COLUMBIA, Mo. -- The recent economic downturn and volatile financial markets have drastically reduced the retirement accounts of many current and future retirees. In a new study, a University of Missouri financial expert has found that many Americans choose to retire when the economic markets are peaking, an action that can, ironically, cause major problems for the long-term financial stability of retirees. "Potential retirees often will first meet their targeted retirement savings goals during an up market and will be tempted to retire at that point," said Rui Yao, an ...

African-American youth ages 12-20 are seeing more advertisements for alcohol in magazines and on TV compared with all youth ages 12-20, according to a new report from the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The report is available on CAMY's website, www.camy.org. The report analyzes alcohol exposure by type and brand among African-American youth in comparison to all youth. It also assesses exposure of African-American youth to alcohol advertising relative to African-American adults across various media ...

WASHINGTON — Techniques ranging from running to push-ups to sit-and-reach tests have been used to measure various aspects of fitness in children and adults. However, evidence is sparse on how well some of these techniques correspond to desired health outcomes in children, fueling debate about the best fitness measures for youth. Fitness testing has traditionally focused on four aspects: heart and lung function, body composition, muscular and skeletal fitness, and flexibility. A committee convened by the Institute of Medicine undertook a comprehensive review of the ...

PHILADELPHIA— Contrast-enhanced ultrasound was found to better detect high-grade prostate cancer than conventional methods, making it a more appropriate approach for screening clinically important cancers and monitoring low-risk ones with less biopsies, researchers from Thomas Jefferson University and Hospitals conclude in a phase III study published online in September in the Journal of Urology. Findings from the randomized, double-blind trial revealed the technique, which uses microbubbles to measure change in blood flow, found almost three times as many higher grade ...

CLEMSON — Sports journalists covering the Penn State sex abuse scandal posted commentary on Twitter that was inherently biased, Clemson University and University of Louisville researchers say. Their study explored how sports journalists used Twitter to develop and promote their stories during the scandal. Their research findings were published Thursday in the International Journal of Sport Communication. While sports journalists used Twitter in ways that were similar to traditional media channels, a key finding was that they posted commentary that reflected a personal ...

San Diego, CA, September 27, 2012 – Helping children achieve their full potential in school is of great concern to everyone, and a number of commercial products have been developed to try and achieve this goal. The Cogmed Working Memory Training program (http://www.cogmed.com/) is such an example and is marketed to schools and parents of children with attention problems caused by poor working memory. But, does the program actually work? The target article in the September issue of Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (JARMAC) calls into question Cogmed's ...

In the medium term, an investment of only $2500 in photovoltaic cells would suffice to provide more than enough electricity for the consumption of a four people household. This promising scenario has been made possible by the innovations accomplished by EPFL's Institute of Microengineering in Neuchatel. The team of prof. Christophe Ballif, director of the Photovoltaics Laboratory (PVlab), presented their work at the European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition that just took place in Frankfurt. The PVlab specializes in thin film solar cells and has been ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have found that recovery from an emerging, minimally invasive surgical technique called Laparo-Endoscopic Single-Site Surgery (LESS) was less painful for kidney cancer patients than traditional laparoscopic surgery. Study results were published in the September online edition of Urology. "In the largest prospective study of kidney cancer patients to date, the UC San Diego study showed less use of narcotic pain medication and lower pain scores upon hospital discharge," said Ithaar Derweesh, MD, senior ...

VIDEO: This video shows how the SMART surgical tool is able to “hold still” by responding to unexpected movement from a surgical target (in this case, a chicken embryo). In the... Click here for more information. WASHINGTON, Sept. 27, 2012—Even the most skilled and steady surgeons experience minute, almost imperceptible hand tremors when performing delicate tasks. Normally, these tiny motions are inconsequential, but for doctors specializing in fine-scale surgery, such as ...

NEW YORK (Sept. 27, 2012) -- A new study by Weill Cornell Medical College researchers shows that adolescents' reactions to threat remain high even when the danger is no longer present. According to researchers, once a teenager's brain is triggered by a threat, the ability to suppress an emotional response to the threat is diminished which may explain the peak in anxiety and stress-related disorders during this developmental period. The study, published Sept. 17 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is the first to decode ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With the U.S. economy vulnerable to weather events costing billions of dollars, an expert panel today asked Congress to create the first U.S. Weather Commission. The commission would provide guidance to policymakers on leveraging weather expertise across government and the private sector to better protect lives and businesses. "The nation must focus its weather resources on the areas of greatest need in order to keep our economy competitive and provide maximum protection of lives and property," says Thomas Bogdan, president of the University Corporation ...

SALT LAKE CITY Sept. 26, 2012 – Seismologists have known for years that the Indo-Australian plate of Earth's crust is slowly breaking apart, but they saw it in action last April when at least four faults broke in a magnitude-8.7 earthquake that may be the largest of its type ever recorded. The great Indian Ocean quake of April 11, 2012 previously was reported as 8.6 magnitude, and the new estimate means the quake was 40 percent larger than had been believed, scientists from the University of Utah and University of California, Santa Cruz, report in the Sept. 27 issue of ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--The massive earthquake that struck under the Indian Ocean southwest of Sumatra on April 11, 2012, came as a surprise to seismologists and left them scrambling to figure out exactly what had happened. Analysis of the seismic waves generated during the event has now revealed a complicated faulting process unlike anything seen before. "Nobody was anticipating an earthquake of this size and type, and the complexity of the faulting surprised everybody I've spoken to about this," said Thorne Lay, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of ...

