Early colonization of the gut by microbes in infants is critical for development of their intestinal tract and in immune development. A new study, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology, shows that differences in bacterial colonization of formula-fed and breast-fed babies leads to changes in the infant's expression of genes involved in the immune system, and in defense against pathogens. The health of individuals can be influenced by the diversity of microbes colonizing the gut, and microbial colonization can be especially important in regulating ...

SALT LAKE CITY, April 30, 2012 – Cochlear implants have restored basic hearing to some 220,000 deaf people, yet a microphone and related electronics must be worn outside the head, raising reliability issues, preventing patients from swimming and creating social stigma. Now, a University of Utah engineer and colleagues in Ohio have developed a tiny prototype microphone that can be implanted in the middle ear to avoid such problems. The proof-of-concept device has been successfully tested in the ear canals of four cadavers, the researchers report in a study just published ...

PULLMAN, Wash.— The Yellowstone "super-volcano" is a little less super—but more active—than previously thought. Researchers at Washington State University and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre say the biggest Yellowstone eruption, which created the 2 million year old Huckleberry Ridge deposit, was actually two different eruptions at least 6,000 years apart. Their results paint a new picture of a more active volcano than previously thought and can help recalibrate the likelihood of another big eruption in the future. Before the researchers split ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—April 29, 2012—Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have determined how specific circuitry in the brain controls not only body movement but also motivation and learning, providing new insight into neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease—and psychiatric disorders such as addiction and depression. Previously, researchers in the laboratory of Gladstone Investigator Anatol Kreitzer, PhD, discovered how an imbalance in the activity of a specific category of brain cells is linked to Parkinson's. Now, in a paper published online today in Nature ...

Tablet based conference mirroring is giving residents an up close and personal look at images and making radiology case conferences a more interactive learning experience, a new study shows. Residents at Northwestern University in Chicago are using tablets and a free screen sharing software during case conferences to see and manipulate the images that are being presented. "The idea stems from the fact that I was used to having presentation slides directly in front of me during medical school lectures. I thought this would benefit radiology residents, especially in ...

MR enterography is superior to CT enterography in diagnosing fibrosis in pediatric patients with Crohn disease and equally as good as CT enterography in detecting active inflammation, and a new study shows. The study, conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, found that MR enterography was 77.6% accurate in depicting fibrosis compared to 56.9% for CT enterography. MR enterography had an 82.1% accuracy rate versus 77.6% accuracy rate for CT enterography for detecting active inflammation, said Keith Quencer, MD, one of the authors of the study. The study ...

Radiologists classify themselves as less competent than other physicians regarding knowledge of patient imaging costs and patient safety, a new study shows. The study conducted at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and Northwestern University in Chicago compared 711 radiologists to 2,685 non-radiology physicians. "On a scale of one to five, with five being highly competent, understanding of patient safety was rated as 3.1 by radiologists and 3.33 by non-radiologists," said Rajni Natesan, MD, an author of the study from Northwestern University. Patient imaging ...

About one-third of CT examinations performed following an inconclusive abdominal ultrasound examination have positive findings, according to a study of 449 patients at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Opinions vary as to the need and relevance for further diagnostic imaging workup after an inconclusive abdominal ultrasound examination, said Supriya Gupta, MD, one of the authors of the study. "Our study found that 32.9% of follow-up CT examinations had positive findings, while 42.7% had findings that were not significant and 11.7% were equivocal. The remaining ...

BOSTON – Binkies, corks, soothers. Whatever you call pacifiers, conventional wisdom holds that giving them to newborns can interfere with breastfeeding. New research, however, challenges that assertion. In fact, limiting the use of pacifiers in newborn nurseries may actually increase infants' consumption of formula during the birth hospitalization, according to a study to be presented Monday, April 30, at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Boston. Studies have shown that breastfed infants have fewer illnesses such as ear infections and diarrhea ...

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that one-third of U.S. adults with arthritis, 45 years and older, report having anxiety or depression. According to findings that appear today in Arthritis Care & Research, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), anxiety is nearly twice as common as depression among people with arthritis, despite more clinical focus on the latter mental health condition. In the U.S. 27 million individuals, 25 years of age and older, have doctor diagnosed ...

Philadelphia, PA, April 30, 2012 – It is often thought that starting a family will lead parents to healthier eating habits, as they try to set a good example for their children. Few studies, however, have evaluated how the addition of children into the home may affect parents' eating habits. Changes in family finances, the challenges of juggling schedules, or a child's eating preferences may influence how a family eats. In one of the first longitudinal studies to examine the effect of having children on parents' eating habits, researchers have found that parenthood does ...

WASHINGTON, April 30--Physicists have long chased an elusive goal: the ability to "freeze" and then study the motion of electrons in matter. Such experiments could help confirm theories of electron motion and yield insights into how and why chemical reactions take place. Now a collaboration of scientists from France and Canada has developed an elegant new method to study electrons' fleeting antics using isolated, precisely timed, and incredibly fast pulses of light. The team will describe the technique at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics , taking place in San ...

WASHINGTON, April 30--Different types of compact, low-power portable sensors under development by three independent research groups may soon yield unprecedented capabilities to monitor ozone, greenhouse gases, and air pollutants. The three teams will each present their work at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO: 2012 (http://www,cleoconference.org)), to be held May 6-11, in San Jose, Calif. Princeton University engineer Amir Khan and colleagues, working with space scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas, will discuss how their teams combined a compact, ...

