DURHAM, N.C. -- Next time you're doing a slow burn in security screening at the airport, calm yourself with the assurance that a more deliberate baggage scanner may do a better job. In a laboratory test of visual searching ability, scientists found trained Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screening officers were a lot slower than undergraduate students and other civilians. But the amateurs were sloppier. The test is part of ongoing research by Duke University psychologist Stephen Mitroff to understand how the brain manages visual searching, which is important ...

This news release is available in Spanish. The proposed system (Augmented Lecture Feedback System – ALFs) seeks to improve communication between students and professors during large lecture classes like those frequently given at universities. The way they work is quite intuitive: the professor wears a pair of augmented reality glasses that enable him/her to see symbols above each student; the symbols indicate the person's state while this activity is taking place. "These symbols are activated by the students via their cell phones and are used to tell the professor ...

Understanding how gastric bypass surgery changes the properties of nerve cells that help regulate the digestive system could lead to new treatments that produce the same results without surgery, according to Penn State College of Medicine scientists, who have shown how surgery restores some properties of nerve cells that tell people their stomachs are full. The results may also better predict which patients will keep the weight off after surgery. Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery is the most effective way to get severe obesity under control. Doctors make the stomach ...

As Anthony Weiner enters the New York mayoral race two years after scandal forced him from office, a new study in Social Science Quarterly explores the lingering effect of scandals and asks how long a politician need wait before hitting the come-back trail. Using research into 'brand crisis' this study is the first systematic test of the idea that scandals can linger in voters' minds and damage a politician's reelection campaign. The authors find evidence that this lingering effect ensures politicians do not return to their pre-scandal predicted margins of victory until ...

The value of a fuel's long-term usefulness and viability is judged through its energy return on investment; the comparison between the eventual fuel and the energy invested to create it. The energy return on investment (EROI) study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology finds that shale gas has a return value which is close to coal. In the United States, gas is mined from horizontal, hydraulically fractured wells in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania. The study compares the total input energy with the energy expected to be made available to end users. The ...

Fracking, the controversial method of mining shale gas, is widespread across Pennsylvania, covering up to 280,000 km² of the Appalachian Basin. New research in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences explores the threat posed to biodiversity including pollution from toxic chemicals, the building of well pads and pipelines, and changes to wetlands. "Shale gas has engendered a great deal of controversy, largely because of its impact on human health, but effects on biological diversity and resources have scarcely been addressed in the public debate," said study author ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Researchers working to design new materials that are durable, lightweight and environmentally sustainable are increasingly looking to natural composites, such as bone, for inspiration: Bone is strong and tough because its two constituent materials, soft collagen protein and stiff hydroxyapatite mineral, are arranged in complex hierarchical patterns that change at every scale of the composite, from the micro up to the macro. While researchers have come up with hierarchical structures in the design of new materials, going from a computer model to the production ...

SAN FRANCISCO—- Exposing developing tissue to low levels of the plastic bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA, is linked to a greater incidence of prostate cancer in tissue grown from human prostate stem cells, a new study finds. The results were presented Monday, June 17, at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. BPA is a synthetic estrogen that is used to add flexibility to many common products, including food cans and containers, compact discs, eyeglasses, and even baby bottles. It is universally prevalent, and tests indicate that almost everyone ...

SAN FRANCISCO-- A new study links fetal exposure to a common chemical pollutant, bisphenol A (BPA), to defects of a testicular hormone in newborn boys with undescended testicles. The results, which were presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco, suggest yet another potential harmful effect of BPA, which is widely used in many plastics, liners of food cans and dental sealants. "Alone, our study cannot be considered as definitive evidence for an environmental cause of undescended testis," said lead author Patrick Fenichel, MD, PhD, ...

SAN FRANCISCO-- Vitamin D supplementation may help delay early onset of puberty in girls, a new clinical study finds. The results were presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Among girls, puberty generally begins between the ages of 10 and 14. Boys undergo these changes later, usually between 12 to 16 years of age. Precocious puberty is diagnosed in girls when sexual development begins before the age of 8; in boys, it is diagnosed when these changes occur before age 9. Recently, medical research has linked vitamin D deficiency ...

SAN FRANCISCO-- Women with polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS, lost significantly more weight when they took two drugs that are traditionally used to treat diabetes, rather than either drug alone, a study from Slovenia demonstrates. The results will be presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. PCOS is the leading cause of infertility among women. In the United States, the disorder affects approximately 5 million women, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Women's Health. This translates to 1 in ...

This news release is available in French. A new study shows that memory pathology in older mice with Alzheimer's disease can be reversed with treatment. The study by researchers from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital - The Neuro, at McGill University and at Université de Montréal found that blocking the activity of a specific receptor in the brain of mice with advanced Alzheimer's disease (AD) recovers memory and cerebrovascular function. The results, published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation in May, also suggest an underlying mechanism of AD as a ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Cases of pertussis, also known as whooping cough, are on the rise in the U.S., recently reaching their highest level in 50 years. The disease can be serious or even fatal to newborns who have not yet received vaccinations. Effective vaccines against pertussis have been available for many decades, but that vaccine protection can wear off over time. A new University of Michigan poll shows that 61 percent of adults say they don't know when they were last vaccinated against pertussis, which could mean they might be unwittingly exposing vulnerable babies ...

