Non-smokers should give hotels that allow smoking in certain rooms a wide berth, say the authors, and instead choose completely smoke free hotels. The researchers analysed the surfaces and air quality of rooms for evidence of tobacco smoke pollution (nicotine and 3EP), known as third hand smoke, in a random sample of budget to mid-range hotels in San Diego, California. Ten hotels in the sample operated complete bans and 30 operated partial smoking bans, providing designated non-smoking rooms. Non-smokers who spent the night at any of the hotels, provided urine and ...

The authors base their findings on more than 1100 adults who had sustained a stroke between 1999 and 2004 and had been admitted to hospital in the greater Boston area of Massachusetts in the US. On admission, each patient's serum creatinine was measured. This is a by-product of muscle metabolism and is filtered out of the body by the kidney, known as the glomerular filtration rate or GFR. The GFR is therefore an indicator of the health of the kidneys and how well they are working. Half the patients lived within 1 km of a major road, with the rest living between 1 and ...

CHICAGO --- The dangerously high salt levels in processed food and fast food remain essentially unchanged, despite numerous calls from public and private health agencies for the food industry to voluntarily reduce sodium levels, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study conducted with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The study, which will be published May 13 in JAMA Internal Medicine, assessed the sodium content in selected processed foods and in fast-food restaurants in 2005, 2008 and 20011. The main finding was that the sodium content of food is as ...

BOSTON, MA (EMBARGOED UNTIL Monday, May 13, 2013, 4pm EDT) – As the restaurant industry prepares to implement new rules requiring chains with 20 or more locations to post calorie content information, the results of a new study suggest that it would be beneficial to public health for all restaurants to provide consumers with the nutritional content of their products. Researchers at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University analyzed meals from independent and small-chain restaurants, which account for approximately 50% of the ...

Environments containing species that are distantly related to one another are more productive than those containing closely related species, according to new research from the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC). The experimental result from Marc William Cadotte confirms a prediction made by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859. Darwin had said that a plot of land growing distantly related grasses would be more productive than a plot with a single species of grass. Since then, many experiments have shown that multi-species plots are ...

Researchers have identified the dose of dengue virus in human blood that is required to infect mosquitoes when they bite. Mosquitoes are essential for transmitting the virus between people so the findings have important implications for understanding how to slow the spread of the disease. By defining the threshold of the amount of virus needed for transmission, the research also provides a target that experimental dengue vaccines and drugs must prevent the virus from reaching in order to be successful at preventing the spread of disease during natural infection. Dengue, ...

Scientists at Imperial College London have identified four new proteins that act as receptors for an essential signalling molecule in bacteria such as MRSA. The receptors are thought to play an important role in enabling bacteria to respond to their environment. Their discovery provides scientists with vital clues in the hunt for new antibiotics, which are increasingly in need as bacteria become resistant to existing treatments. The bacterium Staphylococcus aureus causes life-threatening diseases in hospital patients and in previously healthy people. Methicillin-resistant ...

The impact of industrial fishing on coastal ecosystems has been studied for many years. But how it affects food webs in the open ocean―a vast region that covers almost half of the Earth's surface―has not been very clear. So a team of Smithsonian and Michigan State University scientists and their colleagues looked to the ancient bones of seabirds for answers, revealing some of the dramatic changes that have happened within open-ocean food webs since the onset of industrial fishing. The team's research is published this week in the Proceedings of the National ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A study has identified microRNA-155 as a new independent prognostic marker and treatment target in patients with acute myeloid leukemia that has normal-looking chromosomes under the microscope (that is, cytogenetically normal acute myeloid leukemia, or CN-AML). The study was led by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James). The researchers found that when microRNA-155 (miR-155) is present at abnormally high levels in CN-AML cells, patients ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- (May 13, 2013) -- Your brain often works on autopilot when it comes to grammar. That theory has been around for years, but University of Oregon neuroscientists have captured elusive hard evidence that people indeed detect and process grammatical errors with no awareness of doing so. Participants in the study -- native-English speaking people, ages 18-30 –- had their brain activity recorded using electroencephalography, from which researchers focused on a signal known as the Event-Related Potential (ERP). This non-invasive technique allows for the capture ...

In a landmark cancer study published online in Nature, researchers at NYU School of Medicine have unraveled a longstanding mystery about how pancreatic tumor cells feed themselves, opening up new therapeutic possibilities for a notoriously lethal disease with few treatment options. Pancreatic cancer kills nearly 38,000 Americans annually, making it a leading cause of cancer death. The life expectancy for most people diagnosed with it is less than a year. Now new research reveals a possible chink in the armor of this recalcitrant disease. Many cancers, including pancreatic, ...

NEW YORK (May 13, 2013) -- A soon-to-be-tested class of drug inhibitors were predicted to help a limited number of patients with B-cell lymphomas with mutations affecting the EZH2 protein. However, a research team, led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medical College, now report that these agents may, in fact, help a much broader cross section of lymphoma patients. The study, reported in Cancer Cell, found that the EZH2 protein the drug agents inhibited is a powerful regulatory molecule in B-cells, and a key driver of cancer in these immune cells. The study's lead ...

