Preschool teachers' use of sophisticated vocabulary and analytic talk about books combined with early support for literacy in the home can predict fourth-grade reading comprehension and word recognition, new research from Vanderbilt University's Peabody College finds. The findings, published in Child Development and included in a review article in the August 19, 2011 edition of Science, present evidence that there are lasting, complex and mutually reinforcing effects that flow from strong early childhood classrooms. "We need to take very seriously the importance ...

There is no scientific basis for teaching boys and girls separately, according to Lise Eliot from The Chicago Medical School. Her review reveals fundamental flaws in the arguments put forward by proponents of single-sex schools to justify the need of teaching teach boys and girls separately. Eliot shows that neuroscience has identified few reliable differences between boys' and girls' brains relevant to learning or education. Her work is published online in Springer's journal Sex Roles. The first issue Eliot highlights is that single-sex school advocates often claim differences ...

Researchers at Lund University have discovered a new function for vitamin C. Treatment with vitamin C can dissolve the toxic protein aggregates that build up in the brain in Alzheimer's disease. The research findings are now being presented in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The brains of people with Alzheimer's disease contain lumps of so-called amyloid plaques which consist of misfolded protein aggregates. They cause nerve cell death in the brain and the first nerves to be attacked are the ones in the brain's memory centre. "When we treated brain tissue from ...

A team of researchers from the University of the Basque Country (Spain) has developed a method to determine the chemical composition of liquids seized by police and suspected to be explosive. Some of the samples analysed contained substances hazardous to health, such as methanol and boric acid. Each year police forces seize tonnes of pyrotechnic substances which, in principle, are for indoor firework manufacturing (i.e. flares or those used in artistic or sporting events), but which also may end up in the hands of violent groups and hooligans. A group of chemists from ...

Researchers have uncovered exactly how a human egg captures an incoming sperm to begin the fertilisation process, in a new study published this week in the journal Science. The research identifies the sugar molecule that makes the outer coat of the egg 'sticky', which is vital for enabling the sperm and egg to bind together. Researchers across the world have been trying to understand what performs this task for over thirty years. The scientists behind this study believe their work could help address some of the previously unexplained causes of human infertility and ...

Large-scale imaging shows mushroom body activity patterns are sparse and randomly distributed Cold Spring Harbor, NY – We know from experience that particular smells are almost inseparable in our minds with memories, some vague and others very specific. The smell of just-baked bread may trigger an involuntary mental journey, even if for a moment, to childhood, or to a particular day during childhood. Or it may, more diffusely, remind someone of grandma. How are these associations forged in the brain and how do we remember them? A research team at Cold Spring Harbor ...

This release is available in German. Boys are maturing physically earlier than ever before. The age of sexual maturity has been decreasing by about 2.5 months each decade at least since the middle of the 18th century. Joshua Goldstein, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock (MPIDR), has used mortality data to prove this trend, which until now was difficult to decipher. What had already been established for girls now seems to also be true for boys: the time period during which young people are sexually mature but socially not yet considered ...

TORONTO, Ont., Aug. 18, 2011_A new study has found no evidence that patients who had a heart ultrasound known as an echocardiogram before major surgery had improved survival rates one month or one year after their operation. Some groups of patients actually had worse survival rates, according to Dr. Duminda Wijeysundera, a scientist at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael's Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences. His study, published in the British Medical Journal, adds to a growing body of evidence that echocardiograms may not be ...

Athens, Ga. – Early Earth's atmosphere provided little shielding for ultraviolet light from space, so many prebiotic molecules, bombarded by it and light of other wavelengths, had a hard time surviving at all. But some molecules became photostable—able to withstand the assault and thrive as building blocks of life. Five of the many molecules that survived the bombardment from UV light were the nucleic acid bases adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine and uracil. Now, in just published research, a University of Georgia physicist and a collaborator in Germany have shown that ...

WASHINGTON – When it comes to mental illness, the sexes are different: Women are more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety or depression, while men tend toward substance abuse or antisocial disorders, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association. Published online in APA's Journal of Abnormal Psychology, the study looked at the prevalence by gender of different types of common mental illnesses. The researchers also found that women with anxiety disorders are more likely to internalize emotions, which typically results in withdrawal, loneliness ...

Vincent Fleury, a researcher at the Paris Diderot University, studied the early stage of development when embryonic cells first form a flat sheet of cells before folding into a U-shape, resembling a folded pancake. He demonstrated that the formation of a chicken's head is a consequence of the collision between both sides of the embryo flowing at constant speed towards each other. This study captured for the first time on film highly accurate observations of how a chicken embryo evolves during its first two days of development, using time-lapse microscopy. Prior attempts ...

This release is available in Spanish. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) researchers have developed an inexpensive way to grade the ethanol potential of perennial grasses at the biorefinery's loading dock. That future has been made possible by a team of Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists, including Ken Vogel, Rob Mitchell, and Steve Masterson at Lincoln, Neb.; Hans Jung at St. Paul, Minn.; Bruce Dien at Peoria, Ill.; and Michael Casler at Madison, Wis. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency, and this research supports the USDA priority ...

New Rochelle, NY, August 18, 2011—Recurring headaches are common during the year following a traumatic brain injury (TBI), regardless of the severity of the TBI, and they tend to occur more often among females and those with a pre-TBI history of headache, according to an article in Journal of Neurotrauma, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/neu More than 70% of patients who had suffered a TBI reported having headaches during the first year after their injury. This finding is a result of ...

