World-class orchestras can be accurately identified by silent video footage of performances, but not through sound recordings, a UCL study has found. Both professional musicians and musical novices are better at identifying top-ranked orchestras from non-ranked orchestras when shown silent video footage, suggesting that such judgements are driven at least in part by visual cues about group dynamics and leadership. When shown two 6-second clips, one from a world-class orchestra ranked among the top ten internationally - which included the London Symphony Orchestra, the ...

A chemical found in plants could reduce the symptoms of a rare muscle disease that leaves children with little or no control of their movements. Scientists have found that a plant pigment called quercetin – found in some fruits, vegetables, herbs and grains – could help to prevent the damage to nerves associated with the childhood form of motor neuron disease. Their findings could pave the way for new treatments for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) – also known as floppy baby syndrome – which is a leading genetic cause of death in children. The team has found that the ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (March 3, 2014) – Using a yeast model of Alzheimer's disease (AD), Whitehead Institute researchers have identified a drug that reduces levels of the toxic protein fragment amyloid-β (Aβ) and prevents at least some of the cellular damage caused when Aβ accumulates in the brains of AD patients. "We can use this yeast model to find small molecules that will address the underlying cellular pathologies of Alzheimer's, an age-related disease whose burden will become even more significant as our population grows older," says Kent Matlack, a former ...

AUSTIN, Texas — African American men who endured greater childhood adversity are likely to experience disadvantages in health and relationships over time, according to new sociology research from The University of Texas at Austin. The study, published in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, helps to explain why African American men are less healthy than white men. "Exposure to childhood adversity may cause stress and lead to a sequence of stressors over time that take a cumulative toll on relationships," says Debra Umberson, professor of sociology ...

Bottom Line: Having a bedroom television is associated with weight gain in children and adolescents, and is unrelated to the time they spend watching. Author: Diane Gilbert-Diamond, Sc.D., of the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Lebanon, N.H., and colleagues. Background: More than one-third of children and adolescents in the United States are overweight or obese. An estimated 71 percent of children and adolescents (ages 8 to 18 years) have bedroom televisions. How the Study Was Conducted: The authors conducted a telephone survey in 2003 of 6,522 boys and girls ...

The discovery of how a KwaZulu-Natal woman's body responded to her HIV infection by making potent antibodies (called broadly neutralising antibodies, because they are able to kill multiple strains of HIV from across the world), was reported today by the CAPRISA consortium of AIDS researchers jointly with scientists from the United States. The study, published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, describes how the research team found and identified these antibodies in her blood and then duplicated them by cloning the antibodies in the laboratory. The cloned antibodies ...

Scientists have shown for the first time that deep-sea fishes that use bioluminescence for communication are diversifying into different species faster than other glowing fishes that use light for camouflage. The new research indicates that bioluminescence—a phenomenon in which animals generate visible light through a chemical reaction—could promote communication and mating in the open ocean, an environment with few barriers to reproduction. The study was recently published in the journal Marine Biology. "Bioluminescence is quite common in the deep sea, and many fishes ...

Beaumont research findings published in the February online issue of Spine shows that patients who have a low back surgery called minimally invasive transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion, end up better off in many ways than patients who have more invasive surgery to alleviate debilitating pain. "About 90 percent of adults experience low back pain in their lifetime, which can be caused by spinal instability, stenosis, spondylolisthesis, and symptomatic degenerative disc disease," says Mick Perez-Cruet, M.D., neuro-spine surgeon at Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak and professor, ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Excessive weight gain during pregnancy increases the risk of suffering illnesses such as hypertension and gestational diabetes, or of having a premature birth or a birth by Caesarean; furthermore, it also has negative effects on the newly-born and increases the risk of infants being overweight by 30%. Aware of the importance of preventing gestational weight gain, both in mother and child, researchers from the University of Granada, Madrid Polytechnic University and the European University carried out a study on the benefits ...

Bottom Line: Most people who use opioid painkillers without a physician's prescription initially get them from friends or relatives for free, but as the number of days of use increase sources for the medications expand to include prescriptions from physicians and purchases from friends, relatives, drug dealers or strangers. Author: Christopher M. Jones, Pharm.D., M.P.H., who was with the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, at the time of research but is now with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ...

Bottom Line: A blood test accurately screened for infection with the agent responsible for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a fatal neurological disease. Author: Graham S. Jackson, Ph.D., of the University College of London (UCL) Institute of Neurology, and colleagues. Background: vCJD is a fatal degenerative brain disorder thought to be caused by a misfolded protein (prion) in the brain and contracted most commonly through eating infected beef. Up to 3 million cattle in the United Kingdom may have been infected with BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), ...

NASA's Terra satellite passed over Tropical Cyclone Kofi in the Southwestern Pacific Ocean and captured an infrared image of the storm revealing powerful thunderstorms around center of circulation. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured an infrared image on March 3 at 09:55 UTC/4:55 a.m. EST. Cloud top temperatures were near -80C/-112F indicating very strong thunderstorms around the center. At 0900 UTC/4 a.m. EST Tropical Storm Kofi had maximum sustained winds near 45 knots51.7 mph/83.3 ...

New York, NY, March 3, 2014 – Men who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer need to assimilate information rapidly in order to weigh the treatment options and make informed decisions. Although patients consult a variety of information sources, outcome information that is specific to the treating physician leads to greater patient satisfaction following treatment, according to a new study published in The Journal of Urology®. The benefits of patient information are broad. For many people confronted with a cancer diagnosis, information translates to greater involvement ...

