COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Low-income parents who receive federal child care subsidies are more satisfied with their child care than those who don't receive such help, according to a recent study. A survey of parents in Missouri found that nearly nine in 10 subsidy recipients reported the funds were a tremendous boost to their family's ability to work and make a living. In addition, those who received subsidies were less likely to have problems with work flexibility, indicating that they had an easier time balancing work and family. The results show the importance of child ...

ANN ARBOR—A common test used to determine mercury exposure from dental amalgam fillings may significantly overestimate the amount of the toxic metal released from fillings, according to University of Michigan researchers. Scientists agree that dental amalgam fillings slowly release mercury vapor into the mouth. But both the amount of mercury released and the question of whether this exposure presents a significant health risk remain controversial. Public health studies often make the assumption that mercury in urine (which is composed mostly of inorganic mercury) can ...

Two new woodlizard species have been uncovered from poorly explored areas of the Peruvian jungles. The males have beautiful body colouration with a distinctive green pattern before a dark brown and black background. It is assumed that the two species share the same territory, with only a slight difference in altitude ranges, which makes their biological divergence intriguing from an evolutionary point of view. The study was published in the open access journal Zookeys. Being traditionally regarded as a group with a low species diversity, recent fieldwork on Enyalioides ...

Chicago, March 20, 2013—The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research announces the publication and availability of a major two-part study designed to better understand how lower-wage workers and those who employ them view such jobs and the opportunities for advancing the careers of lower wage workers. Funding for the surveys was provided to the AP-NORC Center by the Joyce Foundation, the Hitachi Foundation, and NORC at the University of Chicago. "During the Great Recession that began in 2008, about one-half of the U.S. jobs lost were middle-class ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – March 20, 2013 – New research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center is giving radiation oncologists who treat brain tumors a better understanding of how to preserve the brain's functions while still killing cancer. Ann M. Peiffer, Ph.D., assistant professor of radiation oncology at Wake Forest Baptist, and colleagues looked at how radiation treatment to different brain areas impacts function to help protect cognition for patients during and after radiation therapy and beyond. Radiation treatment of organs with cancer is designed to give enough ...

Researchers from The Miriam Hospital and the Rhode Island Community Food Bank report individuals who participated in a six-week cooking program and followed simple, plant-based recipes decreased their total food spending, purchased healthier food items and improved their food security. The study, published in the March issue of the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition, is believed to be the first to show a decrease in food insecurity – or a lack of access to nutritional foods for at least some days or meals for members of a household – as the result of an intervention. Mary ...

Our understanding of brain activity has traditionally been linked to brain areas – when we speak, the speech area of the brain is active. New research by an international team of psychologists led by David Alexander and Cees van Leeuwen (KU Leuven – University of Leuven) shows that this view may be overly rigid. The entire cortex, not just the area responsible for a certain function, is activated when a given task is initiated. Furthermore, activity occurs in a pattern: waves of activity roll from one side of the brain to the other. The brain can be studied on various ...

WASHINGTON--Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory have successfully demonstrated pulse tailoring, producing a time varying focal spot size known as 'focal zooming' on the world's largest operating krypton fluoride (KrF) gas laser. The Nike laser is a two to three kilojoule (kJ) KrF system that incorporates beam smoothing by induced spatial incoherence (ISI) to achieve one percent non-uniformity in single beams and 0.16 percent non-uniformity for 44 overlapped target beams. The facility routinely conducts experiments in support of inertial confinement fusion, ...

In Norway, families receive public support that enables them to care for aging parents in their own homes and keep them out of nursing homes. This includes a salary for a son or daughter to provide care. They also focus on adapting houses to the needs of older people through municipal government-financed repairs and renovations. The nursing home is the last resort. In the Netherlands, older people receive a full, government-paid assessment of needs to help them live as independently as possible. They are given a consumer's choice of how to spend an allotment directed ...

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have made major discoveries that could lead to new treatments for lung disorders in premature babies. In a mouse study, the team located key molecules that switch on stress pathways in preterm lung disorders, and also found that when parts of these pathways were blocked with a pain drug, lung damage was prevented or reversed. The findings are published online ahead of print in the March issue of American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology. Bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) is the most common chronic lung disease ...

Regular family suppers contribute to good mental health in adolescents, according to a study co-authored by McGill professor Frank Elgar, Institute for Health and Social Policy. Family meal times are a measurable signature of social exchanges in the home that benefit adolescents' well-being – regardless of whether or not they feel they can easily talk to their parents. "More frequent family dinners related to fewer emotional and behavioural problems, greater emotional well-being, more trusting and helpful behaviours towards others and higher life satisfaction," says Elgar, ...

WASHINGTON -- In administering the National Flood Insurance Program, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) needs a more modern approach to analyzing and managing flood risk behind levees -- one that would give public officials and individual property owners a clearer idea of the risks they face and how they should address them, says a new report from the National Research Council. Because levees can reduce but not eliminate the risk of flooding, the agency should also encourage communities behind levees to use multiple methods to reduce risk and increase awareness ...

Independent maternal demographic factors such as social status, ethnicity and maternal age can predict the likelihood of operative births in the UK, according to a new study published today (20 March) in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The study, conducted by researchers in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, explores which women are at an increased risk of an operative birth, including caesarean section (CS) or instrumental vaginal birth. It looks at data from the Millennium Cohort Study of babies born in the UK ...

