Using ultrasound technology to visualize the tongue's shape and movement can help children with difficulty pronouncing "r" sounds, according to a small study by NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and Montclair State University. The ultrasound intervention was effective when individuals were allowed to make different shapes with their tongue in order to produce the "r" sound, rather than being instructed to make a specific shape. The findings appear online in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. The "r" sound is one ...

Difficulty in conceiving a child is a major challenge for one in seven heterosexual couples in America, especially for those over the age of 35. Now a new discovery by researchers at Tel Aviv University and Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer could boost the chances of conception in women undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. Their new research reveals a linkage between the genes of the innate immune system — immunity with which human beings are born, rather than immunity they acquire during their lives — and ovarian longevity. The study, ...

Rice University researchers have delivered a scientific one-two punch with a pair of papers that detail how synthetic collagen fibers self-assemble via their sticky ends. Collagen is the most common protein in mammals, a major component of bone and the fibrous tissues that support cells and hold organs together. Discovering its secrets may lead to better synthetic collagen for tissue engineering and cosmetic and reconstructive medicine. The Rice lab of Jeffrey Hartgerink has been studying synthetic collagen for a decade, teasing out the details of how it starts as three ...

The Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), which is native to Southeast Asia, was spotted in Houston in 1985. By 1986 it had reached St. Louis and Jacksonville, Fla. Today it can be found in all of the southern states and as far north as Maine. An aggressive daytime biter, Ae. albopictus has an affinity for humans and is also a vector for human disease, said Kim Medley, PhD, interim director of the Tyson Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis. The mosquito arrived in the U.S. in a shipment of used tires from Japan. Ae. albopictus lays eggs that can ...

Adélie penguins are an indigenous species of the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP), one of the most rapidly warming areas on Earth. Since 1950, the average annual temperature in the Antarctic Peninsula has increased 2 degrees Celsius on average, and 6 degrees Celsius during winter. As the WAP climate warms, it is changing from a dry, polar system to a warmer, sub-polar system with more rain. University of Delaware oceanographers recently reported a connection between local weather conditions and the weight of Adélie penguin chicks in an article in Marine Ecology ...

The price tag for informal caregiving of elderly people by friends and relatives in the United States comes to $522 billion a year, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Replacing that care with unskilled paid care at minimum wage would cost $221 billion, while replacing it with skilled nursing care would cost $642 billion annually. The study, published online by the journal Health Services Research, improves on earlier estimates about the value of informal caregiving by making use of the 2011 and 2012 American Time Use Survey, a new and unique database, to provide ...

A study from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has identified for the first time changes in the metabolic activity of a key brain region in patients successfully treated for depression with psychodynamic psychotherapy, suggesting a mechanism of action behind one of the most historically important and widely practiced forms of therapy. They also found evidence that pretreatment metabolism in a different brain structure might predict which patients are likely to respond to that form of therapy. Their report will appear in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics ...

Do blood vessels that feed tumors differ from other blood vessels? Fourteen years ago, experiments designed to answer that question led to the discovery of several genes that are more active in tumor-associated blood vessels than in normal blood vessels. New research now reveals the normal function of one of those genes and suggests it could be a good target for anticancer drug therapy. A summary of the research appears in the journal Developmental Cell on Oct. 27. The mystery of the gene, TEM5, began in 2000 with research conducted by Brad St. Croix, Ph.D., working ...

For decades, honeybees have been battling a deadly disease that kills off their babies (larvae) and leads to hive collapse. It's called American Foulbrood and its effects are so devastating and infectious, it often requires infected hives to be burned to the ground. Treating Foulbrood is complicated because the disease can evolve to resist antibiotics and other chemical treatments. Losing entire hives not only disrupts the honey industry, but reduces the number of bees for pollinating plants. Now researchers at BYU have produced a natural way to eliminate the scourge, ...

Parents can learn to use a scientifically validated autism therapy with their own children by taking a short series of group classes, a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford has found. The therapy helped children improve their language skills, an area of deficiency in autism, according to the study, which will be published Oct. 27 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. The study is the first randomized, controlled trial to test whether group classes are a good way to train parents ...

You don't always need GPS, a map or a compass to find the right way. What demands a tremendous amount of computational power from today's navigation computers can also be achieved by taking advantage of the laws of physical chemistry and practicing so-called "chemical computing". The trick works as follows: A gel mixed with acid is applied at the exit of a labyrinth – i.e. the destination – filled with alkaline liquid. Within a shorttime, the acid spreads through the alkaline maze, although the majority of it remains together with the gel at the exit. When an ...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 27, 2014 — It's a spooky question, but it doesn't have to be: What happens when you die? Even after you depart, there's a lot of chemistry that still goes on inside you. Reactions teamed up with mortician Caitlin Doughty, author of the new book "Smoke Gets in your Eyes, and Other Lessons from the Crematory" to demystify death and talk about exactly what happens to the body postmortem. Check out the new episode here: http://youtu.be/BpuTLnSr_20. Subscribe to the series at Reactions YouTube, and follow us on Twitter @ACSreactions to be the first to ...

