Santa Barbara, Calif. –– Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for before-and-after analysis, a team of researchers including a UC Santa Barbara graduate student discovered positive changes in brain activity in children with autism who received a particular type of behavioral therapy. Work completed at Yale University's Child Study Center used fMRI as the tool for measuring the impact of Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) –– therapy pioneered at UCSB by Lynn Koegel, clinical director of the Koegel Autism Center –– on both lower- and higher-functioning children ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Obesity rates have increased dramatically in the last few decades. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, African Americans make up more than 60 percent of the overweight and obese population, while only 13 percent of the total population. A new study from the University of Missouri School of Journalism shows that American newspapers, and specifically newspapers geared toward an African-American audience, frame stories on obesity in a negative way. Hyunmin Lee, who performed her research while a doctoral student at MU, says this negative framing could have ...

In laboratory studies, scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have developed a way to personalize chemotherapy drug selection for cancer patients by using cell lines created from their own tumors. If the technique is successful in further studies, it could replace current laboratory tests to optimize drug selection that have proven technically challenging, of limited use, and slow, the researchers say. Oncologists typically choose anticancer drugs based on the affected organs' location and/or the appearance and activity of cancer cells when viewed under ...

There's a billboard up ahead, a roadside sign full of language and imagery. Next stop: the emotionally distracted zone. One University of Alberta researcher has discovered that language used on billboards can provoke an emotional response that affects our driving abilities. And whether the words have a negative or positive connotation seems to determine whether the attention wanders or the foot gets heavier. Lead study author Michelle Chan says that although plenty of literature exists on road rage, none of it deals with external emotional stimuli. Chan and her U of ...

Women who live in a culture in which they are objectified by others may in turn begin to objectify themselves. This kind of self-objectification may reduce women's involvement in social activism, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Psychological scientist Rachel Calogero of the University of Kent, Canterbury hypothesized that women who self-objectify — valuing their appearance over their competence — would show less motivation to challenge the gender status quo, ultimately reducing their ...

New research sheds light on how the brain encodes objects with multiple features, a fundamental task for the perceptual system. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that we have limited ability to perceive mixed color-shape associations among objects that exist in several locations. Research suggests that neurons that encode a certain feature — shape or color, for example — fire in synchrony with neurons that encode other features of the same object. Psychological scientists Liat Goldfarb of the ...

ANN ARBOR—Scientists have known for nearly a century that cold-blooded animals, such as worms, flies and fish all live longer in cold environments, but have not known exactly why. Researchers at the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute have identified a genetic program that promotes longevity of roundworms in cold environments—and this genetic program also exists in warm-blooded animals, including humans. "This raises the intriguing possibility that exposure to cold air—or pharmacological stimulation of the cold-sensitive genetic program—may promote longevity ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Healthy menopausal women carrying a well-known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease showed measurable signs of accelerated biological aging, a new study has found. However, in carriers who started hormone therapy at menopause and remained on that therapy, this acceleration was absent, the researchers said. Hormone therapy for non-carriers of the risk factor, a gene variant called ApoE4, had no protective effect on their biological aging. "This shows that ApoE4 is contributing to aging at the cellular level well before any outward symptoms of ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — New Mayo Clinic research suggests that blood may hold clues to whether post-menopausal women may be at an increased risk for areas of brain damage that can lead to memory problems and possibly increased risk of stroke. The study shows that blood's tendency to clot may contribute to areas of brain damage called white matter hyperintensities. The findings are published in the Feb. 13 online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study involved 95 women with an average age of 53 who recently went through menopause. ...

High school students whose friends' average grade point average (GPA) is greater than their own have a tendency to increase their own GPA over the course of a year, according to research published February 13 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Hiroki Sayama from Binghamton University and his collaborators from Maine-Endwell High School in Endwell, New York, including four high school student researchers. Previous studies have shown that a student's social network can influence obesity, emotional state and other cognitive traits and behavior. However, this is the first ...

Standing and walking for longer stretches improves insulin sensitivity and blood lipid levels more than an hour of intense exercise each day does, but only if the calories spent in both forms of exercise are similar. The findings are published February 13 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Hans Savelberg and colleagues from Maastricht University, Netherlands. The researchers recruited eighteen normal-weight 19 to 24-year-old participants for their study and asked them to follow three regimes. In the first, participants were instructed to sit for 14 hours each day ...

A new owl is the first endemic bird species discovered on the island of Lombok, Indonesia, according to research published February 13 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by an international team headed by George Sangster of the Swedish Museum of Natural History and colleagues from other institutions. The new species has long been confused with a more widespread Indonesian owl species because of its similar plumage. However, in September 2003, two members of the team independently discovered that the vocalizations of the owls on Lombok were unique and different from ...

A team of political scientists and neuroscientists has shown that liberals and conservatives use different parts of the brain when they make risky decisions, and these regions can be used to predict which political party a person prefers. The new study suggests that while genetics or parental influence may play a significant role, being a Republican or Democrat changes how the brain functions. Dr. Darren Schreiber, a researcher in neuropolitics at the University of Exeter, has been working in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California, San Diego on ...

