If only there were a way to forget that humiliating faux pas at last night's dinner party. It turns out there's not one, but two opposite ways in which the brain allows us to voluntarily forget unwanted memories, according to a study published by Cell Press October 17 in the journal Neuron. The findings may explain how individuals can cope with undesirable experiences and could lead to the development of treatments to improve disorders of memory control. "This study is the first demonstration of two distinct mechanisms that cause such forgetting: one by shutting down ...

Boston, MA – A daily multivitamin can help a man reduce his risk of cancer, according to new research from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH). The first-of-its kind study will be presented October 17 at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research and published online the same day in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "The Physicians' Health Study II is the first clinical trial to test the affects of multivitamins on a major disease such as cancer," said lead author J. Michael Gaziano, MD, chief of the Division ...

CHICAGO – For critically ill patients receiving mechanical ventilation, daily sedation interruption did not reduce the duration of mechanical ventilation or appear to offer any benefit to patients, and may have increased both sedation and analgesic use and nurse workload, according to a study appearing in JAMA. The study is being published early online to coincide with its presentation at the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine Annual Congress. "Critically ill patients wean more quickly from mechanical ventilation, with lower risk of delirium, when clinicians ...

PASADENA, Calif., Oct. 17, 2012 — Kaiser Permanente has created a new electronic Exercise Vital Sign initiative to systematically record patients' physical activity in their electronic health records. The new feature is successfully compiling accurate and valuable information that can help clinicians better treat and counsel patients about their lifestyles, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. The study examined the electronic health records of 1,793,385 Kaiser Permanente Southern California patients ...

CHICAGO – In a randomized trial that included nearly 15,000 male physicians, long-term daily multivitamin use resulted in a modest but statistically significant reduction in cancer after more than a decade of treatment and follow-up, according to a study appearing in JAMA. The study is being published early online to coincide with its presentation at the Annual American Association for Cancer Research Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research meeting. "Multivitamins are the most common dietary supplement, regularly taken by at least one-third of U.S. adults. The traditional ...

On the road at night or on a tennis court at dusk, the eye can be deceived. Vision is not as sharp as in the light of day, and detecting a bicyclist on the road or a careening tennis ball can be tough. New research reveals the key chemical process that corrects for potential visual errors in low-light conditions. Understanding this fundamental step could lead to new treatments for visual deficits, or might one day boost normal night vision to new levels. Like the mirror of a telescope pointed toward the night sky, the eye's rod cells capture the energy of photons - ...

Extreme 'housework' cuts the life span of female Komodo Dragons An international team of researchers has found that female Komodo Dragons live half as long as males on average, seemingly due to their physically demanding 'housework' such as building huge nests and guarding eggs for up to six months. The results provide important information on the endangered lizards' growth rate, lifestyle and population differences, which may help plan conservation efforts. The Komodo dragon is the world's largest lizard. Their formidable body size enables them to serve as top predators ...

More people still die from cardiovascular disease than any other illness. Dubbed the number one killer and the silent killer, modern medicine has been researching and incorporating complementary and alternative approaches to help treat and in some cases reverse and hopefully prevent this health problem at an earlier stage of the disease. One of those modalities is meditation. A new research review paper on the effects of the stress-reducing Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique on the prevention and treatment of heart disease among youth and adults provides the hard ...

Information technology and electronics are becoming entwined with our everyday lives in industry, the service sector, transport, logistics, health care, housing, education, and our leisure time, almost without our noticing it. The changes are already apparent to consumers in the energy sector, for example: remotely readable meters are rapidly becoming more common, enabling developments such as new pricing models that encourage the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. The remote control of machines and devices is experiencing substantial growth and spreading to smaller ...

Active surveillance of small kidney masses is a safe and effective alternative to immediate surgery, with similar overall and cancer specific survival rates, according to a study published in the November issue of the urology journal BJUI. The technique is primarily used to treat elderly patients who have complex health issues or decline surgery. But researchers from the Department of Urology at Churchill Hospital, Oxford, UK, say that the results of their study suggest that active surveillance could safely be extended to other selected patients. "The incidence ...

Governments and institutions should focus on developing adaption policies to address and mitigate against the negative impact of global warming, rather than putting the emphasis on carbon trading and capping greenhouse-gas emissions, argue Johannesburg-based Wits University geoscientist Dr Jasper Knight and Dr Stephan Harrison from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. "At present, governments' attempts to limit greenhouse-gas emissions through carbon cap-and-trade schemes and to promote renewable and sustainable energy sources are prob¬ably too late to arrest ...

A command doctrine used by the US military and NATO designed to warn personnel of Nuclear, Chemical and Biological (NBC) hazards could be overly conservative and degrade war fighting effectiveness or, under certain conditions, risk lives because it is susceptible to changes in wind direction and speed that happen in periods shorter than its two-hourly updates. Writing in the International Journal of Environmental Pollution, Nathan Platt and Leo Jones of the Institute for Defense Analyses, in Alexandria, Virginia explain how "Allied Tactical Publication-45(C)" relies on ...

