PITTSBURGH—Despite the lack of any concrete evidence that menu labels encourage consumers to make healthier food choices, they have become a popular tool for policymakers in the fight against obesity. Carnegie Mellon University researchers recently put menu labels to the test by investigating whether providing diners with recommended calorie intake information along with the menu items caloric content would improve their food choices. The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, showed that recommended calorie intake information did not help consumers ...

Breaking a sweat while working out regularly may reduce your risk of stroke, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. In a study of more than 27,000 Americans, 45 years and older who were followed for an average of 5.7 years, researchers found: One-third of participants reported being inactive, exercising less than once a week. Inactive people were 20 percent more likely to experience a stroke or mini-stroke than those who exercised at moderate to vigorous intensity (enough to break a sweat) at least four times a week. Among men, ...

Boston, Mass., July 18, 2013 - Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital have identified a genetic cause of severe obesity that, though rare, raises new questions about weight gain and energy use in the general obese population. The research, published in the journal Science on July 19, involved genetic surveys of several groups of obese humans and experiments in mice. Mice with the genetic mutation gained weight even while eating the same amount of food as their normal counterparts; the affected gene, Mrap2, has a human counterpart (MRAP2) and appears to be involved ...

There has been a "worrying" increase in alcohol related deaths among young women in England and Scotland, since the middle of the last decade, finds research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. This is despite an overall fall in such deaths in both countries since the mid 2000s, say the authors, who describe the trends as a warning signal that must be heeded. The researchers focused on Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, all of which have similar levels of poor health, deprivation, and industrialisation, to see if there were any factors ...

Missed diagnoses―particularly of cancer, heart attack, and meningitis―and drug errors make up the bulk of malpractice claims brought against doctors in primary care, finds an analysis of published data in the online journal BMJ Open. The risk of litigation has not been given a great deal of attention in primary care, say the authors. But with most healthcare contacts taking place in primary care, it is important to characterise the causes and types of claims arising from these encounters, they add. They carried out an extensive trawl of published research ...

You are not just yourself. You are also the thousands of microbes that you carry. In fact, they represent an invisible majority that may be more you than you realize. These microscopic fellow travelers are collectively called the microbiome. Realization that every species of plant and animal is accompanied by a distinctive microbiome is old news. But evidence of the impact that these microbes have on their hosts continues to grow rapidly in areas ranging from brain development to digestion to defense against infection to producing bodily odors. Now, contrary to current ...

Boys are more likely to receive the quadrivalent human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV4) if their mothers receive flu shots or Pap screenings, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study examined the electronic health records of more than 250,000 boys aged 9 to 17 years enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente Southern California health plan and found that a total of 4,055 boys – or 1.6 percent of the membership in this age group – initiated the HPV4 vaccine between October 2009 and December 2010. Researchers found that the ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (July 18, 2013) – Protein production or translation is tightly coupled to a highly conserved stress response that cancer cells rely on for survival and proliferation, according to Whitehead Institute researchers. In mouse models of cancer, targeted therapeutic inhibition of translation disrupts this survival response, dramatically slowing tumor growth and potentially rendering drug-resistant tumors vulnerable to other therapies. From yeast to worms to humans, this stress response and its primary regulator, heat shock factor 1 (HSF1), help normal cells ...

VIDEO: Estrogen therapy has been widely misunderstood, and may offer important benefits to women in their 50s who have had a hysterectomy. Click here for more information. The widespread rejection of estrogen therapy after the 2002 Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study has most likely led to almost 50,000 unnecessary deaths over the last 10 years among women aged 50 to 69 who have had a hysterectomy, Yale School of Medicine researchers reveal in a study published in the July ...

Catalysts are everywhere. They make chemical reactions that normally occur at extremely high temperatures and pressures possible within factories, cars and the comparatively balmy conditions within the human body. Developing better catalysts, however, is mainly a hit-or-miss process. Now, a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Trieste and Brookhaven National Laboratory has shown a way to precisely design the active elements of a certain class of catalysts, showing which parameters are most critical for improving performance. This ...

UBC astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to track the orbital motion of 33,000 stars in one of the Galaxy's oldest globular clusters, offering new insights into the formation of the Milky Way. The careful examination of 'cosmic choreography' enabled researchers, for the first time, to link the movement of stars within the cluster to the stars' ages. The study reveals two distinct generations of stars within globular cluster 47 Tucanae, 16,700 light-years from Earth. Photo editors: Images and more information about 47 Tucanae: http://hubblesite.org/news/2013/25 http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/objects-from/pr1997035c/npp/all/ "When ...

A breakdown of the skin barrier and inflammation in the skin that occurs in eczema could play a key role in triggering food sensitivity in babies, a new study reveals. Scientists say this finding indicates that food allergies may develop via immune cells in the skin rather than the gut, highlighting eczema as a potential target for preventing food allergy in children. A link between eczema and food allergy has been known for some time, but researchers from King's College London and the University of Dundee say this study, published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, ...

Here's yet another reason to get off the couch: new research findings suggest that regularly breaking a sweat may lower the risk of having a stroke. A stroke can occur when a blood vessel in the brain gets blocked. As a result, nearby brain cells will die after not getting enough oxygen and other nutrients. A number of risk factors for stroke have been identified, including smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and being inactive. For this study, published in the journal Stroke, Michelle N. McDonnell, Ph.D., from the University of South Australia, Adelaide and her ...

