An estimated 3.8 million California adults — particularly those in households with children, as well as low-income Latinos — could not afford to put adequate food on the table during the recent recession, according to a new policy brief by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. In 2009, about one in six low-income Californians had "very low food security," which describes multiple instances in which people had to cut their food intake and experienced hunger, according to the study, which is based on data from the California Health Interview Survey. This is double ...

Skin squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is a subtype of very aggressive skin cancers that usually develops in sunexposed body regions, but can also affect a large number of organs such as the bladder, esophagus, lungs etc. However, little is known about the biology of these cells, which consequently makes difficult the generation of new specific therapies; actually, the standard treatments are based on surgery and subsequent radiotherapy. Researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) led by Erwin Wagner, vice-director of Basic Research and director of BBVA ...

CHAMPAIGN, lll. — A new study of aged female rats found that long-term treatment with estrogen and a synthetic progesterone known as MPA increased levels of a protein marker of synapses in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region known to suffer significant losses in aging. The new findings appear to contradict the results of the Women's Health Initiative, a long-term study begun in 1991 to analyze the effects of hormone therapy on a large sample of healthy postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79. Among other negative findings, the WHI found that long-term exposure to estrogen ...

For so many important outcomes in life – applying for jobs, waiting for medical test results – there comes a point when you just have to sit back and hope for the best. But that doesn't mean we always behave that way. New research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that even when an outcome is out of our control we often act as though we can still get on the good side of fate by doing good deeds. According to lead researcher Benjamin Converse, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Psychology at the University ...

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have developed a new silk-based stabilizer that, in the laboratory, kept some vaccines and antibiotics stable up to temperatures of 140 degrees Fahrenheit. This provides a new avenue toward eliminating the need to keep some vaccines and antibiotics refrigerated, which could save billions of dollars every year and increase accessibility to third world populations. Vaccines and antibiotics often need to be refrigerated to prevent alteration of their chemical structures; such alteration can result in less potent or ...

Marine scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have linked the decline in growth of Caribbean forereef corals — due to recent warming — to long-term trends in seawater temperature experienced by these corals located on the ocean-side of the reef. The research was conducted on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System in southern Belize. The results were revealed online in the July 8 issue of Nature Climate Change, a journal that publishes research on the impacts of global climate change and its implications for the economy, policy and the world at large. ...

New research from Norris Cotton Cancer Center estimates, for the first time, the impact of an R rating for movie smoking. James Sargent, MD, co-director of the Cancer Control Research Program at Norris Cotton Cancer Center, emphasizes that an R rating for any film showing smoking could substantially reduce smoking onset in U.S. adolescents -- an effect size similar to making all parents maximally authoritative in their parenting, Sargent says. "Smoking is a killer. Its connection to cancer, heart attacks, and chronic lung disease is beyond doubt. Kids start to smoke before ...

Researchers have discovered yet another way to harvest small amounts of electricity from motion in the world around us – this time by capturing the electrical charge produced when two different kinds of plastic materials rub against one another. Based on flexible polymer materials, this "triboelectric" generator could provide alternating current (AC) from activities such as walking. The triboelectric generator could supplement power produced by nanogenerators that use the piezoelectric effect to create current from the flexing of zinc oxide nanowires. And because these ...

PITTSBURGH—Drivers can struggle to see when driving at night in a rainstorm or snowstorm, but a smart headlight system invented by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute can improve visibility by constantly redirecting light to shine between particles of precipitation. The system, demonstrated in laboratory tests, prevents the distracting and sometimes dangerous glare that occurs when headlight beams are reflected by precipitation back toward the driver. "If you're driving in a thunderstorm, the smart headlights will make it seem like it's a ...

Newer technologies designed to help people with type 1 diabetes monitor their blood sugar levels daily work better than traditional methods and require fewer painful needle sticks, new Johns Hopkins research suggests. The research findings, published online in the July 10 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, suggest that even though these diabetic control technologies are more costly, people with diabetes who use an insulin pump are more satisfied with their treatment and quality of life than those who give themselves insulin shots many times a day. Researchers ...

In 1928, chemists Otto Diels and Kurt Alder first documented diene synthesis, a chemical reaction important for synthesizing many polymers, alkaloids and steroids. Their work on this mechanism, which came to be known as the Diels–Alder reaction, won them the 1950 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Since then, the iconic reaction has become the most commonly used and studied mechanism in organic chemistry. But what happens during the reaction has never been entirely clear. Now, Kendall N. Houk, UCLA's Saul Winstein Professor of Organic Chemistry, and colleagues report exactly ...

A new study suggests that echocardiography be included as part of screenings to help identify student athletes with heart problems that could lead to sudden death. The Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center study, presented recently at the annual meeting of the American Society of Echocardiography, suggests adding a modified echo to the current practice of taking an EKG, getting a family history and having a physical exam. "EKG is a good tool, but may not be sensitive enough to catch problems that could lead to sudden death," says Michelle Grenier, MD, a physician ...