Soldiers preoccupied with threat at the time of enlistment or with avoiding it just before deployment were more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in a study of Israeli infantrymen. Such pre-deployment threat vigilance and avoidance, interacting with combat experience and an emotion-related gene, accounted for more than a third of PTSD symptoms that emerged later, say National Institutes of Health scientists, who conducted the study in collaboration with American and Israeli colleagues. "Since biased attention predicted future risk for PTSD, computerized ...

The richer the assortment of amphibian species living in a pond, the more protection that community of frogs, toads and salamanders has against a parasitic infection that can cause severe deformities, including the growth of extra legs, according to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder. The findings, published Feb. 14 in the journal Nature, support the idea that greater biodiversity in larger-scale ecosystems, such as forests or grasslands, may also provide greater protection against diseases, including those that attack humans. For example, a larger number ...

CHESTNUT HILL, MA (Feb. 14, 2013) – Chemists at Boston College have designed a new class of catalysts triggered by the charge of a single proton, the team reports in the most recent edition of the journal Nature. The simple organic molecules offer a sustainable and highly efficient platform for chemical reactions that produce sets of molecules crucial to advances in medicine and the life sciences. Unearthing a reliable, truly general, efficient synthesis of single mirror-image isomers has proven elusive. Previous methods suffer from a combination of extreme temperatures, ...

A significant proportion of HIV positive patients may not be disclosing their infection to NHS staff, when turning up for treatment at sexual health clinics, suggests preliminary research published online in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections. If the findings reflect a national trend, this could have implications for the true prevalence of undiagnosed HIV infection in the population, which is based on the numbers of "undiagnosed" patients at sexual health clinics, say the authors. Currently, it is estimated that around one in four people in the UK who is HIV ...

Over a span of nearly 20 years, California's tobacco control program cost $2.4 billion and reduced health care costs by $134 billion, according to a new study by UC San Francisco. Additionally, the study -- covering the beginning of the program in 1989 to 2008 -- found that the state program helped lead to some 6.8 billion fewer packs of cigarettes being sold that would have been worth $28.5 billion in sales to cigarette companies. The study was designed to calculate the fiscal impact of California's large public health program on smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption. ...

We make choices about pretty much everything, all the time – "Should I go for a walk or grab a coffee?"; "Shall I look at who just came in or continue to watch TV?" – and to do so we need something common as a basis to make the choice. Dr John Fennell and Dr Roland Baddeley of Bristol's School of Experimental Psychology followed a hunch that the common quantity, often referred to simply as reward, was a representation of what could be gained, together with how risky and uncertain it is. They proposed that these dimensions would be a unique feature of all objects and ...

TEMPE, Ariz. – You may want to ramp up your romance this year by sharing a candlelight dinner, a walk on the beach, or even the scent of a perfume, but will that help you find your perfect mate? For one wasp species, it only takes a whiff of his special love potion to know whether he's "Mr. Right." Unlike humans, most insects rely on their sense of smell when looking for a mate. Scientists have found that sex pheromones play an important role in finding a suitable partner of the same species; yet, little is known about the evolution and genetic basis of these alluring ...

New York, NY (February 13, 2013) —For consumers of the typical Western diet—laden with levels of salt detrimental to long-term health—it may be hard to believe that there is such a thing as an innate aversion to very high concentrations of salt. But Charles Zuker, PhD, and colleagues at Columbia University Medical Center have discovered how the tongue detects high concentrations of salt (think seawater levels, not potato chips), the first step in a salt-avoiding behavior common to most mammals. The findings could serve as a springboard for the development of taste ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The greatest battle in Earth's history has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, isn't over yet, and until now no one knew it existed, scientists reported today in the journal Nature. In one corner is SAR11, a bacterium that's the most abundant organism in the oceans, survives where most other cells would die and plays a major role in the planet's carbon cycle. It had been theorized that SAR11 was so small and widespread that it must be invulnerable to attack. In the other corner, and so strange looking that scientists previously didn't ...

PHILADELPHIA — The spring 2011 flood on the Mississippi was among the largest floods ever, the river swelling over its banks and wreaking destruction in the surrounding areas. But a University of Pennsylvania-led study also shows that the flood reaped environmental benefits — transporting and laying down new sediment in portions of the Delta — that may help maintain the area's wetlands. The study, led by Ph.D. student Nicole Khan of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, is the first to quantify the amount of sediment transported to wetlands by a flood on ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Research shows that married people have better mental and physical health than their unmarried peers and are less likely to develop chronic conditions than their widowed or divorced counterparts. A University of Missouri expert says that people who have happy marriages are more likely to rate their health as better as they age; aging adults whose physical health is declining could especially benefit from improving their marriages. Christine Proulx, an assistant professor in the MU Department of Human Development and Family Studies, examined the long-term ...

The structure of a man's face may indicate his tendency to express racially prejudiced beliefs, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Studies have shown that facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) is associated with testosterone-related behaviors, which some researchers have linked with aggression. But psychological scientist Eric Hehman of Dartmouth College and colleagues at the University of Delaware speculated that these behaviors may have more to do with social dominance than outright aggression. The ...