A person's intensity of Facebook use can be predicted by activity in a reward-related area of the brain, according to a new study published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. In the first study to relate brain activity to social media use, Meshi and colleagues observed activity in the brain's reward circuitry, the nucleus accumbens, in 31 participants. Researchers focused on the nucleus accumbens, a small but critical structure located deep in the center of the brain, because previous research has shown that rewards —including food, money, ...

Boston, MA — Eating more whole fruits, particularly blueberries, grapes, and apples, was significantly associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a new study led by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers. Greater consumption of fruit juices was associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes. The study is the first to look at the effects of individual fruits on diabetes risk. "While fruits are recommended as a measure for diabetes prevention, previous studies have found mixed results for total fruit consumption. Our findings provide novel ...

The human body has hundreds of different cell types, all with the same basic DNA, and all of which can ultimately be traced back to identical stem cells. Despite this fundamental similarity, a bone cell has little in common with a brain cell when it comes to appearance or function. The fact that bone is rigid and mechanically distinct from soft fat or brain had been speculated to play some role in differentiation to new cells in those parts of the body, but mechanisms have been unclear. Now, a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that ...

Several key elements in systems of care can reduce stroke deaths and disabilities, according to a new American Heart Association/American Stroke Association policy statement published in its journal Stroke. Stroke is the number four cause of death and a leading cause of adult disability in the United States. On average, every 4 minutes someone dies of a stroke. The policy statement addresses patients' care from the time stroke symptoms are identified, to the emergency medical services' (EMS) response, to the transport and treatment in the hospital and rehabilitation. Recommendations ...

STANFORD, Calif. - You can't resurrect a dead cell anymore than you can breathe life into a brick, regardless of what you may have gleaned from zombie movies and Dr. Frankenstein. So when heart cells die from lack of blood flow during a heart attack, replacing those dead cells is vital to the heart muscle's recovery. But muscle tissue in the adult human heart has a limited capacity to heal, which has spurred researchers to try to give the healing process a boost. Various methods of transplanting healthy cells into a damaged heart have been tried, but have yet to yield ...

Poverty consumes so much mental energy that those in poor circumstances have little remaining brainpower to concentrate on other areas of life, new research finds. As a result, those with few resources are more likely to make bad decisions that perpetuate their financial woes. Published in the journal Science, the study suggests our cognitive abilities can be diminished by the exhausting effort of tasks like scrounging to pay bills. As a result, less “mental bandwidth” remains for education, training, time-management, and other steps that could help break out of the ...

Poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life, according to research based at Princeton University. As a result, people of limited means are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that may be amplified by -- and perpetuate -- their financial woes. Published in the journal Science, the study presents a unique perspective regarding the causes of persistent poverty. The researchers suggest that being poor may keep a person from concentrating on the very avenues that ...

Eating more whole fruits, particularly blueberries, grapes and apples, is associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, with greater fruit juice consumption having an adverse effect, a paper published today on bmj.com suggests. Increasing fruit consumption has been recommended for the prevention of many chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes. However, studies have generated some mixed results. Researchers from the UK, USA and Singapore therefore looked to examine the association of individual fruit consumption in relation to type 2 diabetes risk. Data were ...

In a call to action on the sorry comparative state of U.S. health, researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health are urging President Obama to "remove the public veil of ignorance" and confront a pressing question: Why is America at the bottom? The report, published in the journal Science, appeals to the President to mobilize government to create a National Commission on the Health of Americans. The researchers underscore the importance of this effort in order for the country to begin reversing the decline in the comparative status of U.S. health, ...

For people struggling to live paycheck-to-paycheck, daily life can sometimes seem like a gauntlet of impossible-to-answer questions – Can I afford to put food on the table? Will I make rent this month? What will happen if I lose my job? What if my kids get sick, or my car breaks down? For many, those questions become so persistent it's hard to concentrate on anything else. And that's exactly the problem, says Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan. The accumulation of those money woes and day-to-day worries leaves many low-income individuals not only struggling financially, ...

Bacteria living in the Gulf of Mexico beaches were able to 'eat up' the contamination from the Deep Water Horizon oil spill by supplementing their diet with nitrogen, delegates at the Goldschmidt conference will be told today, Friday 30th August. Professor Joel Kostka will tell geochemists gathered in Florence for the conference that detailed genetic analysis showed some of the bacteria thrived on a diet of oil because they were able to fix nitrogen from the air. The research -- the first to use next generation sequencing technologies to dig into the detail of how the ...

In a materials science laboratory at Harvard University, a transparent disk connected to a laptop fills the room with music—it's the "Morning" prelude from Peer Gynt, played on an ionic speaker. No ordinary speaker, it consists of a thin sheet of rubber sandwiched between two layers of a saltwater gel, and it's as clear as a window. A high-voltage signal that runs across the surfaces and through the layers forces the rubber to rapidly contract and vibrate, producing sounds that span the entire audible spectrum, 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz. But this is not an electronic ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Using NASA's super-sensitive Chandra X-ray space telescope, a team of astronomers led by Q. Daniel Wang at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has solved a long-standing mystery about why most super massive black holes (SMBH) at the centers of galaxies have such a low accretion rate—that is, they swallow very little of the cosmic gases available and instead act as if they are on a severe diet. "In principle, super massive black holes suck in everything," Wang says, "but we found this is not correct." Astronomers once thought SMBHs with their intense ...

