On Saturday, April 12, female and male fitness models and athletic enthusiasts from all over the Northeast will converge on the Toyota Presents Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford, Conn. for Fitness Atlantic 2014. The Finals of this glamorous fitness pageant will begin at 6 p.m. The event's Preliminary Competition will take place earlier in the day at 10 a.m. Last year's Fitness Atlantic Overall Winner was Amy Diaz who, several months later, went on to win CBS-TV's Amazing Race show. "Fitness Atlantic is a one-of-a-kind pageant where more than 150 contestants compete for ...

New research reports that women who frequently consume fat-free or low-fat milk may delay the progression of osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee. Results published in the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) journal, Arthritis Care & Research, show that women who ate cheese saw an increase in knee OA progression. Yogurt did not impact OA progression in men or women. OA is a common, degenerative joint disease that causes pain and swelling of joints in the hand, hips, or knee. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), OA affects nearly 27 million ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Childhood obesity comes with an estimated price tag of $19,000 per child when comparing lifetime medical costs to those of a normal weight child, according to an analysis led by researchers at the Duke Global Health Institute and Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore. When multiplied by the number of obese 10-year-olds in the United States, lifetime medical costs for this age alone reach roughly $14 billion. An alternative estimate, which takes into account the possibility of normal weight children gaining weight in adulthood, reduces the cost ...

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center found that integrating an educational intervention regarding upper respiratory infections (URI) into Early Head Start programs led to a significant decrease in pediatric emergency visits and adverse care practices among predominantly Latino families, who have been shown to be at high risk for limited health literacy. Findings are published in the journal Pediatrics. Four Early Head Start sites in New York City in the Washington Heights/Inwood section of Northern Manhattan were randomly assigned to intervention or standard ...

WASHINGTON — A nationwide study of children who have witnessed domestic violence found that parents or caregivers were physically injured in more than a third of the cases, yet only a small fraction of offenders went to jail and just one in four incidents resulted in police reports, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. "One of the most shocking findings is that less than 2 percent of the cases resulted in jail time for the perpetrator," said lead researcher Sherry Hamby, PhD, a psychology research professor at Sewanee, The University ...

Researchers at the University of Montreal and the INRS-Institut-Armand-Frappier have shown that men circumcised after the age of 35 were 45% less at risk of later developing prostate cancer than uncircumcised men. This is one of the findings that resulted from a study undertaken by Andrea Spence and her research directors Marie-Élise Parent and Marie-Claude Rousseau. The researchers interviewed 2114 men living on the Island of Montreal. Half of them had been diagnosed with prostate cancer between 2005 and 2009, while the others participated in the study as the control group. ...

Vienna, Austria: Men with prostate cancer that is small and confined to the prostate gland but that is at risk of growing and spreading, do better if they are treated with radiotherapy combined with androgen deprivation therapy, which lowers their levels of the male hormone, testosterone, according to new research. The findings, which will be presented at the 33rd conference of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO33) in Vienna today (Monday), are expected to change clinical practice. Professor Michel Bolla, a professor of radiation oncology at ...

Vienna, Austria: Women who have radiotherapy for breast cancer have a small but significantly increased risk of subsequently developing a primary lung tumour, and now research has shown that this risk increases with the amount of radiation absorbed by the tissue. Dr Trine Grantzau (MD) told the 33rd conference of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO33) in Vienna: "We found that for each Gray [1] delivered to the lung as part of radiotherapy for a breast tumour, the relative risk of developing a subsequent primary lung cancer increased. This increased ...

New research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) suggests that Sweden—the country already thought to have the second highest prevalence of type 1 diabetes in the world—could have 2-3 times more adolescents and young adults with type 1 diabetes than previously estimated. The research is by Dr Araz Rawshani, Swedish National Diabetes Register, Gothenburg, Sweden, and colleagues. Current estimates in Sweden are based on the Diabetes Incidence Study in Sweden (DISS), which has been around since 1983. The DISS is one ...

A third of intensive care patients develop depression that typically manifests as physical, or somatic, symptoms such as weakness, appetite change, and fatigue, rather than psychological symptoms, according to one of the largest studies to investigate the mental health and functional outcomes of survivors of critical care, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. The study suggests that intensive care unit (ICU) survivors could be three times more likely to experience depression than the general population, and that depression is four times more common than post-traumatic ...

SAN DIEGO, CA (April 6, 2014)—Researchers from Fox Chase Cancer Center have shown that NEDD9, a scaffolding protein responsible for regulating signaling pathways in the cell, promotes the growth and spread of epithelial ovarian cancer. Previous studies have demonstrated the protein's importance in tumor invasion and spread of some lymphomas and many solid tumor types, including melanoma, neuroblastoma, and breast cancer, but its role in gynecological cancers has been poorly understood. The new data, to be presented on Sunday, April 6 at the AACR Annual Meeting 2014, ...

Your body's cells have two major interconnected energy sources: the lipid metabolism and the glucose metabolism. Most cancers feed themselves by metabolizing glucose, and thus can be seen in Positron Emission Topography (PET) scans that detect radiolabeled glucose. However, prostate cancers tend to use the lipid metabolism route and so cannot be imaged in this way effectively. A University of Colorado Cancer Center study being presented today at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2014 describes a novel method to "manipulate the lipid metabolism ...

