If you are trying to have a baby, a good night's sleep is more important than ever. A new research report appearing in The FASEB Journal shows that the womb has its own "body clock" that needs to synchronize with the mother's body clock to ensure optimal conditions for fetal growth and development. The inability of a mother's body clock to synchronize with the womb's clock may be at least part of the reason why some women have difficulty carrying a pregnancy to full term. Specifically, the failed synchronization switches off body clock genes in cells lining the womb, which ...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- A team of scientists led by the U.S. Geological Survey found that polar bears, increasingly forced on shore due to sea ice loss, may be eating terrestrial foods including berries, birds and eggs, but any nutritional gains are limited to a few individuals and likely cannot compensate for lost opportunities to consume their traditional, lipid-rich prey -- ice seals. "Although some polar bears may eat terrestrial foods, there is no evidence the behavior is widespread," said Dr. Karyn Rode, lead author of the study and scientist with the USGS. "In the ...

Washington, DC--Night owls are more likely to develop diabetes, metabolic syndrome and sarcopenia than early risers, even when they get the same amount of sleep, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. The study examined the difference between night and morning chronotypes, or a person's natural sleep-wake cycle. Staying awake later at night is likely to cause sleep loss, poor sleep quality, and eating at inappropriate times, which might eventually lead to metabolic change. "Regardless of lifestyle, ...

Washington, DC--Exposure to the endocrine-disrupting chemical bisphenol A during pregnancy may raise a mother's susceptibility to weight gain and diabetes later in life, according to a new animal study published in the Endocrine Society's journal Endocrinology. A chemical used to manufacture plastics and epoxy resins, bisphenol A (BPA) is found in a variety of consumer products, including plastic bottles, food cans and cash register receipts. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have estimated that more than 96 percent of Americans have BPA in their bodies. BPA ...

Cambridge, Mass. April 1, 2015-- A collaborative study between researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Institutes of Health (NIH-NCBI) has identified a highly efficient Cas9 nuclease that overcomes one of the primary challenges to in vivo genome editing. This finding, published today in Nature, is expected to help make the CRISPR toolbox accessible for in vivo experimental and therapeutic applications. Originally discovered in bacteria, the CRISPR-Cas9 ...

Many microbes cannot be cultivated in a laboratory setting, hindering attempts to understand Earth's microbial diversity. Since microbes are heavily involved in, and critically important to environmental processes from nutrient recycling, to carbon processing, to the fertility of topsoils, to the health and growth of plants and forests, accurately characterizing them, as a basis for understanding their activities, is a major goal of the Department of Energy (DOE). One approach has been to study collected DNA extracted from the complex microbial community, or the metagenome, ...

NEW YORK (April 1, 2015) - Hospitals and health systems preparing for and treating patients with Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in the fall of 2015 faced unexpected challenges for ensuring safety of staff, patients and the community. The experiences are detailed in two studies published online in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA). In a case study of the care of two patients with confirmed or suspected EVD at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center's Special Clinical Studies Unit, ...

Mammals are good at figuring out which direction a sound is coming from, whether it's a rabbit with a predator breathing down its neck or a baby crying for its mother. But how we judge how far away that sound is was a mystery until now. Researchers from UConn Health report in the 1 April issue of the Journal of Neuroscience that echoes and fluctuations in volume (amplitude modulation) are the cues we use to figure the distance between us and the source of a noise. "This opens up a new horizon," says Duck O. Kim, a neuroscientist at UConn Health. Researchers have long ...

Don't throw away those bouncing batteries. Researchers at Princeton University have found that common test of bouncing a household battery is not actually an effective way to check a battery's charge. "The bounce does not tell you whether the battery is dead or not, it just tells you whether the battery is fresh," said Daniel Steingart, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. The battery bounce test, popularized in online videos, shows that fully charged batteries bounce very little ...

Researchers offer a few tips for those who are worried that their nerves might stand between them and acing their next job interview. Stop worrying about how much you might blush or your nervous tics, and focus more on being warm, friendly and assertive. The advice comes from Amanda Feiler and Deborah Powell of the University of Guelph in Canada, who carefully watched what anxious people do during an interview, and how others respond to them. Their findings are published in Springer's Journal of Business and Psychology. People who are anxious going into an interview often ...

NASA's fleet of satellites and instruments in space have covered Super Typhoon Maysak's rainfall, winds, clouds and an astronaut about the International Space Station captured a close-up photo of the storm's eye. On April 1 at 01:35 UTC (March 31 at 9:35 p.m. EDT), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a stunning view of Super Typhoon Maysak in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean. The MODIS image clearly showed its eye and bands of powerful thunderstorms circling the eye, and wrapping into it from the east ...

Deployment to Operation Enduring Freedom or Operation Iraqi Freedom was not associated with suicide in a study of more than 3.9 million U.S. military personnel in the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps and Navy, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry. The suicide rate among active duty U.S. military members has increased in the last decade and research on the potential effect of deployment to Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) or Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) is limited, according to the study background. Mark A. Reger, Ph.D., of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, ...

First meta-analysis to look at quality of safety reporting in published reports of clinical trials of the drug finasteride for male pattern baldness Zero of 34 clinical trials had adequate safety reporting Available toxicity information in published reports of clinical trials is very limited, of poor quality and appears systematically biased CHICAGO --- Published reports of clinical trials provide insufficient information to adequately establish the safety of finasteride for treatment of hair loss in men, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study to be published ...