Children born with a complete absence of the external ear canal, even if only one ear is affected, are more likely than their peers to struggle in school, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Hearing amplification and corrective surgery are available for the condition, called aural atresia. But many children with single ear atresia (unilateral atresia) often are not treated, even though they have significant hearing loss in their affected ear. The assumption has been that having one good ear is adequate for children with ...

Astronomers using the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have taken the first-ever image of a snow line in an infant solar system. This frosty landmark is thought to play an essential role in the formation and chemical make-up of planets around a young star. On Earth, snow lines typically form at high elevations where falling temperatures turn atmospheric moisture to snow. In much the same way, snow lines are thought to form around young stars in the distant, colder reaches of the disks from which solar systems form. Depending on the distance ...

In an international collaborative project, scientists have recorded the times, places and concentrations of oceanic plankton occurrences worldwide. Their data has been collected in a global atlas that covers organisms from bacteria to krill. Oceans cover 70 per cent of the earth's surface. The animal and plant species concealed within these vast expanses and almost fathomless depths have been researched relatively little in comparison with those of terrestrial ecosystems. To date, very little is known about the distribution of plankton – those organisms that are too small ...

Boston, Mass., July 18, 2012 – Ending a 30-year search by scientists, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital have identified two proteins in the inner ear that are critical for hearing, which, when damaged by genetic mutations, cause a form of delayed, progressive hearing loss. Findings were published online July 18 by the journal Neuron. The mutations, affecting genes known as TMC1 and TMC2, were reported in 2011 by the laboratory of Jeffrey Holt, PhD, in the Department of Otolaryngology at Boston Children's. Until now, however, it wasn't clear what the genes do. ...

BOWLING GREEN, O.—Fewer women are getting married and they're waiting longer to tie the knot when they do decide to walk down the aisle. That's according to a new Family Profile from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) at Bowling Green State University. According to "Marriage: More than a Century of Change," the U.S. marriage rate is 31.1, the lowest it's been in over a century. That equals roughly 31 marriages per 1,000 married women. Compare that to 1920, when the marriage rate was a staggering 92.3. Since 1970, the marriage rate has declined ...

Looking at the extent of a tropical cyclone's clouds from space doesn't tell you all you need to know about a storm, so satellites use infrared, microwave and multi-spectral imagery to look "under the hood." Two NASA satellites provided an outside and inside look at Tropical Storm Cimaron as it was starting to make landfall in China. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured an infrared image of Tropical Storm Cimaron on July 17 at 17:29 UTC (1:29 p.m. EDT). Infrared data helps determine temperature, such as the ...

Americans used more natural gas, solar panels and wind turbines and less coal to generate electricity in 2012, according to the most recent U.S. energy charts released by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Each year, the Laboratory releases energy flow charts that track the nation's consumption of energy resources. Natural gas use is up particularly in the electricity generation sector, where it has basically substituted directly for coal, while sustained low natural gas prices have prompted a shift from coal to gas in the electricity generating sector, according ...

ACCRA, GHANA (19 July, 2013)—A new study released today finds that so much water may be lost in the Volta River Basin due to climate change that planned hydroelectric projects to boost energy and food production may only tread water in keeping up with actual demand. Some 24 million people in Ghana, Burkina Faso and four other neighboring countries depend on the Volta River and its tributaries as their principal source of water. Specifically, the researchers with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and their partners concluded that the combined effects ...

Concentric hexagons of graphene grown in a furnace at Rice University represent the first time anyone has synthesized graphene nanoribbons on metal from the bottom up -- atom by atom. As seen under a microscope, the layers brought onions to mind, said Rice chemist James Tour, until a colleague suggested flat graphene could never be like an onion. "So I said, 'OK, these are onion rings,'" Tour quipped. The name stuck, and the remarkable rings that chemists marveled were even possible are described in a new paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The ...

PHILADELPHIA—The drug topiramate, typically used to treat epilepsy and more recently weight loss, may also help people addicted to both cocaine and alcohol use less cocaine, particularly heavy users, researchers in the department of Psychiatry at Penn Medicine report in a new study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Results from the double-blind, placebo-controlled trial adds to the growing body of evidence supporting topiramate as a promising medication to treat addiction. Past, separate studies have shown that topiramate can reduce alcohol dependence, as well ...

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been emerging at an alarming rate. In some of the scariest of these pathogens, the mechanism responsible for the bacteria's ability to defeat antibiotics is a complex protein molecule embedded in the bacterial cell wall -- the enzyme β-lactamase. The rapid evolution of β-lactamase is the key factor responsible for the growing antibiotic resistance of some of the most terrifying pathogenic bacteria on the planet – bacteria which are becoming rapidly immune to most, if not all, of our drugs. We can trace the genetic changes ...

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA - http://www.eso.org/alma) have taken the first ever image of the snow line in an infant solar system. On Earth, snow lines form at high altitudes where falling temperatures turn the moisture in the air into snow. This line is clearly visible on a mountain, where the snow-capped summit ends and the rocky face begins. The snow lines around young stars form in a similar way, in the distant, colder reaches of the dusty discs from which solar systems form. Starting from the star and moving outwards, ...