A new study shows that newborns that have been exposed to nicotine from both active and passive smoking mothers show poor physiological, sensory, motor and attention responses. Smoking during pregnancy has been linked to many different problems in infants like learning difficulties, attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity and even obesity. However, although the paediatric and obstetric disorders linked to tobacco during this stage are well defined, the effects on neonatal behaviour have not yet been studied in depth. A new study headed by experts at the ...

Scientists from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) describe how natural selection also occurs at the cellular level, and how our body's tissues and organs strive to retain the best cells in their ranks in order to fend off disease processes. These results appear this week in the new issue of Cell Reports. The research, carried out in the CNIO, is led by Eduardo Moreno, who is currently working at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Recent studies suggest that natural selection described by Charles Darwin also occurs at the cellular level, as our body's ...

There is little doubt that Frances O'Grady has made history as the first woman to be elected General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress in September 2012. A recent study from Queen Mary, University of London casts some light on the level of O'Grady's achievement in the wider union landscape. This cross-national study found that in both the UK and the US, women still have fewer top positions in trade unions despite growth in overall female membership. The paper, Lift as You Rise: Union Women's Leadership Talk, discusses the lack of women at union leadership level, ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Using ultrasound waves, MIT engineers have found a way to enhance the permeability of skin to drugs, making transdermal drug delivery more efficient. This technology could pave the way for noninvasive drug delivery or needle-free vaccinations, according to the researchers. "This could be used for topical drugs such as steroids — cortisol, for example — systemic drugs and proteins such as insulin, as well as antigens for vaccination, among many other things," says Carl Schoellhammer, an MIT graduate student in chemical engineering and one of the lead authors ...

PHILADELPHIA — A syndrome called "post-operative cognitive decline" has been coined to refer to the commonly reported loss of cognitive abilities, usually in older adults, in the days to weeks after surgery. In fact, some patients time the onset of their Alzheimer's disease symptoms from a surgical procedure. Exactly how the trio of anesthesia, surgery, and dementia interact is clinically inconclusive, yet of great concern to patients, their families and physicians. A year ago, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania reported ...

With an 8.1 percent August unemployment rate and 12.5 million Americans out of work, a new Temple University study examines a neglected area of research: how the unemployment process impacts the willingness of those laid off to endorse or return to their previous employer. The study of predominantly highly paid, college-educated professionals who are unemployed finds that 45 percent of layoff victims would return to work for their former employer – despite anger over being terminated. The research also emphasizes the importance of fair and transparent layoff decisions, ...

September 12, 2012. West Orange, NJ. Nancy Chiaravalloti, PhD, an expert in cognitive rehabilitation research, authored two commentaries on trends in multiple sclerosis (MS) research. Dr. Chiaravalloti is director of Neuropsychology & Neuroscience Research at Kessler Foundation. She was recently appointed director of Traumatic Brain Injury Research at the Foundation and also is principal investigator of the Northern New Jersey TBI System, a NIDRR-funded model system. Dr. Chiaravalloti is also an associate professor at UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School. Her editorial, ...

Los Angeles, CA (September 14, 2012) – An expert assessment of China's nuclear weapons strategy highlights the risk of escalation to nuclear war from a conflict beginning with conventional weapons, due to the unusual structure of the nation's military. The new study, previously only available in Chinese, appears in the latest edition of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE. The authors believe that this is the first comprehensive non-governmental study on how China's nuclear-war plan was developed. John W. Lewis and Xue Litai, of Stanford University's ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The fate of an embryonic stem cell, which has the potential to become any type of body cell, is determined by a complex interaction of genes, proteins that bind DNA, and molecules that modify those genes and proteins. In a new paper, biologists from MIT and the University of California at San Francisco have outlined how those interactions direct the development of stem cells into mature heart cells. The study, the first to follow heart-cell differentiation over time in such detail, could help scientists better understand how particular mutations can ...

Mental health professionals, who often are tasked with evaluating and managing the risk of violence by their patients, may benefit from a simple tool to more accurately make a risk assessment, according to a recent study conducted at the University of California, San Francisco. The research, led by psychiatrist Alan Teo, MD, when he was a UCSF medical resident, examined how accurate psychiatrists were at evaluating risk of violence by acutely ill patients admitted to psychiatric units. The first part of the study showed that inexperienced psychiatric residents performed ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The transparent electronics that were pioneered at Oregon State University may find one of their newest applications as a next-generation replacement for some uses of non-volatile flash memory, a multi-billion dollar technology nearing its limit of small size and information storage capacity. Researchers at OSU have confirmed that zinc tin oxide, an inexpensive and environmentally benign compound, has significant potential for use in this field, and could provide a new, transparent technology where computer memory is based on resistance, instead of an ...

Washington, DC (September 13, 2012) — Earlier this year, the American Society of Nephrology (ASN), the world's leading kidney organization, joined other groups in a campaign to help health care professionals and patients avoid wasteful and sometimes harmful medical interventions. A new article in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN) outlines the ASN's top five recommendations for the campaign and the rationale behind them. Following these recommendations would lower costs and lead to better care for patients with kidney disease. Unnecessary ...

