ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Cases of pertussis, also known as whooping cough, are on the rise in the U.S., recently reaching their highest level in 50 years. The disease can be serious or even fatal to newborns who have not yet received vaccinations. Effective vaccines against pertussis have been available for many decades, but that vaccine protection can wear off over time. A new University of Michigan poll shows that 61 percent of adults say they don't know when they were last vaccinated against pertussis, which could mean they might be unwittingly exposing vulnerable babies ...

Mannitol, a sugar alcohol produced by fungi, bacteria, and algae, is a common component of sugar-free gum and candy. The sweetener is also used in the medical field — it's approved by the FDA as a diuretic to flush out excess fluids and used during surgery as a substance that opens the blood/brain barrier to ease the passage of other drugs. Now Profs. Ehud Gazit and Daniel Segal of Tel Aviv University's Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology and the Sagol School of Neuroscience, along with their colleague Dr. Ronit Shaltiel-Karyo and PhD candidate Moran ...

A small, pilot study is examining how mobile technology might support deaf and hard-of-hearing college students when an interpreter can't physically be present at the time the services are requested. The University of Cincinnati research will be presented on June 19, at the Critical Link 7 International Conference in Toronto. The conference is themed, "Global Awakening: Leading Practices in Interpreting." The first phase of the UC research project involved a college student taking a course in a large, auditorium-style classroom. The student used an iPad to gain the services ...

As Descartes famously noted, there's no way to really know that another person has a mind — every mind we observe is, in a sense, a mind we create. Now, new research suggests that victimization may be one condition that leads us to perceive minds in others, even in entities we don't normally think of as having minds. This research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that people attribute minds to entities they perceive as being targets of harm, even when the entity in question is a robot or a corpse. "People ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (June 17, 2013) – Teaching hospitals with a higher intensity of physician-training activity achieve lower mortality rates, but higher hospitalization readmission rates for key medical diagnoses, reports a study in the July issue of Medical Care, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. The disparity in readmissions is greatest for "safety-net" hospitals serving low-income populations, according to the new research led by Dr Stephanie K. Mueller of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. They write, "These findings ...

VIDEO: Researchers from Princeton University and Germany's Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization report the first purely physical experimental evidence that chimera states can occur naturally within any process that... Click here for more information. Systems such as a beating heart or a power grid that depend on the synchronized movement of their parts could fall prey to an invisible and chaotic tug-of-war known as a "chimera." Sharing its name with the fire-breathing, ...

Have you ever thought that you knew something about the world in the blink of an eye? This restaurant is not the right place for dinner. That person could be The One. It turns out that radiologists can do this with mammograms, the x-ray images used for breast cancer screening. Cytologists, who screen micrographic images of cervical cells to detect cervical cancer, have a similar ability. A new study, published in Springer's journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, takes a closer look at the skill these specialists have. There are many routes to making snap judgments (not ...

Millions of people each year have polyps successfully removed during colonoscopies. But when a suspicious polyp is bigger than a marble or in a hard-to-reach location, patients are referred for surgery to remove a portion of their colon — even if doctors aren't sure whether the polyp is cancerous or not. Since only 15 percent of all polyps turn out to be malignant, many patients are unnecessarily subjected to the risks of this major surgery. Now there is an alternative. A UCLA team of surgeons and gastroenterologists has been performing a new, minimally invasive ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Amphibian populations are declining worldwide and a major cause is a deadly fungus thought to be spread by bullfrogs, but a two-year study shows they can also die from this pathogen, contrary to suggestions that bullfrogs are a tolerant carrier host that just spreads the disease. When researchers raised the frogs from eggs in controlled experimental conditions, they found at least one strain of this pathogen, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, also called Bd or a chytrid fungus, can be fatal to year-old juveniles. However, bullfrogs were resistant to one ...

A study by researchers at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego, shows that a protein called MCL-1, which promotes cell survival, is essential for normal heart function. Their study, published in the June 15 online issue of the journal Genes & Development, found that deletion of the gene encoding MCL-1 in adult mouse hearts led to rapid heart failure within two weeks, and death within a month. MCL-1 (myeloid cell leukemia-1) is an anti-apoptotic protein, meaning that it prevents ...

PITTSBURGH—Home remodelers understand the concept of improving original foundations with more modern elements. Using this same approach—but with chemistry—researchers in the University of Pittsburgh's Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences have designed a family of materials that could make drug delivery, gas storage, and gas transport more efficient and at a lower cost. The findings were reported in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). The recent work builds upon Pitt Associate Professor of Chemistry Nathaniel Rosi's earlier ...

Although a family history of Alzheimer's disease is a primary risk factor for the devastating neurological disorder, mutations in only three genes – the amyloid precursor protein and presenilins 1 and 2 – have been established as causative for inherited, early-onset Alzheimer's, accounting for about half of such cases. Now Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have discovered a type of mutation known as copy-number variants (CNVs) – deletions, duplications, or rearrangements of human genomic DNA – in affected members of 10 families with early-onset Alzheimer's. ...

SAN FRANCISCO (June 16, 2013)—Male mice who were fed a high-fat diet and became obese were more likely to father offspring who also had higher levels of body fat, a new Ohio University study finds. The effect was observed primarily in male offspring, despite their consumption of a low-fat diet, scientists reported today at the annual meeting of The Endocrine Society in San Francisco, Calif. "We've identified a number of traits that may affect metabolism and behavior of offspring dependent on the pre-conception diet of the father," said Felicia Nowak, an associate professor ...

