EUGENE, Ore. -- (Jan. 7, 2013) -- The ability to focus and switch tasks readily amid distractions was compromised for up to two months following brain concussions suffered by high school athletes, according to a study at the University of Oregon. Research team members, in an interview, said the discovery suggests that some athletes may need longer recovery periods than current practices dictate to lower the risk of subsequent concussions. Conventional wisdom, said lead author David Howell, a graduate student in the UO Department of Human Physiology, has typical recovery ...

In France, more than 860,000 people suffer from Alzheimer's disease and related disorders, making them the largest cause of age-related loss of intellectual function. Cognitive impairments observed in Alzheimer's disease result from the accumulation of abnormal tau proteins in nerve cells undergoing degeneration . We know that obesity, a major risk factor in the development of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, increases the risk of dementia during the aging process. However, the effects of obesity on 'Taupathies' (i.e. tau protein-related disorders), including Alzheimer's ...

PHILADELPHIA — Though churning smokestacks, cud-chewing cows and gasoline-burning vehicles are contributing constantly to greenhouse gas emissions, there are also many processes that do the reverse, pulling molecules like carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. One of these is chemical weathering, which occurs when rock turns into soil. Carbon dioxide molecules and rain combine to dissolve rock, and the weathering products, including sediment, eventually make their way through waterways to the ocean where some become trapped on the ocean bottom and in coral reefs and seashells. For ...

Los Angeles, CA (January 07, 2013). France has been held up, worldwide, as the forerunner in using nuclear fission to produce electricity. However, a third of the nation's nuclear reactors will need replacing in the next decade, and public opinion has shifted toward reducing reliance on nuclear power. In a special issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE four articles explore whether France has the means or desire to unplug from nuclear power. Nuclear arms experts Patrice Bouveret, Bruno Barrillot, and Dominique Lalanne argue that phasing out ...

AURORA, Colo. (Jan. 7, 2013) – New research from the Children's Outcomes Research Program at Children's Hospital Colorado shows that timely reminders by state or local health departments are more effective at increasing immunization rates among preschool children than those from primary care practices. The study, published December 13 in the American Journal of Public Health, underscores the importance of partnerships between state and county health departments and primary care practices to keep children up-to-date on recommended vaccines. "Immunizations provide ...

New research suggests that racial stereotypes and creativity have more in common than we might think. In an article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researcher Carmit Tadmor of Tel Aviv University and colleagues find that racial stereotyping and creative stagnation share a common mechanism: categorical thinking. "Although these two concepts concern very different outcomes, they both occur when people fixate on existing category information and conventional mindsets," Tadmor and her colleagues write. The researchers ...

Why are efficient and affordable solar cells so highly coveted? Volume. The amount of solar energy lighting up Earth's land mass every year is nearly 3,000 times the total amount of annual human energy use. But to compete with energy from fossil fuels, photovoltaic devices must convert sunlight to electricity with a certain measure of efficiency. For polymer-based organic photovoltaic cells, which are far less expensive to manufacture than silicon-based solar cells, scientists have long believed that the key to high efficiencies rests in the purity of the polymer/organic ...

Post-Christmas and most of us are feeling the over-indulgence. But take heart - experts at Newcastle University, UK, have shown even the kilogram itself has put on weight. Using a state-of-the-art Theta-probe XPS machine – the only one of its kind in the world – the team have shown the original kilogram is likely to be tens of micrograms heavier than it was when the first standard was set in 1875. And they say a suntan could be the key to helping it lose weight. The original kilogram – known as the International Prototype Kilogram or the IPK – is the standard against ...

Researchers have proposed a method for cooling trapped antihydrogen which they believe could provide 'a major experimental advantage' and help to map the mysterious properties of antimatter that have to date remained elusive. The new method, developed by a group of researchers from the USA and Canada, could potentially cool trapped antihydrogen atoms to temperatures 25 times colder than already achieved, making them much more stable and a lot easier to experiment on. The suggested method, which has been published today, 7 January 2013, in IOP Publishing's Journal of ...

PHILADELPHIA - A team, led by senior author Morris J. Birnbaum, MD, PhD, the Willard and Rhoda Ware Professor of Medicine, with the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, found that the diabetes drug metformin works in a different way than previously understood. Their research in mice found that metformin suppresses the liver hormone glucagon's ability to generate an important signaling molecule, pointing to new drug targets. The findings were published online this week in Nature. For fifty years, one ...

Researchers have identified four new regions on the human genome associated with Behcet's disease, a painful and potentially dangerous condition found predominantly in people with ancestors along the Silk Road. For nearly 2,000 years, traders used this 4,000-mile network linking the Far East with Europe to exchange goods, culture and, in the case of the Silk Road disease, genes. National Institutes of Health researchers and their Turkish and Japanese collaborators published their findings in the Jan. 6, 2013, advance online issue of Nature Genetics. Named for the Turkish ...

As they typically result from severe external perturbations, it is of vital interest how stable the most desirable state is. Surprisingly, this basic question has so far received little attention. Now scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), in a paper published in Nature Physics, propose a new concept for quantifying stability. "Up to now, science was able to say if a complex system is stable or not, but it wasn't able to properly say how stable it is," says Peter J. Menck, lead author of the paper. The proposed concept is the first to fill ...