WASHINGTON – Thirty-five years after its launch, Voyager 1 appears to have travelled beyond the influence of the Sun and exited the heliosphere, according to a new study appearing online today. The heliosphere is a region of space dominated by the Sun and its wind of energetic particles, and which is thought to be enclosed, bubble-like, in the surrounding interstellar medium of gas and dust that pervades the Milky Way galaxy. On August 25, 2012, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft measured drastic changes in radiation levels, more than 11 billion miles from the Sun. Anomalous ...

Using a low-cost apparatus designed to quickly and accurately measure the properties of handheld laser devices, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers tested 122 laser pointers and found that nearly 90 percent of green pointers and about 44 percent of red pointers tested were out of compliance with federal safety regulations. The NIST test apparatus was designed so that it can be replicated easily by other institutions. As NIST researchers reported at a conference on March 20, 2013,* both red and green laser pointers often emitted more visible ...

Studying a protein that gives structure to the nucleus of cells, Johns Hopkins researchers stumbled upon mutations associated with familial partial lipodystrophy (FPLD), a rare disease that disrupts normal patterns of fat distribution throughout the body. "Our findings open new paths for learning how and why fat cells are disproportionately affected by mutations in the protein lamin A, which is found in the nucleus of most cells of the body," says Katherine Wilson, Ph.D., professor of cell biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. According to the ...

This press release is available in Spanish. Barcelona, 20th March 2013.- An international study involving dermatologists from the Hospital del Mar and Spanish subjects has concluded that a drug normally used to treat severe bronchial asthma caused by allergies (Omalizumab) rapidly eliminates the symptoms of spontaneous chronic urticaria, a development that it is expected will significantly improve the quality of life of chronic urticaria sufferers. Spontaneous chronic urticaria, one of the most common skin diseases, consists of an abrupt reaction that results in hives ...

NEW YORK (March 20, 2013) -- A multi-center analysis, led by Weill Cornell Medical College and published in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology, shows the use of temporary "fully covered self-expanding metal stents" (FCSEMS) can effectively fix a painful and potentially life-threatening benign biliary stricture -- a severely blocked or narrowed bile duct. "Benign biliary strictures can be managed and resolved with these new fully covered metal stents with flared ends. Our study findings are similar to the recent European study results in patients overseas who received ...

By charting the differing fates of individual T cells, researchers have shown that previously unpredictable aspects of the adaptive immune response can be effectively modeled. The crucial question: What determines which of the immune system's millions of cells will mobilize to fight an acute infection and which will be held back to survive long-term, forming the basis of the immunological memory? The scientists' findings, published in the journal Science, could have implications for improved immunotherapy and vaccination strategies. The scientists found that the immediate ...

HOUSTON – (March 20, 2013) – As Syria's raging civil war approaches the two-year mark, the United States should prepare a more focused strategy that strengthens the moderate political forces in Syria and engages Syria's regional and international stakeholders, according to a new special report from Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. The report also recommends that U.S. strategy should buttress Syria's neighbors, address the deepening humanitarian crisis and plans for a post-Assad Syria. The special report, "Syria at the Crossroads: United States Policy ...

"We live in the post-genomic era, when DNA sequence data is growing exponentially", says Miami University (Ohio) computational biologist Iddo Friedberg. "But for most of the genes that we identify, we have no idea of their biological functions. They are like words in a foreign language, waiting to be deciphered." Understanding the function of genes is a problem that has emerged at the forefront of molecular biology. Many groups develop and employ sophisticated algorithms to decipher these "words". However, until now there was no comprehensive picture of how well these methods ...

Norm Borin of California Polytechnic State University and Arline Savage of the School of Business at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, argue that the fictitious mining company in the 2009 James Cameron movie, Avatar, makes a perfect case study for how not to be a sustainable company and offers lesson to more down to earth corporations hoping to gain green credentials as opposed to the blues. We hear a lot about indigenous peoples (the Na'vi in the movie) whose health and lives are all but destroyed by invading corporations such as Resources Development Administration ...

Sleep plays an important role in the brain's ability to consolidate learning when two new potentially competing tasks are learned in the same day, research at the University of Chicago demonstrates. Other studies have shown that sleep consolidates learning for a new task. The new study, which measured starlings' ability to recognize new songs, shows that learning a second task can undermine the performance of a previously learned task. But this study is the first to show that a good night's sleep helps the brain retain both new memories. Starlings provide an excellent ...

This press release is available in French. Montreal, March 20, 2013 – The aerospace industry is a key sector of the Canadian economy. With sales of over $22.4 billion in 2011, Canada ranks fourth globally in aerospace production. Nearly half of that revenue was generated in Quebec, where Montreal is one of the few places worldwide in which all the components needed to assemble an aircraft are available within a single metropolitan area. To determine whether Canada can keep up with the global pace, Industry Canada commissioned a study to evaluate how well Canadian aerospace ...

When Georgia Tech opens the doors to the Georgia Dome next month as the host institution for the 2013 Final Four, expect third-seeded Florida to walk out as the national champion. That's the prediction from Georgia Tech's Logistic Regression/Markov Chain (LRMC) college basketball ranking system, a computerized model that has chosen the men's basketball national champ in three of the last five years. The LRMC predicts that Florida, Louisville, Indiana and Gonzaga are most likely to advance to the Final Four in Atlanta, with Florida and Gonzaga playing for the title on ...