A mechanism that cells use to group together and move around the body – called 'chase and run' - has been described for the first time by scientists at UCL. Published in Nature Cell Biology, the new study focuses on the process that occurs when cancer cells interact with healthy cells in order to migrate around the body during metastasis. Scientists know that cancer cells recruit healthy cells and use them to travel long distances, but how this process takes place and how it could be controlled to design new therapies against cancer remains unknown. Now, using embryonic ...

National Paracycling Champion Tom Staniford has an extremely rare condition which, until now, has puzzled his doctors. He is unable to store fat under his skin – yet has type 2 diabetes – and suffered hearing loss as a child. Now, thanks to advances in genome sequencing, an international research team led by the University of Exeter Medical School has identified Tom's condition and pinpointed the single genetic mutation that causes it. As well as allowing a better understanding of Tom's condition, the discovery may have implications for his bid to participate in the ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The noble gases get their collective moniker from their tendency toward snobbishness. The six elements in the family, which includes helium and neon, don't normally bond with other elements and they don't dissolve into minerals the way other gases do. But now, geochemists from Brown University have found a mineral structure with which the nobles deign to fraternize. Researchers led by Colin Jackson, a graduate student in geological sciences, have found noble gases to be highly soluble in amphibole, a mineral commonly found in oceanic ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Chemists at Indiana University Bloomington have created a symmetrical, five-sided macrocycle that is easy to synthesize and has characteristics that may help expand the molecular tool box available to researchers in biology, chemistry and materials sciences. The molecule, which the researchers call cyanostar, was developed in the lab of Amar Flood, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences. It is described in an article in the journal Nature Chemistry, scheduled for publication in August and available online. Doctoral ...

A "cold snap" 116 million years ago triggered a similar marine ecosystem crisis to those witnessed in the past as a result of global warming, according to research published today in Nature Geoscience. The international study involving experts from the universities of Newcastle, UK, Cologne, Frankfurt and GEOMAR-Kiel, confirms the link between global cooling and a crash in the marine ecosystem during the mid-Cretaceous greenhouse period. It also quantifies for the first time the amplitude and duration of the temperature change. Analysing the geochemistry and micropaleontology ...

HIV prevention programs for female sex workers in India reduce rates of syphilis, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), a University of Toronto study has found. About two million Indians are infected with HIV, mostly in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. The study, led by Professor Prabhat Jha from U of T's Dalla Lana School of Public Health and St. Michael's Hospital's Centre for Global Health Research (CGHR), examined the impact of prevention among female sex workers whose contact with male clients contributes ...

Because of their central importance to biology, proteins have been the focus of intense research, particularly the manner in which they are produced from genetically coded templates—a process commonly known as translation. While the general mechanism of translation has been understood for some time, protein synthesis can initiate by more than one mechanism. One of the least well understood mechanisms is known as cap-independent translation. Now, John Chaput and his colleagues at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute have produced the first genome-wide investigation ...

New York– Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai will present several new studies at ENDO 2013, The Endocrine Society's Annual Meeting & Expo (ENDO) from June 15-18 in San Francisco. Mount Sinai researchers will demonstrate new data on diabetes self-management, as well as the role of prostastic acid phosphatase (PAP) in Prostate Cancer (PCa) bone metastases; identify new molecules that can stimulate the thyroid gland; reveal the prevalence of primary aldosteronism (PA) in an urban population; and show how thyroid autoimmunity may be triggered ...

DURHAM, N.H. – "It's not fair!" " "You're not the boss of me." "She hit me!" "He started it." Fights between siblings – from toy-snatching to clandestine whacks to being banished from the bedroom – are so common they're often dismissed as simply part of growing up. Yet a new study from researchers at the University of New Hampshire finds that sibling aggression is associated with significantly worse mental health in children and adolescents. In some cases, effects of sibling aggression on mental health were the same as those of peer aggression. "Even kids who reported ...

A study from investigators at MassGeneral Hospital for Children (MGHfC) found that African-American or Hispanic children diagnosed with autism were significantly less likely than white children to have received subspecialty care or procedures related to conditions that often accompany autism spectrum disorders. While previous studies have documented that minority children with autism tend to be diagnosed at a later age than white children, this report – which will appear in the July issue of Pediatrics and has been released online – is the first to describe disparities ...

Even though it doesn't have a head, you can still tell what kind of animal it is: the robot is definitely modeled upon a cat. Developed by EPFL's Biorobotics Laboratory (Biorob), the "cheetah-cub robot," a small-size quadruped prototype robot, is described in an article appearing today in the International Journal of Robotics Research. The purpose of the platform is to encourage research in biomechanics; its particularity is the design of its legs, which make it very fast and stable. Robots developed from this concept could eventually be used in search and rescue missions ...

PULLMAN, Wash. – Canceled flights, lost luggage, a product confirmed to be "in stock" that turns out to be on back order after you've driven 20 minutes to get it—most everyone has at some time experienced anger and frustration over similar service failures. These feelings can, in turn, lead customers to take their business elsewhere, leading the firm to lose a valued patron. But when a firm strikes out a second time - for example, by failing to resolve the initial mistake - the insult added to injury can lead customers to seek revenge by aggressively confronting frontline ...