TEMPE, Ariz. (Sept. 10, 2014) - The ability and consistency in monitoring one's diet, but not dietary quality, improves with the use of smartphone applications, according to new research by Arizona State University health scientists published in the latest issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior. Researchers Christopher Wharton, Carol Johnston, Barbara Cunningham and Danielle Sterner at ASU's School of Nutrition and Health Promotion authored the study. The study compared the effectiveness of a popular smartphone application called "Lose It" for dietary ...

The collaborative study between the University Of Melbourne and the Menzies Research Institute at the University of Tasmania is the first to estimate the long-term costs and health outcomes of depression-related absence as compared to individuals who continue to work among employees with depression in Australia. Lead researcher Dr Fiona Cocker from the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health said a greater understanding of the costs and consequences of both absenteeism and presenteeism would allow for more informed recommendations to be made to the benefit of ...

Researchers from Göttingen in collaboration with colleagues from Augsburg have 'filmed' the movement of lipid molecules using an X-ray stroboscope at DESY. In the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, researchers lead by Professor Tim Salditt of the University of Göttingen report that their study offers new insights into the dynamics of biomolecules, which compose materials such as cell membranes. The cell membranes consist of a double layer of lipid molecules; the properties of the membranes are of great interest because they control which substances enter and exit ...

Resilience, a person's ability to overcome adverse circumstances, is the main quality associated with pain tolerance among patients and their adjustment to chronic pain. This is the result of a new study carried out at the University of Málaga that shows that the effect of gender on this ability is not as significant as originally thought. Over the years a number of clinical trials have shown important gender differences with regard to susceptibility to pain through illness, effectiveness of medications and recovery after anaesthetic. Furthermore, these results coincide ...

MISSOULA, Mont. – Pollution in many cities threatens the brain development in children. Findings by University of Montana Professor Dr. Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas, MA, MD, Ph.D., and her team of researchers reveal that children living in megacities are at increased risk for brain inflammation and neurodegenerative changes, including Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. Calderón-Garcidueñas' findings are detailed in a paper titled "Air pollution and children: Neural and tight junction antibodies and combustion metals, the role of barrier breakdown and brain ...

DURHAM, N.C. –- Numerous studies have linked social interaction to improved health and survival in humans, and new research confirms that the same is true for baboons. A long-term study of more than 200 wild female baboons from the plains of southern Kenya finds that the most sociable females –- measured by how often they engaged in social grooming relative to their peers -- live two to three years longer than their socially isolated counterparts. Socializing with males gave females an even bigger longevity boost than socializing with other females, the researchers ...

MIAMI – A new study on the frequency of past giant earthquakes in the Indian Ocean region shows that Sri Lanka, and much of the Indian Ocean, is affected by large tsunamis at highly variable intervals, from a few hundred to more than one thousand years. The findings suggest that the accumulation of stress in the region could generate as large, or even larger tsunamis than the one that resulted from the 2004 magnitude-9.2 Sumatra earthquake. Researchers from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and the University of Peradeniya ...

Racetrack Playa is home to an enduring Death Valley mystery. Littered across the surface of this dry lake, also called a "playa," are hundreds of rocks – some weighing as much as 320 kilograms (700 pounds) – that seem to have been dragged across the ground, leaving synchronized trails that can stretch for hundreds of meters. What powerful force could be moving them? Researchers have investigated this question since the 1940s, but no one has seen the process in action – until now. In a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE on Aug. 27, a team led by Scripps Institution ...

The work took nearly four years to complete and it opens a fundamentally new direction in photonics – with far-reaching potential consequences for the control of photons in optical fiber channels. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have built the first 500 Gigahertz (GHz) photon switch. "Our switch is more than an order of magnitude faster than any previously published result to date," said UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Stojan Radic. "That exceeds the speed of the fastest lightwave information channels in use today." According ...

The Milky Way galaxy is orbited by more than 150 globular star clusters, which are balls of hundreds of thousands of old stars dating back to the formation of the galaxy. One of these, along with several others in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), was found in the late eighteenth century by the French comet hunter Charles Messier and given the designation Messier 54. For more than two hundred years after its discovery Messier 54 was thought to be similar to the other Milky Way globulars. But in 1994 it was discovered that it was actually associated with a ...

Quantum computing relies on the laws of quantum mechanics to process vast amounts of information and calculations simultaneously, with far more power than current computers. However, development of quantum computers has been limited as researchers have struggled to find a reliable way to increase the power of these systems, a power measured in Q-Bits. Previous attempts to find the elusive Majorana particle have been very promising but have not yet provided definitive and conclusive evidence of its existence. Now, researchers from the University of Surrey and the Ben-Gurion ...

LOS ANGELES – Researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute infused antibody-studded iron nanoparticles into the bloodstream to treat heart attack damage. The combined nanoparticle enabled precise localization of the body's own stem cells to the injured heart muscle. The study, which focused on laboratory rats, was published today in the online peer reviewed journal Nature Communications. The study addresses a central challenge in stem cell therapeutics: how to achieve targeted interactions between stem cells and injured cells. Although stem cells can be a potent ...

