on 350 men aged 75 and older from the "Hispanic Established ...

The University of Waterloo has unveiled a new satellite image of Antarctica, and the imagery will help scientists all over the world gain new insight into the effects of climate change. Thanks to a partnership between the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (MDA), the prime contractor for the RADARSAT-2 program, and the Canadian Cryospheric Information Network (CCIN) at UWaterloo, the mosaic is free and fully accessible to the academic world and the public. Using Synthetic Aperture Radar with multiple polarization modes aboard the ...

When investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine applied light-driven stimulation to nerve cells in the brains of mice that had suffered strokes several days earlier, the mice showed significantly greater recovery in motor ability than mice that had experienced strokes but whose brains weren't stimulated. These findings, which will be published online Aug. 18 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help identify important brain circuits involved in stroke recovery and usher in new clinical therapies for stroke, including the placement ...

Just about every parent is familiar with the signs: the crying, the stomping feet and pouting lips, all of which are usually followed by a collapse to the floor and a wailed insistence that, "It's not fair!" While most people – including many parents – see such tantrums merely as part of growing up, a new study conducted by Harvard scientists suggests that, even at a relatively young age, children have advanced ideas about fairness, and are willing to pay a personal price to intervene in what they believe are unfair situations, even when they have not been personally ...

For the past 10 years, scientists have been fascinated by a type of "electric bacteria" that shoots out long tendrils like electric wires, using them to power themselves and transfer electricity to a variety of solid surfaces. Today, a team led by scientists at USC has turned the study of these bacterial nanowires on its head, discovering that the key features in question are not pili, as previously believed, but rather are extensions of the bacteria's outer membrane equipped with proteins that transfer electrons, called "cytochromes." Scientists had long suspected ...

PULLMAN, Wash.—Scientists at Washington State University have identified a crucial step in DNA repair that could lead to targeted gene therapy for hereditary diseases such as "children of the moon" and a common form of colon cancer. Such disorders are caused by faulty DNA repair systems that increase the risk for cancer and other conditions. The findings are published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Regents Professor Michael Smerdon and post-doctoral ...

HOUSTON – (Aug. 18, 2014) – Rice University scientists have won a race to find the crystal structure of the first virus known to infect the most abundant animal on Earth. The Rice labs of structural biologist Yizhi Jane Tao and geneticist Weiwei Zhong, with help from researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Washington University, analyzed the Orsay virus that naturally infects a certain type of nematode, the worms that make up 80 percent of the living animal population. The research reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences will help ...

In case of an inflammation the body releases substances that increase the immune defense. During chronic inflammation, this immune response gets out of control and can induce organ damage. A research group from the Department of Biomedicine at the University and the University Children's Hospital of Basel now discovered that innate lymphoid cells become activated and induce specific T and B cell responses during inflammation. These lymphoid cells are thus an important target for the treatment of infection and chronic inflammation. The study was recently published in the ...

Hugely popular non-steroidal anti-inflammation drugs like aspirin, naproxen (marketed as Aleve) and ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) all work by inhibiting or killing an enzyme called cyclooxygenase – a key catalyst in production of hormone-like lipid compounds called prostaglandins that are linked to a variety of ailments, from headaches and arthritis to menstrual cramps and wound sepsis. In a new paper, published this week in the online early edition of PNAS, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine conclude that aspirin has a second effect: ...

The small body size associated with the pygmy phenotype is probably a selective adaptation for rainforest hunter-gatherers, according to an international team of researchers, but all African pygmy phenotypes do not have the same genetic underpinning, suggesting a more recent adaptation than previously thought. "I'm interested in how rainforest hunter-gatherers have adapted to their very challenging environments," said George H. Perry, assistant professor of anthropology and biology, Penn State. "Tropical rainforests are difficult for humans to live in. It is extremely ...

While the powerful solvents known as ionic liquids show great promise for liberating fermentable sugars from lignocellulose and improving the economics of advanced biofuels, an even more promising candidate is on the horizon – bionic liquids. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have developed "bionic liquids" from lignin and hemicellulose, two by-products of biofuel production from biorefineries. JBEI is a multi-institutional partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) that was established by the ...