August 21, 2013—The HIV/AIDS epidemic is changing in unexpected ways in countries around the world, showing that greater attention and financial investment may be needed in places where the disease has not reached epidemic levels, according to a new study from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of disease burden in 21 countries concentrated in four regions: Eastern and Southern Africa, Central Africa, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. In another seven countries, it's the second leading ...

This news release is available in French. While children of all ages will be heading back to school in a few days, a new study from the Université de Montréal may encourage their parents to return to the classroom themselves ... at least for a few evenings! The results of a study in developmental psychology published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies show that the How-to Parenting Program improves the mental health of children. "Did you know that certain ways of talking to your child are more effective? Certain ways of listening make a real difference?" These ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– When you share your lunch with someone less fortunate or give your friend half of your dessert, does that act of generosity flow from the milk of human kindness, or is it a subconscious strategy to assure reciprocity should you one day find yourself on the other side of the empty plate? And how do those actions among humans compare to those of our chimpanzee cousins and other nonhuman primates? Through two separate studies, UC Santa Barbara anthropologists Adrian Jaeggi and Michael Gurven found that reciprocity is similar among monkeys, apes, ...

EILAT, ISRAEL, August 20 – In 2007, an artificial reef designed by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers was placed in the Gulf of Eilat to reduce environmental pressure on the region's natural reef. Now teeming with life, a new study using the "Tamar Reef" shows that divers assign economic importance to aspects of reef biodiversity. These findings could help underwater conservation efforts. According to the study published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, divers were willing to pay to improve the reef's attributes and were able to differentiate and ...

HOUSTON -- (Aug. 19, 2013) -- Two proteins have been identified as prime suspects in the proliferation of breast cancer in a study by an international consortium of researchers from Rice University, the University of North Texas, Denton (UNT); the University of California, San Diego (UCSD); and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The research, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' Online Early Edition, may offer a path to therapies that could slow or stop tumors from developing. Rice's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics ...

Singapore, August 19, 2013 – Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have developed a simple method of organizing cells and their microenvironments in hydrogel fibers. Their unique technology provides a feasible template for assembling complex structures, such as liver and fat tissues, as described in their recent publication in Nature Communications1. According to IBN Executive Director Professor Jackie Y. Ying, "Our tissue engineering approach gives researchers great control and flexibility over the arrangement of individual cell types, ...

Charlottesville, VA (August 20, 2013). Researchers at Duke University conducted a randomized clinical trial in patients with subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). In this study, the researchers compared two approaches to intracranial pressure management—continuous and intermittent drainage of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)—and outcomes associated with those methods, focusing specifically on the incidence of cerebral vasospasm. The study had to be closed approximately midway due to a high rate of complications (52.9%) in the group of patients in whom CSF was drained continuously. Details ...

A healthy ear is much better at detecting and transmitting sound than even the most advanced hearing aid. But now researchers reporting in the August 20 issue of the Biophysical Journal, a Cell Press publication, have uncovered new insights into how the ear -- in particular, the cochlea -- processes and amplifies sound. The findings could be used for the development of better devices to improve hearing. Sound-sensing cells within the cochlea -- called hair cells due to the presence of cilia on their membrane surfaces -- vibrate strongly at different sound frequencies ...

Young stars are violent objects that eject material at speeds as high as one million kilometres per hour. When this material crashes into the surrounding gas it glows, creating a Herbig-Haro object [1]. A spectacular example is named Herbig-Haro 46/47 and is situated about 1400 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sails). This object was the target of a study using ALMA during the Early Science phase, whilst the telescope was still under construction and well before the array was completed. The new images reveal fine detail in two jets, one ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana University School of Medicine researchers have found a series of RNA biomarkers in blood that may help identify who is at risk for committing suicide. In a study reported Aug. 20 in the advance online edition of the Nature Publishing Group journal Molecular Psychiatry, the researchers said the biomarkers were found at significantly higher levels in the blood of both bipolar disorder patients with thoughts of suicide as well in a group of people who had committed suicide. Principal investigator Alexander B. Niculescu III, M.D., Ph.D., associate ...

Managing fish in human-altered rivers is a challenge because their food webs are sensitive to environmental disturbance. So reports a new study in the journal Ecological Monographs, based on an exhaustive three-year analysis of the Colorado River in Glen and Grand Canyons. Food webs are used to map feeding relationships. By describing the structure of these webs, scientists can predict how plants and animals living in an ecosystem will respond to change. Coauthor Dr. Emma Rosi-Marshall, an aquatic ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, comments, "Given ...

VIDEO: In this experiment, we describe the method for the environmentally-controlled microtensile testing of mechanically-adaptive polymer nanocomposites for ex-vivo characterization. Click here for more information. On August 20, JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments will publish a technique from the Capadona Lab at Case Western Reserve University to accommodate two challenges inherent in brain-implantation technology, gauging the property changes that occur during ...

Like human babies, new-born piglets have only poorly developed immune systems, although their resistance to disease is generally thought to be extremely important to their survival and growth. Unlike human babies, piglets do not receive antibodies via the placenta so they are even more reliant than humans on antibodies transferred in the colostrum, the first milk that mothers produce when giving birth. For the first few hours after birth, their intestinal walls are fairly permeable so large proteins such as antibodies can pass into the bloodstream and be transferred to ...

