ITHACA, N.Y. – School cafeterias that accept only electronic payments may be inadvertently promoting junkier food and adding empty calories to students' diets, say Cornell behavioral economists in the current issue of the journal Obesity. Paper and videos: http://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/op/debitcard To expedite long lunch lines and enable cleaner accounting, about 80 percent of schools use debit cards or accounts that parents can add money to for cafeteria lunch transactions, write David Just and Brian Wansink, co-directors of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics ...

NORTH GRAFTON, Mass. (October 8, 2013) – A recently published study suggests that exposure to social stress not only impairs a mother's ability to care for her children but can also negatively impact her daughter's ability to provide maternal care to future offspring. Researchers at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University conducted a transgenerational study with female rats, examining the behavioral and physiological changes in mothers exposed to chronic social stress early in life as a model for postpartum depression and anxiety. A different ...

Alexandria, VA – Recent analysis of over 400 responses from the National Geoscience Student Exit Survey from 71 geoscience departments identified distinct trends for bachelor's-, master's- and PhD-level participants on quantitative classes and core science courses. Notably, 70% of all participants had taken Calculus I and II; following those courses, there was a significant drop in bachelor's- and master's-level candidates pursuing further mathematics coursework. Meanwhile, PhD candidates listed multiple courses past Calculus II. Other findings showed that all three groups ...

DURHAM, N.C. – A new analysis of two HIV vaccine trials that involved pediatric patients shows that the investigational vaccines stimulated a critical immune response in infants born to HIV-infected mothers, researchers at Duke Medicine report. The finding, reported Oct. 8, 2013, at the AIDS Vaccine 2013 meeting in Barcelona, Spain, examined samples from two previously completed pediatric HIV vaccine trials – called PACTG 230 and PACTG 326 - to determine whether they elicited a key immune response that has only recently been associated with reduced HIV infection. Searching ...

If you've ever whirled a ball attached to a string around your head and then let it go, you know the great speed that can be achieved through a slingshot maneuver. Similarly, NASA's Juno spacecraft will be passing within some 350 miles of Earth's surface at 3:21p.m. EDT Wednesday, Oct. 9, before it slingshots off into space on a historic exploration of Jupiter. It's all part of a scientific investigation that began with an August 2011 launch. The mission will begin in earnest when Juno arrives at Jupiter in July 2016. Bill Kurth, University of Iowa research scientist ...

DETROIT – While women are far more likely to suffer urinary tract infections, men are more prone to be hospitalized for treatment, according to a study by Henry Ford Hospital urologists. The first-of-its-kind research for the most common bacterial infection in the U.S. is important in providing predictors of hospital admission at a time when the health care industry is searching for ways to reduce costs. "We found that those patients who were hospitalized for treatment of urinary tract infections were most often older men, as well as those with serious kidney infections," ...

NEW YORK (October 8, 2013) -- Damaged or diseased organs may someday be healed with an injection of blood vessel cells, eliminating the need for donated organs and transplants, according to scientists at Weill Cornell Medical College. In studies appearing in recent issues of Stem Cell Journal and Developmental Cell, the researchers show that endothelial cells -- the cells that make up the structure of blood vessels -- are powerful biological machines that drive regeneration in organ tissues by releasing beneficial, organ-specific molecules. They discovered this by ...

WASHINGTON, DC—OCTOBER 8, 2013—A senior researcher who can't get an answer from a shutdown NIH about a proposed clinical trial on a neurodegenerative disease, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who fears that a generation of innovators will be lost, and a young investigator wearied at the lab by endless funding cuts and frustrated at home by the halt to promising research into a genetic disorder that affects her daughter—these are the leaders and members of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) who today told a press conference at the National Press Club that the "temporary" ...

Alexandria, VA –Throughout the history of Earth, supercontinents have formed and ocean basins have opened and closed over timescales of 300 million to 500 million years. But scientists haven't found direct evidence of the in-between phase — an ocean basin that was opening, starting instead to close — until now. Thanks to new high-resolution surveys of the seafloor, scientists think they have evidence of that process starting in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Portugal. If they are right, this nascent subduction zone could close the Atlantic Ocean — in roughly 200 million ...

(Boston)-- Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) researchers have identified a promising screening tool to detect intimate partner violence (IPV) in females in the VA Boston Healthcare System. The findings, which appear in the current issue of Journal of General Internal Medicine, accurately detected 78 percent of women identified as abused within the past year by a more comprehensive and behaviorally specific scale. IPV is a major public health issue, particularly among women receiving medical care at VA facilities. The researchers cite "lifetime reports of IPV ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- You might not think to look to a urine test to diagnose an eye disease. But a new Duke University study says it can link what is in a patient's urine to gene mutations that cause retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, an inherited, degenerative disease that results in severe vision impairment and often blindness. The findings appear online in the Journal of Lipid Research. "My collaborators, Dr. Rong Wen and Dr. Byron Lam at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Florida first sought my expertise in mass spectrometry to analyze cells cultured from a family in which ...

A planet 40 light years from our solar system, believed to be the first-ever discovered planet to consist largely of diamond, may in fact be of less exquisite nature, according to new research led by University of Arizona astronomy graduate student Johanna Teske. Revisiting public data from previous telescope observations, Teske's team analyzed the available data in more detail and concluded that carbon – the chemical element diamonds are made of – appears to be less abundant in relation to oxygen in the planet's host star – and by extension, perhaps the planet – than ...