The study, published today in Nature Climate Change, is the first of its kind on ice sheet melting to use structured expert elicitation (EE) together with an approach which mathematically pools experts' opinions. EE is already used in a number of other scientific fields such as forecasting volcanic eruptions. The ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland contain about 99.5 per cent of the Earth's glacier ice which would raise global sea level by some 63m if it were to melt completely. The ice sheets are the largest potential source of future sea level rise – and ...

Quebec City & Toronto, January 6, 2013—For individuals with agonizing pain, it is a cruel blow when the gold-standard medication actually causes more pain. Adults and children whose pain gets worse when treated with morphine may be closer to a solution, based on research published in the January 6 on-line edition of Nature Neuroscience. "Our research identifies a molecular pathway by which morphine can increase pain, and suggests potential new ways to make morphine effective for more patients," says senior author Dr. Yves De Koninck, Professor at Université Laval in ...

JUPITER, FL, January 6, 2012 – Scientists know that cells in all higher organisms cells need to bind to each other for the development, architecture, maintenance and function of tissues. Mysteries have remained, however, about exactly how cells manage this feat. Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have now solved part of this puzzle by defining the structure of a protein known as α-catenin, which is essential to this process. The work was published online ahead of print on January 6, 2012, by the journal Nature Structural ...

BOSTON – January 8, 2013 -- As part of their ongoing research on the physiologic factors that contribute to the development of obesity, Joslin Diabetes Center scientists have identified a cell cycle transcriptional co-regulator – TRIP-Br2 – that plays a major role in energy metabolism and fat storage. This finding has the potential to lead to new treatments for obesity. The study is being published today ahead of print by Nature Medicine. Transcriptional co-regulators manage the expression of DNA, either by activating or suppressing the expression of genes. TRIP-Br2 ...

VIDEO: This movie shows two simulations of planetary system disruption by galactic disturbances to wide binary stars. On the left is a zoomed-out view showing the orbit of a hypothetical 0.1... Click here for more information. TORONTO, ON – An international team of astrophysicists has shown that planetary systems with very distant binary stars are particularly susceptible to violent disruptions, more so than if they had stellar companions with tighter orbits around them. Unlike ...

Technologically valuable ultrastable glasses can be produced in days or hours with properties corresponding to those that have been aged for thousands of years, computational and laboratory studies have confirmed. Aging makes for higher quality glassy materials because they have slowly evolved toward a more stable molecular condition. This evolution can take thousands or millions of years, but manufacturers must work faster. Armed with a better understanding of how glasses age and evolve, researchers at the universities of Chicago and Wisconsin-Madison raise the possibility ...

Cleaning up mercury pollution and reducing prenatal exposure to the neurotoxin methylmercury (MeHg) could save the European Union €10,000 million per year, finds a new study published in BioMed Central's open access journal Environmental Health. New estimates suggest that between 1.5 and 2 million children in the EU are born each year with MeHg exposures above the safe limit of 0.58µg/g and 200,000 above the WHO recommended maximum of 2.5µg/g. While some mercury occurs naturally in the environment for example from volcanic eruptions or forest fires, most is generated ...

"That's not what I meant": human communication is fraught with misinterpretation. Written out in longhand, words and letters can be misread. A telegraph clerk can mistake a dot for a dash. Noise will always be with us, but at least a new JQI (*) device has established a new standard for reading quantum information with a minimum of uncertainty. Success has come by viewing light pulses not with a single passive detector with but an adaptive network of detectors with feedback. The work on JQI's new, more assured photonic protocol was led by Francisco Becerra ...

DEERFIELD, IL-Beak shape variation in Darwin's finches is a classic example of evolutionary adaptation, with beaks that vary widely in proportions and shape, reflecting a diversity of ecologies. While living birds have a beak to manipulate their food, their fossil bird ancestors had teeth. Now a new fossil discovery shows some fossil birds evolved teeth adapted for specialized diets. A study of the teeth of a new species of early bird, Sulcavis geeorum, published in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, suggests this fossil bird had a durophagous ...

New research reveals a shared genetic susceptibility to epilepsy and migraine. Findings published in Epilepsia, a journal of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE), indicate that having a strong family history of seizure disorders increases the chance of having migraine with aura (MA). Medical evidence has established that migraine and epilepsy often co-occur in patients; this co-occurrence is called "comorbidity." Previous studies have found that people with epilepsy are substantially more likely than the general population to have migraine headache. However, ...

PHILADELPHIA (January 7, 2013)—Fox Chase Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, is now offering patients with advanced cancer a cutting-edge clinical test that will provide them with a unique blueprint of their cancer genes. The new clinical test, known as CancerCode-45TM, evaluates an individual's tumor for genetic alterations in a select group of 45 genes and gives physicians the opportunity to look at the alterations and be even more precise when choosing a course of treatment. The test is being offered through the Cancer ...

BLOOMINGTON and INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Under the law, whistle-blowers are supposed to be protected from direct reprisals on the job, including discrimination. But what if they and their actions becomes the subject of a widely distributed email? Is that a form of retaliation? Two professors at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business set out to answer that question and determine when public disclosure of the whistle-blower's identity -- like in an email -- is sufficient to support such a claim, in a paper that has been accepted for publication in North Carolina Law ...

VIDEO: Breastfeeding advice has been passed down for generations and many new mothers are faced with a lot of information to sort through. Researchers at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center... Click here for more information. COLUMBUS, Ohio – Breastfeeding can be a difficult time for both mother and baby, so using cabbage leaves and tea bags to ease pain or eating oatmeal to increase milk production are among the folk remedies that women pass along to new mothers ...