Magnetic reconnection can trigger geomagnetic storms that disrupt cell phone service, damage satellites and black out power grids. But how reconnection, in which the magnetic field lines in plasma snap apart and violently reconnect, transforms magnetic energy into explosive particle energy remains a major unsolved problem in plasma astrophysics. Magnetic field lines represent the direction, and indicate the shape, of magnetic fields. Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have taken a key step toward a solution, ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. – People with multiple sclerosis (MS) lose myelin in the gray matter of their brains and the loss is closely correlated with the severity of the disease, according to a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study. Researchers said the findings could have important applications in clinical trials and treatment monitoring. The study appears online in the journal Radiology. Loss of myelin, the fatty protective sheath around nerve fibers, is a characteristic of MS, an inflammatory disease of the central nervous system that can lead to a variety of serious neurological ...

Before they reach young adulthood, most children in the United States will experience their parents separating, divorcing, finding another partner, or getting remarried. Research tells us that children have more behavior problems (such as aggression and defiance) when families change structure. Now a new study has found that behavior problems in children increased in families in which parents separated only in higher-income families, and that children's age also played a part in their likelihood of having behavior problems. The study, by researchers at Georgetown University ...

Research has told us that infants whose mothers respond quickly, consistently, and warmly when they cry have healthier emotional development than infants whose mothers are less sensitive to their cries. A new study has found that mothers whose childhood experiences with caregivers was positive and those who have come to terms with negative experiences are more infant-oriented when they see videos of babies crying and respond more sensitively to their own babies' cries. The study, by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, with input from colleagues ...

PHILADELPHIA, PA, September 10, 2014 – African American women and their female children have the highest obesity prevalence of any demographic group and are more likely to underestimate their body weight than white women. Yet, according to new research from Rush University Medical Center, cultural norms for body size may prevent awareness among many African American women about the potential health benefits they and others in their cultural group might achieve through weight loss. Led by Elizabeth Lynch, PhD, this research recruited African American women in a low-income ...

PHILADELPHIA, PA, September 10, 2014 – Smartphones have seen wide adoption among Americans in recent years because of their ease of use and adaptability. With that in mind, researchers from Arizona State University examined how smartphone use affected weight loss goals and determined that smartphones may offer users an advantage over traditional methods when tracking diet data. Roughly 83% of Americans now own a mobile phone and 45% own smartphones with Internet access. For this study, researchers recruited healthy, weight-stable adults and semirandomly divided them ...

Sendai, Japan – A research team headed by Prof. Patrick Han and Prof. Taro Hitosugi at the Advanced Institute of Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University discovered a new bottom-up fabrication method that produces defect-free graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) with periodic zigzag-edge regions. This method, which controls GNR growth direction and length distribution, is a stepping stone towards future graphene-device fabrication by self-assembly. Graphene, with its low dimensionality, high stability, high strength, and high charge-carrier mobility, promises to be a revolutionary ...

As a heart fails, losing its ability to squeeze blood through the circulatory system, the body releases a neurohormone that interferes with the heart's best chance to improve contractility, a team of Temple University School of Medicine researchers show in a study published September 9th in the American Heart Association journal, Circulation. The discovery reveals a promising target for the treatment of end-stage heart failure, and raises intriguing questions about why a drug used to treat some forms of end-stage heart failure improves symptoms but fails to extend lives ...

DALLAS – September 9, 2014– The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) has released the first comprehensive, evidence-based guidelines for management of sickle cell disease from birth to end of life, based on recommendations developed by a nationwide team of experts co-chaired by a UT Southwestern Medical Center hematologist. Appearing today in JAMA, the guidelines are intended for general use by pediatricians, physicians treating adults, hematologists, emergency room personnel, hospitalists, and other health care providers. The new management guidelines consist ...

Turnover of registered nurses (RNs) is an important and widely used measure in analyzing the health care workforce. It's used to project the job market for nurses (based on availability of jobs) and can also be considered an indicator of whether a health care organization has a good working environment. A study in the current issue of Policy, Politics & Nursing Practice reveals that an estimated 17.5 percent of newly-licensed RNs leave their first nursing job within the first year and one in three (33.5%) leave within two years. The researchers found that turnover for ...

As we and other vertebrates age, our DNA accumulates mutations and becomes rearranged, which may result in a variety of age-related illnesses, including cancers. Biologists Vera Gorbunova and Andei Seluanov have now discovered one reason for the increasing DNA damage: the primary repair process begins to fail with increasing age and is replaced by one that is less accurate. The findings have been published in the journal PLOS Genetics. "Scientists have had limited tools to accurately study how DNA repair changes with age," said Gorbunova. "We are now able to measure ...

A new mechanism to inhibit proteasomes, protein complexes that are a target for cancer therapy, is the topic of an article published in the journal Chemistry & Biology. The first author of the study is Daniela Trivella, researcher at the Brazilian Biosciences National Laboratory at the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (LNBio/CNPEM). The findings of the study, conducted with FAPESP support in partnership with researchers from the University of California in San Diego, United States, and at the Technische Universität München, in Germany, are paving the ...

Truly two-dimensional objects are rare. Even a thin piece of paper is trillions of atoms thick. When physicists do succeed in producing 2D systems, quantum interactions can lead to new phenomena and Nobel prizes. Two examples: graphene---single-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms---has unique mechanical, electrical, and optical properties; and two-dimensional electron gases (2DEG)---planar collections of electrons supported at the interface between certain semiconductors such as gallium arsenide---allow the observation of such emergent behaviors as the quantum Hall effect ...