One of the most complex, contested and controversial questions confronting modern juvenile/youth justice systems concerns the minimum age of criminal responsibility: the age at which a child is deemed to be sufficiently 'mature' to be held responsible before the substantive criminal law. The Royal College of Psychiatrists' Adolescent Forensic Psychiatry Special Interest Group took the initiative, in October 2012, to convene a conference in order to explore the question of criminal responsibility from different disciplinary perspectives: clinical, criminological/sociological, ...

They are the latest foodie fashion and look set to become big business in the baking aisles of all the major supermarkets – the blue egg produced by some chickens is prettier and some say tastier and cleaner-breaking than the traditional brown one – and now, thanks to scientists from The University of Nottingham, we know what caused the eggs in some breeds to turn this unusual colour. In a four-year research project just published in the journal, PLOS ONE, the team from the School of Biology, has identified the genetic mutation which first produced the blue egg in native ...

The Faroe Islands were colonised much earlier than previously believed, and it wasn't by the Vikings, according to new research. New archaeological evidence places human colonisation in the 4th to 6th centuries AD, at least 300-500 years earlier than previously demonstrated. The research, directed by Dr Mike J Church from Durham University and Símun V Arge from the National Museum of the Faroe Islands as part of the multidisciplinary project "Heart of the Atlantic", is published in the Quaternary Science Reviews. The research challenges the nature, scale and timing ...

WATERLOO, Ont. (Tuesday, August 20, 2013) — Emergency departments are not meeting the needs of senior citizens, according to a new international study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. The study, which looked at patients over the age of 75 in emergency departments in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Iceland, India and Sweden, found that seniors have very different needs than the general population— needs that are not being addressed well by current clinical practices or emergency department designs. "The majority of older patients attending emergency ...

A new publication in the top-ranked journal Neuron sheds new light onto the unknown processes on how the brain integrates the inputs from the different senses in the complex circuits formed by molecularly distinct types of nerve cells. The work was led by new Umeå University associate professor Paolo Medini. One of the biggest challenges in Neuroscience is to understand how the cerebral cortex of the brain processes and integrates the inputs from the different senses (like vision, hearing and touch) to control for example, that we can respond to an event in the environment ...

Asthma sufferers frequently exposed to heavy traffic pollution or smoke from wood fire heaters, experienced a significant worsening of symptoms, a new University of Melbourne led study has found. The study is the first of its kind to assess the impact of traffic pollution and wood smoke from heaters on middle-aged adults with asthma. The results revealed adults who suffer asthma and were exposed to heavy traffic pollution experienced an 80 per cent increase in symptoms and those exposed to wood smoke from wood fire heaters experienced an 11 per cent increase in symptoms. Asthma ...

University of Warwick scientists have shown how to tie knots in liquid crystals using a miniature Möbius strip made from silica particles. By tying substances like this in knots, the researchers hope to understand how their intricate configurations and unique properties can be harnessed in the next generation of advanced materials and photonic devices. Liquid crystal is an essential material in modern life – the flat panel displays on our computers, TVs and smartphones all make use of its light-modulating properties. It is composed of long, thin, rod-like molecules ...

This news release is available in Spanish. According to Izaskun Casado-Arzuaga, ecosystems provide more services than what many people believe. And their value is not in fact limited to the possibilities they offer in terms of landscape, aesthetic aspects or leisure. Casado is one of the members of the research group into Landscape, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and, in her opinion, it is important to remember the other services offered by ecosystems. Among them she refers to supply services, like food, water, energy and materials, as well as regulating services ...

It's not often that one treatment offers therapeutic potential for multiple conditions. However, after more than two decades of research, Gail Besner, MD, principal investigator for the Center for Perinatal Research and pediatric surgeon for the Department of Pediatric Surgery at Nationwide Children's Hospital, and her team have found that this may just be the case with HB-EGF, or heparin-binding EGF-like growth factor. Having discovered the growth factor in 1990, Dr. Besner most recently conducted two studies in mice published in June in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery ...

With lobster shell disease moving up the East Coast toward Maine — now observing Maine Lobster Month — a new video from the world's largest scientific society focuses on the disease, the chemistry of lobster shell color and why lobster shells turn red during cooking. The American Chemical Society (ACS) video, the latest episode in ACS' award-winning Bytesize Science series, is at http://www.BytesizeScience.com. In the video, Michael Tlusty, Ph.D., director of research at the New England Aquarium, describes how his lab grows different colored lobsters in an effort to understand ...

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- A new study about the common problem of preharvest sprouting, or PHS, in wheat is nipping the crop-killing issue in the bud. Researchers at Kansas State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service, or USDA-ARS, found and cloned a gene in wheat named PHS that prevents the plant from preharvest sprouting. Preharvest sprouting happens when significant rain causes the wheat grain to germinate before harvest and results in significant crop losses. "This is great news because preharvest sprouting is a very difficult trait ...

While observing a newborn star, astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope discovered twin jets of matter blasting out into space at record-breaking speed. These surprisingly forceful molecular "winds" could help refine our understanding of how stars impact their cloudy nurseries and shape their emerging stellar systems. During their formative years, stars both take in and blast away tremendous amounts of matter. When this ejected material collides with the surrounding gas it glows, forming what is known as a Herbig-Haro (HH) object. ...