A clinical trial led by UC San Francisco has found that when pregnant women are educated about their choices on prenatal genetic testing, the number of tests actually drops, even when the tests are offered with no out-of-pocket costs. The findings underscore the need for clear information on all prenatal testing options and their possible outcomes, including the option of no testing, before pregnant women decide whether or not to have genetic testing, the authors said. The study also suggests that some women may have undergone prenatal screening for Down syndrome ...

A new wearable medical device can quickly alert a person if they are having cardiovascular trouble or if it's simply time to put on some skin moisturizer, reports a Northwestern University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign study. The small device, approximately five centimeters square, can be placed directly on the skin and worn 24/7 for around-the-clock health monitoring. The wireless technology uses thousands of tiny liquid crystals on a flexible substrate to sense heat. When the device turns color, the wearer knows something is awry. "Our device is mechanically ...

Eyeless Mexican cavefish show no metabolic circadian rhythm in either light and dark or constant dark conditions, according to a study published September 24, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Damian Moran from Lund University, Sweden, and colleagues. The Mexican tetra fish has two variants, a fully-eyed fish living close to the surface and a blind, deep water, cave-dwelling fish. Scientists in this study used these two fish to study evolutionary adaptation in fish residing in near or total darkness. The two fish types experience differences in daily light exposure, ...

A small study suggests snakes may have developed courtship and male-to-male combat behavior, such as moving undulations, neck biting, and spur-poking, over time, according to a study published September 24, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Phil Senter from Fayetteville State University and colleagues. Behaviors involved in courtship and male-to-male combat have been recorded in over 70 snake species from five families in the clade Boidae and Colubroidea, but before now, scientists had yet to look for evolutionary relationships between these behaviors. The authors ...

Lausanne, Switzerland. EPFL scientists have discovered how to control the limbs of a completely paralyzed rat in real time to help it walk again. Their results are published today in Science Translational Medicine. Building on earlier work in rats, this new breakthrough is part of a more general therapy that could one day be implemented in rehabilitation programs for people with spinal cord injury, currently being developed in a European project called NEUWalk. Clinical trials could start as early as next summer using the new Gait Platform now assembled at the CHUV ...

The millions of people who undergo major surgery each year have no way of knowing how long it will take them to recover from the operation. Some will feel better within days. For others, it will take a month or more. Right now, doctors can't tell individual patients which category they'll fit into. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that the activity level of a small set of immune cells during the first 24 hours after surgery provides strong clues to how quickly patients will bounce back from surgery-induced fatigue and pain, ...

Over 500 million people worldwide carry a genetic mutation that disables a common metabolic protein called ALDH2. The mutation, which predominantly occurs in people of East Asian descent, leads to an increased risk of heart disease and poorer outcomes after a heart attack. It also causes facial flushing when carriers drink alcohol. Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have learned for the first time specifically how the mutation affects heart health. They did so by comparing heart muscle cells made from induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS ...

Around the world, people are living longer and having fewer children, leading to a population that is older, on average, than in the past. On average, life expectancy in developed countries has risen at a pace of three months per year, and fertility has fallen below replacement rate in the majority of Europe and other developed countries. Most academic discussion of this trend has so far focused on potential problems it creates, including challenges to pension systems, economic growth, and healthcare costs. But according to a new study published today in the journal PLOS ...

Simultaneously using mobile phones, laptops and other media devices could be changing the structure of our brains, according to new University of Sussex research. A study published today (24 September) reveals that people who frequently use several media devices at the same time have lower grey-matter density in one particular region of the brain compared to those who use just one device occasionally. The research supports earlier studies showing connections between high media-multitasking activity and poor attention in the face of distractions, along with emotional ...

The perception that Colorado's Front Range wildfires are becoming increasingly severe does not hold much water scientifically, according to a massive new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder and Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif. The study authors, who looked at 1.3 million acres of ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forest from Teller County west of Colorado Springs through Larimer County west and north of Fort Collins, reconstructed the timing and severity of past fires using fire-scarred trees and tree-ring data going back to the 1600s. Only 16 percent ...

(Edmonton) A newly discovered armoured dinosaur from New Mexico has close ties to the dinosaurs of Alberta, say University of Alberta paleontologists involved in the research. From 76 to 66 million years ago, Alberta was home to at least five species of ankylosaurid dinosaurs, the group that includes club-tailed giants like Ankylosaurus. But fewer ankylosaurids are known from the southern parts of North America. The new species, Ziapelta sanjuanensis, was discovered in 2011 in the Bisti/De-na-zin Wilderness area of New Mexico by a team from the New Mexico Museum of Natural ...

Ottawa, Canada – September 24, 2014 – Ovarian cancer is the most deadly gynecological cancer, claiming the lives of more than 50% of women who are diagnosed with the disease. A study involving Ottawa and Taiwan researchers, published today in the influential Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), provides new insight into why ovarian cancer is often resistant to chemotherapy, as well as a potential way to improve its diagnosis and treatment. It is estimated that 2,700 Canadian women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2014 and that 1,750 Canadian ...