SEATTLE – Male DNA is commonly found in the brains of women, most likely derived from prior pregnancy with a male fetus, according to first-of-its-kind research conducted at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. While the medical implications of male DNA and male cells in the brain are unknown, studies of other kinds of microchimerism – the harboring of genetic material and cells that were exchanged between fetus and mother during pregnancy – have linked the phenomenon to autoimmune diseases and cancer, sometimes for better and other times for worse. The study findings ...

A new study published online in the journal Nature suggests it might be possible to develop vaccines to prevent premature birth and other pregnancy complications. If so, such vaccines would be the first intended to stimulate the subset of regulatory CD4 T cells that suppress the immune response. Current vaccines are specifically designed to stimulate T cell subsets that activate the immune response. The study, led by a researcher at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, shows the immune system of a pregnant mother stimulates cells that selectively prevent ...

BOSTON, MA—There are approximately 400,000 people in the United States with multiple sclerosis. Worldwide, the number jumps to more than 2.1 million people. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to treating the millions with multiple sclerosis, what if doctors could categorize patients to create more personalized treatments? A new study by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) may one day make this idea a reality in the fight against the debilitating autoimmune disease. A research team led by Philip De Jager, MD, PhD, BWH Department of Neurology, senior ...

Swift predators are common in the animal world but are rare in the plant kingdom. New research shows that Drosera glanduligera, a small sundew from southern Australia, deploys one of the fastest and most spectacular trapping mechanisms known among carnivorous plants. The study, published Sep. 26 in the open access journal PLOS ONE, is a collaboration between the Plant Biomechanics Group at the University of Freiburg and private sundew cultivators from Weil am Rhein, and provides the first experimental demonstration of fast-moving snap tentacles in sundew plants propelling ...

This year's largest earthquake, a magnitude 8.6 temblor on April 11 centered in the East Indian Ocean off Sumatra, did little damage, but it triggered quakes around the world for at least a week, according to a new analysis by seismologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The April 11 quake was unusually large – the tenth largest in the last 100 years and, similar to a few other recent large quakes, triggered small quakes during the three hours it took for seismic waves to travel through Earth's crust. The new study ...

Cannabis users have a greater chance of relapse to cannabis use when they experience certain withdrawal symptoms, according to research published Sep. 26 in the open access journal PLOS ONE led by David Allsop of the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC) at the University of New South Wales. The authors tested a group of dependent cannabis users over a two week period of abstinence for impairment related to their withdrawal symptoms. Findings were correlated with the probability of relapse to cannabis use during the abstinence period, and the level ...

Small portions of male DNA, most likely left over in a mother's body by a male fetus can be detected in the maternal brain relatively frequently, according to a report published Sep. 26 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by William Chan of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and his colleagues. The process, called fetal 'microchimerism (Mc)', is common in other tissues such as blood, but this is the first evidence of male Mc in the human female brain. Microchimerism can be both beneficial and harmful to maternal health, since it is associated with processes such ...

Spending too much time looking at high heels may influence how a viewer perceives the gender of an androgynous face, according to new research published Sep. 26 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Amir Homayoun Javadi of Technische Universität, Dresden and his colleagues. The study sheds new light on how the objects surrounding us may influence our perceptions of gender. The authors found that when people view objects highly associated with one gender, like high heels for women or electric shavers for men, for a short period of time and are then asked to identify the ...

Achieving the best performance from a horse is the goal of not just professional riders, but also the millions of amateur and hobby riders all over the world. A new article published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Veterinary Research looks at the issues surrounding training, competition environment and practices, and how the psychology of horse mood, emotion and temperament can be used to enhance performance. A sister article looks at the devastating disease laminitis, and finds that the anti-inflammatory protein apolipoprotein A-IV (APOA-IV) is raised in chronic ...

An international team of scientists have identified for the first time a key factor responsible for declining muscle repair during ageing, and discovered how to halt the process in mice with a common drug. Although an early study, the findings provide clues as to how muscles lose mass with age, which can result in weakness that affects mobility and may cause falls. The study, to be published in the journal Nature, involved researchers from King's College London, Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. The study looked at stem cells found inside muscle ...

Results from an observational study evaluating a new anti-TB drug have found that the treatment can improve outcomes and reduce mortality among patients with both MDR-TB and XDR-TB. The research, published online ahead of print today (27 September 2012) in the European Respiratory Journal, suggests a drug called delamanid could have a public health benefit for MDR-TB and also for XDR-TB, as few effective treatment options are currently available. Over the past two decades, multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) has emerged as a significant public health threat, with strains ...

A warming climate and rising seas will enable salt marshes to more rapidly capture and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, possibly playing a role in slowing the rate of climate change, according to a new study led by a University of Virginia environmental scientist and published in the Sept. 27 issue of the journal Nature. Carbon dioxide is the predominant so-called "greenhouse gas" that acts as sort of an atmospheric blanket, trapping the Earth's heat. Over time, an abundance of carbon dioxide can change the global climate, according to generally accepted scientific ...