A Letter to the Editor entitled "What should we advise about alcohol consumption?" was recently published by Maurizio Ponz de Leon in Intern Emerg Med.1 Dr. de Leon argues that the message of health benefits of moderate drinking "seems to me hazardous and extremely dangerous to diffuse in the general population." His reasons included (1) many people may be unable to distinguish between low–moderate and high consumption of wine, beer or spirits, and alcohol metabolism may differ remarkably from one subject to another; (2) alcohol remains a frequent cause of car crash, ...

After a rough day at the office, you might opt for a convenient, pretty restaurant over one with a top-notch menu, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "If you've had a tough day at work, how will that affect the decisions you make, like where to eat, what to do, and what to buy?" ask authors Echo Wen Wan (University of Hong Kong) and Nidhi Agrawal (Northwestern University). Their research revealed that people who are tired from a demanding task will tend to pass up the most desirable choices and go for options that seem to have attractive low-level ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – While monogamy is often touted as a way to protect against disease, young couples who say they have discussed monogamy can't seem to agree on what they decided. And a significant percentage of those couples who at least agreed that they would be monogamous weren't. A new study of 434 young heterosexual couples ages 18-25 found that, in 40 percent of couples, only one partner says the couple agreed to be sexually exclusive. The other partner said there was no agreement. Public health researchers Jocelyn Warren and Marie Harvey of Oregon State University ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new analysis of the Northern Hemisphere's "albedo feedback" over a 30-year period concludes that the region's loss of reflectivity due to snow and sea ice decline is more than double what state-of-the-art climate models estimate. The findings are important, researchers say, because they suggest that Arctic warming amplified by the loss of reflectivity could be even more significant than previously thought. The study was published online this week in Nature Geoscience. It was funded primarily by the National Science Foundation, with data also culled ...

New technology providing the first view of DNA damage throughout the entire human genome developed by Cardiff University scientists could offer a valuable new insight into the development and treatment of conditions like cancer. Professor Ray Waters, Dr Simon Reed and Dr Yumin Teng from Cardiff University's Department of Genetics, Haematology and Pathology have developed a unique way of measuring DNA damage frequency using tiny microarrays. Using the new method Cardiff scientists can, for the first time, examine all 28,000 human genes where previous techniques have ...

Soy protein's ability to lower total and LDL (low-density lipoprotein or "the bad") cholesterol has been extensively studied, but the mechanism whereby soy protein lowers cholesterol remains unresolved. A new study published in the Journal of Clinical Lipidology last month shows that soy protein lowers total cholesterol and non-HDL (non-high-density lipoprotein) cholesterol significantly more than milk protein in patients with moderately high cholesterol levels. "Non-HDL cholesterol has been shown to be a somewhat stronger predictor of cardiovascular disease and mortality ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Researchers have identified how the hormones progesterone and estrogen interact to increase cell growth in normal mammary cells and mammary cancers, a novel finding that may explain why postmenopausal women receiving hormone replacement therapy with estrogen plus progestin are at increased risk of breast cancer. The discovery that both estrogen and progesterone must be present for the increased production of the protein amphiregulin, which binds to mammary cells and promotes cell growth, could lead to new treatment methods for the disease, said Sandra ...

CINCINNATI--Emergency medicine researchers with the University of Cincinnati (UC) are advocating a new strategy for diagnosing a common but dangerous condition in the emergency room. Pulmonary embolism, or PE, is a potentially lethal disease in which a blood clot, usually from the legs, travels to the lungs and becomes lodged in a pulmonary artery. But the most common way of testing for PEs, a computed tomography angiography (CTA), comes with so many side effects that researchers in emergency medicine are now looking for ways to reduce use of the test. In a CTA, a contrast ...

Ask your kid what happened to the dinosaurs, and he or she will likely tell you that an asteroid killed them all. But ask how dinosaurs rose to prominence and you'll likely get a blank stare. Even many paleontologists may have little to say about the subject. But now, as EARTH explores in a feature in the February issue, new fossil discoveries are revealing the backstory of the rise of dinosaurs. Learn more about this eye-opening subject in February's article "Triassic Park: On the Origin of Dinosaur Species," and read other analytical stories on topics such as what OPEC's ...

CHICAGO --- When a traffic light at a busy intersection flashes the WALK sign, people with knee osteoarthritis worry they can't walk fast enough to make it across the street in time. New Northwestern Medicine research shows people with this common arthritis are more likely to walk fast enough if they lead physically active lives. "The more active people are, the faster they can walk," said Dorothy Dunlop, associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "This is strong evidence that even a small increase ...

UNC scientists who study how cells repair damage from environmental factors like sunlight and cigarette smoke have discovered how a "chaperone" enzyme plays a key role in cells' ability to tolerate the DNA damage that leads to cancer and other diseases. The enzyme, known as Rad18, detects a protein called DNA polymerase eta (Pol eta) and accompanies it to the sites of sunlight-induced DNA damage, enabling accurate repair. When Pol eta is not present, alternative error-prone polymerases take its place – a process that leads to DNA mutations often found in cancer cells. ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 18, 2011 -- Physicists and bioengineers have developed an optical instrument allowing them to control the behavior of a worm just by shining a tightly focused beam of light at individual neurons inside the organism. The pioneering optogenetic research, by a team at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is described this week in the journal Nature Methods. Their device is known as the CoLBeRT (Controlling Locomotion and Behavior in Real Time) system for optical control of freely moving ...

