AUDIO: Falon Tilley and Michael W. Beets discuss the successful implementation of the Healthy Lunchbox Challenge, an innovative theory and incentive-based program, at four large-scale, community-based summer day camps. They observed... Click here for more information. PHILADELPHIA, PA, February 18, 2014 – During the school year, 21 million children receive free or reduced-price lunches, yet less than 10% of those children participate in the Department of Agriculture's Summer ...

Jena (Germany) A trousers button, a coin or a watch can be dangerous for people with a nickel allergy. Approximately 1 in 10 Germans is allergic to the metal. "This raises the question of the safety of medical implants containing nickel," explains Professor Dr. Markus Rettenmayr of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany). Nickel-titanium alloys are increasingly used as material for cardiovascular implants in minimal invasive surgery. Once implanted, nickel-titanium alloys can release small amounts of nickel due to corrosion phenomena, the holder of the Chair of ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Corporations with board directors who have investment banking experience are more likely to acquire other businesses – and make better acquisitions when they do – according to a new study from the University at Buffalo School of Management. Forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Economics, the study found that directors with investment banking experience help their firms to select better businesses to acquire, more accurately determine the value of the target business and either reduce reliance on mergers and acquisition consultants or negotiate lower ...

The nature of the machinery responsible for the entry of proteins into cell membranes has been unravelled by scientists, who hope the breakthrough could ultimately be exploited for the design of new anti-bacterial drugs. Groups of researchers from the University of Bristol and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) used new genetic engineering technologies to reconstruct and isolate the cell's protein trafficking machinery. Its analysis has shed new light on a process which had previously been a mystery for molecular biologists. The findings, published today ...

People and spaces, the tragedy of commonsense morality, myths about meaning of life, and remaking love were four themes at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference in Austin. Researchers presented new work, showing how psychology reaches into our everyday lives. Video from four of these talks is now available online. Highlights include: Sam Gosling of the University of Texas-Austin described how the link between our emotions and spaces is is inseparable. As such, our spaces say a lot about us. In new work, Gosling and colleagues identified ...

Sophia Antipolis, 18 February 2014: One-quarter of high risk patients do not receive anticoagulants after ablation of atrial fibrillation (AF), according to the latest survey of European practice. The EORP Atrial Fibrillation Ablation Pilot Study, conducted by the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), reveals that 65% of patients were taking anticoagulants one year after ablation of AF.1 But up to 25% of patients at high risk of stroke (defined as a CHA2DS2-VASc score >1) were not taking any anticoagulant drug. And around ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid have designed a system that speeds up online administrative procedures by automatically verifying and validating printed electronic documents, a process that had been done manually up until now. With the law known as Ley 11/2007, regarding citizens' electronic access to public services, going into effect, electronic documents have gained full legal validity. When a document of this type is printed out, it must be accompanied by its Código Seguro de Verificación (CSV- Secure ...

Couples with young children are as likely to stay together if the mother is the main breadwinner rather than the father, new research shows. A paper published in the journal Sociology today [Tuesday 18 February 2014] says the relationships of parents are in some cases more stable if the mother earns more than the father. Dr Shireen Kanji, of the University of Leicester School of Management, and Dr Pia Schober, of the German Institute for Economic Research, Berlin, examined survey data on 3,944 British couples as their first child aged from eight months to seven years. ...

Emotional eating is something we're all familiar with. Maybe you had had a rough week at work and all you want on Friday night is to plop down and watch a movie with a giant bowl of buttery popcorn. Maybe you're a student stressed about a big exam and you're munching on candy as you study. Or maybe your child's birthday party is coming up and you've bought an ice cream cake to serve a small army to celebrate. Happy or sad, up or down, there's a plethora of media in the world that tells us our moods often dictate the foods we choose to eat. More recent studies, though, ...

Jerusalem, Feb. 18, 2014 – Experimental work pointing to a therapy for alleviating mucositis -- a common, severe side effect of chemotherapy and irradiation of cancer patients or patients prepared for bone marrow transplantation – has been achieved by an international team of researchers from the US and Israel headed by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Mucositis is a strong inflammatory reaction of the mucosal lining of the digestive system, particularly the gut. Mucositis is often a major reason for premature suspension of anti-cancer therapy. As ...

Winter in the Arctic is not only cold and dark, it is also storm season when hurricane-like cyclones traverse the northern waters from Iceland to Alaska. These cyclones are characterized by strong localized drops in sea level pressure, and as Arctic-wide decreases in sea level pressure are one of the expected results of climate change, this could increase extreme Arctic cyclone activity, including powerful storms in the spring and fall. A new study in Geophysical Research Letters uses historical climate model simulations to demonstrate that there has been an Arctic-wide ...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18, 2014 — In what may be the warmest Winter Olympics on record, Sochi looks more like SoCal by the day. With few real snowflakes around to blanket Sochi's slopes, the latest episode of the American Chemical Society's Reactions YouTube series explains how science keeps the Winter Olympics alive with artificial snow. The video is available at http://youtu.be/ftMFMlk6FlA. Producing artificial snow isn't as simple as grinding up big blocks of ice and spraying it on the slopes. Sochi's artificial snow guns — cannons that fire fake snow 20 to 30 feet in ...