When Hurricane Sandy struck the east coast in late October 2012, the "superstorm" disrupted traffic in New York City for more than five days, but the evacuation proceeded relatively efficiently with only minor delays, according to transportation researchers at the University of Illinois. The largest Atlantic hurricane on record, Hurricane Sandy offered a chance for researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to try out a new computational method they developed that promises to help municipalities quantify the resilience of their transportation systems ...

WASHINGTON, DC—The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), American College of Physicians (ACP) and American Osteopathic Association (AOA) convene today in Washington, DC to urge Congress to extend current-law payment parity for primary care and immunization services under Medicaid for at least two years. Absent congressional action, federal support for this policy runs out at the end of the year. Collectively representing nearly 423,000 physicians, the four groups are meeting with dozens of congressional offices on Capitol ...

New Rochelle, NY, October 27, 2014—More than half of women with children less than a year old are working, and work travel can make breastfeeding a challenge. A study of 100 U.S. airports found that few provided a suitably equipped, private lactation room, even though most described themselves as being breastfeeding friendly, as reported in Breastfeeding Medicine, the official journal of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Breastfeeding Medicine website at http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/bfm.2014.0112 ...

This news release is available in French. A key to aortic valve disease prevention: Lowering cholesterol early Montreal, Sunday 26, 2014 – An international research team led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and Lund University has provided new evidence that aortic valve disease may be preventable. Their findings show that so-called "bad" cholesterol or low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C) is a cause of aortic valve disease – a serious heart condition that affects around five million people in North America ...

New York | Heidelberg, 27 October 2014 Thermodiffusion, also called the Soret effect, is a mechanism by which an imposed temperature difference establishes a concentration difference within a mixture. Two studies1,2 by Belgian scientists from the Free University of Brussels, recently published in EPJE, provide a better understanding of such effects. They build on recent experimental results from the IVIDIL (Influence Vibration on Diffusion in Liquids) research project performed on the International Space Station under microgravity to avoid motion in the liquids. In the ...

Case Western Reserve University mental health researcher Joseph Galanek spent a cumulative nine months in an Oregon maximum-security prison to learn first-hand how the prison manages inmates with mental illness. What he found, through 430 hours of prison observations and interviews, is that inmates were treated humanely and security was better managed when cell block officers were trained to identify symptoms of mental illness and how to respond to them. In the 150-year-old prison, he discovered officers used their authority with flexibility and discretion within ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. --- The job market for new college graduates may be heating up fast, but starting salaries will see only modest growth, a Michigan State University economist says in a new study. About six in 10 employers say they will keep starting pay the same as last year for newly minted degree-holders. The remainder will offer salary increases, on average, of a modest 3 percent to 5 percent, said Phil Gardner, author of Recruiting Trends, the nation's largest survey of employers' hiring intentions for college graduates. "Pressure on employers to increase starting ...

Since 2007, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), an EU agency, has gathered information on patients' experiences with adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in the European ADR database, EudraVigilance. Both authorities and pharmaceutical companies have a duty to report information about ADRs to the database, which provides new knowledge about unknown and serious ADRs: "We have studied all EU adverse drug reaction reports on asthma medications approved for – and used by – children over a five-year period (2007 to 2011). In the light of the total use of asthma medications, ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A new study by researchers at The Kinsey Institute and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has found that the timeless, multicultural tradition of grandmothering might have an unexpected benefit: helping some women temper their hot flashes and night sweats during menopause. The researchers, two clinicians and a bioanthropologist, examined how close relationships can help women in midlife with this inevitable change -- with the clinicians looking for therapeutic benefits that might help patients deal with this unpredictable, poorly understood ...

In a paper published today in Nature Nanotechnology, an international group of scientists announced the most significant breakthrough in a decade toward developing DNA-based electrical circuits. The central technological revolution of the 20th century was the development of computers, leading to the communication and Internet era. The main measure of this evolution is miniaturization: making our machines smaller. A computer with the memory of the average laptop today was the size of a tennis court in the 1970s. Yet while scientists made great strides in reducing of the ...

A self-driven reaction can assemble phospholipid membranes like those that enclose cells, a team of chemists at the University of California, San Diego, reports in Angewandte Chemie. All living cells use membranes to define physical boundaries and control the movement of biomolecules, and movement of molecules through membranes is a primary means of sending signals to and from cells. Neal Devaraj, a chemistry and biochemistry professor at UC San Diego, leads a research team that develops and explores new reactions that can trigger the formation of membranes, particularly ...

Astronomers at the University of Sydney are part of a team that has taken images of the thermonuclear fireball from a 'nova star' for the first time tracking the explosion as it expands. The research is published in the journal Nature today. The eruption occurred last year in the constellation of Delphinus (the Dolphin). Professor Peter Tuthill, from the University's Sydney Institute for Astronomy and co-author on the paper says astronomers are excited about the achievement: "Although novae often play second fiddle in the popular imagination to their more famous ...

Recently, a team of astronomers reported discovering a pulsating star that appears to shine with the energy of 10 million suns. The find, which was announced in Nature, is the brightest pulsar – a type of rotating neutron star that emits a bright beam of energy that regularly sweeps past Earth like a lighthouse beam – ever seen. But what are the odds finding another one? According to one of the paper's authors, chances are good now that they know what to look for. Professor Deepto Chakrabarty of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at ...