Thinking about religion gives people more self-control on later, unrelated tasks; according to results from a series of recent Queen's University study. "After unscrambling sentences containing religiously oriented words, participants in our studies exercised significantly more self-control," says psychology graduate student and lead researcher on the study, Kevin Rounding. Study participants were given a sentence containing five words to unscramble. Some contained religious themes and others did not. After unscrambling the sentences, participants were asked to complete ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT postdoc Emile Bruneau has long been drawn to conflict — not as a participant, but an observer. In 1994, while doing volunteer work in South Africa, he witnessed firsthand the turmoil surrounding the fall of apartheid; during a 2001 trip to visit friends in Sri Lanka, he found himself in the midst of the violent conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military. Those chance experiences got Bruneau, who taught high school science for several years, interested in the psychology of human conflict. While teaching, he also volunteered as ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A newly published paper from Rhode Island Hospital reports on the impact to patients if five personality disorders are removed from the upcoming revision to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th edition (DSM-5). Based on their study, the researchers believe these changes could result in false-negative diagnoses for patients. The paper is published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and is now available online in advance of print. The DSM-5 Personality and Personality Disorders work group made several recommendations to change the approach toward ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – While it may appear that infants are helpless creatures that only blink, eat, cry and sleep, one University of Missouri researcher says that studies indicate infant brains come equipped with knowledge of "intuitive physics." "In the MU Developmental Cognition Lab, we study infant knowledge of the world by measuring a child's gaze when presented with different scenarios," said Kristy vanMarle, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences in the College of Arts and Science. "We believe that infants are born with expectations about the ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Prejudice is linked to aggression for men and fear for women, suggests new research led by Michigan State University scholars. The researchers report that, throughout history, men have been the primary aggressors against different groups as well as the primary victims of group-based aggression and discrimination. "There is evidence going back thousands of years of bands of men getting together and attacking other bands of men, eliminating them and keeping the women as the spoils of war," said Carlos David Navarrete, evolutionary psychologist at ...

A recently published academic study set out to examine differences in staffing levels and the quality of resident care between for-profit nursing home companies and government-owned facilities. The study, headed by a professor at the University of California-San Francisco's School of Nursing, sheds interesting light on nursing home neglect problems in the U.S. The study focused on the ten largest nursing home chains in the country, and found that they all had lower staffing hours for registered nurses and other nurses than public facilities. In addition, facilities owned ...

Division of labour is not only a defining feature of human societies but is also omnipresent among the building blocks of biological organisms and is considered a major theme of evolution. Theoretical Biologists Claus Rueffler and Joachim Hermisson from Vienna University in collaboration with Günter P. Wagner from Yale University identified necessary conditions under which division of labour is favoured by natural selection. The results of their study are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Most animals and plants consist of a set ...

Montreal January 24, 2012 – A saliva test used to diagnose the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is comparable in accuracy to the traditional blood test, according to a new study led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and McGill University. The meta-analysis, which compared studies worldwide, showed that the saliva HIV test, OraQuick HIV1/2, had the same accuracy as the blood test for high-risk populations. The test sensitivity was slightly reduced for low risk populations. The study, published in this week's issue of The Lancet ...

Organic chemists at the University of York have made a significant advance towards establishing the origin of the carbohydrates (sugars) that form the building blocks of life. A team led by Dr Paul Clarke in the Department of Chemistry at York have re-created a process which could have occurred in the prebiotic world. Working with colleagues at the University of Nottingham, they have made the first step towards showing how simple sugars –threose and erythrose—developed. The research is published in Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry. All biological molecules have an ...

Evidence of cardiovascular disease and diabetes risk is present in the blood of adolescents who consume a lot of fructose, a scenario that worsens in the face of excess belly fat, researchers report. An analysis of 559 adolescents age 14-18 correlated high-fructose diets with higher blood pressure, fasting glucose, insulin resistance and inflammatory factors that contribute to heart and vascular disease. Heavy consumers of the mega-sweetener also tend to have lower levels of cardiovascular protectors such as such as HDL cholesterol and adiponectin, according to researchers ...

For many people struggling with debt in Chicago, bankruptcy is a great way to get out of debt. After all, bankruptcy can be used to eliminate a number of troublesome debts, including high interest credit cards, medical bills, and loans while allowing most people to keep almost all of their assets. What people may not realize is that they can get protection from wage garnishment through bankruptcy as well. A Chicago wage garnishment attorney can help stop these garnishments by utilizing an important feature of bankruptcy, the automatic stay. This article will describe ...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Research by a team of Sandia National Laboratories chemists could impact worldwide efforts to produce clean, safe nuclear energy and reduce radioactive waste. The Sandia researchers have used metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to capture and remove volatile radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel. "This is one of the first attempts to use a MOF for iodine capture," said chemist Tina Nenoff of Sandia's Surface and Interface Sciences Department. The discovery could be applied to nuclear fuel reprocessing or to clean up nuclear reactor accidents. A characteristic ...

The findings appear in the current edition of the journal PLoS Biology. "Within our cells, we have communicating compartments called vesicles (a bubble-like membrane structure that stores and transports cellular products)," said Dr. Christopher Peters, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at BCM and lead author on the study. "These vesicles migrate through the cell, meet other vesicles and fuse. That fusion process is, in part, mediated through SNARE proteins that bring the vesicles together. How this happens has been in question for years." The ...