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, working with Danish researchers, have developed a novel anticancer drug designed to travel -- undetected by normal cells -- through the bloodstream until activated by specific cancer proteins. The drug, made from a weedlike plant, has been shown to destroy cancers and their direct blood supplies, acting like a "molecular grenade," and sparing healthy blood vessels and tissues. In laboratory studies, researchers said they found that a three-day course of the drug, called G202, reduced the size of human prostate tumors ...

CAIRNS, Australia and STANFORD, California – 9 July 2012 -- Like their warrior ancestors, leaders of many Pacific Island nations have been making efforts to safeguard their countries, this time by sounding an alarm as the impact of climate change becomes more apparent. Today their efforts received a big boost with the release of a Scientific Consensus Statement on Climate Change and Coral Reefs that is supported by over 2,400 scientists, showing the threats that reef corals are under across the globe and calling for governments worldwide to take steps to protect valuable ...

Many of the predictions we make in everyday life are vague, and we often get them wrong because we have incomplete information, such as when we predict the weather. But in quantum mechanics, even if all the information is available, the outcomes of certain experiments generally can't be predicted perfectly beforehand. This inability to accurately predict the results of experiments in quantum physics has been the subject of a long debate, going back to Einstein and co-workers, about whether quantum mechanics is the best way to predict outcomes. Researchers from ...

Alzheimer's disease is one of the most dreaded and debilitating illnesses one can develop. Currently, the disease afflicts 6.5 million Americans and the Alzheimer's Association projects it to increase to between 11 and 16 million, or 1 in 85 people, by 2050. Cell death in the brain causes one to grow forgetful, confused and, eventually, catatonic. Recently approved drugs provide mild relief for symptoms but there is no consensus on the underlying mechanism of the disease. "We don't know what the problem is in terms of toxicity," said Joan-Emma Shea, professor of chemistry ...

There are two hurricanes in the Eastern Pacific today, Daniel and Emilia. NASA's TRMM satellite passed over both storms in pinpointed the intensity of the rainfall within each storm, indicative of their power. Emilia is dropping rain at a greater rate than Daniel according to satellite data. Tropical storm Daniel strengthened and became the third hurricane over the weekend, and today, Monday, July 9, Tropical Storm Emilia strengthened into the fourth hurricane of the season. Tropical storm Emilia formed on July 7 as tropical depression 5E and became a tropical storm on ...

MADISON- A study of university students is the first evidence to refute the supposed link between depression and the amount of time spent on Facebook and other social-media sites. The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health study suggests that it may be unnecessarily alarming to advise patients and parents on the risk of "Facebook Depression" based solely on the amount of Internet use. The results are published online today in the Journal of Adolescent Health. Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a report on the effects of social ...

Cryptology is one of the most important techniques in the field of information security, which provides an abundance of services including privacy, data integrity, authentication, access control, anonymity, non-repudiation. The high level of security, efficiency and ease of implementation of a cryptosystem are the main design aims of cryptographers. Prof. ZHANG Huanguo and his group from Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trusted Computing of Ministry of Education, Wuhan University, have been undertaking research on a entirely new cryptography—Evolutionary ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Government-funded community health centers, which serve low-income and uninsured patients, provide better care than do private practices, a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine has found. Randall Stafford, MD, PhD, professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and colleagues at University of California, San Francisco looked at the actions physicians took when patients visited private practices versus the actions that were taken at community health centers, also referred to as Federally Qualified Health Centers ...

New research reveals that rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients do not receive fewer cancer screening tests than the general population. Results of the study, funded in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), found that RA and non-RA patients receive routine screening for breast, cervical, and colon cancer at similar rates. The ACR estimates that 1.3 million adult Americans are affected by RA—a chronic autoimmune disease characterized by systemic inflammation ...

7/10/12, Zurich, Switzerland. Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, suggests that both animals and humans find multiple pieces of food to be more satiating and rewarding than an equicaloric, single-piece portion of food. Increases in portion size lead to increased intake. We investigated here the impact of number and size of food .Both humans and animals use number as a cue to judge quantities of food, with larger numbers ...

7/10/12, Zurich, Switzerland. Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB) the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior suggests that, not only the amount and type of food eaten but the time of day it is eaten, is important in contributing to obesity. Previous studies have shown that when mice consumed all of their calories during their inactive period they gained more weight than when they consumed the same amount of calories during their active period. A team led by Drs. ...

7/10/12, Zurich, Switzerland. Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, introduces novel cost-effective strategies to facilitate healthy eating among weight-conscious consumers. A number of experiments, by Esther Papies and colleagues of Utrecht University, The Netherlands, now suggest that simply adding words related to health and weight on posters, restaurant menu's, or recipe cards can stimulate healthy food choices among ...

7/10/12, Zurich, Switzerland. Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, finds that gastric bypass surgery induces changes in the gut microbiota and peptide release that are similar to those seen after treatment with prebiotics. Previous animal research demonstrated that ingestion of a high-fat diet produces weight gain and profoundly affects the gut microbiota composition, resulting in a greater abundance of one type of bacteria ...