New Rochelle, NY, May 1, 2013—More than 800 million people worldwide use the social networking site Facebook, and 93% of college students have an active Facebook account, according to a recent estimate. As both students and faculty on college campuses increasingly use Facebook as a means of communication, the sharing of personal information, likes and dislikes, or religious and political beliefs, for example, may affect what students think of professors and expect from their classes. This phenomenon is explored in a study published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social ...

(Philadelphia, PA) – HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is notorious for hiding within certain types of cells, where it reproduces at a slowed rate and eventually gives rise to chronic inflammation, despite drug therapy. But researchers at Temple University School of Medicine's Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Center for Substance Abuse Research (CSAR) recently discovered that synthetic anti-inflammatory substances distantly related to the active ingredient of marijuana may be able to take the punch out of HIV while inside one of its major hideouts – immune ...

The tail of a seahorse can be compressed to about half its size before permanent damage occurs, engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have found. The tail's exceptional flexibility is due to its structure, made up of bony, armored plates, which slide past each other. Researchers are hoping to use a similar structure to create a flexible robotic arm equipped with muscles made out of polymer, which could be used in medical devices, underwater exploration and unmanned bomb detection and detonation. Researchers, led by UC San Diego materials science professors ...

A small survey of U.S. obstetrics and gynecology residents finds that fewer than one in five receives formal training in menopause medicine, and that seven in 10 would like to receive it. The Johns Hopkins-led study, described in today's online version of the journal Menopause, discovered that some American ob/gyn residency programs fail to offer trainees any formal curriculum or clinical experience focused primarily on women's pre- and post-menopausal health. "Although our survey reached only a fraction of the approximately 5,000 ob/gyn residents in the United States, ...

Research in the wake of Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious malady afflicting (primarily commercial) honey bees, suggests that pests, pathogens and pesticides all play a role. New research indicates that the honey bee diet influences the bees' ability to withstand at least some of these assaults. Some components of the nectar and pollen grains bees collect to manufacture food to support the hive increase the expression of detoxification genes that help keep honey bees healthy. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. University ...

Why do rose petals have rounded ends while their leaves are more pointed? In a study to be published in open access journal PLOS Biology, John Innes Centre and University of East Anglia scientists reveal that the shape of petals and leaves is controlled by a hidden map located within growing buds. The map features arrows that direct the growth of each cell in the bud. In a leaf, the pattern of arrows converges towards the tip of the bud leading to a pointy shape, while in a petal the pattern of arrows fans out leading to a more rounded shape. The arrows correspond ...

Chevy Chase, MD––Gastric bypass surgery alters the hormones and amino acids produced during digestion, hinting at the mechanisms through which the surgery eliminates symptoms of type 2 diabetes, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). The study simulated pre-operative digestion and compare how the same patient metabolizes nutrients following surgery. In four patients who had catheters inserted into the bypassed portion of the stomach as part of their post-operative care, researchers ...

Chevy Chase, MD––When teenage girls are exposed to secondhand smoke at home, they tend to have lower levels of the "good" form of cholesterol that reduces heart disease risk, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). High-density lipoproteins (HDL) pick up excess cholesterol in the blood stream and take it to the liver where it can be broken down. Unlike low-density lipoproteins that can create a waxy build-up that blocks blood vessels, HDL cholesterol can play a key role in combatting ...

Chevy Chase, MD––Children who did not receive enough iodine in the womb performed worse on literacy tests as 9-year-olds than their peers, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). Iodine is absorbed from food and plays a key role in brain development. Even mild deficiency during pregnancy can harm the baby's neurological development. "Our research found children may continue to experience the effects of insufficient iodine for years after birth," said the study's lead author, ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Researchers at Mayo Clinic's campus in Florida have discovered a protein that is overly active in every human sample of kidney cancer they examined. They also found that an experimental drug designed to block the protein's activity significantly reduced tumor growth in animals when used alone. Combining it with another drug already used to treat the cancer improved the effectiveness of both. The findings, reported in the April 30 online issue of Clinical Cancer Research, offer a much-needed potential new direction for the treatment of clear cell ...

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) significantly improves muscle function – down to the muscle fibre level – in postmenopausal women, a new study published today [1 May] in The Journal of Physiology shows. Some studies published over the last decade have led to negative publicity around HRT, a treatment used to relieve symptoms of menopause, resulting in many women being reluctant to use it. However this new study offers a positive outcome from the treatment. Previous studies, monitoring walking speed and jumping height, have suggested that HRT reduces the impacts of ...

The authors stress that these findings should be interpreted with caution as some studies did not adjust for other potential confounding factors. They call for further investigations into the long term health effects of breast implants. Cosmetic breast implants have become increasingly popular, but some studies have suggested that implants can make it more difficult to detect breast cancer at an early stage because they create shadows on mammograms that can obscure some breast tissue. A team of researchers based in Canada wanted to find out whether the stage at which ...

Subfertile women who conceive through assisted reproduction are more likely to experience a greater traumatic impact following early pregnancy loss compared with women who conceive naturally, suggests a new study published today (1 May) in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Miscarriage is the most common complication of pregnancy affecting 20% of all clinically recognised pregnancies. This study, conducted at Queen Mary Hospital, The University of Hong Kong, aimed to identify the psychological impact following a first trimester miscarriage ...

