Elizabeth D. Lowenthal, M.D., M.S.C.E., of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and colleagues conducted a study to determine whether there was a difference in time to virological failure between HIV-infected children initiating nevirapine vs. efavirenz-based antiretroviral treatment in Botswana. "More than 2 million children worldwide are infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), approximately 90 percent of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa," according to background information in the article. "Worldwide, ...

In a comparison of the effect of different dosages of vitamin D supplementation in breastfed infants, no dosage raised and maintained plasma concentrations within a range recommended by some pediatric societies. However, all dosages raised and maintained plasma concentrations within a lower range recommended by the Institute of Medicine, according to a study in the May 1 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on child health. Hope Weiler, R.D., Ph.D., of McGill University, Montreal, presented the findings of the study at a JAMA media briefing. "Vitamin D is important during periods ...

With the number of doses and cost of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines a barrier to global implementation, researchers have found that girls who received two doses of HPV vaccine had immune responses to HPV-16 and HPV-18 infection that were noninferior to (not worse than) the responses for young women who received three doses, according to a study in the May 1 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on child health. The authors note that more data on the duration of protection are needed before reduced-dose schedules can be recommended. Simon R. M. Dobson, M.D., of the University ...

Among infants with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS; caused by in utero opioid exposure), variants in certain genes were associated with a shorter length of hospital stay and less need for treatment, preliminary findings that may provide insight into the mechanisms underlying NAS, according to a study in the May 1 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on child health. Jonathan M. Davis, M.D., of The Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center, Boston, presented the findings of the study at a JAMA media briefing. "In the past decade, there has been a significant increase ...

Fredrik Serenius, M.D., Ph.D., of Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, and colleagues conducted a study to assess neurological and developmental outcome in extremely preterm (less than 27 gestational weeks) children at 2.5 years. "A proactive approach to resuscitation and intensive care of extremely preterm infants has increased survival and lowered the gestational age of viability. There are concerns that increased survival may come at the cost of later neurodevelopmental disability among survivors. Approximately 25 percent of extremely preterm infants born in the 1990s ...

Childhood adversity can lead to chronic physical and mental disability in adult life and have an effect on the next generation, underscoring the importance of research, practice and policy in addressing this issue, according to a Viewpoint in the May 1 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on child health. David A. Brent, M.D., of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, Pittsburgh, presented the Viewpoint at a JAMA media briefing. Dr. Brent and co-author Michael Silverstein, M.D., M.P.H., of the Boston University School of ...

The atoms that make up ordinary matter fall down, so do antimatter atoms fall up? Do they experience gravity the same way as ordinary atoms, or is there such a thing as antigravity? These questions have long intrigued physicists, says Joel Fajans of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), because "in the unlikely event that antimatter falls upwards, we'd have to fundamentally revise our view of physics and rethink how the universe works." So far, all the evidence that gravity is the same for matter and antimatter is indirect, ...

Antimatter is strange stuff. It has the opposite electrical charge to normal matter and, when it meets its matter counterpart, the two annihilate in a flash of light. Four University of California, Berkeley, physicists are now asking whether matter and antimatter are also affected differently by gravity. Could antimatter fall upward – that is, exhibit anti-gravity – or fall downward at a different rate than normal matter? Almost everyone, including the physicists, thinks that antimatter will likely fall at the same rate as normal matter, but no one has ever dropped antimatter ...

Writing in Nature Communications, the researchers report the first graphene-based transistor with bistable characteristics, which means that the device can spontaneously switch between two electronic states. Such devices are in great demand as emitters of electromagnetic waves in the high-frequency range between radar and infra-red, relevant for applications such as security systems and medical imaging. Bistability is a common phenomenon – a seesaw-like system has two equivalent states and small perturbations can trigger spontaneous switching between them. The way in ...

Deposits left by the eruption of a subglacial volcano, or tuya, 1.8 million years ago could hold the secret to more accurate palaeo-glacial and climate models, according to new research by University of British Columbia geoscientists. The detailed mapping and sampling of the partially eroded Kima' Kho tuya in northern British Columbia, Canada shows that the ancient regional ice sheet through which the volcano erupted was twice as thick as previously estimated. Subglacial eruptions generate distinctive deposits indicating whether they were deposited below or above ...

Bethesda, MD—April 30, 2013 – Listed below are the selected highlights for the May 2013 issue of the Genetics Society of America's journal, GENETICS. The May issue is available online at http://www.genetics.org/content/current. Please credit GENETICS, Vol. 194, MAY 2013, Copyright © 2013. Please feel free to forward to colleagues who may be interested in these articles on a wide array of topics including: developmental and behavioral genetics; genome integrity and transmission; genetics of complex traits; cellular genetics; and population and evolutionary genetics. ISSUE ...

Cells ingest proteins and engulf bacteria by a gymnastic, shape-shifting process called endocytosis. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health revealed how a key protein, dynamin, drives the action. Endocytosis lets cells absorb nutrients, import growth factors, prevent infections and accomplish many other vital tasks. Yet, despite decades of research, scientists don't fully understand this membrane remodeling process. New research reveals, on the real-life scale of nanometers, how individual molecules work together during a single act of endocytosis. "We've ...

New research from experts within the University of Minnesota School of Nursing has found teen girls at high risk for pregnancy reported being significantly less likely to participate in social bullying after participating in an 18-month preventive intervention program. This research, in combination with University of Minnesota School of Nursing research findings from March 2013, demonstrate the preventative intervention program can reduce social bullying among all girls, including those who did and did not have strong family ties. Furthermore, girls in the intervention ...