Mannitol, a sugar alcohol produced by fungi, bacteria, and algae, is a common component of sugar-free gum and candy. The sweetener is also used in the medical field — it's approved by the FDA as a diuretic to flush out excess fluids and used during surgery as a substance that opens the blood/brain barrier to ease the passage of other drugs. Now Profs. Ehud Gazit and Daniel Segal of Tel Aviv University's Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology and the Sagol School of Neuroscience, along with their colleague Dr. Ronit Shaltiel-Karyo and PhD candidate Moran ...

A small, pilot study is examining how mobile technology might support deaf and hard-of-hearing college students when an interpreter can't physically be present at the time the services are requested. The University of Cincinnati research will be presented on June 19, at the Critical Link 7 International Conference in Toronto. The conference is themed, "Global Awakening: Leading Practices in Interpreting." The first phase of the UC research project involved a college student taking a course in a large, auditorium-style classroom. The student used an iPad to gain the services ...

As Descartes famously noted, there's no way to really know that another person has a mind — every mind we observe is, in a sense, a mind we create. Now, new research suggests that victimization may be one condition that leads us to perceive minds in others, even in entities we don't normally think of as having minds. This research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that people attribute minds to entities they perceive as being targets of harm, even when the entity in question is a robot or a corpse. "People ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (June 17, 2013) – Teaching hospitals with a higher intensity of physician-training activity achieve lower mortality rates, but higher hospitalization readmission rates for key medical diagnoses, reports a study in the July issue of Medical Care, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. The disparity in readmissions is greatest for "safety-net" hospitals serving low-income populations, according to the new research led by Dr Stephanie K. Mueller of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. They write, "These findings ...

VIDEO: Researchers from Princeton University and Germany's Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization report the first purely physical experimental evidence that chimera states can occur naturally within any process that... Click here for more information. Systems such as a beating heart or a power grid that depend on the synchronized movement of their parts could fall prey to an invisible and chaotic tug-of-war known as a "chimera." Sharing its name with the fire-breathing, ...

Have you ever thought that you knew something about the world in the blink of an eye? This restaurant is not the right place for dinner. That person could be The One. It turns out that radiologists can do this with mammograms, the x-ray images used for breast cancer screening. Cytologists, who screen micrographic images of cervical cells to detect cervical cancer, have a similar ability. A new study, published in Springer's journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, takes a closer look at the skill these specialists have. There are many routes to making snap judgments (not ...

Millions of people each year have polyps successfully removed during colonoscopies. But when a suspicious polyp is bigger than a marble or in a hard-to-reach location, patients are referred for surgery to remove a portion of their colon — even if doctors aren't sure whether the polyp is cancerous or not. Since only 15 percent of all polyps turn out to be malignant, many patients are unnecessarily subjected to the risks of this major surgery. Now there is an alternative. A UCLA team of surgeons and gastroenterologists has been performing a new, minimally invasive ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Amphibian populations are declining worldwide and a major cause is a deadly fungus thought to be spread by bullfrogs, but a two-year study shows they can also die from this pathogen, contrary to suggestions that bullfrogs are a tolerant carrier host that just spreads the disease. When researchers raised the frogs from eggs in controlled experimental conditions, they found at least one strain of this pathogen, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, also called Bd or a chytrid fungus, can be fatal to year-old juveniles. However, bullfrogs were resistant to one ...

A study by researchers at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego, shows that a protein called MCL-1, which promotes cell survival, is essential for normal heart function. Their study, published in the June 15 online issue of the journal Genes & Development, found that deletion of the gene encoding MCL-1 in adult mouse hearts led to rapid heart failure within two weeks, and death within a month. MCL-1 (myeloid cell leukemia-1) is an anti-apoptotic protein, meaning that it prevents ...

PITTSBURGH—Home remodelers understand the concept of improving original foundations with more modern elements. Using this same approach—but with chemistry—researchers in the University of Pittsburgh's Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences have designed a family of materials that could make drug delivery, gas storage, and gas transport more efficient and at a lower cost. The findings were reported in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). The recent work builds upon Pitt Associate Professor of Chemistry Nathaniel Rosi's earlier ...

Although a family history of Alzheimer's disease is a primary risk factor for the devastating neurological disorder, mutations in only three genes – the amyloid precursor protein and presenilins 1 and 2 – have been established as causative for inherited, early-onset Alzheimer's, accounting for about half of such cases. Now Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers have discovered a type of mutation known as copy-number variants (CNVs) – deletions, duplications, or rearrangements of human genomic DNA – in affected members of 10 families with early-onset Alzheimer's. ...

SAN FRANCISCO (June 16, 2013)—Male mice who were fed a high-fat diet and became obese were more likely to father offspring who also had higher levels of body fat, a new Ohio University study finds. The effect was observed primarily in male offspring, despite their consumption of a low-fat diet, scientists reported today at the annual meeting of The Endocrine Society in San Francisco, Calif. "We've identified a number of traits that may affect metabolism and behavior of offspring dependent on the pre-conception diet of the father," said Felicia Nowak, an associate professor ...