VIDEO: Salk scientists have developed a drug that slows Alzheimer's in mice. Click here for more information. LA JOLLA, CA---A drug developed by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, known as J147, reverses memory deficits and slows Alzheimer's disease in aged mice following short-term treatment. The findings, published May 14 in the journal Alzheimer's Research and Therapy, may pave the way to a new treatment for Alzheimer's disease in humans. "J147 ...

The fin whale is the second-largest animal ever to live on Earth. It is also, paradoxically, one of the least understood. The animal's huge size and global range make its movements and behavior hard to study. A carcass that washed up on a Seattle-area beach this spring provided a reminder that sleek fin whales, nicknamed "greyhounds of the sea," are vulnerable to collision when they strike fast-moving ships. Knowing their swimming behaviors could help vessels avoid the animals. Understanding where and what they eat could also help support the fin whale's slowly rebounding ...

Detecting alien worlds presents a significant challenge since they are small, faint, and close to their stars. The two most prolific techniques for finding exoplanets are radial velocity (looking for wobbling stars) and transits (looking for dimming stars). A team at Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has just discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein's special theory of relativity. "We are looking for very subtle effects. We needed high quality measurements of stellar brightnesses, accurate to a few ...

CHICAGO (May 13, 2013) – New research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that as many as 200,000 central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) have been prevented among patients in intensive care units (ICUs) since 1990. The study, published in the June issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, suggests that this progress is likely related to prevention strategies now common in hospitals across the United States. CLABSIs are caused when bacteria or ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – May 13, 2013 – New research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center finds that suicide, while strongly associated with psychiatric conditions, also correlates with environmental pollution. Lead researcher John G. Spangler, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of family medicine at Wake Forest Baptist, looked specifically at the relationship between air pollution and emissions from coal-fired electricity plants. "This study raises interesting questions about suicide rates in counties where coal-fired electrical plants operate and suggests that the quality ...

Countries in which girls are commonly married before the age of 18 have significantly higher rates of maternal and infant mortality, report researchers in the current online issue of the journal Violence Against Women. The study, by Anita Raj, PhD, a professor in the Department of Medicine in the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Ulrike Boehmer, PhD, an associate professor in the Boston University School of Public Health, is the first published ecological analysis of child marriage and maternal mortality. The study demonstrates that a 10 percent ...

VIDEO: A Texas A&M bird expert explains importance of macaw genome sequencing. Click here for more information. COLLEGE STATION, May 8, 2013 – In a groundbreaking move that provides new insight into avian evolution, biology and conservation, researchers at Texas A&M University have successfully sequenced the complete genome of a Scarlet macaw for the first time. The team was led by Drs. Christopher Seabury and Ian Tizard at the Schubot Exotic Bird Health Center in the College ...

COLLEGE STATION, May 13, 2013 – The tiniest bones in the human body – the bones of the middle ear – could provide huge clues about our evolution and the development of modern-day humans, according to a study by a team of researchers that include a Texas A&M University anthropologist. Darryl de Ruiter, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M, and colleagues from Binghamton University (the State University of New York) and researchers from Spain and Italy have published their work in the current issue of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science). The ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Remains of endangered Hawaiian petrels – both ancient and modern – show how drastically today's open seas fish menu has changed. A research team, led by Michigan State University and Smithsonian Institution scientists, analyzed the bones of Hawaiian petrels – birds that spend the majority of their lives foraging the open waters of the Pacific. They found that the substantial change in petrels' eating habits, eating prey that are lower rather than higher in the food chain, coincides with the growth of industrialized fishing. The birds' dramatic ...

Doctors at Dartmouth-Hitchcock's Norris Cotton Cancer Center (NCCC) have found a combination of drugs to potentially treat chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) more effectively. The research was published online on May 3, 2013, and it will appear as a letter in the journal Leukemia, a publication of the prestigious Nature Publishing Group. The study helps address a basic problem of treating CLL. CLL lives both in the blood in circulation, and in lymph nodes and bone marrow. The former is relatively easy to kill, but the disease recurs because of resistant CLL cells in the ...

UC Irvine Health researchers have helped discover that genes controlling circadian clock rhythms are profoundly altered in the brains of people with severe depression. These clock genes regulate 24-hour circadian rhythms affecting hormonal, body temperature, sleep and behavioral patterns. Depression is a serious disorder with a high risk for suicide affecting approximately one in 10 Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and is ranked as fourth of all diseases by the World Health Organization in terms of lifetime disability. Study findings provide the ...

BINGHAMTON, NY– A new study, led by a Binghamton University anthropologist and published this week by the National Academy of Sciences, could shed new light on the earliest existence of humans. The study analyzed the tiny ear bones, the malleus, incus and stapes, from two species of early human ancestor in South Africa. The ear ossicles are the smallest bones in the human body and are among the rarest of human fossils recovered. Unlike other bones of the skeleton, the ossicles are already fully formed and adult-sized at birth. This indicates that their size and shape ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Four out of five parents and grandparents in Michigan say they'd rather take children to a hospital that does medical research for children than one that does not, according to a new poll from the University of Michigan. A new study from the Michigan Child Health Research Priorities team at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital found that more than 80 percent of parents and grandparents prefer a hospital that does medical research about children -- if they can expect the same level of care, the hospital is equally accessible and with no difference in cost. The ...