Allergies, or hypersensitivities of the immune system, are more common than ever before. According to the Asthma and Allergies Foundation of America, one in five Americans suffers from an allergy — from milder forms like hay fever to more severe instances, like peanut allergies which can lead to anaphylactic shock. While medications like antihistamines can treat the symptoms of an allergic reaction, the treatment is too limited, says Prof. Ronit Sagi-Eisenberg, a cell biologist at Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine. Cells release dozens of molecules during ...

Marrying multiple husbands at the same time, or polyandry, creates a safety net for women in some cultures, according to a recent study by a University of Missouri researcher. Extra husbands ensure that women's children are cared for even if their fathers die or disappear. Although polyandry is taboo and illegal in the United States, certain legal structures, such as child support payments and life insurance, fill the same role for American women that multiple husbands do in other cultures. "In America, we don't meet many of the criteria that tend to define polyandrous ...

Positive social relationships in childhood and adolescence are key to adult well-being, according to Associate Professor Craig Olsson from Deakin University and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and his colleagues. In contrast, academic achievement appears to have little effect on adult well-being. The exploratory work, looking at the child and adolescent origins of well-being in adulthood, is published online in Springer's Journal of Happiness Studies. We know very little about how aspects of childhood and adolescent development, such as academic ...

August 2, 2012 WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A Purdue University student's research project related to zebrafish eye development could lead to a better understanding of vision problems that affect billions of people worldwide. Zeran Li, as an undergraduate student in biological sciences, led a research team that uncovered an enzyme's role in the regulation of eye size in the fish. If the enzyme's role is similar in human eyes, it could be relevant to human vision problems, such as nearsightedness and farsightedness. "New insights into the process of eye-size control in zebrafish ...

August 2, 2012 - It is not always best to forgive and forget in marriage, according to new research that looks at the costs of forgiveness. Sometimes expressing anger might be necessary to resolve a relationship problem – with the short-term discomfort of an angry but honest conversation benefiting the health of the relationship in the long-term. The research is part of a larger effort to better understand the contexts in which some relationships succeed and others fail, and also to understand how close relationships affect our health. A popular research trend in recent ...

Giving antibiotics before cesarean section surgery rather than just after the newborn's umbilical cord is clamped cuts the infection rate at the surgical site in half, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. "We followed more than 8,000 women over an eight-year period, and our findings support giving antibiotics just before a cesarean section to prevent infections," says infectious disease specialist David K. Warren, MD. "Until recently, standard practice in the U.S. was to give antibiotics when the ...

Washington, D.C. — For decades it has been thought that a shock wave from a supernova explosion triggered the formation of our Solar System. According to this theory, the shock wave also injected material from the exploding star into a cloud of dust and gas, and the newly polluted cloud collapsed to form the Sun and its surrounding planets. New work from Carnegie's Alan Boss and Sandra Keiser provides the first fully three-dimensional (3-D) models for how this process could have happened. Their work will be published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Traces of the ...

Just over two percent of teens in rural schools who have ever tried alcohol, marijuana or other drugs report they have also traded sex for these substances, according to University of British Columbia research published today in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality. This is the first study to track this issue among rural students. Using 2009 survey data from 2,360 students in Grades 7-12 from 28 schools in B.C.'s East Kootenays, the researchers found equal numbers of boys and girls traded sex, and that up to 98 per cent of them were living at home with family. Conducted ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– The junior high and high school years are emotionally challenging even under the best of circumstances, but for adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), that time can be particularly painful. Lacking the social skills that enable them to interact successfully with their peers, these students are often ostracized and even bullied by their classmates. However, a new study conducted by researchers at the Koegel Autism Center at UC Santa Barbara has found that by playing on their strengths –– high intelligence and very specific interests ...

There is growing evidence that, beyond what was previously believed, the adult human brain is remarkably malleable and capable of new feats -- even in the last decades of life. In fact, new experiences can trigger major physical changes in the brain within just a few days, and certain conditions can accelerate this physical, chemical and functional remodeling of the brain. "We used to think that the brain was completely formed by development and its basic structure didn't change much in adults, but as research went on we discovered that wasn't true, at least in the ...

Summer is a peak season for many sports, and with that comes sport-related injuries. Among those injuries is shoulder joint dislocation. According to a literature review in the August 2012 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, most incidences of shoulder joint instability are the result of traumatic contact injuries like force or falling on an outstretched arm; a direct blow to the shoulder area; forceful throwing, lifting or hitting; or contact with another player. By the Numbers In 45 percent of shoulder joint instability injuries, ...

When it comes to sperm meeting eggs in sexual reproduction, conventional wisdom holds that the fastest swimming sperm are most likely to succeed in their quest to fertilize eggs. That wisdom was turned upside down in a new study of sperm competition in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), which found that slower and/or longer sperm outcompete their faster rivals. The study, recently published online in Current Biology and forthcoming in print on Sept. 25, was done by a team of scientists led by corresponding author Stefan Lüpold, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department ...