Starting with a discovery in zebrafish in 2007, Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers have published initial results of a Phase Ib human clinical trial of a therapeutic that has the potential to improve the success of blood stem cell transplantation. This marks the first time, just nine short years after Harvard's major commitment to stem cell biology, that investigators have carried a discovery from the lab bench to the clinic—fulfilling the promise on which HSCI was founded. The Phase 1b safety study, published in the journal Blood, included 12 adult patients ...

The portable breathalyzers preferred by roadside police use expensive electronic readouts, but these devices lack the "immediate and intuitive" color change that tells police whether the alcohol content of a suspect's breath puts them in the legal red zone, said first author Riccardo Pernice of the Università degli Studi di Palermo in Italy. Techniques that do use color change to assess the level of alcohol concentration are typically less expensive, but they cannot give a precise reading of the alcohol concentration and most are use-once-and-toss. Pernice said his team's ...

A team of researchers led by University of Arizona assistant professor Vanessa Huxter has made the first detailed observation of how energy travels through diamonds that contain nitrogen-vacancy centers – defects in which two adjacent carbon atoms in the diamond's crystal structure are replaced by a single nitrogen atom and an empty gap. These "flaws" result in unexpected and attractive properties that have put such diamonds in the spotlight as promising candidates for a variety of technological advances. The findings, published online in Nature Physics, could help ...

Johns Hopkins researchers say they have pinpointed a site in a highly developed area of the human brain that plays an important role in the subconscious recognition of which way is straight up and which way is down. The finding, described online in the journal Cerebral Cortex, may help account for some causes of spatial disorientation and dizziness, and offer targets for treating the feelings of unsteadiness and "floating" people experience when the brain fails to properly integrate input from the body's senses. Disabling dizziness can be a symptom of damage to the ...

LEBANON, NH, Oct. 8, 2013 – Accountable care organizations are rapidly being formed with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and they are being established in areas where it may be easier to meet quality and cost targets, researchers at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice said in a study published in the journal Health Services Research. An accountable care organization is a group of providers collectively held responsible for the overall cost and quality of care for a defined patient. ACOs and other value-based payment reforms are ...

WASHINGTON, DC (Oct. 8, 2013)—State public health departments do not necessarily lose funding when merged with larger Medicaid programs, according to a just-released study. The findings from this first-of-a-kind research should help allay concerns that when such mergers occur they automatically lead to cutbacks in public health, says lead author Paula Lantz, PhD, who is chair of the Department of Health Policy at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS). "The concern has been that such mergers have led to public health departments ...

To expedite long lunch lines and enable cleaner accounting, about 80 percent of schools use debit cards or accounts that parents can add money to for cafeteria lunch transactions, write David Just and Brian Wansink, professors at the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs. "There may be a reason for concern about the popularity of cashless systems," say the researchers. "Debit cards have been shown to induce more frivolous purchases or greater overall spending." Just and Wansink compared purchases at school cafeterias that use debit-only systems ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers exploring the link between newborn infections and later behavior and movement problems have found that inflammation in the brain keeps cells from accessing iron that they need to perform a critical role in brain development. Specific cells in the brain need iron to produce the white matter that ensures efficient communication among cells in the central nervous system. White matter refers to white-colored bundles of myelin, a protective coating on the axons that project from the main body of a brain cell. The scientists induced a mild E. ...

Lessons from underground nuclear tests and explosive volcanoes may hold the answer to how a category of unusual impact craters formed on Mars. The craters feature a thin outer deposit that extends many times beyond the typical range of ejecta, said Nadine Barlow, professor of physics and astronomy at Northern Arizona University. She has called these craters Low-Aspect-Ratio Layered Ejecta (LARLE) craters since the ratio of the thickness to the length of the deposit (the aspect ratio) is so small. Barlow presented the findings of her LARLE crater study at the American ...

Being able to provide high-quality health care is a primary driver of job satisfaction among physicians, and obstacles to quality patient care are a source of stress for doctors, according to a new RAND Corporation study. While physicians note some advantages of electronic health records, physicians complain that the systems in use today are cumbersome to operate and are an important contributor to their dissatisfaction, the study found. The findings suggest that the factors contributing to physician dissatisfaction could serve as early warnings of deeper quality problems ...

Feeding a growing global population while also slowing or reversing global deforestation may only be possible if agricultural yields rise and/or per capita food consumption declines over the next century, according to historic global food consumption and land use trends. Published October 9, 2013, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Chris Pagnutti, Chris Bauch, and Madhur Anand from the University of Guelph, this research underscores the long-term challenge of feeding everyone while still conserving natural habitat. To predict future global forest trends, the scientists ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- Parents who physically abuse their children appear to have a physiological response that subsequently triggers more harsh parenting when they attempt parenting in warm, positive ways, according to new research. Reporting in the quarterly journal Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, a five-member team, led by Elizabeth A. Skowron, a professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology and Human Services in the University of Oregon College of Education, documented connections between the nervous system's ability to calm heart rate -- via ...

Ants and bees are surprisingly more genetically related to each other than they are to social wasps such as yellow jackets and paper wasps, a team of University of California, Davis, scientists has discovered. The groundbreaking research is available online and will be published Oct. 21 in the print version of the journal Current Biology. Using state-of-the-art genome sequencing and bioinformatics, the researchers resolved a long-standing, unanswered evolutionary question. Scientists previously thought that ants and bees were more distantly related, with ants being closer ...