SAN DIEGO, CA (April 6, 2014)—Tumor cells are picky about where they live. In the wrong environment, they fail to reach their potential. But put those same cells on the right bit of real estate, and they grow like mad. Researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center found renal cancer cells planted in a supportive environment proliferate with the help of an enzyme usually only seen in the brain. The enzyme, a specific isoform of a rather common kinase, may eventually become a target for cancer therapy as kinases constitute reasonably targetable enzymes, said Edna Cukierman, PhD, ...

LA JOLLA, CA—April 6, 2014—A study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has helped solve a long-standing mystery about the sense of touch. The "gentle touch" sensations that convey the stroke of a finger, the fine texture of something grasped and the light pressure of a breeze on the skin are brought to us by nerves that often terminate against special skin cells called Merkel cells. These skin cells' role in touch sensation has long been debated in the scientific community. The new study, however, suggests a dual-sensor system involving the Merkel ...

VIDEO: This animation shows the basic process of sequencing amino acids in a nanopore, using the technique of recognition tunneling. Click here for more information. Some three billion base pairs make up the human genome—the floor plan of life. In 2003, the Human Genome Project announced the successful decryption of this code, a tour de force that continues to supply a stream of insights relevant to human health and disease. Nevertheless, the primary actors in virtually all ...

BOSTON, MA (April 6, 2014) -- Researchers studying a rare, always fatal brain tumor in children have found several molecular alterations that drive the cancer, according to a new study from scientists at Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and McGill University. The findings identify potential new targets for drug treatments. The new research could help physicians choose targeted agents with a better chance of combating pediatric high-grade astrocytomas, which are extremely difficult to treat with radiation and surgery. The tumors have resisted ...

For the first time, a field test has demonstrated that elevated levels of carbon dioxide inhibit plants' assimilation of nitrate into proteins, indicating that the nutritional quality of food crops is at risk as climate change intensifies. Findings from this wheat field-test study, led by a UC Davis plant scientist, will be reported online April 6 in the journal Nature Climate Change. "Food quality is declining under the rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide that we are experiencing," said lead author Arnold Bloom, a professor in the Department of Plant Sciences. "Several ...

PULLMAN, Wash.—Researchers led by a Washington State University biologist have found that arid areas, among the biggest ecosystems on the planet, take up an unexpectedly large amount of carbon as levels of carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere. The findings give scientists a better handle on the earth's carbon budget—how much carbon remains in the atmosphere as CO2, contributing to global warming, and how much gets stored in the land or ocean in other carbon-containing forms. "It has pointed out the importance of these arid ecosystems," said R. Dave Evans, a WSU professor ...

The transfer, via a viral vector, of a normal copy of the gene deficient in patients, allowed to fully and very rapidly cure the heart disease in mice. These findings are published in Nature Medicine on 6 April, 2014. Friedreich's ataxia is a severe, rare hereditary disorder which combines progressive neuro-degeneration, impaired heart function and an increased risk of diabetes. The condition affects one in every 50,000 birth. There is currently no effective treatment for this disease. In most cases, Friedreich's ataxia starts in adolescence with impaired balance and ...

The visibility of smoking in city streets has for the first time anywhere been mapped, in new research from the University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand. The research found that up to 116 smokers outside bars/cafés could be seen from any one location in the outdoor public areas of downtown Wellington (e.g. on a footpath). Of 2600 people observed in the outdoor areas of bars and cafés, 16% were smoking, with a higher proportion than this in evenings. Data from observations across the downtown area were mapped by the researchers, producing a record of the street ...

STANFORD, Calif. — A blood sample could one day be enough to diagnose many types of solid cancers, or to monitor the amount of cancer in a patient's body and responses to treatment. Previous versions of the approach, which relies on monitoring levels of tumor DNA circulating in the blood, have required cumbersome and time-consuming steps to customize it to each patient or have not been sufficiently sensitive. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised a way to quickly bring the technique to the clinic. Their approach, which should be broadly ...

VIDEO: This video shows the motion of nanoparticles in neighboring layers of the superlattice as pressure is applied. Click here for more information. A combined computational and experimental study of self-assembled silver-based structures known as superlattices has revealed an unusual and unexpected behavior: arrays of gear-like molecular-scale machines that rotate in unison when pressure is applied to them. Computational and experimental studies show that the superlattice ...

At St. Paul's Cathedral in London, a section of the dome called the Whispering Gallery makes a whisper audible from the other side of the dome as a result of the way sound waves travel around the curved surface. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have used the same phenomenon to build an optical device that may lead to new and more powerful computers that run faster and cooler. Lan Yang, PhD, associate professor of electrical and systems engineering, and her collaborators have developed an essential component of these new computers that would run on light. ...

VIDEO: This video shows a Merkel cell responding to touch. Click here for more information. NEW YORK, NY, April 6, 2014 — In a study published in the April 6 online edition of the journal Nature, a team of Columbia University Medical Center researchers led by Ellen Lumpkin, PhD, associate professor of somatosensory biology, solve an age-old mystery of touch: how cells just beneath the skin surface enable us to feel fine details and textures. Touch is the last frontier of ...

Shadow musician, Catman Cohen, proposes to create a new CD that will be a radical departure from his past efforts. "Knocking Bones & Kissing Shadows" will aim to be the exemplar of what is considered desirable in contemporary music. Catman's 5th CD will be a raw and passionate sonic dance...sexual to the nth degree....mindless to the max....and contrived in service of a 24 hour round-the-clock orgiastic party. The music will pound and throb, the airhead lyrics will extol nothing other the celebration of genital satisfaction, buying expensive stuff, getting high, and ...