An interesting new report of animal research published in Biological Psychiatry suggests that common antidepressant medications may impair a form of learning that is important clinically. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, commonly called SSRIs, are a class of antidepressant widely used to treat depression, as well as a range of anxiety disorders, but the effects of these drugs on learning and memory are poorly understood. In a previous study, Nesha Burghardt, then a graduate student at New York University, and her colleagues demonstrated that long-term SSRI treatment ...

Research from North Carolina State University, the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) and the University of South Florida shows that outpatient treatment of mental illness significantly reduces arrest rates for people with mental health problems and saves taxpayers money. "This study shows that providing mental health care is not only in the best interest of people with mental illness, but in the best interests of society," says Dr. Sarah Desmarais, an assistant professor of psychology at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. The researchers wanted ...

The microorganism Methanosarcina acetivorans lives off everything it can metabolize into methane. How it finds its sources of energy, is not yet clear. Scientists at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum together with colleagues from Dresden, Frankfurt, Muelheim and the USA have identified a protein that might act as a "food sensor". They characterized the molecule in detail and found both similarities and differences to the system that is responsible for the search for food in bacteria. The team reports in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. MsmS has a different function to that ...

VIDEO: A study by Michigan State University researchers found that only 5 percent of people who used the bathroom washed their hands long enough to kill the germs that can cause... Click here for more information. EAST LANSING, Mich. — Remember Mom's advice about washing your hands thoroughly after using the restroom? Apparently not. A new study by Michigan State University researchers found that only 5 percent of people who used the bathroom washed their hands long ...

Boston, Mass.— A new study shows that when a liver from a deceased adult or adolescent donor is split into two separate portions for transplantation—with the smaller portion going to a young child and the larger to an adult—the smaller portion used for the child will last just as long as if the child had received a whole organ from a donor close to his size. The data, collected and analyzed by a team led by Boston Children's Hospital researchers Heung Bae Kim, MD, and Ryan Cauley, MD, MPH, was published online in Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association ...

Comparing dredged and undredged sections of the Allegheny River, reduced populations of fish and less variety of aquatic life occurred in areas where gravel extraction took place, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences,. The researchers investigated navigation pools 7 and 8 near Kittanning and Templeton and published their results in the journal Freshwater Biology. "Understanding and untangling the complex effects of human activities on aquatic ecosystems present a challenge to ecologists and resource managers," said lead investigator ...

The shores of the Sea of Galilee, located in the North of Israel, are home to a number of significant archaeological sites. Now researchers from Tel Aviv University have found an ancient structure deep beneath the waves as well. Researchers stumbled upon a cone-shaped monument, approximately 230 feet in diameter, 39 feet high, and weighing an estimated 60,000 tons, while conducting a geophysical survey on the southern Sea of Galilee, reports Prof. Shmulik Marco of TAU's Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences. The team also included TAU Profs. Zvi Ben-Avraham ...

Overprecision — excessive confidence in the accuracy of our beliefs — can have profound consequences, inflating investors' valuation of their investments, leading physicians to gravitate too quickly to a diagnosis, even making people intolerant of dissenting views. Now, new research confirms that overprecision is a common and robust form of overconfidence driven, at least in part, by excessive certainty in the accuracy of our judgments. The research, conducted by researchers Albert Mannes of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Don Moore of the Haas ...

The mechanism responsible for generating part of the skeletal support for the membrane in animal cells is not yet clearly understood. Now, Jean-François Joanny from the Physico Chemistry Curie Unit at the Curie Institute in Paris and colleagues have found that a well-defined layer beneath the cell outer membrane forms beyond a certain critical level of stress generated by motor proteins within the cellular system. These findings, which offer a new understanding of the formation of this so-called cortical layer, have just been published in EPJ E. Active gels are ideal ...

It's not hard to tell the difference between the "charge" of a battery and criminal "charges." But for computers, distinguishing between the various meanings of a word is difficult. For more than 50 years, linguists and computer scientists have tried to get computers to understand human language by programming semantics as software. Driven initially by efforts to translate Russian scientific texts during the Cold War (and more recently by the value of information retrieval and data analysis tools), these efforts have met with mixed success. IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study suggests that frequent binge drinking is associated with insomnia symptoms in older adults. Results show that overall, 26.2 percent of participants had two or less binge drinking days per week, on average, and 3.1 percent had more than two days per week, on average. After adjustment for demographic variables, medical conditions, and elevated depressive symptoms, participants who binged on an average of more than two days a week had an 84 percent greater odds of reporting an insomnia symptom compared to non-binge drinkers. "It was somewhat surprising ...

PITTSBURGH—Diabetes patients often receive their diagnosis after a series of glucose-related blood tests in hospital settings, and then have to monitor their condition daily through expensive, invasive methods. But what if diabetes could be diagnosed and monitored through cheaper, noninvasive methods? Chemists at the University of Pittsburgh have demonstrated a sensor technology that could significantly simplify the diagnosis and monitoring of diabetes through breath analysis alone. Their findings were published in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Chemical ...