Monozygotic twins have almost identical faces and siblings usually have more similar faces than unrelated people, implying that genes play a major role in the appearance of the human face. However, almost nothing is known about the genes responsible for facial morphology in humans. This study, carried out on behalf of the International Visible Trait Genetics (VisiGen) Consortium, used head magnetic resonance images together with portrait photographs to map facial landmarks, from which facial distances were estimated. The researchers then applied a genome-wide association ...

NAIROBI, KENYA (13 September 2012)—A new analysis published today in Science traces the recent global eradication of the deadliest of cattle diseases, crediting not only the development of a new, heat-resistant vaccine, but also the insight of local African herders, who guided scientists in deciding which animals to immunize and when. The study provides new insights into how the successful battle against rinderpest in Africa, the last stronghold of the disease, might be applied to similar diseases that today ravage the livestock populations on which the livelihoods of one ...

Researchers have identified a set of three genes that are responsible for hybrid sterility in rice, or the inability of many hybrid rice species to pass their genes on to the next generation. These findings inform a model that suggests how such hybrid sterility is maintained across rice species, and they may lead to the genetic improvement of rice as a food stock. The research is published in the 14 September issue of the journal Science, which is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society. When two different species mate, like a horse and a donkey, their hybrid ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A new Arctic study in the journal Science is helping to unravel an important mystery surrounding climate change: How quickly glaciers can melt and grow in response to shifts in temperature. According to the new research, glaciers on Canada's Baffin Island expanded rapidly during a brief cold snap about 8,200 years ago. The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence showing that ice sheets reacted rapidly in the past to cooling or warming, raising concerns that they could do so again as the Earth heats up. "One of the questions scientists have been ...

Boston, Sept. 13, 2012-- A growing body of research shows that children who suffer severe neglect and social isolation have cognitive and social impairments as adults. A study from Boston Children's Hospital shows, for the first time, how these functional impairments arise: Social isolation during early life prevents the cells that make up the brain's white matter from maturing and producing the right amount of myelin, the fatty "insulation" on nerve fibers that helps them transmit long-distance messages within the brain. The study also identifies a molecular pathway ...

A transient ischemic attack, TIA or a "mini stroke," can lead to serious disability, but is frequently deemed by doctors too mild to treat, according to a study in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. "Our study shows that TIA and minor stroke patients are at significant risk of disability and need early assessment and treatment," said Shelagh Coutts, M.D., lead author of the study at Foothills Hospital in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. "We should be imaging patients earlier and be more aggressive in treating patients with thrombolysis if we can see a blockage no ...

VIDEO: This shows southern resident killer whales in the waters around the San Juan Islands, USA and British Columbia. Both male and female killer whales will remain with their mothers throughout... Click here for more information. Scientists have found the answer to why female killer whales have the longest menopause of any non-human species - to care for their adult sons. Led by the Universities of Exeter and York and published in the journal Science (14 September 2012) ...

An ultra-low cost scanner that can be plugged into any computer or laptop to reveal vital information about the unborn child has been developed by engineers at Newcastle University, UK. The hand-held USB device – which is roughly the size of a computer mouse – works in a similar way to existing ultrasound scanners, using pulses of high frequency sound to build up a picture of the unborn child on the computer screen. However, unlike the technology used in most hospitals across the UK costing anywhere from £20,000-£100,000, the scanner created by Jeff Neasham and Research ...

MADISON -- Stress has long been pegged as the enemy of attention, disrupting focus and doing substantial damage to working memory — the short-term juggling of information that allows us to do all the little things that make us productive. By watching individual neurons at work, a group of psychologists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has revealed just how stress can addle the mind, as well as how neurons in the brain's prefrontal cortex help "remember" information in the first place. Working memory is short-term and flexible, allowing the brain to hold a large ...

LA JOLLA, CA, September 13, 2012--Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have determined the structure of a critical protein from the Marburg virus, a close cousin of Ebola virus. These viruses cause similar diseases and are some of the deadliest pathogens on the planet, each killing up to 90 percent of those infected. Described in the September 13, 2012 publication of the journal PLoS Pathogens, the new research reveals how a key protein component of the Marburg virus, called VP35, blocks the human immune system, allowing the virus to grow unchecked. The structure ...

Researchers have taken a key step towards recovering specific brain functions in sufferers of brain disease and injuries by successfully restoring the decision-making processes in monkeys. By placing a neural device onto the front part of the monkeys' brains, the researchers, from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre, University of Kentucky and University of Southern California, were able to recover, and even improve, the monkeys' ability to make decisions when their normal cognitive functioning was disrupted. The study, which has been published today, 14 September, in ...

New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Cell Communication and Signaling describes a large set of interactions (interactome) which maps the range of phosphotyrosine (pTyr)-dependent interactions with SH2 domains underlying insulin (Ins), insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) and fibroblast growth factor (FGF) signaling pathways. In the control of cell signaling pathways SH2 domains can be thought of as a master connector and tyrosine kinases the switch. SH2 domains interact with phosphorylated tyrosine containing peptides on receptors and other ...

Severe UK winters, like the 'big freeze' of 2009/10, can now be better forecast months in advance using the Met Office's latest model, new research suggests. A new study, published today, Friday 14 September, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, compares the latest seasonal forecast system to the one previously used and shows that it can better warn the UK of extreme winter weather conditions. Dubbed the 'high-top' system, it is different from the previous system as it takes into account phenomenon known as sudden stratospheric warmings (SSWs), ...