Odds are, there’s a virus living inside your gut that has gone undetected by scientists for decades. A new study led by researchers at San Diego State University has found that more than half the world’s population is host to a newly described virus, named crAssphage, which infects one of the most common types of gut bacteria, Bacteroidetes. This phylum of bacteria is thought to be connected with obesity, diabetes and other gut-related diseases. The research appears today in Nature Communications. Robert A. Edwards, a bioinformatics professor at SDSU, and his colleagues ...

Washington, DC (July 21, 2014) – It seems common practice. After a long day at work, sometimes you just want to turn on the TV or play a video game to relax, decompress. This is supposed to make you feel better. But, a recent study published in the Journal of Communication, by researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, and VU University Amsterdam, found that people who had high stress levels after work and engaged in television viewing or video game play didn't feel relaxed or recovered, but had high levels of guilt and feelings of failure. Leonard ...

A new study of identical twins has found that early reading skill might positively affect later intellectual abilities. The study, in the journal Child Development, was conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and King's College London. "Since reading is an ability that can be improved, our findings have implications for reading instruction," according to Stuart J. Ritchie, research fellow in psychology at the University of Edinburgh, who led the study. "Early remediation of reading problems might aid not only the growth of literacy, but also more general ...

Adolescents in some countries and U.S. states are required to perform community service, and many national and nongovernmental agencies promote such service. A new study has found that while community service has broad benefits for adolescents, it is particularly effective when the activities are accompanied by reflection and discussion. The study, by researchers at Utrecht University and Rutgers University, appears in the journal Child Development. Researchers used meta-analysis to assess findings from 49 studies from around the world that were conducted from 1980 ...

Children who have been abused or neglected early in life are at risk for developing both emotional and physical health problems. In a new study, scientists have found that maltreatment affects the way genes are activated, which has implications for children's long-term development. Previous studies focused on how a particular child's individual characteristics and genetics interacted with that child's experiences in an effort to understand how health problems emerge. In the new study, researchers were able to measure the degree to which genes were turned "on" or "off" through ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a genetic disorder that causes obsessive-compulsive and repetitive behaviors, and other behaviors on the autistic spectrum, as well as cognitive deficits. It is the most common inherited cause of mental impairment and the most common cause of autism. Now biomedical scientists at the University of California, Riverside have published a study that sheds light on the cause of autistic behaviors in FXS. Appearing online today (July 23) in the Journal of Neuroscience, and highlighted also on the cover in this week's print issue ...

(NEW YORK, NY, July 24, 2014) – If past experience is anything to go by, nurse practitioners in New York State are about to get a lot more recognition for their contributions to primary care. In Massachusetts, laws already on the books allowing NPs to provide primary care offer nurses more recognition of their contributions to patient care and better relationships with physicians and administrators, compared with colleagues in New York, according to a study from Columbia University School of Nursing, published in Health Care Management Review. "This suggests that the ...

In Aesop's fable about the crow and the pitcher, a thirsty bird happens upon a vessel of water, but when he tries to drink from it, he finds the water level out of his reach. Not strong enough to knock over the pitcher, the bird drops pebbles into it — one at a time — until the water level rises enough for him to drink his fill. Highlighting the value of ingenuity, the fable demonstrates that cognitive ability can often be more effective than brute force. It also characterizes crows as pretty resourceful problem solvers. New research conducted by UC Santa Barbara's Corina ...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. – Honey bees, especially the young, are highly sensitive to temperature and to protect developing bees, adults work together to maintain temperatures within a narrow range. Recently published research led by Philip T. Starks, a biologist at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences, is the first to show that worker bees dissipate excess heat within a hive in process similar to how humans and other mammals cool themselves through their blood vessels and skin. "This study shows how workers effectively dissipate the heat absorbed via heat-shielding, ...

A new study supports a growing body of research suggesting a safe and effective role for natural steroid hormones in treating postmenopausal breast cancer, with fewer detrimental side effects and improved health profile than with standard anti-hormone therapies. The study will be published in final format today in the open-access journal Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology. Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in women in the United States. Approximately 70% of breast cancers are diagnosed in postmenopausal women. Major clinical trials and experimental ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Buy the latest electronic gizmo du jour, or use that money to fix a leaky roof? Go out with friends, or stay home to catch-up on work to meet that looming deadline? And after you've finished that big project, do you treat yourself to a slice of chocolate cake or settle for a piece of fruit? These are the kind of self-control dilemmas that people face all the time. And according to research from a University of Illinois expert in new product development and marketing, self-focus plays an important role in how consumers make decisions. When prompted ...

New research from North Carolina State University shows that urban "heat islands" are slowly killing red maples in the southeastern United States. One factor is that researchers have found warmer temperatures increase the number of young produced by the gloomy scale insect – a significant tree pest – by 300 percent, which in turn leads to 200 times more adult gloomy scales on urban trees. "We'd been seeing higher numbers of plant-eating insects like the gloomy scale in cities, and now we know why," says Adam Dale, a Ph.D. student at NC State and lead author of two papers ...

NASA's Terra satellite passed over Typhoon Matmo when it was moving through the Taiwan Strait for its final landfall in mainland China. On July 23 at 02:45 UTC (July 22 at 10:45 p.m. EDT), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a picture of Typhoon Matmo after its center crossed the northern part of the island nation of Taiwan and entered the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwan Strait is the body of water between western Taiwan and southeastern China. The MODIS image showed a cloud-covered center of circulation, ...

