CORVALLIS, Ore. – Mothers who live in neighborhoods with plenty of grass, trees or other green vegetation are more likely to deliver at full term and their babies are born at higher weights, compared to mothers who live in urban areas that aren't as green, a new study shows. The findings held up even when results were adjusted for factors such as neighborhood income, exposure to air pollution, noise, and neighborhood walkability, according to researchers at Oregon State University and the University of British Columbia. "This was a surprise," said Perry Hystad, an environmental ...

Salamanders spend the vast majority of their lives below ground and surface only for short periods of time and usually only on wet nights. When they do emerge, salamanders can be spotted not only on forest floors but also up in trees and on other vegetation, often climbing as high as 8 feet. Given their infrequent appearances aboveground, it has never been clear to biologists why salamanders take time to climb vegetation. Researchers at the University of Missouri recently conducted a study testing a long-standing hypothesis that salamanders might climb vegetation for food. ...

Trust in others and confidence in societal institutions are at their lowest point in over three decades, analyses of national survey data reveal. The findings are forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Compared to Americans in the 1970s-2000s, Americans in the last few years are less likely to say they can trust others, and are less likely to believe that institutions such as government, the press, religious organizations, schools, and large corporations are 'doing a good job,'" explains psychological scientist and ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Accidents as minor as a slip of the knife while chopping onions can turn dangerous for patients with hemophilia, who lack the necessary proteins in their blood to stem the flow from a wound. People with severe hemophilia typically receive regular injections of these proteins, called clotting factors, as a treatment for the disease. But up to 30 percent of people with the most common form, hemophilia A, develop antibodies that attack these lifesaving proteins, making it difficult to prevent or treat excessive bleeding. Now, researchers from University ...

Scientists have discovered and described a new supermassive dinosaur species with the most complete skeleton ever found of its type. At 85 feet long and weighing about 65 tons in life, Dreadnoughtus schrani is the largest land animal for which a body mass can be accurately calculated. Its skeleton is exceptionally complete, with over 70 percent of the bones, excluding the head, represented. Because all previously discovered super-massive dinosaurs are known only from relatively fragmentary remains, Dreadnoughtus offers an unprecedented window into the anatomy and biomechanics ...

Customer experience matters more when the economy is doing well than when it is doing poorly, according to a new study in the Articles in Advance section of Marketing Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The study, entitled "Assessing the Influence of Economic and Customer Experience Factors on Service Purchase Behaviors" is by V Kumar, the Regents' Professor, Nita Umashankar, an assistant professor, and PhD candidates Hannah Kim and Yashoda Bhagwat, all at Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. ...

The Ebola crisis in west Africa could have been averted if governments and health agencies had acted on the recommendations of a 2011 World Health Organisation (WHO) Commission on global health emergencies, according to a new Comment, published in The Lancet. The Comment, written by Professor Lawrence Gostin, Faculty Director of the O'Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law at Georgetown University, USA, calls for renewed international commitment to a health systems contingency fund to prevent another infectious disease crisis, together with long-term funding ...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Five studies from the 2014 Breast Cancer Symposium were highlighted today in an embargoed presscast for reporters. Presentations focused on new studies exploring preventive mastectomy, compliance with recommended screening mammography, and risk of recurrence after pre-surgery therapy for breast cancer. The Symposium will take place September 4-6, 2014, at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, CA. Five major studies were highlighted in today's presscast: Angelina Jolie's Story May Have Helped Double BRCA Testing Rates at a Canadian Cancer ...

The way in which some cells alter their behaviour at the onset of osteoarthritis has been identified for the first time by researchers at the University of Liverpool. The study was funded by medical research charity Arthritis Research UK. The trigger for arthritis is still to be fully defined, but it is known that injuries, obesity or old age can all increase the risk for arthritis, and lead to cells in the affected joint altering their behaviour. The research team from the University's Institute of Ageing and Chronic Disease has now found that changes in the rate ...

LAWRENCE — Astrophysicists believe that about 80 percent of the substance of our universe is made up of mysterious "dark matter" that can't be perceived by human senses or scientific instruments. "Dark matter has not yet been detected in a lab. We infer about it from astronomical observations," said Mikhail Medvedev, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, who has just published breakthrough research on dark matter that merited the cover of Physical Review Letters, the world's most prestigious journal of physics research. Medvedev proposes a ...

A new combination of materials can efficiently guide electricity and light along the same tiny wire, a finding that could be a step towards building computer chips capable of transporting digital information at the speed of light. Reporting today in The Optical Society's (OSA) high-impact journal Optica, optical and material scientists at the University of Rochester and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich describe a basic model circuit consisting of a silver nanowire and a single-layer flake of molybendum disulfide (MoS2). Using a laser to excite electromagnetic ...

Geologists from Trinity College Dublin have rewritten the evolutionary history books by finding that oxygen-producing life forms were present on Earth some 3 billion years ago – a full 60 million years earlier than previously thought. These life forms were responsible for adding oxygen (O2) to our atmosphere, which laid the foundations for more complex life to evolve and proliferate. Working with Professors Joydip Mukhopadhyay and Gautam Ghosh and other colleagues from the Presidency University in Kolkata, India, the geologists found evidence for chemical weathering of ...

