Continued high use of marijuana by the nation's eighth, 10th and 12th graders combined with a drop in perceptions of its potential harms was revealed in this year's Monitoring the Future survey, an annual survey of eighth, 10th, and 12th-graders conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan. The survey was carried out in classrooms around the country earlier this year, under a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The 2012 survey shows that 6.5 percent of high school seniors smoke marijuana daily, up ...

Since the early 1970s school shootings at American elementary, secondary and higher education institutions have been a painful reality for American society. After each incident – like the recent attack in Newtown, CT – there is voluminous dialogue about what can be done to prevent the next, such tragedy. But can anything realistically be done to prevent these horrific crimes? A new article¹ by Dr. Daniel J. Flannery at Case Western Reserve University, and colleagues, scheduled to appear in the January issue of Springer's Current Psychiatry Reports, attempts to parse out ...

The Bonn site of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and the University of Bonn are leading contributors. The complex named "NLRP3 inflammasome" is composed of several proteins and plays a key role in the immune system. It resembles a fire alarm sensor that triggers a chain reaction when activated. As a result, immune cells are mobilized and substances that foster inflammation are released. This process can be triggered by infections, which are subsequently suppressed by the immune response. However, in the case of Alzheimer's disease, the activation ...

The study, published in Psychiatric Services, highlights economic and psycho-social challenges faced by parents of adult children with disabilities, compared with parents of children without disabilities. When either parent becomes disabled, the study found, families' report lower financial well-being. This being especially true when an aging parent must contend with both the needs of an adult child with mental illness and a spouse who develops an age-related disability. Not surprisingly, parents are themselves susceptible to developing disabilities and chronic conditions ...

ANN ARBOR—A carbon-nanotube-coated lens that converts light to sound can focus high-pressure sound waves to finer points than ever before. The University of Michigan engineering researchers who developed the new therapeutic ultrasound approach say it could lead to an invisible knife for noninvasive surgery. Today's ultrasound technology enables far more than glimpses into the womb. Doctors routinely use focused sound waves to blast apart kidney stones and prostate tumors, for example. The tools work primarily by focusing sound waves tightly enough to generate heat, says ...

Researchers report for the first time the seroprevalence of three strains of avian influenza viruses in pigs in southern China, but not the H5N1 avian influenza virus. Their research, published online ahead of print in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, has implications for efforts to protect the public health from pandemics. Influenza A virus is responsible both for pandemics that have killed millions worldwide, and for the much less severe annual outbreaks of influenza. Because pigs can be infected with both human and avian influenza viruses, they are thought to ...

WORCESTER, MA – Promising new research provides evidence that ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, may be treatable using neural stem cells. A consortium of researchers at multiple institutions, including the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital, have shown that neural stem cells, when transplanted into the spinal cord of a mouse model with familial ALS, slow disease onset and progression while improving motor function, breathing and survival time ...

(December 19, 2012) Look out the window and you're likely to see the dispersal of seeds—dandelion tufts in the wind, a squirrel burying an acorn, a robin flying off with a dogwood fruit. You might even have a burr "velcroed" to your sock. Sarah Sumoski, a recent graduate of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has now published a study of seed dispersal in a less-familiar environment—the eelgrass beds of Chesapeake Bay. The study—the first to show that marine animals can disperse eelgrass seeds—appears as the featured article in today's issue of Marine Ecology Progress ...

Cyclone Evan is now far south of Fiji and wind shear and cooler sea surface temperatures have been taking their toll on the storm and weakening it. Infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite has shown a quick decline in the storm's structure over one day. A time series of infrared images from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite showed changes in intense thunderstorms within Cyclone Evan between Dec. 18 and Dec. 19. Over a time period of 36 hours, Evan weakened from Cyclone strength to Tropical Storm strength. In an ...

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite found an unusually tall towering thunderstorm in Cyclone Evan. According to Owen Kelley of the TRMM satellite team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md, the most startling feature of the December 16 overflight of Tropical Cyclone Evan was the extremely tall storm-cell in the north side of the eyewall. At the time TRMM passed overhead and captured an image of the storm, Evan was about to rake across the northern coast of the islands of Fiji. The updrafts in this tower extended high enough ...

Johns Hopkins scientists have created stunning images of the branching patterns of individual sensory nerve cells. Their report, published online in the journal eLife on Dec. 18, details the arrangement of these branches in skin from the backs of mice. The branching patterns define ten distinct groups that, the researchers say, likely correspond to differences in what the nerves do and could hold clues for pain management and other areas of neurological study. Each type of nerve cell that the team studied was connected at one end to the spinal cord through a thin, wire-like ...

Shrinking Arctic sea ice grabbed the world's attention again earlier this year with a new record low minimum. Growing economic activity in the Arctic, such as fishing, mineral exploration and shipping, is emphasizing the need for accurate predictions of how much of the Arctic will be covered by sea ice. Every June, an international research group known as the Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) publishes a summary of the expected September Arctic sea ice minimum known as the Sea Ice Outlook. The initial reports and monthly updates aim to give the scientific community ...

