TORONTO, Feb. 8, 2013—Women who immigrate to Ontario have babies who are bigger than those born in their native countries, new research has shown. But the babies of immigrant mothers from East and South Asia are still smaller than babies born to mothers who were themselves born in Canada. The typical male born to an immigrant mother in Ontario weighs 115 grams more than babies in her native country, said Dr. Joel Ray, a researcher and physician at St. Michael's Hospital. The typical female weighs 112 grams more than babies in her mother's native country, he said. His ...

The effects were dramatic: throughout Vienna it was impossible not to notice that the blackbirds were disappearing. Their melodious song no longer rang around the courtyards of the inner city nor woke tired partygoers in the outlying districts. The birds were simply no longer there. Thankfully, they gradually reappeared and a few years later their population had returned to its original levels. But the sudden crash in numbers was alarming and scientists rushed to find the cause. It soon became apparent that the birds had died as a result of a new kind of viral infection. ...

A study exploring the impact of early parental death has revealed the long-term damage and suffering that can be experienced by individuals in adult life if appropriate levels of support are not provided at the time of bereavement. The new research, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, describes the low self-esteem, loneliness, isolation and inability to express feelings of some individuals who lost a parent in childhood, with the effects felt for as long as 71 years after the bereavement. The researchers found common themes that affect the experience ...

This press release is available in German. At the Photonics West, the leading international fair for photonics taking place in San Francisco (USA) this week, Nanoscribe GmbH, a spin-off of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), presents the world's fastest 3D printer of micro- and nanostructures. With this printer, smallest three-dimensional objects, often smaller than the diameter of a human hair, can be manufactured with minimum time consumption and maximum resolution. The printer is based on a novel laser lithography method. "The success of Nanoscribe is an example ...

Holidaymakers' photos could help scientists track the movements of giant endangered sharks living in the waters of the Indian Ocean. A new study, led by a researcher from Imperial College London, is the first to show that these publically sourced photographs are suitable for use in conservation work. Tourists scuba diving and snorkelling in the Maldives frequently take underwater pictures of the spectacular and docile whale shark, often called the world's largest fish. Conservationists have long hoped to use this photographic resource to help them trace the sharks' life ...

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 8, 2013 – Genes that have roles in the same biological pathways change their rate of evolution in parallel, a finding that could be used to discover their functions, said a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in the February issue of GENETICS. Humans have nearly 21,000 genes that make as many proteins, but the functions of most of those genes have not been fully determined, said lead investigator Nathan Clark, Ph.D., assistant professor of computational and systems biology at the Pitt School of Medicine. Knowing what a particular ...

WASHINGTON – The first randomized controlled study to evaluate a procedure that removes blood clots in the brain from patients experiencing severe strokes finds it delivers no better outcomes than non-invasive standard medications. In addition, the study found imaging techniques were not helpful in identifying patients who potentially would benefit most from clot removal. The study, led by a Georgetown University Medical Center researcher, was published online today in the New England Journal of Medicine and simultaneously presented at the International Stroke Conference ...

The use of advanced imaging shortly after the onset of acute stroke failed to identify a subgroup of patients who could benefit from a clot-removal procedure, a study has found. The randomized controlled trial known as Mechanical Retrieval and Recanalization of Stroke Clots Using Embolectomy (MR RESCUE) was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health, and was published online Feb. 8 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In patients with ischemic stroke (caused by a blockage in an artery), ...

People are bombarded with claims in newspapers and on the internet that are based on scientific studies. When faced with a headline that suggests an Alzheimer's drug increases the risk of heart attack or that watching TV is bad for children's mental health, or that pesticides are causing a decline in bee populations, people have to work out what to believe. Which claims should be taken seriously? Which are 'scares'? I Don't Know What to Believe: Making Sense of Science Stories... explains the peer review process – the system researchers use to assess the validity, significance ...

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 8, 2013 – Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC describe in PLoS ONE how an electrode array sitting on top of the brain enabled a 30-year-old paralyzed man to control the movement of a character on a computer screen in three dimensions with just his thoughts. It also enabled him to move a robot arm to touch a friend's hand for the first time in the seven years since he was injured in a motorcycle accident. With brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, the thoughts of Tim Hemmes, who sustained a spinal cord injury that ...

HOUSTON - Low-grade serous ovarian cancer is less common and aggressive than the high-grade variety, yet exceptionally difficult to treat when frontline therapy fails. "After surgery, with or without pre-surgical chemotherapy, when low-grade serous ovarian cancer persists or returns, chemotherapy and hormonal therapy are relatively ineffective," said David Gershenson, M.D., professor in The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Department of Gynecological Oncology and Reproductive Medicine. Response rates for treatment are measured in single digits. Gershenson ...

Highlights Compared with standard dialysis, frequent dialysis can cause complications related to repeated access to the blood. The findings provide valuable information for dialysis patients and their physicians. Approximately 2 million patients in the world receive dialysis treatments. Washington, DC (February 7, 2013) — Compared with standard dialysis, frequent dialysis can cause complications related to repeated access to the blood, requiring patients to undergo more repair procedures to the site through which blood is removed and returned, according to a study ...