Pfizer Consumer Healthcare is very pleased that study investigators at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, chose Centrum® Silver® for the Physicians' Health Study II. The Centrum® multivitamins' quality, among other factors, led investigators to choose Centrum® Silver® for inclusion in the study. Centrum® Silver® multivitamins currently available in stores have since been updated and improved to reflect advances in nutritional science. In response to the Physicians' Health Study II findings shared this morning, Pfizer Consumer ...

Monozygotic twins have the same genome, that is, the same DNA molecule in both siblings. Despite being genetically identical, both twins may have different diseases at different times. This phenomenon is called "twin discordance". But how can people who have the same genetic sequence present different pathologies and at different ages? The explanation partly lies in the fact that the chemical signals added in the DNA to "switch off" or "switch on" genes can be different. These signals are known as epigenetic marks. The research team led by Manel Esteller, director of ...

Athens, Ga. – Ecologists in the University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology have found that evolutionary diversity can be an effective method for identifying hotspots of mammal biodiversity. In a paper published Oct. 17 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they report that evolutionary diversity can be an effective proxy for both the sheer number of species as well as their characteristics and ecological roles. Their findings could help conservation organizations better protect threatened species across the globe. There are several measures of biodiversity, ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — There's a new contender in the race to find an inexpensive alternative to platinum catalysts for use in hydrogen fuel cells. Brown University chemist Shouheng Sun and his students have developed a new material — a graphene sheet covered by cobalt and cobalt-oxide nanoparticles — that can catalyze the oxygen reduction reaction nearly as well as platinum does and is substantially more durable. The new material "has the best reduction performance of any nonplatinum catalyst," said Shaojun Guo, postdoctoral researcher in Sun's lab and ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Twitter, best known as the 140-character social-networking site where Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga chit-chat with fans, has become a new literary format that is improving student learning, a new study argues. Christine Greenhow, assistant professor of education at Michigan State University, found that college students who tweet as part of their instruction are more engaged with the course content and with the teacher and other students, and have higher grades. "Tweeting can be thought of as a new literary practice," said Greenhow, who also studies ...

Amsterdam, October 17, 2012 – The claim that nanopore technology is on the verge of making DNA analysis so fast and cheap that a person's entire genome could be sequenced in just minutes and at a fraction of the cost of available commercial methods, has resulted in overwhelming academic, industrial, and global interest. But a review by Northeastern University physicist Meni Wanunu, published in a special issue on nanopore sequencing in Physics of Life Reviews, questions whether the remaining technical hurdles can be overcome to create a workable, easily produced commercial ...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, and TRIESTE, Italy — To encourage researchers around the world to adhere to universal science values and ethical behavior, a new report on responsible science has been issued by the InterAcademy Council and the IAP – the global network of science academies. The report is the first product of the IAC and IAP's project on scientific integrity, initiated in response to several major trends reshaping the research enterprise, including the increasingly global and interdisciplinary nature of science, its heightened role in policy debates, and the continued ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a new technique that uses sound waves to rapidly separate selected collections of cells for use in biomedical research. "We think this is important because it will make it faster and easier for researchers to sort out the live cells they need for research ranging from disease study to drug development," says Dr. Xiaoning Jiang, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and adjunct professor of biomedical engineering at NC State and co-author ...

WASHINGTON, DC, October 17, 2012 — Hindus and Muslims are less likely than Christians and Jews to have premarital sex, and Muslims are the least likely among people of these religious groups to have extramarital sex, according to a new study that analyzed data on premarital and extramarital sexual behaviors in over 30 developing countries around the world. Co-authored by Amy Adamczyk, an Associate Professor of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Brittany Hayes, a Ph.D. student in John Jay's Criminal Justice program, the study, "Religion and Sexual Behaviors: ...

The scale of the challenge to reduce the use of anti-psychotic drugs by people with dementia may be under-estimated, according to researchers from Aston University and the University of East Anglia, working with NHS Kent and Medway. There is a key public health challenge to reduce the prescribing of anti-psychotic drugs to people with dementia as they are thought to be associated with up to 1,800 deaths a year. Ian Maidment, corresponding author and a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacy from Aston University has worked in medication management in dementia for 20 ...

In newscasts after intense wind and ice storms, damaged trees stand out: snapped limbs, uprooted trunks, entire forests blown nearly flat. In a storm's wake, landowners, municipalities and state agencies are faced with important financial and environmental decisions. A study by Harvard University researchers, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and published in the journal Ecology, yields a surprising result: when it comes to the health of forests, native plants and wildlife, the best management decision may be to do nothing. Salvage logging is a ...

Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center have carried out a clinical trial in which patients with metastatic melanoma were given chemotherapy and an immunotherapy of adoptive cell transfer (ACT) with tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL). Tumor tissues were surgically removed from patients, minced and grown in culture. The treatment combined chemotherapy, then ACT with TIL, followed by interleukin-2 (IL-2). The combination therapy drew a high response rate from some patients. The study appears in the October issue of the Journal of Immunotherapy. "Our purpose was to demonstrate ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- A team led by MIT neuroscientists has developed a way to monitor how brain cells coordinate with each other to control specific behaviors, such as initiating movement or detecting an odor. The researchers' new imaging technique, based on the detection of calcium ions in neurons, could help them map the brain circuits that perform such functions. It could also provide new insights into the origins of autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other psychiatric diseases, says Guoping Feng, senior author of a paper appearing in the Oct. 18 issue of the journal ...