Breastfeeding longer is associated with better receptive language at 3 years of age and verbal and nonverbal intelligence at age 7 years, according to a study published by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication. Evidence supports the relationship between breastfeeding and health benefits in infancy, but the extent to which breastfeeding leads to better cognitive development is less certain, according to the study background. Mandy B. Belfort, M.D., M.P.H., of Boston Children's Hospital, and colleagues examined the relationships of breastfeeding duration and exclusivity ...

Glucose intolerance or insulin resistance do not appear to be associated with pathological features of Alzheimer disease (AD) or detection of the accumulation of the brain protein β-amyloid (Αβ), according to a report published by JAMA Neurology, a JAMA Network publication. Glucose intolerance and diabetes mellitus have been proposed as risk factors for the development of AD, but evidence of this has not been consistent, the study background notes. Madhav Thambisetty, M.D., Ph.D., of the National Institute on Aging, Baltimore, and colleagues investigated ...

Healthcare professionals are urged to counsel heart and stroke patients on how to resume a healthy sex life, according to a joint statement published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation and the European Heart Journal. It is the first scientific statement to offer detailed guidance for patients. "Patients are anxious and often afraid sex will trigger another cardiac event – but the topic sometimes gets passed over because of embarrassment or discomfort," said Elaine Steinke, A.P.R.N., Ph.D., lead author of the statement and professor of nursing at Wichita ...

BOSTON – Patient care could be enhanced and the health care system could see significant cost savings if health care professionals followed published clinical guidelines to manage and treat back pain, according to researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and published in the July 29 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. "Back pain treatment is costly and frequently includes overuse of treatments that are not supported by clinical guidelines, and that don't impact outcomes," says lead author John N. Mafi, MD, a fellow in the Division of General Medicine and Primary ...

A team led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health has overcome a major biological hurdle in an effort to find improved treatments for patients with a rare disease called methylmalonic acidemia (MMA). Using genetically engineered mice created for their studies, the team identified a set of biomarkers of kidney damage—a hallmark of the disorder—and demonstrated that antioxidant therapy protected kidney function in the mice. Researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of NIH, validated the same biomarkers in 46 patients with MMA ...

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have created and confirmed the accuracy of a mathematical model that predicts how weight and body fat in children respond to adjustments in diet and physical activity. The results will appear online July 30 in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology. While the model may help to set realistic expectations, it has not been tested in a controlled clinical trial to determine if it is an effective tool for weight management. The model evolved from one developed at the NIH in 2011 to predict weight change in adults. The model ...

In 2011, Nature announced that scientists had discovered a single-celled organism that is a primitive farmer. The organism, a social amoeba called Dictyostelium discoideum, picks up edible bacteria, carries them to new locations and harvests them like crops. D. discoideum enjoyed a brief spell in the media spotlight, billed as the world's smallest farmer. Now a collaboration of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University has taken a closer look at one lineage, or clone, of a D. discoideum farmer. This farmer carries not one but two strains ...

In perhaps the most comprehensive and definitive effort to date, scientists have explained the processes that drove male mammals to adopt social monogamy as a breeding strategy. Because male mammals have a much higher potential to produce offspring in a single breeding season than do their female counterparts (who must endure long gestation periods), it would seem that mating with one female per cycle would be limiting. Yet a percentage of mammalian males do this -- and researchers have debated why, seeking to identify selective advantages social monogamy offers, for ...

The chemical components crucial to the start of life on Earth may have primed and protected each other in never-before-realized ways, according to new research led by University of Washington scientists. It could mean a simpler scenario for how that first spark of life came about on the planet, according to Sarah Keller, UW professor of chemistry, and Roy Black, UW affiliate professor of bioengineering, both co-authors of a paper published online July 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists have long thought that life started when the right ...

Boston, Mass.—A new method of vaccine design, called the Multiple Antigen Presentation System (MAPS), may result in vaccines that bring together the benefits of whole-cell and acellular or defined subunit vaccination. The method, pioneered by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, permits rapid construction of new vaccines that activate mulitple arms of the immune system simultaneously against one or more pathogens, generating robust immune protection with a lower risk of adverse effects. As reported by Fan Zhang, PhD, Ying-Jie Lu, PhD, and Richard Malley, MD, from ...

Astronomers have found a new way of measuring the spin in supermassive black holes, which could lead to better understanding about how they drive the growth of galaxies. The scientists at Durham University, UK, observed a black hole - with mass 10 million times that of our Sun - at the centre of a spiral galaxy 500 million light years from Earth while it was feeding on the surrounding disc of material that fuels its growth and powers its activity. By viewing optical, ultra-violet and soft x-rays generated by heat as the black hole fed, they were able to measure how ...

Scientists studying an aggressive form of leukaemia have discovered that rather than displacing healthy stem cells in the bone marrow as previously believed, the cancer is putting them to sleep to prevent them forming new blood cells. The finding offers the potential that these stem cells could somehow be turned back on, offering a new form of treatment for the condition, called Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML). The work was led by scientists at Queen Mary, University of London with the support of Cancer Research UK's London Research Institute. Around 2,500* people are diagnosed ...

A team of researchers has devised a way to measure the internal properties of stars—a method that offers more accurate assessments of their orbiting planets. The research, which appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by a multi-national team of scientists, including physicists at New York University, Princeton University, and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. The researchers examined HD 52265—a star approximately 92 light years away and nearly 20 percent more massive than our Sun. More than a decade ago, scientists ...

