WASHINGTON, DC, June 5, 2013 — Many elementary students' math performance improves when their teachers collaborate, work in professional learning communities or do both, yet most students don't spend all of their elementary school years in these settings, a new study by UNC Charlotte researchers shows. The U.S. Department of Education funded the study, which the journal Sociology of Education recently published. As school districts work to improve math scores and narrow racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, many schools may have overlooked the impact of teacher collaboration ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Southern California beaches with storm drain diversion systems attract millions more people annually, a new study in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin shows. The study looked at whether improving the environmental quality of coastal areas through policy intervention had an effect on the way people use coastal areas. Researchers found a direct correlation between increased attendance and the installation of storm drain diversions at 26 beaches in Santa Monica Bay and Malibu. "Cost has many municipalities opposed to installing storm drain diversion ...

WASHINGTON, DC (June 5, 2013)—Despite their inclusion as essential health benefits, habilitative services face an uncertain future under the Affordable Care Act, according to a new analysis done at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS). Many parents of children with developmental disabilities have trouble getting insurance coverage for habilitative services which can help their children keep, learn or improve their skills and daily functioning. The new analysis, by Sara Rosenbaum, JD, the Harold and Jane Hirsh Professor of ...

Today's nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technologies, like quantum information processing and nuclear spintronic technologies, are based on an intrinsic quantum property of electrons and atomic nuclei called "spin." Electrons and nuclei can act like tiny bar magnets with a spin that is assigned a directional state of either "up" or "down." NMR/MRI signals depend upon a majority of nuclear spins being polarized to point in one direction. The greater the polarization, the stronger the signal. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy ...

Toronto - By some measures the over-the-counter derivatives business is the largest business in the world with over $600 trillion in transactions outstanding. This business plays a significant role in the profitability of global banking institutions. Before 2007, banks agreed on the value of most of these transactions, but since the financial crisis of 2007-09 there has been growing uncertainty about derivative values. This centers on the question of whether or not to make what is known as a "funding value adjustment" (FVA). This is an adjustment to the price of a derivative ...

New evidence from research suggests that infants fed formula, rather than breast milk, experience metabolic stress that could play a part in the long-recognized link between formula-feeding and an increased risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes and other conditions in adult life. The study appears in ACS' Journal of Proteome Research. Carolyn Slupsky and colleagues explain that past research showed a link between formula-feeding and a higher risk for chronic diseases later in life. Gaps exist, however, in the scientific understanding of the basis for that link. The scientists ...

A Georgia State University researcher is the first to show that the Clean Air Act of 1970 caused a rebound in rainfall for a U.S. city. Jeremy Diem, an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences, analyzed summer rainfall data from nine weather stations in the Atlanta metropolitan area from 1948 to 2009. He discovered that precipitation increased markedly in the late 1970s as pollution decreased following passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970. Diem also noted that pollution in the 1950s and 1960s caused rainfall to drop in the Atlanta area. Previous studies ...

We don't just share our lives with animals; we are animals – a reality that we often choose to forget in modern Western culture. Research published in the June special issue of SAGE journal, Social Science Information (SSI), delves deeper into our relationship with other creatures, critically examining our own animal nature, and looking at how animals profoundly influence our culture – perhaps more so than we had initially thought. We have often been told in Western thought that the human species is one that is highly developed, above that of the animal kingdom, a division ...

BALTIMORE, Md. (June 5, 2013) – In a study of the co-occurrence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in early school-age children (four to eight years old), researchers at the Kennedy Krieger Institute found that nearly one-third of children with ASD also have clinically significant ADHD symptoms. Published in Autism: The International Journal and Practice (Epub ahead of print), the study also found that children with both ASD and ADHD are significantly more impaired on measures of cognitive, social and adaptive functioning ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Americans are gaining weight at an alarming rate, with obesity increasing from 12 percent of the nation's population in 1990 to 23 percent by 2005, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite an increase in state public health funding to combat these growing rates around the country, obesity continues to rise. A new University of Missouri study has found that as states spend more money on health care, obesity rates actually increase. Charles Menifield, a professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at MU, says his findings strongly ...

Bubbles in a champagne glass may add a festive fizz to the drink, but microscopic bubbles that form in a material called metallic glass can signal serious trouble. In this normally high-strength material, bubbles may indicate that a brittle breakdown is in progress. That's why Johns Hopkins researchers used computer simulations to study how these bubbles form and expand when a piece of metallic glass is pulled outward by negative pressure, such as the suction produced by a vacuum. Their findings were published recently in the journal Physical Review Letters. "A lot ...

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered that a single mutation in a leukemia-associated gene reduces the ability of blood stem cells to make more blood stem cells, but leaves their progeny daughter cells unaffected. Their findings have relevance to all cancers that are suspected to have a stem cell origin as they advance our understanding of how single stem cells are subverted to cause tumors. Published this week in PLOS Biology, the study by Professor Tony Green and his team at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research is the first to isolate highly ...

Evergreening strategies—where pharmaceutical companies slightly change the formulation of their brand drug into "follow on" drugs by combining formulations or producing slow-release forms, for example, so that they can extend the patent—substantially contributed to an increase in overall healthcare costs in the Swiss canton of Geneva, according to a study by international researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine. These findings are important as they provide further evidence that policies encouraging the prescribing of generic medicines, for example through hospital ...