The reintroduction of mountain lions across the mid-western United States has made species management an urgent area of research for conservationists. A report in the Wildlife Society Bulletin explores the fatal cost of human interaction with cougars and asks what state agencies can do to protect both species. Cougars (Puma concolor) are slowly recolonizing their historic habitats, including the Black Hills of South Dakota, but since they've been away, the land has become crossed with roads and home to many human communities. "The cougar population in the Black Hills ...

The open air plays of the Ancient Greeks may offer us a valuable insight into the Mediterranean climate of the time, reports new research in Weather. Using historical observations from artwork and plays, scientists identified 'halcyon days', of theatre friendly weather in mid-winter. "We explored the weather conditions which enabled the Athenians of the classical era to watch theatre performances in open theatres during the midwinter weather conditions," said Christina Chronopoulou, from the National and Kapodestrian University of Athens. "We aimed to do so by gathering ...

Politicians know that turning on the tears can be a vote winner, but how does the political manipulation of our emotions actually work? Research in Political Psychology explores how emotions such as anxiety, even if their cause has nothing to do with politics, can result in a hardening of our views. "There's been a lot of focus in recent years on emotions and political attitudes, but the ways we, as political scientists, have studied this phenomena have made it hard to draw firm conclusions," said Dr. Jonathan Renshon, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "We bypassed ...

Medical diagnoses and DNA sequencing can be made cheaper, faster and more reliable using a new miniaturized technique for gel electrophoresis based on conducting polymer materials, according to researchers at Linköping University in Sweden. Gel electrophoresis is a process through which different proteins or DNA fragments are separated so that they can be identified and studied. Today, most separations require considerable manual work and are carried-out on large gels which require several hours to complete. The industry needs miniaturized systems capable of automatically ...

Facebook has become a global phenomenon and an active space for social comparison. With the increase in technology use, there is a positive correlation with decreased body image in young women. In a study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, 960 female college students were evaluated on the time they spend on social media sites, how important "likes" are, and whether or not they untag photos of themselves. "Over 95% of college women in our study use Facebook, and those with Facebook accounts described typically spending 20 minutes on the site during ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 3, 2014—What do some high-end golf clubs and your living room window have in common? The answer is glass, but in the golf clubs' case it's a specialized glass product, called metallic glass, with the ability to be bent considerably and spring back into its original form. Your windows, as you know, aren't quite as forgiving of a sudden impact, and they shatter – they are brittle, as opposed to ductile, or more flexible products. For the golf clubs, however, a new generation of flexible metallic glass puts more bounce back into a golf ball, from the ...

Rotary-wing aircraft, such as Apache and Chinook helicopters, play vital combat and logistical roles across the U.S. military services, but new research in the Wildlife Society Bulletin reveals how vulnerable these aircraft are to wildlife strikes. Many types of aircraft are vulnerable to strikes, estimated to cost the aviation industry $1.2 billion worldwide per year; however, to date no assessment of strikes to military rotary-wing aircraft has been conducted. A research team led by Dr. Brian Washburn from the Wildlife Research Center used records from the Army, Navy, ...

Researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center have found that blocking the action of a key signaling molecule in the immune system known as Netrin-1 stalls chronic inflammation and insulin resistance tied to obesity and often derived from fatty diets. Reporting in this week's issue of Nature Medicine, the NYU Langone team showed in experiments in mice and human tissue that Netrin-1 signaling is propelled by fat tissue growth. The team previously discovered that Netrin-1 was secreted by the immune system clean-up cells, or macrophages, whose buildup leads to inflammation. ...

PITTSBURGH, March 4, 2014 – Eating fish in amounts comparable to those of people living in Japan seems to impart a protective factor that wards off heart disease, according to an international study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and led by the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Middle-aged Japanese men living in Japan had lower incidence of coronary artery calcification, a predictor of heart disease, than middle-aged white men living in the United States, likely due to the significantly higher consumption of omega-3 fatty acids ...

Research at UCLA on a technique for detecting the earliest spread of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, has confirmed that the procedure significantly prolongs patients' survival rates compared with traditional "watch and wait" techniques. The technique, which combines lymphatic mapping and sentinel-node biopsy, allows doctors to quickly determine whether the disease has spread, or metastasized, to the lymph nodes, which occurs in approximately 20 percent of patients. Patients with cancer in their lymph nodes may benefit from having their other nearby lymph ...

A UCLA-led team of researchers has found evidence that photosensitizing a virus's membrane covering can inhibit its ability to enter cells and potentially lead to the development of stronger, cheaper medications to fight a host of tough viruses. The UCLA AIDS Institute study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Virology, is part of ongoing research on a compound called LJ001, a "broad-spectrum" antiviral that can attack a wide range of microbes. The current paper advances the science by showing that the process of photosensitization — heightening a ...

A team of researchers from National University of Singapore (NUS) have created the first two-photon, small molecule fluorogenic probe that can serve as a useful tool for the rapid assessment of an individual's potential risk for Parkinson's disease. The highly sensitive fluorescence probe can detect with high precision the activity of Monoamine Oxidase B (MAO-B), an enzyme that is found in elevated levels in patients with Parkinson's disease. This innovation paves the way for the development of less costly non-invasive technologies and devices to help monitor the risk and ...