PULLMAN, Wash. - A Washington State University researcher has found that engaging elementary school students in science for as little as 10 hours a year can lead to improved test scores in math and language arts. Samantha Gizerian, a clinical assistant professor in WSU's Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology and Physiology, saw improved test scores among fourth-grade students in South Los Angeles after students from the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science gave 10 one-hour presentations on science. "A lot of students say things like, ...

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS –The last few months leading up to an election can be a critical, political game changer. One right or one wrong move can quickly change a candidate's standing at the polls. New research suggests that judges who are elected, rather than appointed, respond to this political pressure by handing down more severe criminal sentences – as much as 10 percent longer –in the last three months before an election compared with the beginning of their terms. "We can't say if more severe sentencing is better for society or ...

Non-infected babies born to HIV positive mothers should be vaccinated early against measles, to avoid them acquiring the virus or passing it on to others. A study published in the November issue of Acta Paediatrica found that even if babies are born without HIV, their maternally derived protection against measles may be impaired by their mother's positive HIV status. "The eradication of measles is high on the agendas of the World Health Organization and other international agencies and it is important to define and target any new group of susceptible infants" says ...

Almost 500 international experts have worked together to develop a ranking system of the ten most important phytopathogenic fungi on a scientific and economic level. The rice blast fungus (Magnaporthe oryzae) sits at the top of the list. A survey conducted on 495 international researchers resulted in a list contaning the most important phytopathogenic fungi. Each researcher chose three that they thought to be most significant and the most voted then formed the list. Said list has been published in the journal Molecular Plant Pathology and each one of the species mentioned ...

Researchers at the University of Leeds have identified a crucial stage in the lifecycle of simple viruses like polio and the common cold that could open a new front in the war on viral disease. The team are the first to observe at a single-molecule level how the genetic material (genome) that forms the core of a single-strand RNA virus particle packs itself into its outer shell of proteins. Lead researcher Professor Peter Stockley said their results overturn accepted thinking about the process and could open a chink in the armour of a wide range of viruses. "If we can ...

UK scientists hope that lymphoma patients could benefit from a new drug that triggers the cancer-fighting properties of the body's own immune system, after highly promising early laboratory results. The University of Manchester researchers, who were funded by the charity Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research, have shown that, when used in conjunction with radiotherapy, the new drug is potentially four times more likely to lead to long-term survival than radiotherapy alone. Relapse is a common fate for many lymphoma patients and new treatments are desperately needed. The new ...

A University of British Columbia and Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT) study has revealed that childhood poverty, stress as an adult, and demographics such as age, sex and ethnicity, all leave an imprint on a person's genes. And, that this imprint could play a role in our immune response. The study was published last week in a special volume of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looks at how experiences beginning before birth and in the years after can affect the course of a person's life. Known as epigenetics, or the study ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. ­—The Pulitzer Prize in Journalism is one of the world's most prestigious awards. Despite progress in the last few decades, gender disparities in the field of journalism have existed as long as the profession has. Now, a University of Missouri researcher has found that female Pulitzer Prize winners are more likely to have greater qualifications than their male counterparts in order to win the coveted award. In a study to be published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Yong Volz, an assistant professor of journalism studies in the MU School of ...

Parents need to be good role models to help their children make sensible financial decisions, according to Adam Hancock and his team, from East Carolina University in the US. Their work highlights that parents who argue about finances contribute to increasing credit card debt among their children during their student years. Their work is published online in Springer's Journal of Family and Economic Issues. Credit card debt among college students has been a growing concern for researchers and policymakers over the last decade. In addition, there is growing concern among ...

A sociologist of religion from the University of Copenhagen has interviewed 21 young patients diagnosed with a life-threatening cancer about their religious beliefs. She concludes that a cancer diagnosis will not make young people, who are not religious already, turn to religion. But it can confirm already existing beliefs. "My research shows that young cancer patients' views on existential issues show consistency before and after the diagnosis: Their faith and their religious practices remain the same. However, the beliefs they already had can be confirmed and strengthened ...

Combat-ready spikes which shoot from fingers sounds like the weaponry of a comic book hero, but a Japanese scientist has found exactly this in a rare breed of frog. The discovery, which is published in the Journal of Zoology, reveals how the Otton frog uses spikes which protrude from a false thumb for both combat and mating. The study, conducted by Dr Noriko Iwai from the University of Tokyo, focused on the Otton frog (Babina subaspera), whose habitat is the Amami islands of Southern Japan. Unlike most other frogs the Otton has an extra digit-like structure, a trait it ...

U.S. Forest Service and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) scientists have found that rising levels of ozone, a greenhouse gas, may amplify the impacts of higher temperatures and reduce streamflow from forests to rivers, streams, and other water bodies. Such effects could potentially reduce water supplies available to support forest ecosystems and people in the southeastern United States. Impacts of ozone, a global scale pollutant, on forests are not well understood at a large scale. This modeling study indicates that current and projected increases in ozone in the ...