LEXINGTON, Ky (Sept. 4, 2014) -- A team of investigators at the University of Kentucky has made a thought-provoking discovery about a type of cholesterol previously believed to be a "bad guy" in the development of heart disease and other conditions. Jason Meyer, a University of Kentucky MD-PhD candidate, worked with Deneys van der Westhuyzen, Ph.D., a Professor in the Departments of Internal Medicine and Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, to study the role oxidized LDL plays in the development of plaque inside artery walls. According to Meyer, the medical research ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — California's water supply depends on a clean snow pack and healthy mountain lakes. The lakes receive a large amount of runoff in the spring from the melting snowpack. If the snowpack is polluted, the lakes will be polluted. James O. Sickman, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Riverside, has conducted research on lakes in the Sierra Nevada—the most sensitive lakes in the U.S. to acid rain, according to the Environmental Protection Agency—and described human impacts on them during the 20th century. The research was done by ...

Many patients suffer from severe spinal cord injuries after being involved in traffic accidents or accidents at work. An injury to the spinal cord is a catastrophe for the individual, and often results in complete or partial paralysis of the person's arms and legs. Despite the paralysis, several patients experience problems with involuntary muscle contractions or spasms which impair the patient's quality of life. The movements are due to the neurotransmitter serotonin, which normally plays a crucial role in relation to our voluntary control of movements by reinforcing ...

In some parts of the Earth, material rises upwards like a column from the boundary layer of the Earth's core and the lower mantel to just below the Earth's crust hundreds of kilometres above. Halted by the resistance of the hard crust and lithospheric mantle, the flow of material becomes wider, taking on a mushroom-like shape. Specialists call these magma columns "mantle plumes" or simply "plumes". Are mantel plumes responsible for the African rift system? Geologists believe that plumes are not just responsible for creating volcanoes outside of tectonically active areas ...

Glucocorticoids are speculated to have a long-term impact on the development of the nervous system and increase the incidence of cerebral palsy in preterm infants. The existing studies concerning the role of dexamethasone in preterm infants are insufficiently reliable owing to short follow-up periods and small sample sizes in clinical studies, or the absence of randomized controlled trials. Ruolin Zhang and co-workers from the Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University in China conducted a meta-analysis of 10 relevant randomized controlled trials. They found that ...

Current evidence shows that apolipoprotein E (APOE), apolipoprotein CI (APOC1) and low density lipoprotein receptor-related protein (LRP) variations are related to late-onset Alzheimer's disease. However, it remains unclear if genetic polymorphisms in these genes are associated with cognitive decline in late-onset Alzheimer's disease patients. According to a recent study reported in the Neural Regeneration Research, APOE ε4 plays an important role in augmenting cognitive decline, and APOC1 H2 may act synergistically with APOE ε4 in increasing the risk of cognitive ...

Cystic fibrosis (mucoviscidosis) is due to a mutation of an ion channel which leads to highly viscous mucus and to dysfunction of the lung and the gastrointestinal organs. Since these patients frequently suffer from chronic infections, Dr. Thomas Hofer and Professor Dr. Loems Ziegler-Heitbrock from the Comprehensive Pneumology Center (CPC) at Helmholtz Zentrum München - together with colleagues at the Klinikum der Universität München and the University of Leicester, UK - investigated, whether these patients might have an additional immune defect. The scientists found ...

Researchers from the University of Liverpool in collaboration with Public Health England have been investigating new ways to identify drugs that could be used to treat Ebola virus infection. Their approach has been to study what proteins inside a cell are critical for the functions of Ebola virus and are hijacked by the virus to help with infection. One of the proteins they have targeted is known as VP24. This protein disrupts signalling in infected human cells and disrupts the body's immune system and the fight against the virus. Once the team identified these cellular ...

Echolocating bats have historically been classified into two groups: 'loud' aerial hawkers who catch flying insects on the wing and 'whispering' gleaners that pick up prey from the ground. While some bat species can forage in multiple ways, others have limited flexibility in the amplitude of their echolocation calls. Dr Talya Hackett and colleagues studied the desert long-eared bat (Otonycteris hemprichii), said to be a passive 'whispering' gleaner that picks up ground-dwelling invertebrates, such as scorpions, from the desert floor. Using an acoustic tracking system, ...

Tinnitus, migraine, epilepsy, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's: all these are examples of diseases with neurological causes, the treatment and study of which is more and more frequently being carried out by means of magnetic stimulation of the brain. However, the method's precise mechanisms of action have not, as yet, been fully understood. The work group headed by PD Dr Dirk Jancke from the Institut für Neuroinformatik was the first to succeed in illustrating the neuronal effects of this treatment method with high-res images. Painless Therapy Transcranial magnetic ...

New Rochelle, NY, September 4, 2014--Imagine a non-rigid, shape-changing robot that walks on four "legs," can operate without the constraints of a tether, and can function in a snowstorm, move through puddles of water, and even withstand limited exposure to flames. Harvard advanced materials chemist George Whitesides, PhD and colleagues describe the mobile, autonomous robot they have created in Soft Robotics, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available on the Soft Robotics website. In "A Resilient, Untethered Soft Robot," ...

Researchers at Lund University have published new research findings on the role of the intestinal barrier in the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis (MS). Within medical science, it is not known for certain how MS develops or why the body's immune system attacks cells in the central nervous system. Inflammation develops for an unknown reason, which hinders transport of neural impulses. This can produce various physical and mental symptoms, including a loss of sensation, motor difficulties, blurred vision, dizziness and tiredness. The present study investigates whether ...

Researchers from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Viktor Zhukov, Vladislav Sechenov and Andrei Starikovsky, have published experimental data on the combustion of jet fuel in the journal Fuel. The results of their research are important for simulating processes in jet engines. In their paper, the scientists described how quickly a mixture of jet fuel and oxygen ignites depending on different conditions. This value, called the induction period or combustion delay period, was defined for different temperatures, pressure values and blending ratios. The data obtained ...