SAMOSIR, NORTH SUMATRA (30 August 2013)—With governments, loggers, miners and palm oil producers poaching their lands with impunity, indigenous leaders from 17 countries gathered on a remote island in Sumatra this week to launch a global fight for their rights that will take advantage of powerful mapping tools combined with indigenous knowledge to mark traditional boundaries. "It's amazing to see indigenous groups from all over the world coming here armed with hundreds of detailed maps they have created with things like handheld GPS devices and Internet mapping apps," ...

VIDEO: This is a short-term animation showing the motion of 2011 QF99, as seen from above the north pole of the solar system. Click here for more information. BC astronomers have discovered the first Trojan asteroid sharing the orbit of Uranus, and believe 2011 QF99 is part of a larger-than-expected population of transient objects temporarily trapped by the gravitational pull of the Solar System's giant planets. Trojans are asteroids that share the orbit of a planet, ...

University of Arizona researchers led a team that has discovered that venom of spiders in the genus Loxosceles, which contains about 100 spider species including the brown recluse, produces a different chemical product in the human body than scientists believed. The finding has implications for understanding how these spider bites affect humans and development of possible treatments for the bites. One of few common spiders whose bites can have a seriously harmful effect on humans, brown recluse spider venom contains a rare protein that can cause a blackened lesion at ...

Titanium dioxide is an inexpensive, yet versatile material. It is used as a pigment in wall paint, as a biocompatible coating in medical implants, as a catalyst in the chemical industry and as UV protection in sunscreen. When applied as a thin coating, it can keep all sorts of surfaces sparkling clean. The use of titanium oxide in the electronics industry is currently being investigated. Fundamental to all these properties could be the atomic properties discovered by Ulrike Diebold from the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Vienna and Annabella Selloni from the Frick ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – More children with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis are experiencing remission of their symptoms, thanks to new biological therapies, but the remission is not well-understood. A new study published today in Arthritis Research & Therapy provides the first genomic characterization of remission in juvenile rheumatoid arthritis patients. "It turns out that even though these children in remission appear to be perfectly normal and symptom-free, their immune systems are still perturbed," says James N. Jarvis, MD, clinical professor of pediatrics in the University ...

Collagen, the stuff of ligaments and skin, and the most abundant protein in the human body, has an extraordinary role in triggering chemical signals that help protect the body from cancer, a new study reveals. Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, have uncovered a series of chemical signals sent out by collagen that appear to protect against cancer's growth. Boosting those signals could act as an effective treatment for cancers that grow in the presence of collagen, including squamous cell lung cancer, for which no targeted treatments currently exist. And ...

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have taken a major step in explaining why material around the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy is extraordinarily faint in X-rays. This discovery holds important implications for understanding black holes. New Chandra images of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), which is located about 26,000 light-years from Earth, indicate that less than 1 percent of the gas initially within Sgr A*'s gravitational grasp ever reaches the point of no return, also called the event horizon. Instead, much of the gas is ejected ...

CHESTNUT HILL, MA (Aug. 29, 2013) – Disrupting the symmetrical structure of a solid-state topological crystalline insulator creates mass in previously mass-less electrons and imparts an unexpected level of control in this nascent class of materials, an international team of researchers reports in the current edition of Science Express. The researchers not only confirmed several theoretical predictions about topological crystalline insulators (TCIs), but made a significant experimental leap forward that revealed even more details about the crystal structure and electronic ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The law that has helped medical discoveries make the leap from university labs to the marketplace for more than 30 years needs revising, in part to ensure the American people benefit from science their tax dollars have paid for, says a University of Michigan Medical School physician and medical historian. In a new commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine, Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D., director of the U-M Center for the History of Medicine, looks at the fluke-ridden history of how the law known as Bayh-Dole Technology Transfer Act was passed in ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (August 29, 2013) – Virtual surgical planning technologies give surgeons a powerful new tool for their most challenging facial reconstruction cases, reports a paper in the September issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). "Use of virtual surgical planning allows for complex maxillofacial reconstruction with multiple simultaneous free flaps to be preformed reliably and successfully," according to the study by Dr. Adam Saad of Louisiana State University Health Sciences ...

An assay designed to measure normal and abnormal forms of the huntingtin protein – the mutated form of which causes Huntington's disease (HD) – was successful in detecting levels of the mutant protein in a large multicenter study of individuals at risk for the devastating neurological disorder. The report from a team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators – which will appear in the Sept. 24 issue of Neurology and has been released online – also found changes in levels of the mutated protein that might predict when symptoms will appear. "Our validation ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Glucose monitoring systems with an autocorrect feature that can detect red blood cells (hematocrit), vitamin C and other common interferents in burn patients' blood are better for monitoring care, a pilot study conducted by UC Davis researchers at the School of Medicine and College of Engineering has found. The study was published in the Journal of Burn Care Research. Burn patients are at risk for high blood glucose levels, or hyperglycemia, due to the body's stress response. Intensive insulin therapy, which is commonly used to keep glucose under ...