This news release is available in French. Mindfulness-based meditation could lessen some symptoms associated with cancer in teens, according to the results of a clinical trial intervention led by researchers at the University of Montreal and its affiliated CHU Sainte-Justine children's hospital. Mindfulness-based meditation focuses on the present moment and the connection between the mind and body. Adolescents living with cancer face not only the physical symptoms of their condition, but also the anxiety and uncertainty related to the progression of the disease, the ...

The study found that children as young as four and five can understand that the human body works to keep us alive. The researchers call this a 'life theory' and say it is important because it enables children to understand other related biological facts, such as what the vital organs do to keep us alive and what happens when people die. The results also have implications for teaching about the human body in schools. The research, published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, aimed to identify the age by which children begin to demonstrate a biological ...

People exposed to takeaway food outlets around their home, at work and on their way to work are more likely to consume more of these foods, as well as being more likely to be obese, suggest a paper published on bmj.com today. During the past decade in the UK, consumption of food away from home has risen by 29% while the number of takeaways has increased dramatically. This, the researchers say, could be contributing to rising levels of overweight and obesity. Despite increasing policy focus, identifying the association between exposures to unhealthy neighbourhood food ...

People who have diabetes at the time they are diagnosed with cancer are more likely to die early than those without diabetes, concludes research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes). The research is by Kristina Ranc, University of Copenhagen and Steno Diabetes Center, Gentofte, Denmark, and colleagues. The researchers conclude that patients with both diabetes and cancer constitute a particularly vulnerable group, and efforts are needed to reduce cancer-related mortality among these patients. While the research base ...

Human mouths contain a balanced mix of microbes which, when disrupted, can lead to oral diseases. A study published on March 13th in PLOS Pathogens compares the bacteria and fungi present in the mouths of healthy individuals with those from patients infected with HIV, and illustrates why oral candidiasis (aka "thrush") is a common complication of HIV infection. Using high-throughput gene sequencing, Mahmoud Ghannoum, from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, USA, and colleagues catalogued the core oral bacteriome (the bacteria commonly present) and the core ...

An analysis of 100 million US medical records reveals that autism and intellectual disability (ID) rates are correlated at the county level with incidence of genital malformations in newborn males, an indicator of possible congenital exposure to harmful environmental factors such as pesticides. Autism rates—after adjustment for gender, ethnic, socioeconomic and geopolitical factors—jump by 283 percent for every one percent increase in frequency of malformations in a county. Intellectual disability rates increase 94 percent. Slight increases in autism and ID rates are ...

Scientists at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine and University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center have discovered how the beneficial fungal yeast, Pichia, holds at bay a harmful fungal yeast, Candida. The hope for this finding is that components in Pichia could one day become therapeutic agents to stave off not only thrush, but also other life-threatening systemic fungal infections. Research findings about the effect of oral Pichia on Candida appear in the March 13 edition of PLOS Pathogens. "Our aim was to try to understand what microorganisms live in our mouths. ...

Imagine two children, both with the exact same risk factors for joining a gang. As teenagers, one joins a gang, the other doesn't. Even though the first teen eventually leaves the gang, years later he or she is not only at significantly higher risk of being incarcerated and receiving illegal income, but is also less likely to have finished high school and more likely to be in poor health, receiving government assistance or struggling with drug abuse. University of Washington researchers have found that joining a gang in adolescence has significant consequences in adulthood ...

Every 15-minute delay in delivering a clot-busting drug after stroke robs survivors of about a month of disability-free life, according to a new study in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. On the other hand, speeding treatment by just one minute means another 1.8 days of healthy life, researchers said. "'Save a minute; save a day' is the message from our study, which examined how even small reductions in treatment delays might benefit patients measurably in the long run," said Atte Meretoja, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc., lead author of the study and associate professor ...

Mexican-Americans had worse neurologic, functional and cognitive outcomes 90 days after stroke compared to non-Hispanic whites, in a study reported in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. Mexican-Americans have increased stroke risk, but lower risk of death compared to non-Hispanic whites. The new research suggests that prolonged survival is at the expense of increased disability. The study's stroke participants were drawn from the Brain Attack Surveillance in Corpus Christi (BASIC) project conducted in a non-immigrant south Texas community. Researchers assessed ...

American Muslims who interpret negative events in life as punishment from God are less likely to believe that donating organs after death is ethical than those with a more positive outlook, according to a survey conducted by researchers from the University of Chicago's Program on Medicine and Religion. The study points to a complex relationship between attitudes toward organ donation and the Islamic faith. Previous research has shown that Muslims are less likely than other religious groups to believe organ donation is ethically justified, and suggests that religious values ...

PITTSBURGH, March 13, 2014 – A low-cost program reduced falls in the elderly by 17 percent statewide, illustrating the value and effectiveness of using existing aging services, such as senior centers, in preventing falls, a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health study determined. Pitt Public Health researchers followed nearly 2,000 older Pennsylvanians between 2010 and 2011 to determine the effectiveness of the state's Healthy Steps for Older Adults, a voluntary fall-prevention program. Results of the study, funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control ...