New Rochelle, NY, October 18, 2012—Despite efforts to reduce disparities in breastfeeding, only 44% of African-American women report that they breastfeed compared with 66 and 68% of Hispanic and white women, respectively. According to UNICEF, there is a 14-fold difference in survival rates in the first 6 months, in developing countries, between children who have been breastfed exclusively and non-breastfed children. These disparities in breastfeeding and other key challenges and opportunities in the ongoing mission to encourage and support breastfeeding are discussed in ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (October 18, 2012) - An ongoing program is developing new tools for assessing health care quality from the most important viewpoint—that of the patient receiving care, according to a special supplement to Medical Care. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. The special issue presents a progress report on the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS®) surveys —an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) initiative to capture patients' perspectives on healthcare. The ...

1. Scientists have identified a mutation in a gene that causes patches of very thick skin to appear on the palms and soles of affected people. This skin disorder is related, albeit in a much milder form, to that of the Indonesian 'Tree Man', Dede Koswara . These thick rough skin patches on hands and feet steadily increase in number as a person ages and often coalesce to form larger lesions. In severe cases, these lesions can be painful and debilitating. 2. The team of scientists from A*STAR's Institute of Medical Biology (IMB), in collaboration with hospitals and research ...

Researchers at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and The Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) have collaborated on the development of a diagnostic tool that identifies the metastatic ability of breast cancer cells. The analysis is based on the characterization of the lipid component of the cells, which is indicative of malignancy. This has allowed the researchers to develop a classifier to discriminate cells capable of inducing metastasis. The results of the study have been published in the online version of the scientific journal PLoS ONE. The characterization ...

NEW YORK (Oct. 18, 2012) -- A research team at Weill Cornell Medical College has discovered a way to utilize diagnostic prenatal amniocentesis cells, reprogramming them into abundant and stable endothelial cells capable of regenerating damaged blood vessels and repairing injured organs. Their study, published online today in Cell, paints a picture of a future therapy where amniotic fluid collected from thousands of amniocentesis procedures yearly, during mid-pregnancy to examine fetal chromosomes, would be collected with the permission of women undergoing the test. These ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – Geology articles posted online ahead of print this month survey topography, minerals, faults and tectonics, alluvium, modeling, snowball Earth, fossils and extinction, and pyrite-filled worm burrows. One notable study provides a new eruption date for the Salton Buttes (Calif., USA) of 30,000 years later than that determined by earlier studies, coinciding with the appearance of the earliest known obsidian tools there. Highlights are provided below. GEOLOGY articles published ahead of print can be accessed online at http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/recent. ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —The cabin of a spacecraft halfway to Mars would be the least convenient place -- one cannot say "on earth" -- for a Salmonella or Pneumococcus outbreak, but a wide-ranging new paper suggests that microgravity and prolonged space flight could give unique advantages to germs. What's a space agency to do? Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital infectious disease expert Dr. Leonard Mermel offers several ideas. And no, they are not to add more Vitamin C to the Tang, or to give each crew member a bottle of Purell. It's a lot more complicated ...

PASADENA, Calif.—Thanks to better voting technology over the last decade, the country's election process has seen much improvement, according to a new report released today by researchers at Caltech and MIT. However, the report notes, despite this progress, some problems remain. Spurred by the debacle of hanging chads and other voting problems during the 2000 presidential election, the Voting Technology Project (VTP) was started by Caltech and MIT to bring together researchers from across disciplines to figure out how to improve elections. The VTP issued its first report ...

NEW ORLEANS, La. — People who like to nap say it helps them focus their minds post a little shut eye. Now, a study from Georgetown University Medical Center may have found evidence to support that notion. The research, presented at Neuroscience 2012, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, found that when participants in a study rested, the right hemisphere of their brains talked more to itself and to the left hemisphere than the left hemisphere communicated within itself and to the right hemisphere – no matter which of the participants' hands was dominant. ...

MINNEAPOLIS – Research shows that use of popular antidepressants is linked to an increased risk of some strokes caused by bleeding in the brain, but that the risk is low, according to a multi-study analysis published in the October 17, 2012, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. For the research, scientists analyzed all of the studies that have looked at antidepressant use and stroke, which included 16 studies with more than 500,000 total participants. They found that people taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors ...

ANAHEIM, Calif. — The combination of shortened telomeres, a biological marker of aging associated with cancer development, and elevated depression significantly impacted bladder cancer mortality, according to data presented at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, held here Oct. 16-19, 2012. "We found that patients with bladder cancer with shorter telomeres and high levels of depression symptoms have a threefold increased risk for mortality," said Meng Chen, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at The University of Texas MD Anderson ...

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Twenty-nine percent of patients with colorectal cancer in a nationally representative sample were diagnosed after an emergency, such as an obstruction or perforation of the bowel, according to data presented at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, held here Oct. 16-19, 2012. In addition, African-Americans and those living in high-poverty areas were more likely to present with an emergency diagnosis. "Overall, there are high rates of emergency presentation of colorectal cancer in the United States," ...

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Two components of red meat — dietary protein and dietary iron — may combine to form powerful carcinogens, N-nitroso compounds, which increase risk for bladder cancer. Moreover, individuals with reduced ability to reverse the effects of N-nitroso compounds because of a genetic variation in their RAD52 gene could be at particularly high risk. Chelsea Catsburg, a doctoral student at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, presented these data at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer ...