Pouring a glass of wine is rarely an exact measurement, especially in a social setting. While most people think of a glass as one serving, in reality it could be closer to two or three. Researchers at Iowa State and Cornell universities discovered just how much one pours is influenced by a variety of environmental factors and could have serious consequences when it comes to overconsumption. In the study, published in the journal Substance Use and Misuse, participants were asked to pour what they considered a normal drink using different types of glasses in various settings. ...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26, 2013 – In a first-of-its-kind study to evaluate the impact of a medical specialty on patient outcomes, researchers found that hospitalized patients with severe infections such as meningitis and Clostridium difficile (C. diff.) are significantly less likely to die if they receive care from an infectious diseases specialist. The study, which analyzed nearly 130,000 Medicare patient cases, is now available online and will be published in the December 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases. According to the data, researchers at Avalere Health and the ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- People with mental illness smoke at much higher rates than the overall population. But the popular belief that they are self-medicating is most likely wrong, according to researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Instead, they report, research indicates that psychiatric disease makes the brain more susceptible to addiction. As smoking rates in the general population have fallen below 25 percent, smoking among the mentally ill has remained pervasive, encompassing an estimated half of all cigarettes sold. Despite the well-known health dangers ...

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. -- Contrary to perceptions shaped by media coverage and public discussion, the number of children in immigrant families is not the primary reason more children are living in poverty, a Rutgers study has found, raising the question of whether federal policies impacting immigrants should be significantly altered. Other determinants, including local labor market conditions, parental education and family structure appear to have a greater impact on child poverty levels, according to Myungkook Joo, assistant professor in Rutgers School of Social Work, who ...

BOSTON—Scanning the DNA of nearly 5,000 tumor samples, a team led by scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute has identified 140 regions of scrambled genetic code believed to contain many undiscovered cancer genes. The researchers said the mapping of the abnormal regions gives cancer scientists a starting point from which to search for as-yet undiscovered oncogenes and broken tumor-suppressor genes, which allow cells to divide and grow uncontrollably. Published in the October issue of Nature Genetics, the results are part of an ongoing international ...

Many animals construct homes or shelters to escape from biological and physical hostilities. Birds, spiders, termites, ants, bees and wasps are the most famous animal architects. As shelter construction requires considerable investment of resources and time, builders tend to minimize the cost of building while maximizing the benefits. Builders are rather uncommon among adult leaf beetles though young ones of certain species use own feces to construct a defensive shield. Two closely related, hitherto unknown species of tiny southern Indian leaf beetles, only slightly larger ...

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Infants show strong universals as they acquire their native language, but a recent study with infants acquiring Korean also reveals that there are striking language differences. Sandra Waxman, Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, is senior author of a new study providing the first ever evidence comparing how infants (monolingual, from Korea) acquiring Korean learn new nouns and verbs. Researchers have long suggested that in "noun friendly" languages including English, infants' attention is focused primarily on objects, ...

MADISON -- A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) is a hard lot. Patients typically get the diagnosis around age 30 after experiencing a series of neurological problems such as blurry vision, wobbly gait or a numb foot. From there, this neurodegenerative disease follows an unforgiving course. Many people with MS start using some kind of mobility aid -- cane, walker, scooter or wheelchair -- by 45 or 50, and those with the most severe cases are typically bed-bound by 60. The medications that are currently available don't do much to slow the relentless march of the disease. ...

New research from the University of Sheffield could offer solutions into slowing down the progression of motor neurone disease (MND). Scientists from the University of Sheffield's Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN) conducted pioneering research assessing how the devastating debilitating disease affects individual patients. MND is an incurable disease destroying the body's cells which control movement causing progressive disability. Present treatment options for those with MND only have a modest effect in improving the patient's quality of life. Professor ...

WASHINGTON D.C. Sept. 27, 2013 -- As a modern culture, we crave artificial white lights -- the brighter the better, and ideally using less energy than ever before. To meet the ever-escalating demand for more lighting in more places and to improve the bulbs used in sports stadiums, car headlights and street lamps, scientists are scrambling to create better light-emitting diodes (LEDs) -- solid state lighting devices that are more energy efficient than conventional incandescent or fluorescent light sources. Just one thing stands in the way: "droop," the term for a scientific ...

WASHINGTON D.C. September 27, 2013 -- Streamers may be great for decorating a child's party, but in dielectrics, they are the primary origin of electric breakdown. They can cause catastrophic damage to electrical equipment, harm the surrounding environment, and lead to large-scale power outages. Understanding streamers and the mechanisms behind their initiation, acceleration and branching is necessary to devise better solutions to avoid them. As recently reported in the Journal of Applied Physics, a team of researchers at MIT have developed an accurate 3-D model of streamer ...

A team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University has devised a novel nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that delivers a roughly 10¬nanometer spatial resolution. This represents a significant advance in MRI sensitivity -- modern MRI techniques commonly used in medical imaging yield spatial resolutions on the millimeter length scale, with the highest-resolution experimental instruments giving spatial resolution of a few micrometers. "This is a very promising experimental result," said U. of I. physicist Raffi Budakian, ...

Researchers from the universities of Calgary and Cambridge, UK, have discovered that a mutation in a gene necessary for the metabolism of folic acid not only impacts immediate offspring but can also have detrimental health effects, such as spina bifida and heart abnormalities, on subsequent generations. The animal study, published this week in the journal Cell, also sheds light on the molecular mechanism of folic acid (also known as folate) during development. About one in 1,200 children are born with spina bifida. The detrimental effects of folic acid deficiency during ...