MADISON — Hundreds of millions of daily posts on the social networking service Twitter are providing a new window into bullying — a tough nut to crack for researchers. "Kids are pretty savvy about keeping bullying outside of adult supervision, and bullying victims are very reluctant to tell adults about it happening to them for a host of reasons," says Amy Bellmore, a University of Wisconsin–Madison educational psychology professor. "They don't want to look like a tattletale, or they think an adult might not do anything about it." Yet typical bullying research methods ...

Park Ridge, Ill. (August 1, 2012) – New research from Cornell University indicates that pregnant women who increase choline intake in the third trimester of pregnancy may reduce the risk of the baby developing metabolic and chronic stress-related diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes later in life.(i) The results, published in the latest edition of the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, suggest that choline, a nutrient found in high quantities in eggs, may help protect against the effects of a mother's stress during pregnancy. ...

Neighbors' lawn signs, public opinion polls and even a conversation in the next restaurant booth can affect how people vote in an election. But it all depends on how far away the election is. In a new research article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, scientists Alison Ledgerwood and Shannon Callahan of the University of California, Davis conducted two different studies examining the relationship between abstract thinking and group norms people's support for different policies. In the first study, they asked ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — It's relatively easy to collect massive amounts of data on microbes. But the files are so large that it takes days to simply transmit them to other researchers and months to analyze once they are received. Researchers at Michigan State University have developed a new computational technique, featured in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that relieves the logjam that these "big data" issues create. Microbial communities living in soil or the ocean are quite complicated. Their genomic data is easy enough to ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - If the drought forces producers to feed a larger portion of distillers dried grains with solubles, cattle can maintain gains and improve meat quality if the animals are weaned early, a Purdue University scientist has shown. The finding, reported at the American Society of Animal Science Midwest Meetings in Des Moines, Iowa, could allow some producers to save on rising feed costs in the face of this year's drought. Distillers dried grains with solubles, or DDGS, are the leftovers from corn ethanol production. DDGS generally cost about 10 percent ...

When it comes to intelligence, what factors distinguish the brains of the exceptionally smart from those of average humans? As science has long suspected, overall brain size matters somewhat, accounting for about 6.7 percent of individual variation in intelligence. More recent research has pinpointed the brain's lateral prefrontal cortex, a region just behind the temple, as a critical hub for high-level mental processing, with activity levels there predicting another 5 percent of variation in individual intelligence. Now, new research from Washington University in St. ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Infants innately relieve stress by crying, turning their heads or maintaining eye contact. Adults manage emotional tension using problem-solving or by seeking support. A new study by a University of Missouri human development expert describes how adolescents' developing personalities and coping habits affect their behaviors toward others. "We're each born with some personality tendencies; for example, we see that babies are fussy or calm," said Gustavo Carlo, the Millsap Professor of Diversity in the MU Department of Human Development and Family Studies. ...

A team of researchers has developed a cheap, rechargeable and eco-friendly battery that could be used to store energy at solar power plants for a rainy day. Led by Sri Narayan, professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the team developed an air-breathing battery that uses the chemical energy generated by the oxidation of iron plates that are exposed to the oxygen in the air – a process similar to rusting. "Iron is cheap and air is free," Narayan said. "It's the future." Details about the battery will be published July 20 in the ...

New York, NY and Oxford, UK, August 1, 2012 – The body has a built-in system known as autophagy, or 'self-eating,' that controls how cells live or die. Deregulation of autophagy is linked to the development of human diseases, including neural degeneration and cancer. In a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Oxford discovered a critical molecular switch that regulates autophagy. They also studied the links between autophagy and a cellular process called senescence ...

Archaeological sites that currently take years to map will be completed in minutes if tests underway in Peru of a new system being developed at Vanderbilt University go well. The Aurora Flight Sciences unmanned aerial vehicle will be integrated into a larger system that combines the flying device that can fit into a backpack with a software system that can discern an optimal flight pattern and transform the resulting data into three-dimensional maps. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Vanderbilt archaeologist Steven Wernke and engineering professor ...

A pilot study in adolescents and adults has found that an investigational drug shows promise as the first potential medical treatment for children with the severest type of congenital hyperinsulinism, a rare but potentially devastating disease in which gene mutations cause insulin levels to become dangerously high. "There is currently no effective medicine for children with the most common and most severe form of hyperinsulinism," said study leader Diva D. De Leon, M.D., a pediatric endocrinologist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "Our new research shows that ...

NASA's Aqua satellite spotted some very cold, high, thunderstorms around the center of a tropical low pressure area in the Atlantic Ocean today, indicating that the system is getting stronger and more organized. The low pressure area, designated as "System 99L" was located about 850 miles east of the southern Windward Islands, near 10.7 North latitude and 46.9 West longitude. It was moving west between 15 and 20 mph. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over System 99L on August 1 at 0405 UTC (12:05 a.m. EDT) and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured an ...

Montreal, August 1, 2012 – Caffeine, which is widely consumed around the world in coffee, tea and soft drinks, may help control movement in people suffering from Parkinson's. This is the finding of a study conducted at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI MUHC) that was recently published in Neurology®, the official journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study opens the door to new treatment options for Parkinson's disease that affects approximately 100 000 Canadians. "This is one of the first studies to show the benefits of caffeine ...