Fairfax, Va.--The popular spice turmeric packs more than just flavor — it shows promise in fighting devastating viruses, Mason researchers recently discovered. Curcumin, found in turmeric, stopped the potentially deadly Rift Valley Fever virus from multiplying in infected cells, says Aarthi Narayanan, lead investigator on the new study and a research assistant professor with Mason's National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases. Mosquito-borne Rift Valley Fever virus (RVF) is an acute, fever-causing virus that affects domestic animals such as cattle, sheep ...

Everyone knows the adage: "If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is." Why, then, do some people fall for scams and why are older folks especially prone to being duped? An answer, it seems, is because a specific area of the brain has deteriorated or is damaged, according to researchers at the University of Iowa. By examining patients with various forms of brain damage, the researchers report they've pinpointed the precise location in the human brain, called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, that controls belief and doubt, and which explains why some ...

Ramadan dinners in the Danish Parliament, staff parties without either pork or alcohol and prayer rooms at the airport are all examples of how religion is becoming more visible in public spaces. "Prior to the mass migration of the '60s, '70s and '80s, almost all Danes shared similar values and were members of the national Christian church, so religion was not an issue in everyday life. There was no need to discuss neither one's own nor another person's religious viewpoint, and secularisation was a matter of course. Today, it is difficult to be in a public place, read ...

VIDEO: An animation of satellite observations from Aug. 13-16, 2012 shows the birth of the Atlantic Ocean hurricane season's eighth tropical depression that strengthens into Tropical Storm Gordon. This visualization was... Click here for more information. NASA has been watching the low pressure system called System 93L for the last week, and late on August 15 it organized into Tropical Depression 8, then Tropical Storm Gordon. NOAA's GOES-13 satellite captured a visible ...

Astronomers using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have caught two clusters full of massive stars that may be in the early stages of merging. The clusters are 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy to our Milky Way. What at first was thought to be only one cluster in the core of the massive star-forming region 30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula) has been found to be a composite of two clusters that differ in age by about one million years. The entire 30 Doradus complex has been an active star-forming region ...

In the quest to understand how the world's weather moves around the globe, scientists have had to tease apart different kinds of atmospheric movement, such as the great jet streams that can move across a whole hemisphere versus more intricate, localized flows. Much the same must currently be done to understand the various motions at work in the great space weather system that links the sun and Earth as the sun shoots material out in all directions, creating its own version of a particle sea to fill up the solar system. "People think of the sun as giving out light and ...

HOUSTON - A metabolic protein that nourishes cancer cells also activates tumor-promoting genes by loosening part of the packaging that entwines DNA to make up chromosomes, a team led by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center reports in the Aug. 16 issue of Cell. Working in cell lines and mouse models of glioblastoma multiforme, the most lethal form of brain tumor, senior author Zhimin Lu, Ph.D., associate professor of Neuro-Oncology at MD Anderson, and colleagues show that pyruvate kinase M2 (PKM2) fuels tumor growth by influencing a histone protein. DNA ...

PHILADELPHIA, August 16, 2012 – Without other risk factors, all Americans born between 1945 and 1965 should have a one-time screening for the hepatitis C virus (HCV) according to new recommendations being published early online today in Annals of Internal Medicine, the flagship journal of the American College of Physicians. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also recommends that all persons identified with HCV should receive a brief alcohol screening and intervention and be referred to appropriate care and treatment services for HCV and related conditions. Up ...

Thermafiber has officially announced the release of a new continuous insulation product. RainBarrier HD (Heavy Density) is a rigid insulation board with a consistent 6.0pcf density throughout the entire thickness. The consistent density from top to bottom simplifies installation by eliminating the need to orient the insulation in a certain direction like other mixed-density products. The increased density enhances the rigidity and ease of fabrication. The mineral wool board is non-combustible and provides exceptional R-values of 4.2 per inch of thickness. In addition to ...

MINNEAPOLIS – People who are free of dementia and have high levels of a protein that indicates the presence of inflammation have relatives who are more likely to avoid the disease as well, according to a new study published in the August 15, 2012, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "In very elderly people with good cognition, higher levels of C-reactive protein, which is related to inflammation, are associated with better memory," said study author Jeremy M. Silverman, PhD, with Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New ...

An early age at first drink (AFD) has been linked to later alcohol-related problems, which is one of the reasons behind the legal drinking age of 21 in the U.S. It is unclear, however, if increased risk is primarily due to initiation of any drinking, or initiation of heavier drinking. A comparison of the influence of these potential risk factors among college undergraduates found that both an early AFD as well as a quick progression from the first drink to drinking to intoxication independently predicted later problems. Results will be published in the November 2012 ...

Not only have energy drinks become increasingly popular among adolescents and young adults in recent years, so too has mixing and drinking them with alcohol. However, research on the subjective psychological, physiological, and behavioral risk-taking outcomes of alcohol/energy drinks has had mixed results. A first-of-its-kind study compares the outcomes of alcohol/energy drinks with alcohol-only drinks among members of the Australian public. Results will be published in the November 2012 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available ...

Many studies have found that problem drinking is related to subsequent unemployment; however, the reverse association is unclear. Some studies have found that unemployment can increase total drinking, alcohol disorders, and/or problem drinking while others have found that unemployment can decrease drinking or have no effect at all. An analysis of binge drinking as either a predictor or outcome of unemployment has found that binge drinking among women seems to have a significant association with long-term unemployment. Results will be published in the November 2012 ...

