The press release
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Medicine14 Feb 2013

California's Tobacco Control Program generates huge health care savings, UCSF study shows

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. ...

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Science14 Feb 2013

Cracking the semantic code

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 ...

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Science14 Feb 2013

Finding 'Mr. Right,' how insects sniff out the perfect mate

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 ...

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Science14 Feb 2013

Scientists discover how animals taste, and avoid, high salt concentrations

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 ...

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Environment14 Feb 2013

A war without end -- with Earth's carbon cycle held in the balance

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 ...

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Environment14 Feb 2013

Penn geologists quantify, characterize sediment carried by Mississippi flood to Louisiana's wetlands

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 ...

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Medicine14 Feb 2013

Happily married couples consider themselves healthier, expert says

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 ...

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Science14 Feb 2013

Facial structure may predict endorsement of racial prejudice

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 ...

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Environment14 Feb 2013

NASA scientists part of Arctic Sea ice study

New research using combined records of ice measurements from NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), the European Space Agency's CryoSat-2 satellite, airborne surveys and ocean-based sensors shows Arctic sea ice volume declined 36 percent in the autumn and 9 percent in the winter over the last decade. The work builds on previous studies using submarine and NASA satellite data and confirms computer model estimates that showed ice volume decreases over the last decade, and builds a foundation for a multi-decadal record of sea ice volume changes. In a report ...

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Science14 Feb 2013

Resignation of Pope Benedict XVI demands a close look at rules of modern papal election

New Rochelle, NY, February 13, 2013—When Pope Benedict XVI ends his reign at the end of February he will be the first pope to do so before his death in nearly 600 years. He shocked the Catholic Church by announcing his resignation and set in place a centuries-old process to select his successor. The fascinating Conclaves system for electing a new pope, which has been in place since the late 1200s is described in "Creating the Rules of the Modern Papal Election," published in Election Law Journal, from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available on the Election ...

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Social Science14 Feb 2013

Why there are bad learners: EEG activity predicts learning success

The reason why some people are worse at learning than others has been revealed by a research team from Berlin, Bochum, and Leipzig, operating within the framework of the Germany-wide network "Bernstein Focus State Dependencies of Learning". They have discovered that the main problem is not that learning processes are inefficient per se, but that the brain insufficiently processes the information to be learned. The scientists trained the subjects' sense of touch to be more sensitive. In subjects who responded well to the training, the EEG revealed characteristic changes ...

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Science14 Feb 2013

Genetic study pursues elusive goal: How many humpbacks existed before whaling?

Scientists from Stanford University, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the American Museum of Natural History, and other organizations are closing in on the answer to an important conservation question: how many humpback whales once existed in the North Atlantic? Building on previous genetic analyses to estimate the pre-whaling population of North Atlantic humpback whales, the research team has found that humpbacks used to exist in numbers of more than 100,000 individuals. The new, more accurate estimate is lower than previously calculated but still two to three times ...

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Technology14 Feb 2013

Robots with lift

They can already stand, walk, wriggle under obstacles, and change colors. Now researchers are adding a new skill to the soft robot arsenal: jumping. Using small explosions produced by a mix of methane and oxygen, researchers at Harvard have designed a soft robot that can leap as much as a foot in the air. That ability to jump could one day prove critical in allowing the robots to avoid obstacles during search and rescue operations. The research is described in a Feb. 6 paper in the international edition of Angewandte Chemie. "Initially, our soft robot systems used pneumatic ...

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Medicine14 Feb 2013

Study supports regulation of hospitals

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Hospital beds tend to get used simply because they're available – not necessarily because they're needed, according to a first-of-its-kind study that supports continued regulation of new hospitals. Michigan State University researchers examined all 1.1 million admissions at Michigan's 169 acute-care hospitals in 2010 and found a strong correlation between bed availability and use, even when accounting for myriad factors that may lead to hospitalization. These factors include nature of the ailment, health insurance coverage, access to primary care ...

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Science14 Feb 2013

Clues to chromosome crossovers

Neil Hunter's laboratory in the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences has placed another piece in the puzzle of how sexual reproduction shuffles genes while making sure sperm and eggs get the right number of chromosomes. The basis of sexual reproduction is that a fertilized egg gets half its chromosomes from each parent — sperm and eggs each contributing one partner in each pair of chromosomes. We humans have 23 pairs of 46 chromosomes: so our sperm or eggs have 23 chromosomes each. Before we get to the sex part, though, those sperm and eggs have to be formed from ...

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Medicine14 Feb 2013

Preventing obesity transmission during pregnancy

A much neglected part of the obesity epidemic is that it has resulted in more overweight/obese women before and during pregnancy. Their offspring also tend to have higher birth weights and more body fat, and carry an increased risk of obesity and chronic diseases later in life. However, the nutritional factors and mechanisms involved pre and during pregnancy that may influence child obesity remain uncertain. A recent publication by ILSI Europe identifies and discusses key contributing factors leading to obesity. In an article recently published in Annals of Nutrition and ...

