Nothing inspires environmentalism quite like a smog-filled sky or a contaminated river, according to a new study that also indicates that environmentalism isn't just for the prosperous. People living in China's cities who say they've been exposed to environmental harm are more likely to begreen: re-using their plastic grocery bags or recycling. Moreover, the study, published this week in the international journal AMBIO, indicates that the poor would sacrifice economic gain to protect their environment. "The human and natural worlds are tightly coupled and we cannot ...

For millions of people around the world being sick doesn't mean making a trip to the local pharmacy for medicines like Advil and Nyquil. Instead it means turning to the forest to provide a pharmacopeia of medicines to treat everything from tooth aches to chest pains. But while questions persist about whether such natural remedies are as effective as their pharmacological cousins, one Harvard researcher is examining the phenomenon from a unique perspective, and trying to understand the economic benefits people receive by relying on such traditional cures. As reported ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A study co-written by a University of Illinois business professor shows that higher wages are associated with lower levels of employee theft, shedding light on the impact that compensation practices have on shaping employee honesty and ethical norms in organizations. Using data sets from the convenience-store industry, Clara Xiaoling Chen, a professor of accountancy, and co-author Tatiana Sandino, of the University of Southern California, found that after controlling for each store's employee characteristics, monitoring environment and socio-economic ...

CORAL GABLES, FL (July 11, 2012)—Emotional problems in childhood are common. Approximately 8 to 22 percent of children suffer from anxiety, often combined with other conditions such as depression. However, most existing therapies are not designed to treat co-existing psychological problems and are therefore not very successful in helping children with complex emotional issues. To develop a more effective treatment for co-occurring youth anxiety and depression, University of Miami (UM) psychologist Jill Ehrenreich-May and her collaborator Emily L. Bilek analyzed the efficacy ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Interactive proofs, which MIT researchers helped pioneer, have emerged as one of the major research topics in theoretical computer science. In the classic interactive proof, a questioner with limited computational power tries to extract reliable information from a computationally powerful but unreliable respondent. Interactive proofs are the basis of cryptographic systems now in wide use, but for computer scientists, they're just as important for the insight they provide into the complexity of computational problems. Twenty years ago, researchers showed ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — For the human brain, learning a new task when rules change can be a surprisingly difficult process marred by repeated mistakes, according to a new study by Michigan State University psychology researchers. Imagine traveling to Ireland and suddenly having to drive on the left side of the road. The brain, trained for right-side driving, becomes overburdened trying to suppress the old rules while simultaneously focusing on the new rules, said Hans Schroder, primary researcher on the study. "There's so much conflict in your brain," said Schroder, "that ...

(SALT LAKE CITY)—Alternating hemiplegia of childhood (AHC) is a rare disorder that usually begins in infancy, with intermittent episodes of paralysis and stiffness, first affecting one side of the body, then the other. Symptoms mysteriously appear and disappear, again and again, and affected children often experience dozens of episodes per week. As they get older, children fall progressively behind their peers in both intellectual abilities and motor skills, and more than half develop epilepsy. Unfortunately, medications that work for epilepsy have been unsuccessful in ...

Kansas City, Missouri - The vomeronasal organ (VNO) is one of evolution's most direct enforcers. From its niche within the nose in most land-based vertebrates, it detects pheromones and triggers corresponding basic-instinct behaviors, from compulsive mating to male-on-male death matches. A new study from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, published online in Nature Neuroscience on July 29, 2012, extends the scientific understanding of how pheromones activate the VNO, and has implications for sensory transduction experiments in other fields. "We found two new ...

Sandwiching individual graphene sheets between insulating layers in order to produce electrical devices with unique new properties, the method could open up a new dimension of physics research. Writing in Nature Materials, the scientists show that a new side-view imaging technique can be used to visualize the individual atomic layers of graphene within the devices they have built. They found that the structures were almost perfect even when more than 10 different layers were used to build the stack. This surprising result indicates that the latest techniques of isolating ...

BOSTON, MA—A research team led by Xian Chang Li, MD, PhD, Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) Transplantation Research Center, has shed light on how a population of lymphocytes, called CD4+ T cells, mature into various subsets of adult T helper cells. In particular, the team uncovered that a particular cell surface molecule, known as OX40, is a powerful inducer of new T helper cells that make copious amounts of interleukin-9 (IL-9) (and therefore called TH9 cells) in vitro; such TH9 cells are responsible for ongoing inflammation in the airways in the lungs in vivo. The ...

BOSTON (July 29, 2012) – Researchers from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Loyola University Chicago Health Sciences Division and their collaborators have isolated an elusive human gene that causes a common form of Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a relatively rare but devastating form of early-onset blindness. The new LCA gene is called NMNAT1. Finding the specific gene mutated in patients with LCA is the first step towards developing sight-saving gene therapy. LCA is an inherited retinal degenerative disease characterized ...

A team of British and Australian scientists has discovered an important method of how carbon is drawn down from the surface of the Southern Ocean to the deep waters beneath. The Southern Ocean is an important carbon sink in the world – around 40% of the annual global CO2 emissions absorbed by the world's oceans enter through this region. Reporting this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Australia's national research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), reveal that rather ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Alternating hemiplegia of childhood (AHC) is a very rare disorder that causes paralysis that freezes one side of the body and then the other in devastating bouts that arise at unpredictable intervals. Seizures, learning disabilities and difficulty walking are common among patients with this diagnosis. Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have now discovered that mutations in one gene cause the disease in the majority of patients with a diagnosis of AHC, and because of the root problem they discovered, a treatment may become possible. The study ...