Washington, DC, April 30, 2013 – The nation's more than 2,900 nonprofit hospitals are facing new requirements to qualify for federal tax-exempt status under the Affordable Care Act, including producing a Community Health Needs Assessment that identifies local health needs. With obesity affecting more than one-third of adults and 17 percent of children in the United States, the Strategies to Overcome and Prevent (STOP) Obesity Alliance released five research-based, consensus recommendations today to help guide nonprofit hospitals in developing programs that address obesity ...

Research from the University of Adelaide suggests that mothers who eat junk food while pregnant have already programmed their babies to be addicted to a high fat, high sugar diet by the time they are weaned. In laboratory studies, the researchers found that a junk food diet during pregnancy and lactation desensitised the normal reward system fuelled by these highly palatable foods. Led by Dr Bev Mühlhäusler, Postdoctoral Fellow in the University's FOODplus Research Centre, this is the first study to show the effects of maternal junk food consumption at such an early ...

From methanol to formaldehyde - this reaction is the starting point for the synthesis of many everyday plastics. Using catalysts made of gold particles, formaldehyde could be produced without the environmentally hazardous waste generated in conventional methods. Just how the mysterious gold catalyst works has been found out by theoretical and experimental researchers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in a cooperation project. In the international edition of the journal "Angewandte Chemie" they report in detail on what happens on the gold surface during the chemical reaction. "Gold ...

Seaweed has been eaten for thousands of years by people all over the world, and it can be considered a tasty and healthy food item. This is the conclusion from professor Ole G. Mouritsen, Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Southern Denmark, who has scientifically studied the species dulse (Palmaria palmata). Dulse has traditionally been eaten by populations along North Atlantic coasts in countries such as Iceland, Ireland, England, Scotland, France, Norway and along the North American and Canadian Atlantic coasts. Dulse has particularly ...

Being a physicist offers many perks. For one, it allows an understanding of the substances ubiquitous in everyday industrial products such as emulsions, gels, granular pastes or foams. These are known for their intermediate behaviour between fluid and solid. Paint, for example, can be picked up on a paintbrush without flowing and spread under the stress of the brush stroke like a fluid. Baudouin Geraud and colleagues from the Light Matter Institute at the University of Lyon, France, have studied the flow of a microgel confined in microchannels. They have shown, in a study ...

Do frogs live underground? The answer is yes, some amphibians, such as salamanders and frogs have been often reported to dwell in subterranean habitats, some of them completely adjusted to the life in darkness, and others just spending a phase of their lifecycle in an underground shelter. Up until 2010, however, no one suspected that the Mediterranean anuran frog Rana iberica - commonly known as Iberian brown frog and usually found in streams - also participates in underground adventures. A new study published in the open access journal Subterranean Biology confirms the ...

As planets age they become darker and cooler. Saturn however is much brighter than expected for a planet of its age - a question that has puzzled scientists since the late sixties. New research published in the journal Nature Geoscience has revealed how Saturn keeps itself looking young and hot. Researchers from the University of Exeter and the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon found that layers of gas, generated by physical instability deep within the giant planet, prevent heat from escaping and have resulted in Saturn failing to cool down at the expected rate. Professor ...

Atmospheric contamination due to heavy metals is currently a severe problem of global proportions, with important repercussions in public health. However, this type of pollution is not a recent fact and can even be detected during pre-historic times. A team of scientists, which includes scientists from the Andalusian Institute of Earth Sciences and the University of Granada, has discovered evidence of atmospheric pollution caused by lead. This evidence was found in a lagoon in Sierra Nevada (Granada), at an altitude of 3,020 m. The pollution comes from metallurgical activities, ...

With the remains of a recent lottery winner having been exhumed for foul play related to cyanide poisoning, future winners might wonder what they can do to avoid the same fate. A new report in The FASEB Journal involving zebrafish suggests that riboflavin, also known as vitamin B2, may mitigate the toxic effects of this infamous poison. In addition, the report shows that zebrafish are a viable model for investigating the effects of cyanide on humans. As with any research involving animal models, these findings are preliminary until thoroughly tested in clinical trials. ...

A quantum computer is controlled by the laws of quantum physics; it promises to perform complicated calculations, or search large amounts of data, at a speed that exceeds by far those that today's fastest supercomputers are capable of. "You could say that a quantum computer can think several thoughts simultaneously, while a traditional computer thinks one thought at a time," says Weimin Chen, professor in the Division of Functional Electronic Materials at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology at LiU, and one of the main authors of the article in Nature Communications. A ...

A new use for compounds related in composition to the active ingredient in marijuana may be on the horizon: a new research report published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology shows that compounds that stimulate the cannabinoid type 2 (CB2) receptor in white blood cells, specifically macrophages, appear to weaken HIV-1 infection. The CB2 receptor is the molecular link through which the pharmaceutical properties of cannabis are manifested. Diminishing HIV-1 infection in this manner might make current anti-viral therapies more effective and provide some protection against ...

By targeting the factors that may play a significant role in the development of postpartum depression (PPD) in adolescent mothers, researchers at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island believe they have found a way to prevent it. The team – led by Maureen G. Phipps, MD, MPH, interim chief of obstetrics and gynecology and director of the Division of Research at Women & Infants, and Caron Zlotnick, PhD, of the hospital's Center for Women's Behavioral Health – recently published "Randomized controlled trial to prevent postpartum depression in adolescent mothers" in the ...