SEATTLE – For the first time, researchers at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance have demonstrated the feasibility of using serial positron emission tomography (PET) scans, using a special estrogen-containing isotope, to confirm the relative effectiveness of estrogen-blocking and estrogen-depleting therapy in patients with metastatic breast cancer. The results of the research are published online in Clinical Cancer Research. The PET scans, taken before, during and after hormonal therapy, confirmed the superior effectiveness of estrogen-receptor-blocking drugs such as tamoxifen ...

In this study, Carsten Grabow and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany, created a model to test the speed of synchronisation of complex networks in collaboration with the Warwick Complexity Centre, UK. They tested this model using three very different oscillators acting on complex networks, which are known as Kuramoto, Rössler and pulse-coupled oscillators. As a result, for all tested networks they showed that the structure of the coupling between network nodes determines the speed of synchronisation. In short: ...

Washington, D.C.— Plant biologists have been working for years to nail down the series of chemical signals that one class of plant hormones, called brassinosteroids, send from a protein on the surface of a plant cell to the cell's nucleus. New research from Carnegie scientists Tae-Wuk Kim and Zhiyong Wang, with contributions from the University of California San Francisco, isolated another link in this chain. Fully understanding the brassinosteroid pathway could help scientists better understand plant growth and help improve food and energy crop production. Brassinosteroids ...

MBL, WOODS HOLE, MASS.—Why can one animal re-grow tissues and recover function after injury, while another animal (such as a human being) cannot? This is a central question of regenerative biology, a field that has captured the imagination of scientists and the public since the 18th century, and one that is finally gaining traction and momentum through modern methods of analysis. Regeneration of the eye lens in frogs; of neural tissue in the snail; of the spinal cord in the sea lamprey; of the entire viscera in the sea cucumber—these and other capacities of animal regeneration ...

3i, an international investor focused on private equity, infrastructure and debt management, announced today that it has acquired a minority stake of newly issued shares in TouchTunes Interactive Networks, the world's largest digital interactive out-of-home entertainment provider, for $40 million. Current majority shareholder VantagePoint Capital Partners will invest an additional $5 million. The total investment will support TouchTunes' growth strategy and help bolster its product and service offering. Founded in 1998, TouchTunes is the world's largest digital interactive ...

As the U.S. military prepares for the repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" (DADT), policymakers are looking to other military bodies around the world that have successfully integrated gay, lesbian and bisexual (GLB) soldiers into military service. Now a new study from Tel Aviv University suggests that an integrated support and education dimension is essential to the successful assimilation of these soldiers into the U.S. armed forces. Dr. Guy Shilo of TAU's Bob Shapell School of Social Work has completed the only quantitative study detailing the LGB experience in the military. ...

VIDEO: Newly reprocessed archival data from STEREO-A/SECCHI show details of the first Earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME) of the STEREO mission, from inception on December 12, 2008, to Earth impact on... Click here for more information. Using data collected by NASA's STEREO spacecraft, researchers at Southwest Research Institute and the National Solar Observatory have developed the first detailed images of solar wind structures as plasma and other particles from a coronal ...

PITTSBURGH—Science educators aim to nurture, enrich and sustain children's natural and spontaneous interest in scientific knowledge using many different approaches. In a new paper published in "Science," Carnegie Mellon University's David Klahr and Jamie Jirout and Illinois State University's Corinne Zimmerman use psychology research to outline ways to advance the science of science instruction. "Instead of looking at this issue from a science education perspective, we looked at it from a cognitive and developmental psychology perspective," said Klahr, the Walter van ...

This release is available in German. International agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) basically have one snag: it is almost impossible to independently verify whether participating countries abide by the agreement. Thus the evaluation of whether or not the countries have achieved their reduction targets is based on the official reports by the countries that are signatories to the UNFCCC ('United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change'). If they report reduced emissions they're sitting pretty; if not, they are pilloried. This ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Computer scientists in the field of artificial intelligence have made an important advance that blends computer vision, machine learning and automated planning, and created a new system that may improve everything from factory efficiency to airport operation or nursing care. And it's based on watching the Oregon State University Beavers play football. The idea is for a computer to observe a complex operation, learn how to do it, and then optimize those operations or accomplish other related tasks. In this project, the goal is for the computer to watch ...

CORAL GABLES, FL (August 18, 2011) — The birth of a baby can elicit many emotions, from joy and excitement to fear and uncertainty. But it can also trigger unexpected difficulties with anxiety, in particular with postpartum Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Psychologist Kiara Timpano from the University of Miami (UM) and her collaborators developed an effective program for the prevention of postpartum obsessive compulsive symptoms. The findings are reported online ahead of print by the Journal of Psychiatric Research. "Postpartum depression has received much attention, ...

A key glacier in Greenland is melting faster than previously expected, according to findings by a team of academics, including Dr Edward Hanna from University of Sheffield. Dr Hanna, from the University of Sheffield's Department of Geography, was part of a team of researchers that also included Dr Sebastian Mernild from the Los Alamos Laboratory, USA, and Professor Niels Tvis Knudsen from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The team's new findings present crucial insight into the effects of climate change. The researchers found that Greenland's longest-observed glacier, ...