The press release
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Medicine14 Aug 2014

Prevalence, risk factors for diabetic macular edema explored in study

Bottom Line: The odds of having diabetic macular edema (DME), a leading cause of vision loss in patients with diabetes mellitus, appears to be higher in non-Hispanic black patients than white patients, as well as in those individuals who have had diabetes longer and have higher levels of hemoglobin A1c. Author: Rohit Varma, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and colleagues. Background: About 347 million people worldwide have diabetes and diabetic eye disease is a leading cause of vision loss in patients between the ages of 20 and 74 ...

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Science14 Aug 2014

Strong state alcohol policies reduce likelihood of binge drinking

(Boston) – People living in states with stronger alcohol policy environments have a substantially lower likelihood of any binge drinking, frequent binge drinking, and high-intensity binge drinking, according to a new study by researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and Boston Medical Center (BMC), published in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Specifically, the study found, each 10 percentage point increase in the strength of a state's alcohol policy score (reflecting more effective and/or better implemented alcohol ...

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Science14 Aug 2014

New tool makes a single picture worth far more than a thousand words

A photo is worth a thousand words, but what if it could also represent a hundred thousand other images? New software developed by UC Berkeley computer scientists seeks to tame the vast amount of visual data in the world by generating a single photo that can represent massive clusters of images. This tool can give users the photographic gist of a kid on Santa's lap, housecats, or brides and grooms at their weddings. It works by generating an image that literally averages the key features of the other photos. Users can also give extra weight to specific features to ...

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Medicine14 Aug 2014

Global public health objectives need to address substance abuse in developing countries

New York, NY, August 14, 2014 – Substance addiction is a large and growing problem for developing societies. A new study that surveyed reports on modalities for treating addiction and their effectiveness in the developing world calls on policymakers to use this information to support the design of programs that meet known population needs. The study also encourages looking at ways to adapt the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) model to fit different cultural norms. The findings are published in the Annals of Global Health. The World Health Organization has indicated that alcohol ...

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Science14 Aug 2014

Understanding parallels of human and animal parenting can benefit generations to come

Strong evidence now shows that human and animal parenting share many nervous system mechanisms. This is the conclusion of Yerkes National Primate Research Center researchers Larry Young, PhD, and James Rilling, PhD, in their review article about the biology of mammalian parenting, published in this week's issue of Science. Better understanding this biology could lead to improved social development, benefitting generations of humans and animals to come. In their article, Young and Rilling review the biological mechanisms governing a shift in mammals' parental motivation ...

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Science14 Aug 2014

Food allergies more widespread among inner-city children

Already known for their higher-than-usual risk of asthma and environmental allergies, young inner-city children appear to suffer disproportionately from food allergies as well, according to results of a study led by scientists at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. The federally funded multi-center study, described online Aug. 13 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, found that at least one in 10 children from four large U.S. cities has a food allergy. However, the true number may be even higher, the investigators say, because the study used highly stringent ...

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Medicine14 Aug 2014

Severity of sleep apnea impacts risk of resistant high blood pressure

DARIEN, IL – A new study shows a strong association between severe, untreated obstructive sleep apnea and the risk of elevated blood pressure despite the use of high blood pressure medications. The study involved patients who had cardiovascular risk factors or established heart disease and moderate or severe obstructive sleep apnea. Among participants prescribed at least three antihypertensives including a diuretic, resistant elevated blood pressure was more prevalent in those with severe sleep apnea (58.3 %) compared with moderate sleep apnea (28.6%). Further analysis ...

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Science14 Aug 2014

UTSA research sheds light on factors affecting veteran hiring

In the coming years, increased troop withdrawals from the Middle East may result in greater numbers of combat veterans searching for jobs in the private sector. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, military veterans have numerous problems gaining and maintaining jobs in the U.S., and their unemployment rates are consistently higher than nonveterans. To help solve this problem, University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) College of Business Ph.D. student in organization and management studies Christopher Stone is leading groundbreaking research on the factors affecting ...