A Simon Fraser University-led team behind a new discovery has "…had the vision to go, like Star Trek, where no one has gone before: to a steep and violent bedrock canyon, with surprising results." That comment comes from a reviewer about a truly groundbreaking study just published in the journal Nature. Scientists studying river flow in bedrock canyons for the first time have discovered that previous conceptions of flow and incision in bedrock-rivers are wrong. SFU geography professor Jeremy Venditti led the team of SFU, University of Ottawa and University of British ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Cancer, while always dangerous, truly becomes life-threatening when cancer cells begin to spread to different areas throughout the body. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have discovered that a molecule used as a communication system by bacteria can be manipulated to prevent cancer cells from spreading. Senthil Kumar, an assistant research professor and assistant director of the Comparative Oncology and Epigenetics Laboratory at the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, says this communication system can be used to "tell" cancer cells how to act, ...

As more gardeners and farmers add ground charcoal, or biochar, to soil to both boost crop yields and counter global climate change, a new study by researchers at Rice University and Colorado College could help settle the debate about one of biochar's biggest benefits -- the seemingly contradictory ability to make clay soils drain faster and sandy soils drain slower. The study, available online this week in the journal PLOS ONE, offers the first detailed explanation for the hydrological mystery. "Understanding the controls on water movement through biochar-amended soils ...

Tropical Depression Fung-Wong looked more like a cold front on infrared satellite imagery from NASA than it did a low pressure area with a circulation. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Depression Fung-Wong on Sept. 23 at 12:23 a.m. EDT. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument that flies aboard Aqua gathered infrared temperature data on the storm's clouds. The data was false-colored at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California and showed that the storm resembled a frontal system more than a depression. The center of circulation was southwest ...

Retinoblastoma is a childhood retinal tumor usually affecting children one to two years of age. Although rare, it is the most common malignant tumor of the eye in children. Left untreated, retinoblastoma can be fatal or result in blindness. It has also played a special role in understanding cancer, because retinoblastomas have been found to develop in response to the mutation of a single gene – the RB1 gene—demonstrating that some cells are only a step away from developing into a life-threatening malignancy. David E. Cobrinik, MD, PhD, of The Vision Center at Children's ...

Astronomers have found water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet about four times bigger than Earth, in the constellation Cygnus about 124 light years - or nearly 729 trillion miles - from our home planet. In the quest to learn about planets beyond our solar system, this discovery marks the smallest planet for which scientists have been able to identify some chemical components of its atmosphere. The researchers' findings were published Sept. 25, 2014 in the journal Nature. The team was led by University of Maryland Astronomy Professor Drake Deming, an expert in the study ...

Public support for effective road safety laws, already solid, can be strengthened by a single number: a statistic that quantifies the traffic-related injury risks associated with a given law, according to a new study from the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study, published in the September issue of Accident Analysis & Prevention, surveyed 2,397 adults nationwide about their attitudes toward four types of road-safety laws —mandatory ignition interlock installation for people convicted of driving ...

A new University of Iowa study further supports an inescapable message: caregivers have a profound influence—good or bad—on the emotional state of individuals with Alzheimer's disease. Patients may not remember a recent visit by a loved one or having been neglected by staff at a nursing home, but those actions can have a lasting impact on how they feel. The findings of this study are published in the September 2014 issue of the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, and can be viewed online for free here. UI researchers showed individuals with Alzheimer's disease ...

Astronomers using data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Kepler Space Telescope have discovered clear skies and steamy water vapour on a planet outside our Solar System. The planet, known as HAT-P-11b, is about the size of Neptune, making it the smallest exoplanet ever on which water vapour has been detected. The results will appear in the online version of the journal Nature on 24 September 2014. The discovery is a milestone on the road to eventually finding molecules in the atmospheres of smaller, rocky planets more akin ...

A team of researchers, led by Miho N. Ishigaki, at the Kavli IPMU, The University of Tokyo, pointed out that the elemental abundance of the most iron-poor star can be explained by elements ejected from supernova explosions of the universe's first stars. Their theoretical study revealed that massive stars, which are several tens of times more immense than the Sun, were present among the first stars. The presence of these massive stars has great implications on the theory of star formation in the absence of heavy elements. Iron-poor stars provide insight about the very ...

CORAL GABLES, FLORIDA (September 24, 2014) — The challenge and excitement of catching a large fish makes shark fishing very appealing for recreational anglers. However, many species of sharks have experienced population declines due to commercial overfishing. Although generally overlooked by conservation advocates, catch and release shark fishing can provide a strong economic incentive to protect sharks, benefiting both ecotourism businesses and shark conservation. Florida is one of the largest recreational shark fishing markets in the world. However, Florida's recreational ...

Miami, Fla. (September, 24, 2014)—Two decades after its initiation, the University of Miami (UM) Linda Ray Intervention Program for substance-exposed babies and toddlers demonstrates long-term success. The program is designed to help children from birth to three years of age who are developmentally delayed, prenatally exposed to drugs and often with the additional risk of maltreatment, ultimately achieve their developmental milestones and be ready to enter kindergarten ready to learn. The program started in 1993 as an innovative partnership between the UM Linda Ray Intervention ...

DENVER – There were only modest acute changes in cardiac biomarkers and electrocardiograms and there were no clinically significant cardiac events in patients with high-dose radiation exposure to the heart following thoracic radiation therapy (RT) and short-term follow-up. Radiation therapy is standard of care for some patients with thoracic malignancies such as lung cancer, esophageal cancer, thymoma, or malignant mesothelioma. Radiation exposure to the heart is avoided when possible but even with advanced radiation therapy techniques there are instances when high radiation ...