In a single new scientific publication, 24 new species of lizards known as skinks, all from islands in the Caribbean, have been discovered and scientifically named. According to Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Penn State University and the leader of the research team, half of the newly added skink species already may be extinct or close to extinction, and all of the others on the Caribbean islands are threatened with extinction. The researchers found that the loss of many skink species can be attributed primarily to predation by the mongoose -- an invasive predatory ...

Philadelphia -- A few months after the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report on the use of psychoactive drugs by children in foster care in five states, a national study from PolicyLab at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia describes prescription patterns over time in 48 states. The updated findings show the percentage of children in foster care taking antipsychotics--a class of psychoactive drugs associated with serious side effects for children-- continued to climb in the last decade. At the same time, a slight decline was seen in the use ...

KOREA (30 April 2012) — There is more going on in DPR Korea than rocket science: local people in collaboration with natural resources scientists are taking control of their food supply through agroforestry. This is according to a report published in Agroforestry Systems journal. How participatory agroforestry restored land and secured the food supply The report published online on 24 March, notes that in DPR Korea a bottom–up participatory process of developing locally appropriate agroforestry has been a revelation to many and is helping to reverse the chronic food ...

Scientists have discovered that they can dramatically increase the life span of mice with progeria (premature ageing disease) and heart disease (caused by Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy) by reducing levels of a protein called SUN1. This research was done by A*STAR's Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) in collaboration with their partners at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States and the Institute of Cellular and System Medicine in Taiwan. Their findings were published in the prestigious scientific journal, Cell, on 27th April 2012 ...

A new study of the wandering albatross – one of the largest birds on Earth – has shown that some of the birds are breeding earlier in the season compared with 30 years ago. Reporting online this month (April) in the journal Oikos, a British team of scientists describe how they studied the breeding habits of the wandering albatross on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia. They have discovered that because some birds are now laying their eggs earlier, the laying date for the population is an average of 2.2 days earlier than before. The researchers say the reasons ...

Corals, trees and marine sediments, among others, are direct evidence of the climate of the past, but they are not the only indicators. A team led by Spanish scientists has interpreted records written in Iraq by Arabic historians for the first time and has made a chronology of climatic events from the year 816 to 1009, when cold waves and snow were normal. The Arabic historians' records chronologically narrate social, political and religious matters, and some of them mention climate. A study led by researchers from the University of Extremadura (Spain) has focused on ancient ...

Researchers studying a superconducting strip observed an intermittent motion of magnetic flux which carries vortices inside the regularly spaced weak conducting regions carved into the superconducting material. These vortices resulted in alternating static phases with zero voltage and dynamic phases, which are characterised by non-zero voltage peaks in the superconductor. This study, which is about to be published in EPJ B¹, was carried out by scientists from the Condensed Matter Theory Group of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, working in collaboration with Brazilian ...

Obese women are more likely to be discriminated against when applying for jobs and receive lower starting salaries than their non-overweight colleagues, a new study has found. The study, led by The University of Manchester and Monash University, Melbourne, and published in the International Journal of Obesity, examined whether a recently developed measure of anti-fat prejudice, the universal measure of bias (UMB), predicted actual obesity job discrimination. The researchers also assessed whether people's insecurity with their own bodies (body image) and conservative personalities ...

Great care should be taken when performing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in patients with a cardiac pacemaker. Henning Bovenschulte and his co-authors review recent findings in the latest issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2012; 109[15]: 270-5). MRI is generally contraindicated in patients with a pacemaker (PM) or an implantable cardiac defibrillator (ICD), because of the risk of life-threatening events. The devices and their sensors may interact with the magnetic fields, disrupting the cardiac rhythm. Energy builds up in the electrode leads, ...

Pasadena, CA—The Big Bang produced lots of hydrogen and helium and a smidgen of lithium. All heavier elements found on the periodic table have been produced by stars over the last 13.7 billion years. Astronomers analyze starlight to determine the chemical makeup of stars, the origin of the elements, the ages of stars, and the evolution of galaxies and the universe. Now for the first time, astronomers have detected the presence of arsenic and selenium, neighboring elements near the middle of the periodic table, in an ancient star in the faint stellar halo that surrounds ...

Evidence that a Florentine merchant house financed the earliest English voyages to North America, has been published on-line in the academic journal Historical Research. The article by Dr Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli, a member of a project based at the University of Bristol, indicates that the Venetian merchant John Cabot (alias Zuan Caboto) received funding in April 1496 from the Bardi banking house in London. The payment of 50 nobles (£16 13s. 4d.) was made so that 'Giovanni Chabotte' of Venice, as he is styled in the document, could undertake expeditions 'to go and find ...

Theoretical physicist Ali Naji from the IPM in Tehran and the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues have shown how small random patches of disordered, frozen electric charges can make a difference when they are scattered on surfaces that are overall neutral. These charges induce a twisting force that is strong enough to be felt as far as nanometers or even micrometers away. These results, about to be published in EPJ E (1), could help to understand phenomena that occurr on surfaces such as those of large biological molecules. To measure the strength of the twist ...