HOUSTON – (Aug.15, 2012) – A study by a Baylor College of Medicine physician-researcher has shed light on the most effective treatment for adults with Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH) in bones. LCH is a disease that can affect the skin, mouth, ears, bones, brain, gastrointestinal system, liver, spleen, or bone marrow. In the study, appearing in the current issue of PLOS ONE, researchers reviewed health records for 58 adults with the disease and compared the effectiveness of three chemotherapy treatments – vinblastine/prednisone, 2-Chlorodeoxyadenosine, and cytosine ...

A paper published 15 August 2012 in Biology of Reproduction's Papers-in-Press reveals that eating 75 grams of walnuts a day improves the vitality, motility, and morphology of sperm in healthy men aged 21 to 35. Approximately 70 million couples experience subfertility or infertility worldwide, with 30 to 50 percent of these cases attributable to the male partner. Some studies have suggested that human semen quality has declined in industrialized nations, possibly due to pollution, poor lifestyle habits, and/or an increasingly Western-style diet. Dr. Wendie Robbins and ...

An investigational drug currently under FDA review for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis has now shown positive results in patients with moderate-to-severe ulcerative colitis, according to researchers at the University of California San Diego, School of Medicine. The study will appear in the August 16, 2012 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Results from the phase 2 clinical trial showed the drug Tofacitinib achieved clinical response and remission in certain patients suffering from ulcerative colitis – a chronic inflammatory disease of the colon ...

A previously unrecognized system that drains waste from the brain at a rapid clip has been discovered by neuroscientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center. The findings were published online August 15 in Science Translational Medicine. The highly organized system acts like a series of pipes that piggyback on the brain's blood vessels, sort of a shadow plumbing system that seems to serve much the same function in the brain as the lymph system does in the rest of the body – to drain away waste products. "Waste clearance is of central importance to every organ, ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – An international group of more than 30 researchers today gave a score to every coastal nation on their contribution to the health of the world's oceans, which showed the United States as being slightly above average, and identified food provision, tourism and recreation as leading concerns. The analysis, published in the journal Nature, scored each nation on a 0-100 scale in 10 separate categories such as clean water, biodiversity, food provision, carbon storage, coastal protection, coastal economies and others. In this "Ocean Health Index," the world ...

A research team from the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry (PCMD), University of Exeter, and University of Cambridge has for the first time established a link between high levels of urinary Bisphenol-A (BPA) and severe coronary artery stenosis (narrowing of the arteries). The study is published in PLoS ONE today, 15th August 2012. The team analysed data from 591 patients who participated in the Metabonomics and Genomics Coronary Artery Disease (MaGiCAD) study in Cambridgeshire, UK. They compared urinary BPA with grades of severity of coronary artery disease ...

Sexual selection in the Forked Fungus Beetle favors larger body and horn size, and a new study investigates the relationship between these traits and the beetles' grip strength, which is crucial for the male to hold on to the female and shield her from other males in an elaborate courtship ritual. The full results are reported on Aug. 15 in the open access journal PLoS ONE. During the courtship ritual, male beetles grab onto the female, sometime for several hours, which would seem to favor males with stronger grip. A video of this behavior is included with the published ...

Given the option to commit spiteful acts, reducing the money payoffs of others at no cost to themselves, many people avoid acting spitefully, but those that do, consistently impose the maximum harm, according to research reported on Aug. 15 in the open access journal PLoS ONE. The authors, Erik Kimbrough of Simon Fraser University in Canada and Philipp Reiss of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, created an artificial auction market scenario, with participants "bidding" for objects and having the opportunity to raise the price paid by others, to test the frequency ...

Specific gut bacteria may be associated with metabolic syndrome traits, as determined by a study of Pennsylvania's Old Order Amish population. The full results are reported on Aug. 15 in the open access journal PLoS ONE. The researchers, led by Claire M. Fraser of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, chose the Amish as subjects for their study due to their close genetic relationships, similar lifestyles, and low prescription drug usage, among other factors, all of which reduced the number of confounders in the study and helped ...

STANFORD, Calif. — One might expect that ridding a brain cell of damaged proteins would be a universally good thing, and that impairing the cell's ability to do this would allow the faulty proteins to accumulate within the cell, possibly to toxic levels. So a lot of scientific effort has gone into looking for ways to enhance the process by which cells dispose of banged-up proteins. But this thinking may need some revision, according to a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine. Senior author Thomas Sudhof, MD, professor of molecular and cellular physiology, ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Using a new comprehensive index designed to assess the benefits to people of healthy oceans, scientists have evaluated the ecological, social, economic, and political conditions for every coastal country in the world. Their findings, published today in the journal Nature, show that the global ocean scores 60 out of 100 overall on the Ocean Health Index. Individual country scores range widely, from 36 to 86. The highest-scoring locations included densely populated, highly developed nations such as Germany, as well as uninhabited islands, such as ...

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have identified 26 species of bacteria in the human gut microbiota that appear to be linked to obesity and related metabolic complications. These include insulin resistance, high blood sugar levels, increased blood pressure and high cholesterol, known collectively as "the metabolic syndrome," which significantly increases an individual's risk of developing diabetes, cardiovascular disease and stroke. The results of the study, which analyzed data from the Old Order Amish in Lancaster County, Pa., are being published ...