"We see landslides everywhere in the solar system," says Kelsi Singer, graduate student in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, "but Saturn's icy moon Iapetus has more giant landslides than any body other than Mars." The reason, says William McKinnon, PhD, professor of earth and planetary sciences, is Iapetus' spectacular topography. "Not only is the moon out-of-round, but the giant impact basins are very deep, and there's this great mountain ridge that's 20 kilometers (12 miles) high, far higher than Mount Everest. "So ...

On a time scale of tens to hundreds of millions of years, the geomagnetic field may be influenced by currents in the mantle. The frequent polarity reversals of Earth's magnetic field can also be connected with processes in the mantle. These are the research results presented by a group of geoscientists in the new advance edition of "Nature Geoscience" on Sunday, July 29th. The results show how the rapid processes in the outer core, which flows at rates of up to about one millimeter per second, are coupled with the processes in the mantle, which occur more in the velocity ...

July 29th, 2012, Shenzhen, China – A five-country international team, led by Casey Eye Institute Molecular Diagnostic laboratory, BGI and Zhejiang University School of Medicine First Affiliated Hospital identified the NMNAT1 mutations as a cause of Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), one of the most common causes of inherited blindness in children. The latest study was published online in Nature Genetics, reporting the genetic characteristics underlying some LCA patients, and providing important evidences that support NMNAT1 as a promising target for the gene therapy of LCA. LCA ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The chronic drought that hit western North America from 2000 to 2004 left dying forests and depleted river basins in its wake and was the strongest in 800 years, scientists have concluded, but they say those conditions will become the "new normal" for most of the coming century. Such climatic extremes have increased as a result of global warming, a group of 10 researchers reported today in Nature Geoscience. And as bad as conditions were during the 2000-04 drought, they may eventually be seen as the good old days. Climate models and precipitation projections ...

TORONTO, ON – Researchers from the University of Toronto (U of T) and King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) have made a breakthrough in the development of colloidal quantum dot (CQD) films, leading to the most efficient CQD solar cell ever. Their work is featured in a letter published in Nature Nanotechnology. The researchers, led by U of T Engineering Professor Ted Sargent, created a solar cell out of inexpensive materials that was certified at a world-record 7.0% efficiency. "Previously, quantum dot solar cells have been limited by the large internal ...

After the fall of the Soviet Union twenty years ago, water distribution in Central Asia became a source of conflict. In areas where summer precipitation is low, glaciers play an important role when considering the quantity of available water. The Tien Shan region is a prime example; mountain glaciers in this region contribute significantly to the fresh water supply in the arid zones of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Northwestern China. Like Switzerland, Kyrgyzstan serves as a water tower for its neighboring countries. While the impact of climate ...

SALT LAKE CITY, July 30, 2012 – In the years after Columbus' voyage, burning of New World forests and fields diminished significantly – a phenomenon some have attributed to decimation of native populations by European diseases. But a new University of Utah-led study suggests global cooling resulted in fewer fires because both preceded Columbus in many regions worldwide. "The drop in fire [after about A.D. 1500] has been linked previously to the population collapse. We're saying no, there is enough independent evidence that the drop in fire was caused by cooling climate," ...

HAMILTON, ON (July 30, 2012) – Child abuse experts say psychological abuse can be as damaging to a young child's physical, mental and emotional health as a slap, punch or kick. While difficult to pinpoint, it may be the most challenging and prevalent form of child abuse and neglect, experts say in an American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) position statement on psychological maltreatment in the August issue of the journal Pediatrics. Psychological abuse includes acts such as belittling, denigrating, terrorizing, exploiting, emotional unresponsiveness, or corrupting a child ...

A new analysis has found that doing away with PSA (prostate specific antigen) testing for prostate cancer would likely cause three times as many men to develop advanced disease that has spread to other parts of the body before being diagnosed. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study suggests that PSA testing and early detection may prevent approximately 17,000 men each year from having such advanced prostate cancer at diagnosis. PSA testing has come under fire recently as a potentially ineffective screen for ...

Eliminating the PSA test to screen for prostate cancer would be taking a big step backwards and would likely result in rising numbers of men with metastatic cancer at the time of diagnosis, predicted a University of Rochester Medical Center analysis published in the journal, Cancer. The URMC study suggests that the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test and early detection may prevent up to 17,000 cases of metastatic prostate cancer a year. Data shows, in fact, that if age-specific pre-PSA era incidence rates were to occur in the present day, the number of men whose cancer ...

Chicago—(July 30, 2012): A surgical patient safety program that combines three components—accurate outcome measurement, support of hospital leadership, and engaged frontline providers—reduces surgical site infections (SSIs) by 33 percent in patients who undergo colorectal procedures, according to a new study published in the August issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. SSIs are the most common complication for this high-risk population, occurring in 15 to 30 percent of patients after colorectal operations, according to the study authors. "Colorectal ...

Author Max Elliot Anderson has published his 10th adventure book for children 8 - 13, The Scarecrow. "The Scarecrow is the first of my books to carry a stronger Christian message as part of the plot and story," Anderson said. "My primary intent in writing The Scarecrow is to provide an exciting book for readers 8 - 13, that can be used with confidence by parents, churches, children's ministries, homeschoolers, Christian schools, and others who wish to reach out to kids with this unique tool." The Scarecrow can also be given as a gift to a hurting ...