Following a three-year study using more than 2,800 mice, a University of Missouri researcher was not able to replicate a series of previous studies by another research group investigating the controversial chemical BPA. The MU study is not claiming that BPA is safe, but that the previous series of studies are not reproducible. The MU study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also investigated an estrogenic compound found in plants, genistein, in the same three-year study. "Our findings don't say anything about the positive or negative effects ...

This press release is available in Spanish. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are developing strategies to help livestock producers control stable flies, the most damaging arthropod pests of cattle in the United States. An economic impact assessment by scientists at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Agroecosystem Management Research Unit (AMRU) in Lincoln, Neb., looked at four sectors of cattle production: dairy, cow/calf, pastured and range stocker, and animals on feed. They found that stable flies cost the U.S. cattle industry more than $2.4 ...

A new ray of hope has broken through the clouded outcomes associated with Alzheimer's disease. A new research report published in January 2013 print issue of the FASEB Journal by scientists from the National Institutes of Health shows that when a molecule called TFP5 is injected into mice with disease that is the equivalent of human Alzheimer's, symptoms are reversed and memory is restored—without obvious toxic side effects. "We hope that clinical trial studies in AD patients should yield an extended and a better quality of life as observed in mice upon TFP5 treatment," ...

BOSTON – A small percentage of men in a prostate cancer study complained that their penis seemed shorter following treatment, with some saying that it interfered with intimate relationships and caused them to regret the type of treatment they chose. Complaints were more common in men treated with radical prostatectomy (surgical removal of the prostate) or male hormone-blocking drugs combined with radiation therapy, according to the study by researchers from Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center (DF/BWCC). No men reported a perceived shortening of their penis following ...

In Ethiopia, where more than 1.2 million people are infected with HIV, disclosure of infection by patients is important in the fight against the disease. A new study led by a Brown sociology researcher investigates HIV-positive status disclosure rates among men and women in Africa's second most populous country. In the December 17 issue of AIDS Care, Ayalu Reda, a sociology graduate student, and colleagues from Jimma University in Ethiopia found that among a sample of 1,540 patients receiving antiretroviral treatment in eastern Ethiopia, a majority (66 percent) disclosed ...

Alexandria, VA – The Burgess Shale provides us with a rare glimpse into the softer side of paleontology. Most fossils are preserved hard parts – bones, teeth and shells – but one of the most famous fossil locales in the world, the Burgess Shale, reveals subtle soft body structures like gills and eyes delicately preserved between the layers of dark rock. For more than 100 years, the Burgess Shale has been giving us a unique perspective on what life was like in the Cambrian seas. This month, EARTH Magazine contributor Mary Caperton Morton reminds us that no matter how well ...

MAYWOOD, Il. - Millions of Americans read physician ratings on websites such as Healthgrades.com, but such ratings are based on scores from an average of only 2.4 patients, a Loyola University Medical Center study has found. The study of 500 randomly selected urologists found that 79.6 percent of physicians were rated by at least one of the 10 free physician-review websites researchers examined. Eighty-six percent of physicians had positive ratings, with 36 percent receiving highly positive ratings. Healthgrades had the most physician ratings. Results were published ...

Today, mothers of newborns find themselves confronting a common dilemma: Should they let their babies "cry it out" when they wake up at night? Or should they rush to comfort their crying little one? In fact, waking up in the middle of the night is the most common concern that parents of infants report to pediatricians. Now, a new study from Temple psychology professor Marsha Weinraub gives parents some scientific facts to help with that decision. The study, published in Developmental Psychology, supports the idea that a majority of infants are best left to self-soothe ...

Athens, Ga. – Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys—even when they perform worse on standardized tests? New research from the University of Georgia and Columbia University published in the current issue of Journal of Human Resources suggests that it's because of their classroom behavior, which may lead teachers to assign girls higher grades than their male counterparts. "The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as 'approaches toward learning,'" said Christopher Cornwell, head of economics ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Almost all computer chips use two types of transistors: one called p-type, for positive, and one called n-type, for negative. Improving the performance of the chip as a whole requires parallel improvements in both types. At the IEEE's International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in December, researchers from MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) presented a p-type transistor with the highest "carrier mobility" yet measured. By that standard, the device is twice as fast as previous experimental p-type transistors and almost four times as fast ...

Tropical Storm Freda may no longer be a tropical storm, but as a low pressure area it is bringing rainfall and gusty winds to New Caledonia. Two NASA satellites captured two different looks at the storm. Wind shear has punched Freda down to tropical storm status on Jan. 1 and weakened it to a remnant low pressure area on Jan. 2. NASA's Aqua satellite showed strong thunderstorms were over New Caledonia early on Jan. 2, while NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite peered under the hood of Freda's clouds and measured some moderate to heavy rainfall the ...

BETHESDA, Md. (Jan. 2, 2012)—A new study led by North Carolina researchers has found that when it comes to weight- and fat loss, aerobic training is better than resistance training. The study is believed to the largest randomized trial to directly compare changes in body composition induced by comparable amounts of time spent doing aerobic and resistant training, or both in combination, among previously inactive overweight or obese non-diabetic adults. The study is entitled "Effects of aerobic and/or resistance training on body mass and fat mass in overweight or obese ...

