This news release is available in French. Montreal, May 6, 2014 — A sexy wood elf with pointy ears. A hulking ogre with blue skin. An intimidating heroine with a buxom breastplate. When it comes to computer games, players can choose to be anyone or anything. But gamers don't always mask their true identities with online avatars. According to a new study by researchers at Concordia University, Colorado State University, Syracuse University, Hofstra University and the University of Toronto, a male gamer who chooses to play as a female character will still display ...

Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Ocean, with the land masses of the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia in between – that's how we know our earth. From a geologist's point of view, however, this is only a snapshot. Over the course of the earth's history, many different continents have formed and split again. In between oceans were created, new seafloor was formed and disappeared again: Plate tectonics is the generic term for these processes. The Red Sea, where currently the Arabian Peninsula separates from Africa, is one of the few places on earth where the splitting ...

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine have discovered a protein molecule that seems to slow the progression of pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive lung disease that is often fatal three to five years after diagnosis. The finding is reported in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Nearly five million people worldwide are affected by pulmonary fibrosis, which causes the lungs to become covered in fibrous scar tissue and leads to shortness of breath that gets more severe as the disease progresses. Chronic inflammatory ...

Rice University scientists have designed a tunable virus that works like a safe deposit box. It takes two keys to open it and release its therapeutic cargo. The Rice lab of bioengineer Junghae Suh has developed an adeno-associated virus (AAV) that unlocks only in the presence of two selected proteases, enzymes that cut up other proteins for disposal. Because certain proteases are elevated at tumor sites, the viruses can be designed to target and destroy the cancer cells. The work appears online this week in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano. AAVs are ...

A system developed by investigators at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Engineering in Medicine (CEM) and the MGH Transplant Center has the potential to increase both the supply and the quality of donor organs for liver transplantation. In their report, which has been published online in the American Journal of Transplantation, the research team describes how use of a machine perfusion system delivering a supply of nutrients and oxygen though an organ's circulation at room temperature preserved and improved the metabolic function of donor livers in a ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Concussion rates in U.S. high-school athletes more than doubled between 2005 and 2012, according to a new national study using data on nine team sports. Overall, the rate increased from .23 to .51 concussions per 1,000 athlete exposures. An athlete exposure is defined as one athlete participating in one competition or practice. The increase might appear to sound an alarm about sports safety, but the researchers suspect the upward trend in reported concussions reflects increased awareness – especially because the rates went up the most after the 2008-09 ...

New Rochelle, NY, May 6, 2014—Despite reports in the media that the obesity rate among young children has declined dramatically during the past 10 years, that is not the conclusion reached by recent studies published in the medical literature. Those studies did, however, reveal some potentially encouraging findings, which are detailed in the Editorial "Childhood Obesity Trends: Time for Champagne?" published in Childhood Obesity, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Childhood Obesity website at http://www.liebertpub.com/chi. "The ...

Ban cigarette filters. Start a deposit-return scheme for used butts. Hold manufacturers responsible for clean-ups. Place warnings on packets about the impact of simply flicking one's used cigarettes away. These are among the policy measures that Thomas Novotny of the San Diego State University in the US and Elli Slaughter advocate to curb the environmental harm done through the large-scale littering of cigarette butts, packaging and matches. The suggestions are part of a review article in Springer's journal Current Environmental Health Reports. Cigarette butts and other ...

Neutron stars, the extraordinarily dense stellar bodies created when massive stars collapse, are known to host the strongest magnetic fields in the universe -- as much as a billion times more powerful than any man-made electromagnet. But some neutron stars are much more strongly magnetized than others, and this disparity has long puzzled astrophysicists. Now, a study by McGill University physicists Konstantinos Gourgouliatos and Andrew Cumming sheds new light on the expected geometry of the magnetic field in neutron stars. The findings, published online April 29 in Physical ...

Chromosomal abnormalities that result in birth defects and genetic disorders like Down syndrome remain a significant health burden in the United States and throughout the world, with some current prenatal screening procedures invasive and a potential risk to mother and unborn child. In a paper published online this week in the Early Edition of PNAS, a team of scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and in China describe a new benchtop semiconductor sequencing procedure and newly developed bioinformatics software tools that are fast, accurate, ...

WASHINGTON D.C. May 6, 2013 -- The eye is an exquisitely sensitive system with many aspects that remain somewhat of a mystery—both in the laboratory and in the clinic. A U.S.-based team of mathematicians and optometrists is working to change this by gaining a better understanding of the inner workings of tear film distribution over the eye's surface. This, in turn, may lead to better treatments or a cure for the tear film disease known as "dry eye." They describe their work in the journal Physics of Fluids. Dry eye disease afflicts millions of people worldwide, with ...

WASHINGTON D.C. May 6, 2013 -- A team of U.K. researchers has developed a way to dramatically reduce the complexity of modeling "bistable" systems which involve the interaction of two evolving species where one changes faster than the other ("slow-fast systems"). Described in The Journal of Chemical Physics, the work paves the way for easier computational simulations and predictions involving such systems, which are found in fields as diverse as chemistry, biology and ecology. Imagine, for instance, trying to predict how a population of whales would fare based on the ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Coffee drinkers, rejoice! Aside from java's energy jolt, food scientists say you may reap another health benefit from a daily cup of joe: prevention of deteriorating eyesight and possible blindness from retinal degeneration due to glaucoma, aging and diabetes. Raw coffee is, on average, just 1 percent caffeine, but it contains 7 to 9 percent chlorogenic acid, a strong antioxidant that prevents retinal degeneration in mice, according to a Cornell study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The retina is a thin tissue layer on the ...