A study by researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) finds that electromyography (EMG) testing to determine the quality of donor nerves can improve the outcome of nerve transfer surgery to restore function in patients with a brachial plexus injury. EMG is a sophisticated test used to objectively measure muscle and nerve function. The paper, "Does Pre-operative Donor Nerve Electromyography Predict Nerve Transfer Outcomes?," will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons on March 13 in New Orleans. "Our study found that ...

A revolutionary University of Colorado Boulder toilet fueled by the sun that is being developed to help some of the 2.5 billion people around the world lacking safe and sustainable sanitation will be unveiled in India this month. The self-contained, waterless toilet, designed and built using a $777,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has the capability of heating human waste to a high enough temperature to sterilize human waste and create biochar, a highly porous charcoal, said project principal investigator Karl Linden, professor of environmental engineering. ...

A husband's agreeable personality and good health appear crucial to preventing conflict among older couples who have been together a long time, according to a study from University of Chicago researchers. The report found that such characteristics in wives play less of a role in limiting marital conflict, perhaps because of different expectations among women and men in durable relationships. "Wives report more conflict if their husband is in poor health," said the study's lead author, James Iveniuk, PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. "If the wife is in poor ...

An ultra-fast and ultra-small optical switch has been invented that could advance the day when photons replace electrons in the innards of consumer products ranging from cell phones to automobiles. The new optical device can turn on and off trillions of times per second. It consists of individual switches that are only one five-hundredths the width of a human hair (200 nanometers) in diameter. This size is much smaller than the current generation of optical switches and it easily breaks one of the major technical barriers to the spread of electronic devices that detect ...

If Galileo was still alive and kicking, he might want to take a selfie with some of the thousands of citizen scientists all around the world for their surprisingly accurate work of counting craters on the pock-marked moon. A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder showed that as a group, volunteer counters who examined a particular patch of lunar real estate using NASA images did just as well in identifying individual craters as professional crater counters with five to 50 years of experience. And Galileo, who was observing the craters some 400 years ago with ...

Researchers at Virginia Tech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have used a computer-aided design tool to create genetic languages to guide the design of biological systems. Known as GenoCAD, the open-source software was developed by researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech to help synthetic biologists capture biological rules to engineer organisms that produce useful products or health-care solutions from inexpensive, renewable materials. GenoCAD helps researchers in the design of protein expression vectors, artificial gene networks, ...

Deep coral reefs in Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (PMNM) may contain the highest percentage of fish species found nowhere else on Earth, according to a study by NOAA scientists published in the Bulletin of Marine Science. Part of the largest protected area in the United States, the islands, atolls and submerged habitats of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) harbor unprecedented levels of biological diversity, underscoring the value in protecting this area, scientists said. Hawaii is known for its high abundance of endemic species – that is, species ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Auxin, a small molecule, is a plant hormone discovered by Charles Darwin about 100 years ago. Over the years that followed it became understood to be the most important and versatile plant hormone controlling nearly all aspects of plant growth and development, such as bending of shoots toward the source of light (as discovered by Darwin), formation of new leaves, flowers, and roots, growth of roots, and gravity-oriented growth. Just how a small molecule like auxin could play such a pivotal role in plants baffled plant biologists for decades. Then, ...

The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 6:34 p.m. EDT on March 12, 2014, and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, captured an image of it. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. To see how this event may impact Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's ...

MADISON — A new study in animals shows that using a compound to block the body's immune response greatly reduces disability after a stroke. The study by scientists from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health also showed that particular immune cells – CD4+ T-cells produce a mediator, called interleukin (IL) -21 that can cause further damage in stroke tissue. Moreover, normal mice, ordinarily killed or disabled by an ischemic stroke, were given a shot of a compound that blocks the action of IL-21. Brain scans and brain sections showed that the ...

A wasp's sting might explain it all. Marty Condon, professor of biology at Cornell College, has been studying flies in the tropics for years, and in a paper published in Science this week, she reports evidence that there is more to a fly's ecological niche than where it lives and what it eats—you have to look at what eats the fly, as well. In a previous Science paper, Condon and her co-researchers found that there were far more species of flies feeding on tropical flowers than expected. It was counter-intuitive, Condon said, to see so many species of flies filling what ...

JUPITER, FL – March 13, 2014 – As the United States continues to lead the world in the production of natural gas, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have devised a new and more efficient method with the potential to convert the major components found in natural gas into useable fuels and chemicals—opening the door to cheaper, more abundant energy and materials with much lower emissions. The research, which was led by TSRI Professor Roy Periana, uses clever chemistry and nontraditional materials to turn natural gas into liquid ...

LA JOLLA, CA—March 13, 2014—Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have devised a greatly improved technique for making amino acids not found in nature. These "unnatural" amino acids traditionally have been very difficult to synthesize, but are sought after by the pharmaceutical industry for their potential medical uses. "This new technique offers a very quick way to prepare unnatural amino acids, many of which are drug candidates or building blocks for peptide drugs," said Jin-Quan Yu, a professor in TSRI's Department of Chemistry. Yu's team has reported ...