There's a saying that goes, "as long as there are tests, there will be prayer in public schools." At one time, that likely reflected a fairly uniform view about school prayer: that despite what federal law said about the practice, religious Americans by and large approved of it. A new study, however, paints a more complicated picture of attitudes toward school prayer over the last four decades, finding sharp differences in school-prayer support between different generations and their religious denominations. Forthcoming in the journal Sociological Forum, the study ...

Demyelinating diseases, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), are frequently associated with the progressive loss of vision. The retinal nerve damage is thought to be caused by immune system-mediated inflammation; however, other demyelinating disorders, such as Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease, do not involve the immune system, suggesting that there are other causes of retinal nerve damage. Deimination is a protein modification that is altered in patients with MS and PMD. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Sanjoy Bhattacharya at the University ...

Bacterial imbalance contributes to intestinal inflammation and carcinogenesis Instability in the composition of gut bacterial communities (dysbiosis) has been linked to common human intestinal disorders, including inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer; however, it is unclear if dysbiosis can instigate disease or if it is a consequence of the underlying disorder. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Mathias Chamaillard at the University Lille Nord de France in Lille, France, examined intestinal inflammation and tumorigenesis ...

Instability in the composition of gut bacterial communities (dysbiosis) has been linked to common human intestinal disorders, including inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer; however, it is unclear if dysbiosis can instigate disease or if it is a consequence of the underlying disorder. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Mathias Chamaillard at the University Lille Nord de France in Lille, France, examined intestinal inflammation and tumorigenesis in a mouse model of dysbiosis. Dysbiosis enhanced intestinal inflammation and ...

PITTSBURGH, Jan. 2, 2013 – The presence of a certain molecule allows the immune system to effectively police tuberculosis (TB) of the lungs and prevent it from turning into an active and deadly infection, according to a new study led by researchers at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Their findings appear today in the online version of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. More than 2 billion people or one-third of the world's population are infected with mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes ...

Medical centers that elect to keep psychiatric files private and separate from the rest of a person's medical record may be doing their patients a disservice, a Johns Hopkins study concludes. In a survey of psychiatry departments at 18 of the top American hospitals as ranked by U.S. News & World Report's Best Hospitals in 2007, a Johns Hopkins team learned that fewer than half of the hospitals had all inpatient psychiatric records in their electronic medical record systems and that fewer than 25 percent gave non-psychiatrists full access to those records. Strikingly, ...

Certain plants and animals protect themselves against temperatures below freezing with antifreeze proteins. How the larva of the beetle Dendroides canadensis manages to withstand temperatures down to -30 degrees Celsius is reported by an international team of researchers led by Prof. Dr. Martina Havenith from the Department of Physical Chemistry II at the Ruhr-Universität in the journal PNAS. Together with American colleagues, the RUB-researchers showed that interactions between the antifreeze proteins and water molecules contribute significantly to protection against the ...

Magnets have practically become everyday objects. Earlier on, however, the universe consisted only of nonmagnetic elements and particles. Just how the magnetic forces came into existence has been researched by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Schlickeiser at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. In the journal Physical Review Letters, he describes a new mechanism for the magnetisation of the universe even before the emergence of the first stars. No permanent magnets in the early universe Before the formation of the first stars, the luminous matter consisted ...

Elementary school students often learn that plants grow toward the light. This seems straightforward, but in reality, the genes and pathways that allow plants to grow and move in response to their environment are not fully understood. Leading plant scientists explore one of the most fundamental processes in plant biology—plant movement in response to light, water, and gravity—in a January Special Issue of the American Journal of Botany. Plant movements, known as tropisms, are crucial for plant survival from the second a plant germinates to how a plant positions its flowers ...

The western long-beaked echidna, one of the world's five egg-laying species of mammal, became extinct in Australia thousands of years ago…or did it? Smithsonian scientists and colleagues have found evidence suggesting that not only did these animals survive in Australia far longer than previously thought, but that they may very well still exist in parts of the country today. The team's findings are published in the Dec. 28, 2012 issue of the journal ZooKeys. With a small and declining population confined to the Indonesian portion of the island of New Guinea, the western ...

Two new species of cichlid fish from Lake Victoria are described by biologists from Naturalis Biodiversity Center (Research Department Marine Zoology) and the Institute of Biology Leiden (Section Integrative Zoology), the Netherlands. One of these species is named in honour of Tijs Goldschmidt, author of Darwin's Dreampond. This book, published in nine languages, describes the dramatic extinction of hundreds of cichlid species in Lake Victoria in the 1980s due to the introduced Nile perch and other human induced environmental changes. In 1985, Leiden biologists made a ...

Advances in bio-technologies and computer software have helped make genome sequencing much more common than in the past. But still in question are both the accuracy of different sequencing methods and the best ways to evaluate these efforts. Now, computer scientists have devised a tool to better measure the validity of genome sequencing. The method, which is described in the journal PLOS ONE, allows for the evaluation of a wide range of genome sequencing procedures by tracking a small group of key statistical features in the basic structure of the assembled genome. Such ...

ANN ARBOR—Researchers used electricity on certain regions in the brain of a patient with chronic, severe facial pain to release an opiate-like substance that's considered one of the body's most powerful painkillers. The findings expand on previous work done at the University of Michigan, Harvard University and the City University of New York where researchers delivered electricity through sensors on the skulls of chronic migraine patients, and found a decrease in the intensity and pain of their headache attacks. However, the researchers then couldn't completely explain ...