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Medicine14 Aug 2014

Single enzyme is necessary for development of diabetes

An enzyme called 12-LO promotes the obesity-induced oxidative stress in the pancreatic cells that leads to pre-diabetes, and diabetes. 12-LO's enzymatic action is the last step in the production of certain small molecules that harm the cell, according to a team from Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis. The findings will enable the development of drugs that can interfere with this enzyme, preventing or even reversing diabetes. The research is published ahead of print in the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology. Nearly 40 percent of Americans—more than ...

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Science14 Aug 2014

Parasitic worms sniff out their victims as 'cruisers' or 'ambushers'

It has been speculated that soil-dwelling parasitic worms use their sense of smell to find suitable hosts for infection. Research published on August 14th in PLOS Pathogens comparing odor-driven behaviors in different roundworm species reveals that olfactory preferences reflect host specificity rather than species relatedness, suggesting that olfaction indeed plays an important role in host location. To study worm olfaction, Elissa Hallem, from the University of California Los Angeles, USA, and colleagues examined the host-seeking strategies and sensory behaviors of different ...

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Medicine14 Aug 2014

Drugs that flush out HIV may impair killer T cells, possibly hindering HIV eradication

Histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors have shown promise in "flushing out" HIV from latently infected cells, potentially exposing the reservoirs available for elimination by cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL), also called killer T cells. However, findings published on August 14th in PLOS Pathogens now suggest that treatment with HDAC inhibitors might suppress CTL activity and therefore compromise the "kill" part of a two-pronged "flush-and-kill" HIV eradication strategy. At least three different HDAC inhibitors, romidepsin, panobinostat, and SAHA, are under investigation as ...

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Science14 Aug 2014

Plants may use newly discovered language to communicate, Virginia Tech scientist discovers

VIDEO: This time-lapse video shows how the parasitic plant dodder attacks tomatoes. But beyond stealing nutrients from the host plants, a Virginia Tech researcher has discovered that the two plants also... Click here for more information. A Virginia Tech scientist has discovered a potentially new form of plant communication, one that allows them to share an extraordinary amount of genetic information with one another. The finding by Jim Westwood, a professor of plant pathology, ...

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Environment14 Aug 2014

Human contribution to glacier mass loss on the increase

This news release is available in German. The ongoing global glacier retreat causes rising sea-levels, changing seasonal water availability and increasing geo-hazards. While melting glaciers have become emblematic of anthropogenic climate change, glacier extent responds very slowly to climate changes. "Typically, it takes glaciers decades or centuries to adjust to climate changes," says climate researcher Ben Marzeion from the Institute of Meteorology and Geophysics of the University of Innsbruck. The global retreat of glaciers observed today started around the middle ...

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Space14 Aug 2014

Seven tiny grains captured by Stardust likely visitors from interstellar space

Since 2006, when NASA's Stardust spacecraft delivered its aerogel and aluminum foil dust collectors to Earth, a team of scientists has combed through the collectors in search of rare, microscopic particles of interstellar dust. The team now reports that they have found seven dust motes that probably came from outside our solar system, perhaps created in a supernova explosion millions of years ago and altered by eons of exposure to the extremes of space. They would be the first confirmed samples of contemporary interstellar dust. "They are very precious particles," ...

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Social Science14 Aug 2014

Memories of errors foster faster learning

Using a deceptively simple set of experiments, researchers at Johns Hopkins have learned why people learn an identical or similar task faster the second, third and subsequent time around. The reason: They are aided not only by memories of how to perform the task, but also by memories of the errors made the first time. "In learning a new motor task, there appear to be two processes happening at once," says Reza Shadmehr, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "One is the learning of the motor ...

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Medicine14 Aug 2014

Harnessing the power of bacteria's sophisticated immune system

Bacteria's ability to destroy viruses has long puzzled scientists, but researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health say they now have a clear picture of the bacterial immune system and say its unique shape is likely why bacteria can so quickly recognize and destroy their assailants. The researchers drew what they say is the first-ever picture of the molecular machinery, known as Cascade, which stands guard inside bacterial cells. To their surprise, they found it contains a two-strand, unencumbered structure that resembles a ladder, freeing it to ...