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Medicine14 Feb 2013

Probiotic-derived treatment offers new hope for premature babies

BETHESDA, Md. (Feb. 13, 2013)—"Good" bacteria that live in our intestines have been linked with a variety of health benefits, from fighting disease to preventing obesity. In a new study, Kriston Ganguli of Massachusetts General Hospital for Children and Harvard Medical School and her colleagues have discovered another advantage to these friendly microscopic tenants: Chemicals secreted by good bacteria that typically live in the intestines of babies could reduce the frequency and severity of a common and often-lethal disease of premature infants. This disease, known as ...

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Space14 Feb 2013

Marsh plants actively engineer their landscape

DURHAM, NC -- Marsh plants, far from being passive wallflowers, are "secret gardeners" that actively engineer their landscape to increase their species' odds of survival, says a team of scientists from Duke University and the University of Padova in Italy. Scientists have long believed that the distribution of plants within a marsh is a passive adaption in which species grow at different elevations because that's where conditions like soil aeration and salinity best meet their needs. But this team found intertidal marsh plants in Italy's famed Venetian lagoon were ...

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Medicine14 Feb 2013

Cellular renewal process may underlie benefits of omega fatty acids

A search for genes that change their levels of expression in response to nutrient deprivation has uncovered potential clues to the mechanism underlying the health benefits of omega fatty acids. In the Feb. 15 issue of Genes & Development, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers describe finding that feeding omega-6 fatty acids to C. elegans roundworms or adding them to cultured human cells activates a cellular renewal process called autophagy, which may be deficient in several important diseases of aging. A process by which defective or worn-out cellular components ...

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Medicine14 Feb 2013

Vanderbilt study reveals clues to childhood respiratory virus

New Vanderbilt-led research published in the Feb. 14 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine has identified the relatively unknown human metapneumovirus (MPV) as the second most common cause of severe bronchiolitis in young children. Senior author John Williams , M.D., associate professor of Pediatric Infectious Diseases and a well-known expert in MPV research, said it is gratifying to offer a clearer picture of how this virus impacts children. "We found MPV is as important a cause of respiratory illness as influenza, and caused more illness than the three common ...

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Science14 Feb 2013

Rewiring the serotonin system

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the University of Houston has found a new way to influence the vital serotonin signaling system — possibly leading to more effective medications with fewer side effects. Scientists have linked malfunctions in serotonin signaling to a wide range of health issues, everything from depression and addictions to epilepsy and obesity and eating disorders. Much of their attention has focused on complex proteins called serotonin receptors, which are located in the cell membrane. ...

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Medicine14 Feb 2013

Light-emitting bioprobe fits in a single cell

If engineers at Stanford have their way, biological research may soon be transformed by a new class of light-emitting probes small enough to be injected into individual cells without harm to the host. Welcome to biophotonics, a discipline at the confluence of engineering, biology and medicine in which light-based devices – lasers and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) – are opening up new avenues in the study and influence of living cells. The team described their probe in a paper published online February 13 by the journal Nano Letters. It is the first study to demonstrate ...

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Medicine14 Feb 2013

Recent marijuana use in HIV-infected Russians associated with increased sex and drug risk behaviors

(Boston) – Researchers from Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Boston University's School of Medicine (BUSM) and School of Public Health (BUSPH) have found that in Russian HIV-infected risky drinkers, marijuana use is associated with other increased risky behaviors involving drug use and sex. These findings, published online in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, may aid clinicians and public health experts in detecting individuals at a higher risk of transmitting HIV. Marijuana, otherwise known as cannabis, is the most frequently used illicit drug worldwide. Previous ...

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Science14 Feb 2013

Team creates MRI for the nanoscale

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reveals details of living tissues, diseased organs and tumors inside the body without x-rays or surgery. What if the same technology could peer down to the level of atoms? Doctors could make visual diagnoses of a person's molecules – examining damage on a strand of DNA, watching molecules misfold, or identifying a cancer cell by the proteins on its surface. Now Dr. Carlos Meriles, associate professor of physics at The City College of New York, and an international team of researchers at the University of Stuttgart and elsewhere have opened ...

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Science14 Feb 2013

Gene associated with high anxiety can have protective effect on the battlefield

The onset of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is unpredictable. Because it depends on the unforeseeable occurrence of traumatic events, it is difficult to identify preventative or causative factors. Scientists typically turn to patients who have already developed PTSD to study the disorder, but that means they can't draw comparisons to their psychological state prior to experiencing trauma. Now, through a combination of genetic and psychological testing, Prof. Yair Bar-Haim and PhD student Ilan Wald of Tel Aviv University's School of Psychological Sciences have ...

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