Measuring variability of heart rate may identify premature infants at risk of developing necrotizing enterocolitis, a serious inflammatory condition that can lead to death, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. Necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC, may lead to destruction of the intestinal wall and vital organ failure. It affects 6 to 10 percent of premature infants within the first two weeks of life. "NEC is currently diagnosed by a combination of laboratory and radiology tests, usually done when the disease is already significant," said Kim Doheny, director ...

This is of particular importance to the Mediterranean coastal societies with 300 million inhabitants (living and visiting), unique ecosystems, love of seafood and its role as a focus for tourist worldwide. Research professor Patrizia Ziveri, from Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the UAB and the coordinator of the project says "We knew next to nothing about the combined effects of warming and acidification in the Mediterranean until this study, now we know that they are a serious double threat to our marine ecosystems." "Iconic Mediterranean ecosystems ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — In a remarkable series of experiments on a fungus that causes cryptococcal meningitis, a deadly infection of the membranes that cover the spinal cord and brain, investigators at UC Davis have isolated a protein that appears to be responsible for the fungus' ability to cross from the bloodstream into the brain. The discovery — published online June 3 in mBio, the open-access, peer-reviewed journal of the American Society for Microbiology — has important implications for developing a more effective treatment for Cryptococcus neoformans, the cause ...

The VicHealth-funded survey, published in the latest edition of the Medical Journal of Australia, could go some way to explaining the reduced quality of healthcare often reported by Indigenous communities.  Led by Associate Professor Margaret Kelaher and researcher Angeline Ferdinand in collaboration with Professor Yin Paradies from Deakin University, the survey examined experiences of racism in health settings alongside other areas including workplaces, education and sport and their impact on mental health among Aboriginal Australians. Of the 755 survey participants, ...

Systems containing self-propelling particles, such as bacteria or artificial colloidal particles, are always out of equilibrium but may show interesting transitions between different states, reminiscent of phase transitions in equilibrium. However, application of analytical and computational methodologies from equilibrium statistical mechanics is questionable to study properties of such active systems. An international team of researchers – including Dr. Peter Virnau and Professor Kurt Binder of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), Benjamin Trefz of the JGU Graduate ...

Fighting off illness- rather than the illness itself- causes sleep deprivation and affects memory, a new study has found. University of Leicester biologist Dr Eamonn Mallon said a common perception is that if you are sick, you sleep more. But the study, carried out in flies, found that sickness induced insomnia is quite common. The research has been published in the journal PeerJ at: http://peerj.com/articles/434 Dr Mallon said: "Think about when you are sick. Your sleep is disturbed and you're generally not feeling at your sharpest. Previously work has been ...

HANOVER, N.H. – June 12, 2014 – A new Dartmouth study shows 12 minutes of exercise can improve attention and reading comprehension in low-income adolescents, suggesting that schools serving low-income populations should work brief bouts of exercise into their daily schedules. The study, published as part of the June volume of Frontiers in Psychology, compared low-income adolescents with their high-income peers. While both groups saw improvement in selective visual attention up to 45 minutes after exercising, the low-income group experienced a bigger jump. (Selective visual ...

Bethesda, MD (June 12, 2014) — The gluten-specific enzyme ALV003 reduces a patient's exposure to gluten and its potential harm, according to a new phase 2 study appearing in Gastroenterology1, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. This study is the first to find that a non-dietary intervention can potentially benefit celiac disease patients. Study participants were put on an everyday gluten-free diet, challenged with up to 2 grams of gluten daily (equivalent to approximately one half of a standard slice of bread in the U.S.). Researchers ...

BELLINGHAM, Washington (USA) — The Journal of Medical Imaging (JMI) has launched, with freely accessible articles on new research on earlier and more accurate diagnosis and monitoring of cancer and other diseases, image quality assessment, 3D imaging, and other topics. Published by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, the quarterly journal is available online in the SPIE Digital Library, with each peer-reviewed article published as it is approved. JMI will also be issued in print. JMI covers fundamental and translational research and applications ...

The Antarctic Peninsula, the northern most region of Antarctica, is experiencing some of the most dramatic changes due to climate warming, including population declines of some penguin species. This is not the first time that region has felt the effects of climate warming. How did penguins respond to the melting of snow and ice cover 11,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age? Today, scientists have traced the genetics of modern penguin populations back to their early ancestors from the last Ice Age to better understand how three Antarctic penguin species – gentoo, ...

A study of how penguin populations have changed over the last 30,000 years has shown that between the last ice age and up to around 1,000 years ago penguin populations benefitted from climate warming and retreating ice. This suggests that recent declines in penguins may be because ice is now retreating too far or too fast. An international team, led by scientists from the Universities of Southampton and Oxford, has used a genetic technique to estimate when current genetic diversity arose in penguins and to recreate past population sizes. Looking at the 30,000 years before ...

For nearly 100 years, we have known that type 1 diabetes (T1D) is a disease fundamentally about the progressive loss of insulin-producing beta cells, but measuring that loss has continued to elude researchers—at least until now. In a recent scientific publication, JDRF-funded researchers used a radiotracer or marker and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scanning as a non-invasive technique to follow changes in how many active beta cells a person has. Dr. Olle Korsgren and his colleagues at the University of Uppsala in Sweden used the technique in a clinical study ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Joint research between the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and the University of Nottingham has identified, for the first time, the structural damage caused at a molecular level to the brain by the chronic excessive abuse of alcohol. In concrete, the research team has determined the alterations produced in the neurones of the prefrontal zone of the brain (the most advanced zone in terms of evolution and that which controls executive functions such as planning, designing strategies, working memory, selective ...