BOSTON - (September 27, 2013) - Joslin researchers have identified immune cells that promote growth of beta cells in type 1 diabetes. This study provides further evidence of a changed role for immune cells in type 1 diabetes pathology. The study appears online today and will also appear in the January issue of Diabetes. In type 1 diabetes, the immune system infiltrates pancreatic islets and destroys insulin-producing beta cells. However, previous studies in non-obese diabetic (NOD) mice have suggested that immune cells can also contribute to preserving beta cells. This ...

It's often said that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has a woman's face. The proportion of women infected with HIV has been on the rise for a decade; in sub-Saharan Africa, women constitute 60 percent of people living with disease. While preventative drugs exist, they have often proven ineffective, especially in light of financial and cultural barriers in developing nations. A new intravaginal ring filled with an anti-retroviral drug could help. Developed with support from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases by Northwestern University visiting associate professor ...

New York, September 27, 2013 -- Clinical trial design for new cancer therapies has historically been focused on the tissue of origin of a tumor, but a paper from researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center published on September 26 in Nature Genetics supports a new approach: one based on the genomic signature of a tumor rather than the tissue of origin in the body. It is well known that the emergence of cancer is a multi-step process, but because of the efforts of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), funded by the US National Institutes of Health, and other large-scale ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (September 26, 2013) - Blurred images that are unidentifiable as still pictures become understandable once the images are set in motion. That's because of a phenomenon called "optic flow"—which may be especially relevant as a source of visual information in people with low vision, reports a study 'With an Eye to Low Vision: Optic Flow Enables Perception Despite Image Blur' (published online ahead of print, September 3, 2013) in the October issue of Optometry and Vision Science official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. The journal is published ...

Washington, DC (September 26, 2013) — The short-term risks associated with kidney donation are relatively modest, but because many donors have additional medical conditions, it is important to evaluate their ongoing health. That's the conclusion of a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). In more than a third of kidney transplantations performed in the United States, the transplanted organs come from live donors. Research suggests that there are minimal health consequences for donors, but only a few ...

Troy, N.Y. – The first scoop of soil analyzed by the analytical suite in the belly of NASA's Curiosity rover reveals that fine materials on the surface of the planet contain several percent water by weight. The results were published today in Science as one article in a five-paper special section on the Curiosity mission. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Dean of Science Laurie Leshin is the study's lead author. "One of the most exciting results from this very first solid sample ingested by Curiosity is the high percentage of water in the soil," said Leshin. "About 2 ...

Singapore, 27 September 2013 – Species living in rainforest fragments could be far more likely to disappear than was previously thought, says an international team of scientists. In a study spanning two decades, the researchers witnessed the near-complete extinction of native small mammals on forest islands created by a large hydroelectric reservoir in Thailand. "It was like ecological Armageddon," said Luke Gibson from the National University of Singapore, who led the study. "Nobody imagined we'd see such catastrophic local extinctions." The study, just published ...

Cancer encompasses a complex group of diseases traditionally defined by where in the body it originates, as in lung cancer or colon cancer. This framework for studying and treating cancer has made sense for generations, but molecular analysis now shows that cancers of different organs have many shared features, while cancers from the same organ or tissue are often quite distinct. The Pan-Cancer Initiative, a major effort to analyze the molecular aberrations in cancer cells across a range of tumor types, has yielded an abundance of new findings reported in 18 forthcoming ...

Benzathine penicillin G (BPG) is the most essential antibiotic for the treatment and prevention of group A streptococcal infections associated with rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease. Yet while some countries such as South Africa and Brazil have stable supplies, most countries with a high RHD burden often suffer interruptions in supply and also have quality control issues. The problems around supply of this drug are discussed in one of the papers of the RHD special issue of Global Heart, the journal of the World Heart Federation. The paper is by Dr Rosemary Wyber, ...

As this year's World Heart Day approaches (Sunday September 29), focus is returning to a neglected and entirely preventable heart disease that largely affects the world's youngest and poorest populations: rheumatic heart disease (RHD). To highlight this long-neglected condition, Global Heart, the journal of The World Heart Federation (WHF) is publishing a special issue dedicated to RHD. The World Heart Federation views the publication of the special issue of Global Heart as a vital step in its target of reducing global RHD deaths in under 25s by 25% by 2025. Reducing ...

Without a huge improvement in living conditions, a cure, or a vaccine, rheumatic heart disease (RHD) will continue to blight low-income and middle-income countries. Raising community awareness of the condition, emphasising that untreated sore throat caused by group A streptococcal (GAS) infection can lead to acute rheumatic fever (ARF)/RHD, is a huge part of the battle. The issues around advocacy and awareness are discussed in a paper in the RHD special issue of Global Heart, the journal of the World Heart Federation, written by Dr Liesl Zühlke, University of Cape Town ...

A paper in the RHD special issue of Global Heart, the journal of the World Heart Federation, analyses the burden of disease and suggests that numbers published to date (ranging from at least 233,000 deaths per year upwards) could be substantial underestimates for a variety of reasons, most commonly lack of high quality (or in some cases any) data from high-prevalence countries and regions. The paper is by Dr Liesl Zühlke, University of Cape Town and Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa and Dr Andrew Steer, Centre for International Child Health ...