CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new technique to fight crop insect pests may affect different insect populations differently, researchers report. They analyzed RNA interference (RNAi), a method that uses genetic material to "silence" specific genes – in this case genes known to give insect pests an advantage. The researchers found that western corn rootworm beetles that are already resistant to crop rotation are in some cases also less vulnerable to RNAi. The study is reported in the journal Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology. "Our results indicate that the effectiveness of ...

PITTSBURGH—Too much garlic mustard in your neighborhood forest? Actually, the problem may be too many deer. A research team led by Susan Kalisz, professor of evolutionary ecology in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Biological Sciences, published a paper online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that takes a long view on why invasive garlic mustard plants thrive to the detriment of native species. The study, initiated in 2003 at the Trillium Trail Nature Reserve in Fox Chapel, Pa., concludes that an overpopulation of deer (density ...

Worried that you could be in a car accident? Insurance company X can protect you and your family. Afraid you will lose your children to drunk driving? MADD can help you educate them to avoid drinking and driving. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, when a person-to-person support system is not available in a fearful situation, brands can act as a replacement source of emotional attachment. "We look at how fear can impact evaluations of a new brand," write authors Lea Dunn and JoAndrea Hoegg (both University of British Columbia). "Our research ...

From a very young age, children are targeted with advertising messages that emphasize fun and happiness, especially for food products and toys. But what happens to these beliefs once the child is grown? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, children develop brand loyalty and biases that carry over into their adult lives and are often difficult to change. "Our research provides an initial investigation into how exposure to ads in childhood can lead to enduring biases that favor products associated with the ads once the kids grow up," write authors ...

When it comes to shopping for gifts, we try to select things we think people both want and need. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, focusing too much on the gift recipient can lead to giving the gift we were trying to avoid in the first place. "We predict that in a gift-giving situation, both the gift givers and gift receivers will focus on the gift receivers when thinking about the gift. Givers will choose gifts that are more desirable over gifts that are more practical, whereas receivers will give greater weight to the gift's practicality," ...

BATON ROUGE – New research finds face matching, as when customs agents check passports, to be incredibly fallible, with error rates between 10 and 20 percent under ideal, laboratory-induced conditions, and much worse in more realistic settings. "Because society relies on face perception and ID verification for many tasks, people are often under the impression that we are experts in this domain," said LSU Assistant Professor of Psychology Megan Papesh. "Our research shows the precise opposite." In a recent article published in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, ...

Patients who received help from a poison center had shorter hospital stays and lower hospital charges among those who are the most expensive to treat, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. Poison centers provide 24-hour assistance year round to the public and to medical professionals. While studies show that poison centers reduce system-wide costs, their impact on patient outcomes at the hospital level has not been clear, the study's authors report. The researchers conducted a retrospective analysis ...

Organ-transplant recipients often reject donated organs, but a new, two-pronged strategy developed by UC San Francisco researchers to specifically weaken immune responses that target transplanted tissue has shown promise in controlled experiments on mice. The hope is that using this novel treatment strategy at the time of transplantation surgery could spare patients from lifelong immunosuppressive treatments and their side effects. The approach might also be used to treat autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes, the researchers said. The study is published and commented ...

Imagine that you are in a meeting with coworkers or at a gathering of friends. You pull out your cell phone to show a presentation or a video on YouTube. But you don't use the tiny screen; your phone projects a bright, clear image onto a wall or a big screen. Such a technology may be on its way, thanks to a new light-bending silicon chip developed by researchers at Caltech. The chip was developed by Ali Hajimiri, Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering, and researchers in his laboratory. The results were presented at the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) conference ...

LOS ANGELES (March 10, 2014) – A team of researchers from the National Institutes of Health, Emory University and Cedars-Sinai – specialists in identifying and treating very rare diseases – used three innovative tools to detect a previously unknown gene mutation, test potential therapies in the lab, and initiate personalized drug treatment for a boy with a lifelong history of uncontrollable seizures that caused significant impact on his cognitive and social development. "This personalized medical approach exemplifies the power of current research tools and shows the immense ...

After hip replacement surgery, many patients are anxious to resume driving, and a new study challenges the conventional wisdom that patients should wait six weeks before getting back behind the wheel. Dr. Geoffrey Westrich, director of research, Adult Reconstruction and Joint Replacement at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, found that patients in the study were able to return to driving four weeks after total hip replacement. The study, titled, "A Novel Assessment of Driving Reaction Time Following THR Using a New Fully Interactive Driving Simulator," will ...

People who sustain the most common type of hip fracture, known as a femoral neck fracture, are at increased risk of complications. A special type of MRI developed at Hospital for Special Surgery in collaboration with GE Healthcare can show a detailed image following fracture repair, without the distortion caused by metal surgical screws that are problematic in standard MRIs. Each year, more than 340,000 people suffer a broken hip in the United States. The femoral neck, the area just below the ball of the hip's ball-and-socket joint, is the most common site of fracture, ...

Middle-aged women with rheumatoid arthritis or arthritis resulting from an injury are among the patients most likely to experience serious pain following a knee replacement, researchers from Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) in New York have found. One of the biggest concerns patients have is the amount of pain they will have after knee replacement surgery. Although it is a very successful operation overall to relieve arthritis pain and restore function, persistent postoperative pain can be a problem for some patients. Researchers at HSS set out to determine which groups ...