New Orleans, LA –Research led by Dr. Udai Pandey, Assistant Professor of Genetics at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, has found that the ability of a protein made by a gene called FUS to bind to RNA is essential to the development of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). This discovery identifies a possible therapeutic target for the fatal neurological disease. The research will be available online in the Advanced Access section of the journal Human Molecular Genetics website, posted by December 21, 2012. It will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal. ...

Making small easy changes to our eating habits on a consistent basis - 25 days or more per month - can lead to sustainable weight loss, according to research by Professor Brian Wansink in Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab. The challenge is to figure out which changes work for specific individuals and how to stick with changes long enough to make them second nature. To explore this issue, Cornell researchers launched the National Mindless Eating Challenge (NMEC), an online healthy eating and weight loss program that focused on simple eating behavior changes, instead ...

Amsterdam, NL, December 19, 2012 – As many as 50 percent of all human protein-coding genes are regulated by microRNA (miRNA) molecules. While some miRNAs impact onset and progression of cancer, others can actually suppress the development of malignant tumors and are useful in cancer therapy. They can also serve as potential biomarkers for early cancer detection. In a new issue of Cancer Biomarkers, investigators report on non-coding miRNAs as appealing biomarkers for malignancy. "MiRNA-based therapies are attractive partly due to the fact that these molecules can target ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have conducted a study showing that many skills and practices that could help scientists make use of technological and computational opportunities are only marginally being taught in California's formal graduate programs in the environmental sciences. The researchers found, too, that graduate students in the state were, in general, not engaged in data management practices. Of the students surveyed who had already completed their graduate degree, only 29.3 percent had made their research data products ...

He loves her, he loves her not. A new study led by Joshua Hart, assistant professor of psychology, suggests that men's insecurities about relationships and conflicted views of women as romantic partners and rivals could lead some to adopt sexist attitudes about women. The study was recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal. Hart and his co-authors, Jacqueline Hung '11, a former student of Hart's, and psychology professors Peter Glick of Lawrence University and Rachel Dinero of Cazenovia College, surveyed more than 400 ...

Many high school students work in addition to going to school, and some argue that employment is good for at-risk youths. But a new study has found that placing juvenile offenders in jobs without ensuring that they attend school may make them more antisocial. The study, by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, Temple University, and the University of California, Irvine, appears in the journal Child Development. While evidence suggests that working long hours during the school year has negative effects on adolescent antisocial behavior among middle- and upper-income ...

Fights between siblings about simple things, like whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher, aren't harmless. Rather, such fights are about equality and fairness, and they can lead to depression, according to a new study. The longitudinal research, by researchers at the University of Missouri, appears in the journal Child Development. Although teen siblings fight about a lot of different issues, many of their fights can be categorized as being about equality and fairness (for example, whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher) or invasion of personal space (for example, ...

Low-income teenagers who have supportive role models and engage in adaptive strategies have lower levels of a marker for cardiovascular risk than low-income teens without such resources, according to a new study. The study, by researchers at Northwestern University and the University of British Columbia, is published in the journal Child Development. "Low socioeconomic status is one of the strongest determinants of chronic disease in developed countries," notes Edith Chen, professor of psychology and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern ...

It's not how smart students are but how motivated they are and how they study that determines their growth in math achievement. That's the main finding of a new study that appears in the journal Child Development. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Munich and the University of Bielefeld. "While intelligence as assessed by IQ tests is important in the early stages of developing mathematical competence, motivation and study skills play a more important role in students' subsequent growth," according to Kou Murayama, postdoctoral researcher of ...

Toddlers with more developed language skills are better able to manage frustration and less likely to express anger by the time they're in preschool. That's the conclusion of a new longitudinal study from researchers at the Pennsylvania State University that appears in the journal Child Development. "This is the first longitudinal evidence of early language abilities predicting later aspects of anger regulation," according to Pamela M. Cole, liberal arts research professor of psychology and human development and family studies at Pennsylvania State University, who was ...

Familiar categories whose members appear in orderly sequences are processed differently than others in the brain, according to new research published by David Eagleman in the open access journal Frontiers in Neuroscience on December 20th, 2012. The study suggests that ordinal sequences have a strong spatial quality and activate a region of the brain not thought to be directly involved in language acquisition and production. Also, sequences shown in the correct order stimulated less brain activity in comparison to sequences that were not in the correct order, implying that ...

Pina Fratamico is on the quest to find the easiest and fastest way to test for harmful Escherichia coli in ground beef. In an article published in Frontiers in Microbiology on the 20th of December, she explores using a next-generation real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) system to discover specific gene targets that indicate the presence of dangerous foodborne pathogens. The results show that assays performed using this PCR system are rapid, sensitive, and reliable. "Testing using these types of systems is faster, easier, and more reproducible than previous methods, ...

WASHINGTON — Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center say they have new evidence that challenges scientific dogma involving two fatal neurodegenerative diseases — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) — and, in the process, have uncovered a possible therapeutic target as a novel strategy to treat both disorders. The study, posted online today in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, found that the issue in both diseases is the inability of the cell's protein garbage disposal system to "pull out" and destroy TDP-43, a powerful, ...