CHICAGO (May 6, 2014) – Surgical site infections (SSIs) are the most common and costly healthcare-associated infection (HAI) in the United States. New evidence-based recommendations provide a framework for healthcare institutions to prioritize and implement strategies to reduce the number of infections. The guidelines are published in the June issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology and were produced in a collaborative effort led by the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Hospital Association, ...

CHICAGO (May 6, 2014) – With rates of Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) now rivaling drug-resistant Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) as the most common bacteria to cause healthcare-associated infections, new expert guidance encourages healthcare institutions to implement and prioritize prevention efforts for this infectious diarrhea. The guidelines are published in the June issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology. The new practice recommendations are a part of Compendium of Strategies to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections in Acute ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The average U.S. child snacks three times a day. Concerned about the role of snacking in obesity, a team of researchers set out to explore how eating frequency relates to energy intake and diet quality in a sample of low-income, urban schoolchildren in the Boston area. They expected that snacking would substantially contribute to kids' overall energy intake, and the new data confirm that. But they were surprised that the nutritional value of snacks and meals differed by age. The findings, led by first author E. Whitney Evans, a ...

The team—which includes researchers from the University of British Columbia and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) at the University of Toronto—created the map using data from the Planck Space Telescope. Since 2009, Planck has charted the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the light from the Universe a mere 380,000 years after the Big Bang. But Planck also observes light from much closer than the farthest reaches of time and space. With an instrument called the High Frequency Instrument (HFI), Planck detects the light from microscopic dust particles ...

WASHINGTON (May 6, 2014) — George Washington University (GW) researcher David Mendelowitz, Ph.D., was recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience for his research on how heart rate increases in response to alertness in the brain. Specifically, Mendelowitz looked at the interactions between neurons that fire upon increased attention and anxiety and neurons that control heart rate to discover the "why," "how," and "where to next" behind this phenomenon. "This study examines how changes in alertness and focus increase your heart rate," said Mendelowitz, vice chair ...

MANHATTAN, Kan. — A collaborative discovery involving Kansas State University researchers may lead to the first universal treatment for dystonia, a neurological disorder that affects nearly half a million Americans. Michal Zolkiewski, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Kansas State University, and Jeffrey Brodsky at the University at Pittsburgh co-led a study that focused on a mutated protein associated with early onset torsion dystonia, or EOTD, the most severe type of dystonia that typically affects adolescents before the age of 20. Dystonia ...

An international team led by glaciologists from the University of Colorado Boulder and Trent University in Ontario, Canada has completed the first mapping of virtually all of the world's glaciers -- including their locations and sizes -- allowing for calculations of their volumes and ongoing contributions to global sea rise as the world warms. The team mapped and catalogued some 198,000 glaciers around the world as part of the massive Randolph Glacier Inventory, or RGI, to better understand rising seas over the coming decades as anthropogenic greenhouse gases heat the ...

WASHINGTON (May 6, 2014) — According to the World Health Organization, more than 450 million people worldwide, primarily children and pregnant women, suffer illness from soil-transmitted helminths (STH), intestinal parasites that live in humans and other animals. Considerable effort and resources have been, and continue to be, spent on top-down, medical-based programs focused on administering drugs to control STH infections, with little success. John Hawdon, Ph.D., associate professor of microbiology, immunology, and tropical medicine at the George Washington University ...

WASHINGTON – A new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council says that changes EPA has proposed and implemented into its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) process are "substantial improvements." While acknowledging the progress made to date, the report offers further guidance and recommendations to improve the overall scientific and technical performance of the program, which is used to assess the hazards posed by environmental contaminants. In 2011, a Research Council committee reviewed EPA's IRIS assessment for formaldehyde and found ...

Britain could become a nation of non-swimmers if drastic changes aren't made to ensure all young people have access to adequate lessons and facilities, according to academics at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Dr Craig Avieson and Dr Penny Lamb, of UEA's School of Education and Lifelong Learning, warn swimming provisions are falling to secondary physical education (PE) teachers, with 51 per cent of British children aged 7-11 unable to swim 25 metres. Children should be able to swim at least that length by the time they leave primary school, under curriculum requirements ...

The SETI project scientists are known for tracking possible extraterrestrial signals, but now they are also considering sending messages from Earth telling of our position. A researcher from the University of Cádiz (Spain) questions this idea in view of the results from a survey taken by students, revealing the general level of ignorance about the cosmos and the influence of religion when tackling these matters. The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project is an initiative that began in the 70s with funding from NASA, but that has evolved towards the collaboration ...

WASHINGTON, May 6, 2014 — Pregnant women go through a lot to bring a baby into this world: 2 a.m. food cravings, hypersensitivity to certain smells and morning sickness, not to mention labor and delivery. In honor of Mother's Day, the American Chemical Society's (ACS') newest Reactions video highlights the chemistry behind a pregnant woman's altered sense of taste and smell, how mom's diet influences baby's favorite foods and other pregnancy phenomena. The video is available at http://youtu.be/Gnqjh-L4e9g And because moms always deserve more, we've created a bonus video ...