Unlocking the secrets to better treating the pernicious disorders of obesity and dementia reside in the brain, according to a paper from American University's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. In the paper, researchers make the case for treating obesity with therapies aimed at areas of the brain responsible for memory and learning. Furthermore, treatments that focus on the hippocampus could play a role in reducing certain dementias. "In the struggle to treat these diseases, therapies and preventive measures often fall short. This is a new way for providers who treat ...

In lab experiments using tissue samples cultured from cystic fibrosis patients, scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and the UNC Marsico Lung Institute have shown that a new CF drug counteracts the intended beneficial molecular effect of another CF drug. The finding, published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine, shows how a mutant CFTR protein becomes unstable and loses its ability to function properly when in the presence of the two drugs. The research offers several insights into how novel CF pharmacotherapies could be improved. “In our human ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Spinach gave Popeye super strength, but it also holds the promise of a different power for a group of scientists: the ability to convert sunlight into a clean, efficient alternative fuel. Purdue University physicists are part of an international group using spinach to study the proteins involved in photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert the sun's energy into carbohydrates used to power cellular processes. "The proteins we study are part of the most efficient system ever built, capable of converting the energy from the sun into chemical ...

The discovery of a new material combination that could lead to a more efficient approach to computer memory and logic will be described in the journal Nature on July 24, 2014. The research, led by Penn State University and Cornell University physicists, studies "spin torque" in devices that combine a standard magnetic material with a novel material known as a "topological insulator." The team's results show that such a scheme can be 10 times more efficient for controlling magnetic memory or logic than any other combination of materials measured to date. "This is a really ...

AUDIO: Some researchers are proposing that changing how medical care is delivered could help prevent multiple chronic diseases and extend healthy lifespan. The idea, they argue, would be to target the... Click here for more information. Medicine focuses almost entirely on fighting chronic diseases in a piecemeal fashion as symptoms develop. Instead, more efforts should be directed to promoting interventions that have the potential to prevent multiple chronic diseases and extend ...

Not getting enough sleep may increase the likelihood of forming false memories, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In a study conducted by psychological scientist Steven J. Frenda of the University of California, Irvine and colleagues, sleep-deprived people who viewed photographs of a crime being committed and then read false information about the photos were more likely to report remembering the false details in the photos than were those who got a full night's sleep. Research has demonstrated ...

NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured imagery of the Atlantic Ocean's Tropical Depression 2 is it degenerated into a tropical wave on July 23. At 1445 UTC (10:45 a.m. EDT), NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured an image of what was once Tropical Depression 2 (TD2), about 400 miles east of the Lesser Antilles. The GOES-East visible satellite imagery indicated that the depression weakened since July 22. TD2 appeared as just a weak swirl of clouds with no strong thunderstorms or deep convection. The GOES image was created by NASA/NOAA's GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight ...

Irvine, Calif., July 23, 2014 — A therapy combining salmon fibrin injections into the spinal cord and injections of a gene inhibitor into the brain restored voluntary motor function impaired by spinal cord injury, scientists at UC Irvine's Reeve-Irvine Research Center have found. In a study on rodents, Gail Lewandowski and Oswald Steward achieved this breakthrough by turning back the developmental clock in a molecular pathway critical to the formation of corticospinal tract nerve connections and providing a scaffold so that neuronal axons at the injury site could grow ...

Environment Canada has issued a high health risk warning for Yellowknife and surrounding area because of heavy smoke in the region due to forest fires. In the image taken by the Aqua satellite, the smoke is drifting eastward along normal wind patterns. Fire is an obvious health hazard, but the smoke that comes from fires is not quite so obvious and its effects are insidious. The smoke released by any type of fire (forest, brush, crop, structure, tires, waste or wood burning) is a mixture of particles and chemicals produced by incomplete burning of carbon-containing ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a genetic disorder that causes obsessive-compulsive and repetitive behaviors, and other behaviors on the autistic spectrum, as well as cognitive deficits. It is the most common inherited cause of mental impairment and the most common cause of autism. Now biomedical scientists at the University of California, Riverside have published a study that sheds light on the cause of autistic behaviors in FXS. Appearing online today (July 23) in the Journal of Neuroscience, and highlighted also on the cover in this week's print issue ...

From AGU's blogs: Oso disaster had its roots in earlier landslides A research team tasked with being some of the first scientists and engineers to evaluate extreme events has issued its findings on disastrous Oso, Washington, landslide. The report studies the conditions and causes related to the March 22 mudslide that killed 43 people and destroyed the Steelhead Haven neighborhood in Oso, Washington. The team from the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association, funded by the National Science Foundation, determined that intense rainfall in the three ...

TORONTO, July 23, 2014 – Migratory songbirds are disappearing, and though conservationists are examining several possible reasons such as climate change, loss of habitat, acid rain and light pollution, a key piece of the puzzle has remained missing: where do these birds go once they leave their breeding sites, and what threats may they be encountering along the way? To answer this question, a team of researchers out of York University have created the first ever migratory connectivity map produced for a songbird, using tracking from both breeding and winter sites. They ...