WASHINGTON – When it comes to helping young adults avoid serious health problems later in life, assessing their personalities during routine medical exams could prove as useful as recording their family medical histories and smoking habits, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. "Health care reform provides a great opportunity for preventive care, with physicians seeing more young adults who may not previously have had insurance," said lead author Salomon Israel, PhD, of Duke University and Duke University Medical Center. "Our research ...

Athens, Ga. – Although choosing to do something because the perceived benefit outweighs the financial cost is something people do daily, little is known about what happens in the brain when a person makes these kinds of decisions. Studying how these cost-benefit decisions are made when choosing to consume alcohol, University of Georgia associate professor of psychology James MacKillop identified distinct profiles of brain activity that are present when making these decisions. "We were interested in understanding how the brain makes decisions about drinking alcohol. Particularly, ...

BOSTON (March 11, 2014) — Traumatic brain injury is a risk factor for epilepsy, though the relationship is not understood. A new study in mice, published in Cerebral Cortex, identifies increased levels of a specific neurotransmitter as a contributing factor connecting traumatic brain injury (TBI) to post-traumatic epilepsy. The findings suggest that damage to brain cells called interneurons disrupts neurotransmitter levels and plays a role in the development of epilepsy after a traumatic brain injury. The research team, led by David Cantu and Chris Dulla, studied the ...

Melbourne scientists are a step closer to creating a new drug to stop a heart attack in its tracks and reduce the damage caused, without any side effects. The Monash University research, published today in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (PNAS), offers new hope to thousands of people who experience heart attacks and heart failure – one of the major causes of death worldwide. Professors Arthur Christopoulos and Peter Scammells from the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS) led a team of scientists combining molecular pharmacology ...

Baboons learn from other baboons about new food sources – but only if they are bold or anxious – according to a new study published in the journal PeerJ). The results suggest that personality plays a key role in social learning in animals, something previously ignored in animal cognition studies. Studying animals at the Zoological Society of London's Institute of Zoology Tsaobis Baboon Project in Namibia, the researchers examined how personality influenced whether baboons solved foraging tasks and whether they then demonstrated to others how to solve the tasks. They found ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Brain imaging using radioactive dye can detect early evidence of Alzheimer's disease that may predict future cognitive decline among adults with mild or no cognitive impairment, according to a 36-month follow-up study led by Duke Medicine. The national, multicenter study confirms earlier findings suggesting that identifying silent beta-amyloid plaque build-up in the brain could help guide care and treatment decisions for patients at risk for Alzheimer's. The findings appeared online March 11, 2014, in Molecular Psychiatry, a Nature Publishing Group journal. "Our ...

Obesity in adolescent girls is associated with lower academic attainment levels throughout their teenage years, a new study has shown. The research conducted by the Universities of Strathclyde, Dundee, Georgia and Bristol is the most comprehensive study yet carried out into the association between obesity and academic attainment in adolescence. The results are published in the International Journal of Obesity. The results showed that girls who were obese, as measured by BMI (body mass index) at age 11 had lower academic attainment at 11, 13 and 16 years when compared ...

VIDEO: An animation that illustrates the positions of the nearby galaxies, including those in the "Council of Giants, " in three dimensions. Click here for more information. We live in a galaxy known as the Milky Way – a vast conglomeration of 300 billion stars, planets whizzing around them, and clouds of gas and dust floating in between. Though it has long been known that the Milky Way and its orbiting companion Andromeda are the dominant members of a small group ...

Medical debt continues to be a leading cause of new filings in Ohio Article provided by Bailey & Gunderson Co., L.P.A. Visit us at http://www.baileyandgunderson.com If the number of bankruptcies filed is any indication of an economic recovery, the latest statistics indicate that Ohio is recovering from the recession of 2008. According to the data, the number of personal bankruptcyfiling declined in Ohio by five percent to 46,892 filings during 2013. Along with the good news, the data also had some negative points. Although the number of bankruptcies declined ...

Should you use retirement assets to pay down debts? Article provided by Bankruptcy Centers of Michigan Visit us at http://www.bankruptcycentersofmichigan.com Most people have some type of debt that they are working to repay each month. Whether they are paying the minimum balance on their credit cards, trying to stay current in their mortgages or dealing with unplanned medical expenses, these obligations can place a significant strain on the resources that they may have available. When they start falling behind on certain bills, they may be confused about the steps ...

More divorced fathers and mothers sharing custody in Washington Article provided by Madow Law Office Visit us at http://www.madowlaw.com Single fathers with sole custody of minor children are not the rare breed they once were. According to Pew Research, single fathers make up 8 percent of U.S. households. In 1960, only 1 percent of single fathers cared for minor children. This means that in 2011, the most recent year that data is available, 2.6 million single fathers were doing their best to parent after a divorce or split from the mother. Single mothers are still ...

Indiana police to crackdown on impaired driving this March Article provided by Arnold Terrill Anzini, P.C. Visit us at http://www.fortwaynedefense.com/ This month, more than 250 law enforcement agencies across Indiana, including the Indiana State Police, will participate in a concentrated effort to crackdown on drivers who may be over the legal limit. The expressed aim of this enforcement campaign - which is known as Operation Pull Over - it to catch more impaired drivers by utilizing saturation police patrols and sobriety checkpoints throughout Indiana. Penalties ...