PITTSBURGH—A 350-year-old mathematical mystery could lead toward a better understanding of medical conditions like epilepsy or even the behavior of predator-prey systems in the wild, University of Pittsburgh researchers report. The mystery dates back to 1665, when Dutch mathematician, astronomer, and physicist Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the pendulum clock, first observed that two pendulum clocks mounted together could swing in opposite directions. The cause was tiny vibrations in the beam caused by both clocks, affecting their motions. The effect, now referred ...

Bethesda, MD (June 10, 2013) — The current standard practice of screening adolescents who are either symptomatic or at high-risk for celiac disease proves to be more cost-effective than universal screening. Additionally, the strategy is successful in preventing bone loss and fractures in celiac patients, according to a new study in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official clinical practice journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. As many as 70 percent of untreated celiac patients experience decreased bone mineral density, which can lead ...

Over 100 years ago psychologist Carl Gustav Jung penned his theory of 'complexes' where he explained how unconscious psychological issues can be triggered by people, events, or Jung believed, through word association tests. New research in the Journal of Analytical Psychology is the first to reveal how modern brain function technology allows us to see inside the mind as a 'hot button' word triggers a state of internal conflict between the left and right parts of the brain. The study revealed that some words trigger a subconscious internal conflict between our sense ...

There's trouble ahead for the whitebark pine, a mountain tree that's integral to wildlife and water resources in the western United States and Canada. Over the last decade, some populations of whitebark pines have declined by more than 90 percent. But these declines may be just the beginning. New research results, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and published today in the Journal of Ecology, suggest that as pine stands are increasingly fragmented by widespread tree death, surviving trees may be hindered in their ability to produce their usually abundant ...

Baltimore, MD – June 10, 2013 – In the largest study of its kind, physicians from the Department of Surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) have determined that outcomes for traumatic injury in patients with organ transplants are not worse than for non-transplanted patients, despite common presumptions among physicians. The findings, published in the June 2013 issue of The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, also show that transplanted organs are rarely ...

HOUSTON – (June 10, 2013) – Scientists at Rice University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have advanced on the goal of two-dimensional electronics with a method to control the growth of uniform atomic layers of molybdenum disulfide (MDS). MDS, a semiconductor, is one of a trilogy of materials needed to make functioning 2-D electronic components. They may someday be the basis for the manufacture of devices so small they would be invisible to the naked eye. The work appears online this week in Nature Materials. The Rice labs of lead investigator Jun Lou, Pulickel ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio—New technology under development at The Ohio State University is paving the way for low-cost electronic devices that work in direct contact with living tissue inside the body. The first planned use of the technology is a sensor that will detect the very early stages of organ transplant rejection. Paul Berger, professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at Ohio State, explained that one barrier to the development of implantable sensors is that most existing electronics are based on silicon, and electrolytes in the body interfere with the ...

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Ames Laboratory have discovered a new family of rare-earth quasicrystals using an algorithm they developed to help pinpoint them. Quasicrystalline materials may be found close to crystalline phases that contain similar atomic motifs, called crystalline approximants. And just like fishing experts know that casting a line in the right habitat hooks the big catch, the scientists used their knowledge to hone in on just the right spot for new quasicrystal materials discovery. Their research resulted in finding the only known ...

VIDEO: This animation of GOES-14 satellite data from Saturday, June 8, through Monday, June 10 at 7:31 a.m. EDT shows Post-Tropical Storm Andrea's movement. On June 8, Andrea was centered off... Click here for more information. Post-Tropical cyclone Andrea's remnants sped into the North Atlantic Ocean over the weekend of June 8 and 9. NOAA's GOES-14 satellite data was used to create an animation of imagery that showed Andrea's movement from off the Maine coast through Atlantic ...

Arlington, Va. (June 10, 2013) – Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) is one of the most frequent healthcare-associated infections found in intensive-care units (ICUs). New research on the prevalence of VAP in community hospitals shows small hospitals (less than 30,000 patient-days/year) have a higher rate of VAP than their larger counterparts, despite less use of ventilators. The study, published in the July issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, compares outcomes of patients on ventilators ...

With the daily mean concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide having reached 400 parts-per-million for the first time in human history, the need for carbon-neutral alternatives to fossil fuel energy has never been more compelling. With enough energy in one hour's worth of global sunlight to meet all human needs for a year, solar technologies are an ideal solution. However, a major challenge is to develop efficient ways to convert solar energy into electrochemical energy on a massive-scale. A key to meeting this challenge may lie in the ability to test such energy conversion ...

This news release is available in German. Perennial plants flower only when they have reached a certain age and been subjected to the cold. These two circumstances prevent the plant from starting to flower during winter. George Coupland and his fellow scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne have now discovered that the Alpine rock cress determines its age based on the quantity of a short ribonucleic acid. Perennial plants carefully balance periods of growth and flowering to ensure that they can live for many years. They do ...

Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center have determined that chronic myeloid leukemia patients who are treated with a class of oral chemotherapy drugs known as a tyrosine kinase inhibitors have significant side effects and quality-of-life issues that need to be addressed. Some of these issues include depression, fatigue, nausea and change of appearance. The researchers say it is important to improve the patients' quality of life because most will take tyrosine kinase inhibitors for the rest of their lives. Their study appeared in the April issue of Supportive Care in Cancer. "Although ...