CHICAGO --- A small group of elusive neurons in the brain's cortex play a big role in ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), a swift and fatal neurodegenerative disease that paralyzes its victims. But the neurons have always been difficult to study because there are so few of them and they look so similar to other neurons in the cortex. In a new preclinical study, a Northwestern Medicine® scientist has isolated the motor neurons in the brain that die in ALS and, for the first time, dressed them in a green fluorescent jacket. Now they're impossible to miss and easy to ...

Only within the past 12 years have marine biologists come to learn about the eye-opening characteristics of mystifying sea worms that live and thrive on the bones of whale carcasses. With each new study, scientists have developed a better grasp on the biology of Osedax, a genus of mouthless and gutless "bone worms" that make a living on skeletons lying on the seafloor. In the latest finding, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego describe how the wispy worms are able to carry out their bone-drilling activities. As published in the May 1 online ...

Philadelphia, April 30, 2013 — Researchers from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Perelman School of Medicine at The University of Pennsylvania, along with colleagues at the Botswana-Baylor Children's Clinical Centre of Excellence, conducted the first large-scale comparison of first-line treatments for HIV-positive children, finding that initial treatment with efavirenz was more effective than nevirapine in suppressing the virus in children ages 3 to 16. However, the less effective nevirapine is currently used much more often in countries with a high prevalence ...

In this month's issue of Physics World, an international group of researchers propose a new technology that could divert vibrations away from load-bearing elements of bridges to avoid catastrophic collapses. Michele Brun, Alexander Movchan, Ian Jones and Ross McPhedran describe a "wave bypass" technique that has many similarities to those being used by researchers looking to create Harry Potter-style invisibility cloaks, which exploit man-made materials known as metamaterials to bend light around objects. Led by Movchan, who is at the University of Liverpool, the researchers ...

The behaviour of seabirds during migration – including patterns of foraging, rest and flight – has been revealed in new detail using novel computational analyses and tracking technologies. Using a new method called 'ethoinformatics', described as the application of computational methods in the investigation of animal behaviour, scientists have been able to analyse three years of migration data gathered from miniature tracking devices attached to the small seabird the Manx Shearwater (Puffinus puffinus). The Manx Shearwater is currently on the 'amber' list of UK Birds ...

A new study is the first to report a significant positive association between long sleep duration and the development of colorectal cancer, especially among individuals who are overweight or snore regularly. The results raise the possibility that obstructive sleep apnea may contribute to cancer risk. "Our current study adds to the very limited literature regarding the relationship between sleep duration and/or sleep quality and colorectal cancer risk," said lead author Xuehong Zhang, MD, ScD, instructor in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and associate ...

Chevy Chase, MD––Researchers claim to have calculated for the first time, the upper safe limit of vitamin D levels, above which the associated risk for cardiovascular events or death raises significantly, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). There is increasing evidence that vitamin D plays a pivotal role in human physiology. Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to cardiovascular events and mortality, but previous studies have found supplementation fails to decrease mortality ...

WHAT: NIH-supported scientists used lab-grown human lung cells to study the cells' response to infection by a novel human coronavirus (called nCoV) and compiled information about which genes are significantly disrupted in early and late stages of infection. The information about host response to nCoV allowed the researchers to predict drugs that might be used to inhibit either the virus itself or the deleterious responses that host cells make in reaction to infection. Since nCoV was recognized in 2012, 17 confirmed cases and 11 deaths have been reported—a high fatality ...

Two-thirds of all forest inventory plots in the Northeast and Midwestern United States contain at least one non-native plant species, a new U.S. Forest Service study found. The study across two dozen states from North Dakota to Maine can help land managers pinpoint areas on the landscape where invasive plants might take root. "We found two-thirds of more than 1,300 plots from our annual forest inventory had at least one introduced species, but this also means that one-third of the plots had no introduced species," said Beth Schulz, a research ecologist at the Pacific ...

In one of the largest observational studies of its kind, researchers report that a combination of chemotherapy and radiation followed by surgery in patients with stage 3 non-small cell lung cancer improves survival. Patients who had chemoradiation therapy followed by surgery had twice the five-year survival rate of those who had only chemoradiation, says Dr. Matthew Koshy, a radiation oncologist at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System and lead author of the study. The study, published online in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, looked at various ...

WASHINGTON —Most children with isolated skull fractures may not need to stay in the hospital, which finding has the potential to save the health care system millions of dollars a year ("Isolated Skull Fractures: Trends in Management in U.S. Pediatric Emergency Departments"). In addition, a new device more accurately estimates children's weights, leading to more precise drug dosing in the ER ("Evaluation of the Mercy TAPE: Performance Against the Standard for Pediatric Weight Estimation"). Two studies published online this month in Annals of Emergency Medicine showcase ...

HOUSTON – (April 30, 2013) – Women engineers are underpaid for their contributions to technical activities, due to cultural ideologies in the engineering profession, according to Rice University research. "Cultural ideologies within professions may seem benign and have little salience outside of a profession's boundaries, but may play an important role in wage inequality," said Rice Assistant Professor of Sociology Erin Cech. To study the engineering profession, Cech used National Science Foundation survey data to demonstrate that patterns of sex segregation and unequal ...