Increased iron levels may be causally associated with a decreased risk of developing Parkinson's disease, says a new paper published this week in PLOS Medicine. Irene Pichler from EURAC in Italy and a group of international colleagues investigated whether there was any evidence of an association between serum iron levels and the risk of Parkinson's disease. While the causes of Parkinson's disease are currently unknown, a combination of genetic and environmental factors are said to be attributed to the disease. Because previous studies have shown a possible association ...

Addressing the burden of household air pollution from solid fuel combustion— the leading environmental cause of death and disability in the world—has led to the implementation of many important interventions to promote access to improved stoves and clean fuels, but there is little demonstrated evidence of health benefits from most of these programs or technologies. Such are the conclusions of a new Policy Forum article published in this week's PLOS Medicine by authors who also outline a set of research priorities for addressing household air pollution. A group of international ...

Among mild to moderately obese patients with type 2 diabetes, adding gastric bypass surgery to lifestyle and medical management was associated with a greater likelihood of improved levels of metabolic risk factors such as blood glucose, LDL-cholesterol and systolic blood pressure, according to a study in the June 5 issue of JAMA. "The foundation of treatment for type 2 diabetes mellitus is weight loss, achieved through reduction of energy intake and increased physical activity via lifestyle modification. Results from the Look AHEAD (Action for Health in Diabetes) trial ...

A review of more than 50 studies found limited evidence supporting the use of bariatric surgical procedures for non-morbidly obese adults (body mass index [BMI] 30-35) with diabetes or impaired glucose intolerance, according to a study in the June 5 issue of JAMA. For the limited data that was available for this patient group, bariatric surgery was associated with greater improvements in short-term weight loss, intermediate blood glucose levels, blood pressure, and high cholesterol than nonsurgical interventions such as medications, diet, and behavioral changes. "Bariatric ...

"Exposure to high altitude can cause acute mountain sickness (AMS) and, in severe cases, cerebral or pulmonary edema. Capillary leakage has been hypothesized to play a role in the pathogenesis of AMS, although the mechanism of altitude-related illnesses remains largely unknown," writes Gabriel Willmann, M.D., of the University of Tubingen, Germany, and colleagues. "Vessel leakage in the retinal periphery has not been investigated. Our objective was to assess retinal vessel integrity at high altitude using fluorescein angiography." As reported in a Researcher Letter, the ...

Some 40 million years before rock and roll singer Jim Morrison's lyrics earned him the moniker "the Lizard King," an actual king lizard roamed the hot tropical forests of Southeast Asia, competing with mammals for food and other resources. A team of U.S. paleontologists, led by Jason Head of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, describes fossils of the giant lizard from Myanmar this week in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Their analysis shows that it is one of the biggest known lizards ever to have lived on land. Fittingly, it's been named ...

A joint project between the Griffith University and the UQ Centre for clinical Research (UQCCR) has characterised an in vitro model that allows further studies on the breast cancer biology. These studies include the confirmation that primary tissue obtained from patients with breast cancer behaves similarly to those derived from long-term cultured cell lines. Griffith University's Associate Professor Alejandro Lopez said the team was working towards making breast cancer stem cells the target of specific cancer therapies, to improve current treatment outcomes. "We ...

Drugs that are used for treating Alzheimer's disease in its early stages are linked to a reduced risk of heart attacks and death, according to a large study of over 7,000 people with Alzheimer's disease in Sweden. The research, which is published online today (Wednesday) in the European Heart Journal [1], looked at cholinesterase inhibitors (ChEIs), such as donepezil, rivastigmine and galantamine, which are used for treating mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease [2]. Side-effects of ChEIs include a beneficial effect on the vagus nerve, which controls the rate at which ...

A remote controlled helicopter has been flown through a series of hoops around a college gymnasium in Minnesota. It sounds like your everyday student project; however, there is one caveat…the helicopter was controlled using just the power of thought. The experiments have been performed by researchers hoping to develop future robots that can help restore the autonomy of paralysed victims or those suffering from neurodegenerative disorders. Their study has been published today, 4 June 2013, in IOP Publishing's Journal of Neural Engineering and is accompanied by a video ...

Researchers at the University of Exeter and the University of Hamburg investigated how personality is transferred between generations. They found that foster parents have a greater influence on the personalities of fostered offspring than the genes inherited from birth parents. Dr Nick Royle from the University of Exeter said: "This is one of the first experiments to show that behaviour can be non-genetically transmitted from parents to offspring. Our study shows that in zebra finches, personality traits can be transmitted from one generation to another through behaviour ...

In the first genome-wide association study to focus on warfarin dose requirement in African-Americans, a multi-institutional team of researchers has identified a common genetic variation that can help physicians estimate the correct dose of the widely used blood-thinning drug warfarin. The discovery, reported online first in The Lancet, suggests that people of African ancestry who carry this variant—more than 40 percent of the patients enrolled in this study—need significantly less warfarin to obtain optimal benefits compared to those who lack this variant. "Adding ...

Biologists have uncovered new insights into how the male sexual behaviour of the peculiar southern bottletail squid is primed to produce the greatest number of offspring. Recent studies published in the journals Biology Letters and Behavioral Ecology, have revealed the female squid ingest the ejaculates of their mates, a trait never before associated with any species of cephalopod – a group including squid, octopus, cuttlefish and nautilus. The studies, led by PhD student Benjamin Wegener and Dr Bob Wong from Monash University's School of Biological Sciences, in collaboration ...