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Science14 Aug 2014

Message to parents: Babies don't 'start from scratch'

There's now overwhelming evidence that a child's future health is influenced by more than just their parents' genetic material, and that children born of unhealthy parents will already be pre-programmed for greater risk of poor health, according to University of Adelaide researchers. In a feature paper called "Parenting from before conception" published in today's issue of the top international journal Science, researchers at the University's Robinson Research Institute say environmental factors prior to conception have more influence on the child's future than previously ...

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Technology14 Aug 2014

A self-organizing thousand-robot swarm

Cambridge, Mass. – August 14, 2014 – The first thousand-robot flash mob has assembled at Harvard University. "Form a sea star shape," directs a computer scientist, sending the command to 1,024 little bots simultaneously via an infrared light. The robots begin to blink at one another and then gradually arrange themselves into a five-pointed star. "Now form the letter K." The 'K' stands for Kilobots, the name given to these extremely simple robots, each just a few centimeters across, standing on three pin-like legs. Instead of one highly-complex robot, a "kilo" of robots ...

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Technology14 Aug 2014

Molecular engineers record an electron's quantum behavior

A team of researchers led by the University of Chicago has developed a technique to record the quantum mechanical behavior of an individual electron contained within a nanoscale defect in diamond. Their technique uses ultrafast pulses of laser light both to control the defect's entire quantum state and observe how that single electron state changes over time. The work appears in this week's online Science Express and will be published in print later this month in Science. This research contributes to the emerging science of quantum information processing, which demands ...

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Space14 Aug 2014

Mysteries of space dust revealed

The first analysis of space dust collected by a special collector onboard NASA's Stardust mission and sent back to Earth for study in 2006 suggests the tiny specks, which likely originated from beyond our solar system, are more complex in composition and structure than previously imagined. The analysis, completed at a number of facilities including the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) opens a door to studying the origins of the solar system and possibly the origin of life itself. "Fundamentally, the solar system and everything ...

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Space14 Aug 2014

New Milky Way maps help solve stubborn interstellar material mystery

An international team of sky scholars, including a key researcher from Johns Hopkins, has produced new maps of the material located between the stars in the Milky Way. The results should move astronomers closer to cracking a stardust puzzle that has vexed them for nearly a century. The maps and an accompanying journal article appear in the Aug. 15 issue of the journal Science. The researchers say their work demonstrates a new way of uncovering the location and eventually the composition of the interstellar medium—the material found in the vast expanse between star systems ...

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Science14 Aug 2014

CF mucus defect present at birth

VIDEO: This is a 3-D reconstruction from time-lapse CT-scans of a CF pig lung. Images show the trachea and bronchi. Colored round dots represent positions of particles that were... Click here for more information. Mucus is key to keeping our lungs clean and clear of bacteria, viruses, and other foreign particles that can cause infection and inflammation. When we inhale microbes and dust, they are trapped in the mucus and then swept up and out of the lungs via a process called ...

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Medicine14 Aug 2014

Potential drug therapy for kidney stones identified in mouse study

Anyone who has suffered from kidney stones is keenly aware of the lack of drugs to treat the condition, which often causes excruciating pain. A new mouse study, however, suggests that a class of drugs approved to treat leukemia and epilepsy also may be effective against kidney stones, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report. The drugs are histone deacetylase inhibitors, or HDAC inhibitors for short. The researchers found that two of them — Vorinostat and trichostatin A — lower levels of calcium and magnesium in the urine. Both calcium ...

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Medicine14 Aug 2014

Broader organ sharing won't harm liver transplant recipients

New research shows that broader sharing of deceased donor livers will not significantly increase cold ischemia time (CIT)—the time the liver is in a cooled state outside the donor suggesting that this is not a barrier to broader sharing of organs. However, findings published in Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the International Liver Transplantation Society, do indicate that broader sharing of organs will significantly increase the percentage of donor organs that are transported by flying rather than driving. ...

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Science14 Aug 2014

Scientists study 'talking' turtles in Brazilian Amazon

AUDIO: These are vocalizations made between adults and hatchlings (individual sounds repeated for the listener's benefit). Click here for more information. Turtles are well known for their longevity and protective shells, but it turns out these reptiles use sound to stick together and care for young, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society and other organizations. Scientists working in the Brazilian Amazon have found that Giant South American river turtles actually ...

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