Hamilton, ON -- Researchers at McMaster University have discovered a solution to a long-standing medical mystery in Huntington's disease (HD). HD is a brain disease that can affect 1 in about 7,000 people in mid-life, causing an increasing loss of brain cells at the centre of the brain. HD researchers have known what the exact DNA change is that causes Huntington's disease since 1993, but what is typically seen in patients does not lead to disease in animal models. This has made drug discovery difficult. In this week's issue of the science journal, the Proceedings of ...

Social monogamy, where one breeding female and one breeding male are closely associated with each other over several breeding seasons, appears to have evolved as a mating strategy, new research reveals. It was previously suspected that social monogamy resulted from a need for extra parental care by the father. The comparative study, by University of Cambridge researchers Dieter Lukas and Tim Clutton-Brock, shows that the ancestral system for all mammalian groups is of females living in separate ranges with males defending overlapping territories, and that monogamy evolved ...

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS –Have you ever applied for a job and wondered why it is offered to someone who appears to be less qualified than you? A new study by Berkeley-Haas Associate Professor Don Moore finds employment managers tend to ignore the context of past performance. The article, "Attribution Errors in Performance Evaluation," (PLOS ONE, July 24, 2013), is co-authored by Samuel A. Swift, a Berkeley-Haas post-doctoral fellow; Zachariah S. Sharek, director of strategy and innovation at CivicScience; and Francesco Gino, associate ...

Alexandria, VA – Few destinations capture the imagination like Cuba; a forbidden fruit to U.S. citizens since the 1960s. Recently, 14 earth scientists from the U.S.-based Association for Women Geoscientists travelled there to explore its geology and culture. The expedition is chronicled in the August issue of EARTH Magazine. While Cuba is an intriguing destination as an actor on the global political stage, its geological history captures events that tell scientists even more about the history of the planet. While there, the scientists studied rocks that captured the ...

To address the growing problem of people being overdiagnosed and overtreated for cancer, a group of scientists convened by the National Cancer Institute and chaired by a UC San Francisco breast cancer expert is proposing a major update of the way the nation approaches diseases now classified as “cancer.” The “Viewpoint” article will be published online Monday, July 29, in the Journal of the American Medical Association. When cancer screening programs were widely initiated three decades ago, medical knowledge of the disease was more simplistic. The intent was ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 26, 2013) — It appears tiny and inconsequential enough, but the "super mouse" — created by researchers at the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center some six years ago — has spawned plenty of new research into preventing and/or treating many types of cancer. Back in 2007, cancer researcher Vivek Rangnekar and his team announced that they discovered a gene — known as Par-4 —that specifically kills cancer cells without killing normal cells. Rangnekar's team used this gene to develop cancer-resistant mice that become known as "super mice" for ...

It may seem like a stretch to envision a 3D printer in every home. However, a Michigan Technological University researcher is predicting that personal manufacturing, like personal computing before it, is about to enter the mainstream in a big way. "For the average American consumer, 3D printing is ready for showtime," said Associate Professor Joshua Pearce. 3D printers deposit multiple layers of plastic or other materials to make almost anything, from toys to tools to kitchen gadgets. Free designs that direct the printers are available by the tens of thousands on websites ...

New York, NY – In time for the third annual International Tiger Day, recent findings from a camera trap survey in Sumatra, Indonesia have uncovered a burgeoning tiger stronghold on an island that typically makes headlines for its rampant loss of forests and wildlife. Mr. Tomy Winata, an Indonesian businessman, conservationist and founder of Tambling Wildlife Nature Conservation (TWNC, which is a 450km2 privately managed concession), has carried out critical tiger conservation initiatives in the region since 1996, and recently partnered with Panthera, a global big cat ...

Scientists historically have argued that evolution proceeds through gradual development of traits. But how can incremental changes apply to the binary switch between two sexes, male or female? Researchers at Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine have found that a genetic process among the many species of rodents could have significant implications regarding our assumptions about sex determination and the pace of evolution. "What we addressed is a long-standing puzzle in natural history: why different types of rodents can exhibit profound differences in ...

SALT LAKE CITY, July 29, 2013 – A University of Utah biologist has identified 33 new species of predatory ants in Central America and the Caribbean, and named about a third of the tiny but monstrous-looking insects after ancient Mayan lords and demons. "These new ant species are the stuff of nightmares" when viewed under a microscope, says entomologist Jack Longino, a professor of biology. "Their faces are broad shields, the eyes reduced to tiny points at the edges and the fierce jaws bristling with sharp teeth. "They look a little like the monster in 'Alien.' They're ...

UCLA computer science professor Amit Sahai and a team of researchers have designed a system to encrypt software so that it only allows someone to use a program as intended while preventing any deciphering of the code behind it. This is known in computer science as "software obfuscation," and it is the first time it has been accomplished. Sahai, who specializes in cryptography at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, collaborated with Sanjam Garg, who recently earned his doctorate at UCLA and is now at IBM Research; Craig Gentry, Shai Halevi ...

For the first time since exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the sun, were discovered almost 20 years ago, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its parent star. An advantageous alignment of a planet and its parent star in the system HD 189733, which is 63 light-years from Earth, enabled NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM Newton Observatory to observe a dip in X-ray intensity as the planet transited the star. "Thousands of planet candidates have been seen to transit in only optical light," said ...