Highlight Adding fruits and vegetables to the diet is an effective alternative to medication to reduce metabolic acidosis and kidney injury in late-stage chronic kidney disease. Metabolic acidosis is a common complication of kidney disease. Washington, DC (February 7, 2013) — Adding fruits and vegetables to the diet may help protect the kidneys of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) with too much acid build-up, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). Western diets that are ...

An international team of researchers has reconstructed the common ancestor of placental mammals—an extremely diverse group including animals ranging from rodents to whales to humans—using the world's largest dataset of both genetic and physical traits. In research to be published in the journal Science, the scientists reveal that, contradictory to a commonly held theory, placental mammals did not diversify into their present-day lineages until after the extinction event that eliminated non-avian dinosaurs, and about 70 percent of all species on Earth, some 65 million years ...

The demise of the dinosaurs is the world's ultimate whodunit. Was it a comet or asteroid impact? Volcanic eruptions? Climate change? In an attempt to resolve the issue, scientists at the Berkeley Geochronology Center (BGC), the University of California, Berkeley, and universities in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have now determined the most precise dates yet for the dinosaur extinction 66 million years ago and for the well-known impact that occurred around the same time. The dates are so close, the researchers say, that they now believe the comet or asteroid, ...

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania…A groundbreaking six-year research collaboration has produced the most complete picture yet of the evolution of placental mammals, the group that includes humans. Placental mammals are the largest branch of the mammalian family tree, with more than 5,100 living species. Researchers from Carnegie Museum of Natural History are among the team of 23 that took part in this extensive interdisciplinary effort that utilizes molecular (DNA) and morphological (anatomy) data on an extraordinary scale. By combining these two types of data scientists reconstructed, ...

In a study that represents a potential cultural shift in how basic science research can be conducted, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School and London Business School have demonstrated that a crowdsourcing platform pioneered in the commercial sector can solve a complex biological problem more quickly than conventional approaches—and at a fraction of the cost. Partnering with TopCoder, a crowdsourcing platform with a global community of 450,000 algorithm specialists and software developers, researchers identified a program that can analyze ...

By identifying two genes required for transforming inorganic into organic mercury, which is far more toxic, scientists today have taken a significant step toward protecting human health. The question of how methylmercury, an organic form of mercury, is produced by natural processes in the environment has stumped scientists for decades, but a team led by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has solved the puzzle. Results of the study, published in the journal Science, provide the genetic basis for this process, known as microbial mercury methylation, and have far-reaching ...

A new report suggests that the concentration of one human cytokine, interleukin 7 (IL-7), in the semen of HIV-1-infected men may be a key determinant of the efficiency of HIV-1 transmission to an uninfected female partner. In their study published February 7 in the Open Access journal PLOS Pathogens, a research group from the Eunice Kennedy-Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) led by Leonid Margolis report that the increased IL-7 concentration in semen facilitates HIV transmission to cervical tissue ex vivo. Semen is a complex biological ...

A University of Toronto Scarborough researcher was part of a team that reconstructed the family tree of placental mammals – a diverse group that includes cats, dogs, horses and humans. The research traces placental mammals back to a small, scampering, insect-eating creature that got its start 200,000 years or more after the extinction of the dinosaurs. The work is featured in this week's Science magazine. Mary Silcox, assistant professor of anthropology at UTSC, is a co-author on the paper and the only Canadian member of the team. She was responsible for organizing the ...

A proof-of-concept device that could pave the way for on-chip optical quantum networks has been created by a group of researchers from the US. Presenting the device today, 8 February, in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, it has been described as the "building block of future quantum networks." In an optical quantum network, information is carried between points by photons – the basic unit of light. There is a huge potential for this type of network in the field of quantum computing and could enable computers that are millions ...

The 11 March 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake (Mw9.0) produced the largest slip ever recorded in an earthquake, over 50 meters. Such huge fault movement on the shallow portion of the megathrust boundary came as a surprise to seismologists because this portion of the subduction zone was not thought to be accumulating stress prior to the earthquake. In a recently published study, scientists from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) shed light on the stress state on the fault that controls the very large slip. The unexpectedly large fault displacements resulted in the devastating ...

The proteins that have now been identified shouldn't actually exist. Nevertheless, they build the core of cellular aggregates whose identity has been enigmatic until now. These aggregates are typically associated with hereditary neurodegenerative diseases including variants of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), also known as frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). They are likely to be damaging and might be a target for therapy. FTD and ALS are part of a group of neurodegenerative diseases that show a broad and overlapping variety ...

Work-related stress is not linked to the development of colorectal, lung, breast or prostate cancers, a study published today on bmj.com suggests. Around 90% of cancers are linked to environmental exposures and whilst some exposures are well recognised (such as UV radiation and tobacco smoke), others are not (psychological factors such as stress). Stress can cause chronic inflammation which has been shown to have various roles in the development of cancer, plus stressed individuals are more likely to smoke, consume excessive amounts of alcohol and be obese – all ...

Research: Long term effect of reduced pack sizes of paracetamol on poisoning deaths and liver transplant activity in England and Wales: interrupted time series analysis The number of deaths and liver transplants due to paracetamol overdoses has significantly reduced thanks to UK legislation to make pack sizes smaller, a paper published today on bmj.com suggests. Paracetamol overdoses are a common method of suicide and frequent cause of liver damage. In September 1998, a new legislation was introduced by the UK Government which restricted pack sizes to a maximum of ...