In nature, it is very rare to find a proverbial much smaller David able to overpower and kill a Goliath for supper. This is exactly the modus operandi of a solitary tiny spider from the Negev desert in Israel that routinely kills ants up to almost four times its own size. Details about how it attacks and kills its prey with a venomous bite is published in Springer's journal Naturwissenschaften – The Science of Nature. The study was led by Stano Pekár of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. Pekár's team observed the natural prey and predatory behavior of the minute ...

New research reports that survivors of childhood liver transplant remain nutritionally compromised over the long-term. Findings published in Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the International Liver Transplantation Society, indicate that the recipients' return to normal weight post-transplant was due to an increase in fat mass as body cell mass remained low, indicating a slim body composition with little lean muscle mass or "skinny fat." Children with end-stage liver disease may be malnourished due to inadequate ...

Obesity and diabetes are among the fastest growing health problems in the world, and the hunt is in for a pill that can fight the problem. Now a Danish/British team has come up with a smart tool that will speed up the scientific hunting process, and we may be one step closer to a pill against obesity. The body has a variety of functions that decide if we get overweight or not. For instance hormones control our appetite and the uptake of food. In recent years science has taken on the quest of investigating these physiological functions and finding a medical way to fight ...

Children are showing signs of social withdrawal are more susceptible to parental influences than others. These children were also more prone to distress caused by the impacts of guilt-inducing parenting. The researchers of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, have found that children showing signs of social withdrawal are more susceptible to parental influences than others. The researchers followed up about 300 children across the first three years of primary school and monitored the children's social skills and problem behaviors. At the same time, mothers' and fathers' ...

The studies, published in the acclaimed Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, show that 24 weeks of twice-weekly recreational football training sessions lower blood pressure and improves heart function in men with high blood pressure and men with type 2 diabetes. Furthermore, men with type 2 diabetes lost 12 % of their abdominal fat and reduced their blood sugar 20% more than inactive control subjects. These effects are likely to reduce the risk of developing heart diseases including heart failure and myocardial infarction, and the participants had a reduced ...

Women with weight problems were more impulsive than average in a food-related psychology test, a new research paper has shown. This suggested that they are more instinctively stimulated by images of food as well as lacking contemplative will power. Further, some women reported food craving even if they had eaten recently, a symptom of possible food addiction. "All addictions are similar in that the sufferer craves to excess the feel-good buzz they receive from chemical neurotransmitters produced when they eat, gamble, smoke, have sex or take drugs," commented Claus Voegele, ...

Certain processes used to sterilize blood products could potentially cause serious health issues in transfusion recipients, according to an international study published in the journal Platelets and led by Dr. Patrick Provost of Université Laval's Faculty of Medicine and the CHU de Québec Research Center. These processes purportedly alter the blood platelets to the extent of preventing them from carrying out their functions correctly and may be the cause of hemorrhages observed in patients having received treated blood. The function of platelets goes far beyond their ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- When people get together in groups, unusual things can happen — both good and bad. Groups create important social institutions that an individual could not achieve alone, but there can be a darker side to such alliances: Belonging to a group makes people more likely to harm others outside the group. "Although humans exhibit strong preferences for equity and moral prohibitions against harm in many contexts, people's priorities change when there is an 'us' and a 'them,'" says Rebecca Saxe, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT. "A group ...

White sharks are among the largest, most widespread apex predators in the ocean, but are also among the most vulnerable. A new study, the most comprehensive ever on seasonal distribution patterns and historic trends in abundance of white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) in the western North Atlantic Ocean, used records compiled over more than 200 years to update knowledge and fill in gaps in information about this species. Scientists from NOAA Fisheries and colleagues added recent unpublished records to previously published data to present a broad picture of 649 confirmed ...

The use of nanoparticles in cancer research is considered as a promising approach in detecting and fighting tumour cells. The method has, however, often failed because the human immune system recognizes the particles as foreign objects and rejects them before they can fulfil their function. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and at University College Dublin in Ireland have, along with other partners, developed nanoparticles that not only bypass the body's defence system, but also find their way to the diseased cells. This procedure uses fragments ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —The immune system maintains a rich abundance of "natural killer" cells to confront microbial invaders, but as the body gains the upper hand in various infections it sometimes starts to produce even more of the cells. For three decades, scientists haven't understood what purpose that serves. In a new paper, Brown University researchers show one: proliferation helps change the NK cells' function from stimulating the immune response to calming it down, lest it get out of hand. In a series of experiments now published online in the Journal ...

Proteins are chains of amino acids that, when folded into certain structural patterns and also when unfolded, exert functions within cells. Proteins receive signals that are transmitted from one to the next and that are essential for life. However, within a given protein, are there "highways" along which the signals travel, like a in a relay event? That is to say, how is the information transmitted in a given protein? "This is one of the key questions in biophysics," says Xavier Salvatella, ICREA Professor at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and ...