A study led by Dr. Tom P. Aufderheide, professor of emergency medicine at The Medical College of Wisconsin, shows an alternative method of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation increases long-term survival of patients. The study, which is published in the January 19th, 2011 online version of Lancet, and will be in an upcoming publication of Lancet, determined that active compression-decompression cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) with augmentation of negative intrathoracic pressure gave patients a better chance of survival. When the pressure inside the thorax decreases, ...

CHICAGO – January 18, 2011 – Maintaining periodontal health may contribute to a healthy respiratory system, according to research published in the Journal of Periodontology. A new study suggests that periodontal disease may increase the risk for respiratory infections, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and pneumonia. These infections, which are caused when bacteria from the upper throat are inhaled into the lower respiratory tract, can be severely debilitating and are one of the leading causes of death in the U.S. The study included 200 participants ...

A complex sugar may someday become one of the most effective weapons to stop the spread of cholera, a disease that has claimed thousands of lives in Haiti since the devastating earthquake last year. A technique developed by University of Central Florida scientists would allow relief workers to test water sources that could be contaminated with the cholera toxin. In the test, the sugar dextran is coated onto iron oxide nanoparticles and then added to a sample of the water. If the cholera toxin is present, the toxin will bind to the nanoparticles' dextran. This is because ...

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Researchers at Northwestern University have placed nanocrystals of rock salt into lead telluride, creating a material that can harness electricity from heat-generating items such as vehicle exhaust systems, industrial processes and equipment and sun light more efficiently than scientists have seen in the past. The material exhibits a high thermoelectric figure of merit that is expected to enable 14 percent of heat waste to electricity, a scientific first. Chemists, physicists and material scientists at Northwestern collaborated to develop the material. ...

LA JOLLA, CA – January 18, 2011 – Using chemical compounds found in a Japanese plant as a lead and the clever application of ultraviolet light, a Scripps Research Institute team has created a unique library of dozens of synthetic compounds to test for biomedical potential. Already, one of the compounds has shown great promise in inhibiting replication of HIV particles and fighting inflammation. With the report of their work scheduled to appear in the online Early Edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, the researchers now plan to optimize ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers have determined the structure and mechanism of an enzyme that performs the crucial first step in the formation of cholesterol and a key virulence factor in staph bacteria. Chemists at the University of Illinois and collaborators in Taiwan studied a type of enzyme found in humans, plants, fungi, parasites, and many bacteria that begins the synthesis of triterpenes – one of the most abundant and most ancient classes of molecules. Triterpenes are precursors to steroids such as cholesterol. "These enzymes are important drug targets," said chemistry ...

While every cell of an organism contains the same genes only a proportion are expressed in any tissue at a given stage in development. Knowing the extent of gene transcription is valuable and a team of European researchers has generated an atlas of gene expression for the developing mouse embryo. This will be a powerful resource to determine co-expression of genes and to identify functional associations between genes relevant to development and disease. The findings will be published next week in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology. The comprehensive, interactive ...

Severe asthma in early childhood may lead to premature loss of lung function during adolescence and more serious disease during adulthood, researchers at Emory University School of Medicine report. Early identification and treatment of children with severe asthma is important to help stem asthma progression. In an article available online in the January issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749%2810%2901651-9/fulltext, Anne M. Fitzpatrick, PhD, and W. Gerald Teague, MD, and colleagues report on their study of ...

A new study at Rochester Institute of Technology indicates that the incidence of maltreatment, including neglect and physical and sexual abuse, is more than 25 percent higher among deaf and hard-of-hearing children than among hearing youths. The research also shows a direct correlation between childhood maltreatment and higher rates of negative cognition, depression and post-traumatic stress in adulthood. The study, which was presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, is one of the first to compare childhood maltreatment ...

We all want an apology when someone does us wrong. But a new study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people aren't very good at predicting how much they'll value an apology. Apologies have been in the news a lot the last few years in the context of the financial crisis, says David De Cremer of Erasmus University in the Netherlands. He cowrote the study with Chris Reinders Folmer of Erasmus University and Madan M. Pillutla of London Business School. "Banks didn't want to apologize because they didn't ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Frigid weather may seem like a good excuse to avoid workouts, stay inside and overindulge in comfort foods. However, health experts from the University of Missouri have found that these tendencies leave most people feeling less content during the winter months. MU researchers say people should establish new traditions to increase happiness and avoid wintertime woes. Instead of resolving to make drastic new year changes, establish healthy traditions for the winter months, MU nutrition and exercise physiology experts recommend. Incorporate activities ...

The newly released 2011 Thomson Reuters - HCPlexus National Physicians Survey (NPS) links doctors' fears that their pay will go down under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), commonly called Healthcare Reform Act (HCRA), with their concerns that the quality of care will also deteriorate. The study includes responses from 2,958 doctors of varying specialties and practice types, from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. The NPS is the most comprehensive survey of physicians surrounding their thoughts on the future of healthcare, including ideas ...

Atrazine is one of the most widely used herbicides in North American corn production, but heated controversy remains over the 50-plus-year-old product. Several other herbicides are used in corn production, and a host of non-chemical tactics are sometimes used, too. If the use of atrazine is restricted or banned altogether, how will sweet corn growers cope? A recent University of Illinois study shows sweet corn can be grown successfully without atrazine, but given today's approach, perhaps not very often. "We wanted to know the implications of using less atrazine in current ...