Are you active at your job? If you're like most workers, you probably aren't. And the consequences could be deadly. A team of researchers at the University of Iowa measured physical activity in police, whose jobs are presumably predicated on movement. Yet the group found that police officers burn as much energy on the job as someone sitting while holding a baby or washing dishes. "We find that police work is primarily sedentary," explains Sandra Ramey, assistant professor in the UI College of Nursing. "The public view, how the media portray it on shows like 'Hawaii ...

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz uses computer simulations to explore the universe's most violent events, so when the first detailed observations of a star being ripped apart by a black hole were reported in 2012 (Gezari et al., Nature), he was eager to compare the data with his simulations. He was also highly skeptical of one of the published conclusions: that the disrupted star was a rare helium star. "I was sure it was a normal hydrogen star and we were just not understanding what's going on," said Ramirez-Ruiz, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, ...

Primary care doctors are not quick to prescribe antihypertensive medication to young people even after an average of 20 months of high blood pressure. Young adults who are white, male, not on Medicaid and not frequent clinic visitors are especially less likely to receive medication. These are the results of a study¹ by a research team at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in the United States led by Heather Johnson. It appears in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer. One in every 10 Americans between the ages of ...

A new UCLA-led study shows that a blood test commonly used to determine whether heart transplant recipients are rejecting their new organ can also predict potential rejection-related problems in the future. Reporting in the online edition of the peer-reviewed journal Transplantation, researchers demonstrate how the AlloMap test, which uses a blood sample to measure changes in the expression of roughly a dozen genes, can be used over a period of time to assess the risk of dysfunction or rejection of a transplanted heart — months before such an event may occur. "For ...

This news release is available in German. An almost infinite number of complex and interlinked reactions take place in a biological cell. In order to be able to better investigate these networks, scientists led by Professor Friedrich Simmel, Chair of Systems Biophysics and Nano Biophysics at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) try to replicate them with the necessary components in a kind of artificial cell. This is also motivated by the thought of one day using such single-cell systems for example as "nanofactories" for the production of complex organic substances ...

By 2020, nearly 80 million people are expected to have glaucoma, a disorder of the eye that, if left untreated, can damage the optic nerve and eventually lead to blindness. The disease often causes pressure in the eye due to a buildup of fluid and a breakdown of the tissue that is responsible for regulating fluid drainage. Doctors commonly treat glaucoma using eye drops that can help the eye drain or decrease fluid production. Unfortunately, patients frequently have a hard time sticking to the dosing schedules prescribed by their doctors, and the medication — when ...

As winter turns to spring and many Northern Californians plan outdoor adventures, a mysterious, potentially debilitating threat looms. A newly recognized human pathogen with unknown health consequences has been found to occur over a large part of the San Francisco Bay Area. A study to be published in the March issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Disease details how researchers including Dan Salkeld, a research associate at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, found the bacterium, Borrelia miyamotoi, as well as Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that ...

VIDEO: This video shows a female wasp marked with pink paint that was a recently accepted non-nestmate who became a subordinate worker. A resident female flies in and forces the newly... Click here for more information. Coral Gables, Fla. (Feb. 17, 2014) -- Ants, wasps and humans live in highly complex societies. Our organizations share some basic features of group life, like individuals trying to find the balance between cooperation and conflict. Understanding what factors are ...

Irvine, Calif., Feb. 18, 2014 — UC Irvine researchers have found a specific genetic flaw that is connected to sudden death due to heart arrhythmia – a leading cause of mortality for adults around the world. While a number of genes have been linked with arrhythmias, UC Irvine's Geoffrey Abbott and his colleagues discovered that the functional impairment of a gene called KCNE2 underlies a multisystem syndrome that affects both heart rhythm and blood flow and can activate chemical triggers that can cause sudden cardiac death. "With these findings, we can now explore improved ...

Online shoppers are accustomed to viewing consumer products in 360 degrees. Now RealeyeZ3D is taking the power of RealHD to the next level. Their new product, RealHD MooV, offers moving features that are not available elsewhere in video or 3D marketing and merchandising. "RealHD Moov uses the MPEG-4 movie format," says company founder and CEO, Ofer Rubin. "It is compatible with Apple and all other platforms and responsive to all screen sizes. Together with its new scalability. It will look like retailers spent tens of thousands of dollars on high-end TV ...

Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have tested a new approach to fabricating spin valves. Using ion beams, the researchers have succeeded in structuring an iron aluminium alloy in such a way as to subdivide the material into individually magnetizable regions at the nanometer scale. The prepared alloy is thus able to function as a spin valve, which is of great interest as a candidate component for use in spintronics. Not only does this technology use electron charge for purposes of information storage and processing, it also draws on its inherent ...

BLOOMINGTON -- A new Indiana University study that examines the brain activity of alcohol-dependent women compared to women who were not addicted found stark and surprising differences, leading to intriguing questions about brain network functions of addicted women as they make risky decisions about when and what to drink. The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study differences between patterns of brain network activation in the two groups of women. The findings indicate that the anterior insular region of the brain may be implicated in the ...

Without administering a simple blood test in the first few days after surgery, 85 percent of the heart attacks or injuries patients suffer could be missed, according to a study in the March issue of Anesthesiology. Globally, more than 8 million adults have heart attacks or injuries after surgery every year, and 10 percent of those patients die within 30 days. The study suggests a new diagnosis, Myocardial Injury after Noncardiac Surgery (MINS), would be useful to physicians because of its broader definition from what is traditionally used to diagnose heart attacks now. ...