As scientific researchers become evermore competitive for scarce funding, scientific journals are increasing efforts to identify submissions that plagiarize the work of others. Still, it may take years to identify and retract the plagiarized papers and give credit to the actual researchers. "We need a better system," said Harold Garner, executive director of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech. Garner discussed the problem and solution in a Comment in the January 4, 2012 issue of Nature and in a January 19, 2012 radio interview with NPR's Leonard Lopate. ...

Research involving scientists at The University of Nottingham has taken us a step closer to breeding hardier crops that can better adapt to different environmental conditions and fight off attack from parasites. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), the researchers have shown that they can alter root growth in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress, by controlling an important regulatory protein. Dr Ive De Smet, a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) David ...

New Rochelle, NY, January 24, 2012—The time for commercial development of gene therapy has come. Patients with diseases treatable and curable with gene therapy deserve access to the technology, which has demonstrated both its effectiveness and feasibility, says James Wilson, MD, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Human Gene Therapy in a provocative commentary and accompanying videocast. Human Gene Therapy and Human Gene Therapy (HGT) Methods are peer-reviewed journals published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.. Until recently, gene therapy has been reserved for severe diseases with few ...

San Diego – Cytori Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CYTX) announced today the publication of previously reported six-month outcomes from APOLLO, the Company's European clinical trial evaluating adipose-derived stem and regenerative cells (ADRCs) in patients with acute myocardial infarction (heart attack or AMI), as Research Correspondence in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The APOLLO trial was a 14-patient, prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, feasibility trial (Phase I/IIA) evaluating autologous ADRCs extracted with the Company's proprietary ...

A molecule embedded in the membrane of human liver cells that aids in cholesterol absorption also allows the entry of hepatitis C virus, the first step in hepatitis C infection, according to research at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. The cholesterol receptor offers a promising new target for anti-viral therapy, for which an approved drug may already exist, say the researchers, whose findings were reported online in advance of publication in Nature Medicine. An estimated 4.1 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C virus, or HCV, which ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – In August 2010, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside discovered a tiny fairyfly wasp in upstate New York that had never been seen in the United States until then. Nearly exactly a year later, he discovered the wasp in Irvine, Calif., strongly suggesting that the wasp is well established in the country. Called Gonatocerus ater, the wasp is about 1 millimeter long and arrived in North America from Europe. It lays its eggs inside the eggs of leafhoppers. Leafhopper females lay their eggs inside plant tissue. Gonatocerus ater ...

Hampton Inn Atlanta-Southlake Morrow GA Hotel offers affordable accommodations to participants and guests attending the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions. Taking place at Clayton State University's Spivey Hall, the auditions will be held on Sunday, February 5, 2012. At the event, outstanding young vocalists from North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia will sing opera arias before a panel of expert judges, competing to advance to the national finals on stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Tickets are $35 and can be purchased through Spivey ...

Sheraton Atlanta Perimeter North / Dunwoody Hotel, located at Atlanta Perimeter Center, announces a new special savings package for travelers to enjoy. Guests who register for the SPG Better by the Night promotion can earn unlimited bonus Starpoints even faster. With every stay from January 9 through April 8, 2012, at this property and over 750 other participating hotels and resorts worldwide, guests earn double Starpoints on two-night stays and triple Starpoints on stays of three nights or longer. Register by March 15, 2012, and then book your stays to begin earning ...

Researchers have found a genetic variation predisposing children to six-times greater risk of developing metabolic syndrome when taking second-generation anti-psychotic medications. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions that are risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The study showed a close association with two conditions in particular: high blood pressure and elevated fasting blood sugar levels, which is a precursor to diabetes. The research is published today in the medical research journal Translational Psychiatry. "This is the first report of an underlying ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside has identified a property of "bilayer graphene" (BLG) that the researchers say is analogous to finding the Higgs boson in particle physics. Graphene, nature's thinnest elastic material, is a one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. Because of graphene's planar and chicken wire-like structure, sheets of it lend themselves well to stacking. BLG is formed when two graphene sheets are stacked in a special manner. Like graphene, BLG has high current-carrying ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – On any given weekend, at least 10 percent of students at a single college could be hosting a party, and on average, party hosts who live off campus are drinking more and engaging in more alcohol-related problem behaviors than are the students attending their bashes, research suggests. In contrast, hosts of parties held on campus tend to drink less than do the students attending their gatherings, according to the study. The research also suggests that college party hosts are more likely than the students attending parties to be male, living off campus, ...

Santa Barbara, CA –The Bren School-based authors of a study published Jan. 20 in the journal PLoS ONE have observed toxicity to marine organisms resulting from exposure to a nanoparticle that had not previously been shown to be toxic under similar conditions. Lead author and assistant research biologist Robert Miller and co-authors Arturo Keller and Hunter Lenihan – both Bren School professors and lead scientists at the UC Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology (UC CEIN) – Bren Phd student Samuel Bennett, and Scott Pease, a former UCSB undergraduate ...