Those suffering from depressive symptoms have an increased risk for physical diseases, especially for arthrosis and arthritis. These findings were reported by researchers from the University of Basel and the Ruhr-University Bochum. Their results, based on data from 14,300 people living in Switzerland, have been published in the scientific journal "Frontiers in Public Health". Depression is one of the leading health risks and affects 350 million people worldwide. In Switzerland, around 400,000 people individuals suffer from it each year. Several studies in countries around ...

For the crew of the Starship Enterprise, Star Trek's "Tricorder" was an essential tool, a multifunctional hand-held device used to sense, compute, and record data in a threatening and unpredictable universe. It simplified a number of Starfleet tasks, scientific or combat-related, by beaming sensors at objects to obtain instant results. The Tricorder is no longer science fiction. An invention by Tel Aviv University researchers may be able to turn smartphones into powerful hyperspectral sensors, capable of identifying the chemical components of objects from a distance. ...

Low doses of the anti-cancer drug imatinib can spur the bone marrow to produce more innate immune cells to fight against bacterial infections, Emory researchers have found. The results were published March 30, 2015 in the journal PLOS Pathogens. The findings suggest imatinib, known commercially as Gleevec , or related drugs could help doctors treat a wide variety of infections, including those that are resistant to antibiotics, or in patients who have weakened immune systems. The research was performed in mice and on human bone marrow cells in vitro, but provides information ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. - A drug used for decades to treat leukemia may have other uses in the fight against cancer, researchers at the University of Missouri have found. Previously, doctors used 6-Thioguanine, or 6-TG, as a chemotherapy treatment to kill cancer cells in patients with leukemia. In recent years, many doctors have shelved 6-TG in exchange for newer drugs that are more effective. Now, Jeffrey Bryan, an associate professor of oncology at the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, and his colleagues found that 6-TG can not only kill cancer cells, but also works to change ...

College students may realize that texting in the shower or at a funeral is inappropriate, but many do it anyway, according to Penn State psychologists. "We have looked at inappropriate texting behavior -- texting while driving, for instance -- before, but what we wanted to find out is whether the people who are engaging in these forms of behavior even know whether or not it is the right thing to do," said Marissa Harrison, associate professor of psychology, Penn State Harrisburg. The researchers suggest that college students are not necessarily trying to create new ...

Why It's Not Time for Health Care Rationing Peter A. Ubel There is a notable change in professional debates about how to better control health care costs. Discussion of health care rationing has become much more muted. "I contend that debates about health care rationing have waned not because the need to ration has dwindled nor because ethical debates about how or whether to ration have been resolved," writes Peter A. Ubel. They have declined because the word "rationing" has been replaced by terms such as "value" that "are not burdened by emotional and historical baggage." ...

DETROIT - A new study by scientists at the Wayne State University School of Medicine demonstrates that communication between some of the brain's most important centers is altered in children with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The research led by the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience's David Rosenberg, M.D., and Vaibhav Diwadkar, Ph.D., sheds significant light on our understanding of how brain networks contribute to obsessive-compulsive disorder in youth. The study included youth with a diagnosis of OCD and a comparison group free of psychiatric illness. ...

A Chemistry undergraduate at the University of York has helped to develop a new drug release gel, which may help avoid some of the side effects of painkillers such as ibuprofen and naproxen. In a final year project, MChem undergraduate student Edward Howe, working in Professor David Smith's research team in the Department of Chemistry at York looked for a way of eliminating the adverse side-effects associated pain-killing drugs, particularly in the stomach, and the problems, such as ulceration, this could cause patients. Supervised by PhD student Babatunde Okesola, whose ...

Andres Pinto, an orofacial pain and oral medicine specialist at Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine, often feels like the doctor in the television series House, who solves medical mysteries each week. Pinto is among about 700 facial pain and oral medicine specialists nationally who patients often turn to when their own doctors are unable to identify and treat complex and rare medical conditions. In fact, according to a new study Pinto conducted with input from fellow members of the American Academy of Oral Medicine (AAOM), patients see, on average, ...

A small area in the midbrain known as the substantia nigra is the control center for all bodily movement. Increasing loss of dopamine-generating neurons in this part of the brain therefore leads to the main symptoms of Parkinson's disease - slowness of movement, rigidity and shaking. In recent years, there has been increasing scientific evidence suggesting that inflammatory changes in the brain play a major role in Parkinson's. So far, it has been largely unclear whether this inflammation arises inside the brain itself or whether cells of the innate immune system that ...

Large amount of fat in neck muscles predicts chronic pain, disability and PTSD Will enable earlier treatment for whiplash victims Fat indicates atrophy, shows the chronic pain is not psychological Whiplash affects more than 4 million Americans annually CHICAGO --- While most people should expect to fully recover from whiplash injuries within the first few months, about 25 percent have long-term pain and disability that lasts many months or years. Using special MRI imaging, Northwestern Medicine scientists have identified, within the first one and two weeks ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. --- America's welfare state is quietly evolving from needs-based to an employment-based safety net that rewards working families and fuels dreams of a better life, indicates a new study led by a Michigan State University scholar. The major reason: the little-known Earned Income Tax Credit, a $65 billion federal tax-relief program for poor, working families. The program has been expanded dramatically during the past 25 years, while cash welfare has been sharply curtailed. Reporting in the April issue of the American Sociological Review, Jennifer Sykes ...