CINCINNATI—The alarm caused by bisphenol A (BPA) presence in reusable plastic bottles resulted in a recent industry change, producing products made with supposed BPA-free materials. Prompted by requests and concern from consumers, University of Cincinnati (UC) researchers wanted to see if these alternatives—including products made with stainless steel and coated aluminum—were truly giving the consumer an option free of BPA. In a study reported in the July 8, 2011 advance online edition of the journal Chemosphere, Scott Belcher, PhD, associate professor in the pharmacology ...

CHICAGO --- "I don't remember how I got home from the party." This could be a text from last night to one hard-partying college student from another. New research from Northwestern Medicine shows that 50 percent of college drinkers report at least one alcohol-induced memory blackout -- a period of amnesia -- in the past year during a drinking binge. Despite being fully conscious during such blackouts, students could not recall specific events, such as how they got to a bar, party or their own front door. Published in Injury Prevention, May 2011, the study found college ...

Teenaged boys from well-off Chinese families who say they are physically active and eat plenty of vegetables but few sweets are more likely to be overweight, according to a study led by researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC). The study, published in the July 2011 issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior, is one of the first to examine how weight among Chinese adolescents relates to factors like sleep duration, physical activity, diet and general demographics. Most of what the research team found runs counter to ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---A link between chemicals called phthalates and thyroid hormone levels was confirmed by the University of Michigan in the first large-scale and nationally representative study of phthalates and BPA in relation to thyroid function in humans. The U-M School of Public Health study also reported suggestive findings consistent with a previously reported link between a chemical called bisphenol-A and thyroid hormone levels. BPA is best known for its use in certain plastic water bottles and in the linings of canned foods. Researchers used publicly available ...

Networks of biologically-connected marine protected areas need to be carefully planned, taking into account the open ocean migrations of marine fish larvae that take them from one home to another sometimes hundreds of kilometers away. Research published today in the international journal Oecologia sheds new light on the dispersal of marine fish in their larval stages, important information for the effective design of marine protected areas (MPAs), a widely advocated conservation tool. Using a novel genetic analysis, researchers at the University of Windsor, Canada, ...

AURORA, Colo. (July 11, 2011) Bulimia nervosa is a severe eating disorder associated with episodic binge eating followed by extreme behaviors to avoid weight gain such as self-induced vomiting, use of laxatives or excessive exercise. It is poorly understood how brain function may be involved in bulimia. A new study led by Guido Frank, MD, assistant professor, Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and Director, Developmental Brain Research Program at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, studied the brain response to a dopamine related reward-learning ...

The Alquity Africa equity investment fund targets double-digit returns from Africa's high-growth economies. Notably, it achieved a 10% return for investors in its maiden year. In addition, Alquity Investment Management, the fund's investment manager, has committed to donating a minimum of 25% of its net management fees on an ongoing basis to projects aimed at transforming lives across Africa. As the donation comes from Alquity's management fees, investors still receive their full investment return. The Alquity Africa Fund will be available to invest in via The deVere ...

SALT LAKE CITY – One-fifth of all patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension suffer with the fatal disease for more than two years before being correctly diagnosed and properly treated, according to a new national study led by researchers at Intermountain Medical Center in Salt Lake City. "For a lot of patients, that means the treatment is more difficult and the damage is irreversible," said Lynnette Brown, MD, PhD, a pulmonologist and researcher at Intermountain Medical Center and lead author of the study, which is published this week in the July issue of Chest, the ...

Hospitals across the nation are increasingly implementing palliative care programs to help patients manage the physical and emotional burdens of serious illnesses, but a new University of Georgia study finds that 82 percent of the state's hospitals do not offer palliative care services. "Most people will have some sort of extended illness at the end of their life, and many, especially frail elders, could benefit from this type of care," said study principal investigator Anne Glass, assistant director of the UGA Institute of Gerontology, part of the College of Public Health. ...

Studies by the University of Toronto's psychology department suggest that racism may impact some female minority groups more deeply than sexism. "We found that Asian women take racism more personally and find it more depressing than sexism," said lead author and doctoral student Jessica Remedios. "In order to understand the consequences for people who encounter prejudice, we must consider the type of prejudice they are facing," says Remedios. In one study, 66 participants of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Taiwanese and Japanese descent were assigned one of three hypothetical ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. − A team of researchers led by University of Kentucky College of Agriculture Professor Joe Chappell is making a connection from prehistoric times to the present that could result in being able to genetically create a replacement for oil and coal shale deposits. This could have fundamental implications for the future of the earth's energy supply. Tom Niehaus, completing his doctorate in the Chappell laboratory; Shigeru Okada, a sabbatical professor from the aquatic biosciences department at the University of Tokyo; Tim Devarenne, a UK graduate and ...

Toronto, ON - When it comes to how they respond to the environment, trees may not be that different from humans. Recent studies showed that even genetically identical human twins can have a different chance of getting a disease. This is because each twin has distinct personal experiences through their lifetime. It turns out that the same is likely true for forest trees as well, according to new research from the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC). "The findings were really quite stunning," says Malcolm Campbell, a biologist and lead author of the study. "People ...

A genome-wide survey by researchers at The Wistar Institute shows how our cells create alternate versions of mRNA transcripts by altering how they "read" DNA. Many genes are associated with multiple gene promoters, the researchers say, which is the predominant way multiple variants of a given gene, for example, can be made with the same genetic instructions. Their findings, which appear in the journal Genome Research, available online now, show how genes are read in developing and adult brains, and identify the changes in reading DNA that accompany brain development. ...

Researchers at the NYU Cancer Institute, an NCI-designated cancer center at NYU Langone Medical Center, identified for the first time the key role specific microRNAs (miRNAs) play in melanoma metastasis to simultaneously cause cancer cells to invade and immunosuppress the human body's ability to fight abnormal cells. The new study is published in the July 11, 2011 issue of the journal Cancer Cell. Researchers performed a miRNA analysis of human melanoma tissues, including primary and metastatic tumors. They found in both sets of tumor cells significantly high levels ...

Researchers from Rigshospitalet – Copenhagen University Hospital – and the University of Copenhagen have discovered why malaria parasites are able to hide from the immune defences of expectant mothers, allowing the parasite to attack the placenta. The discovery is an important part of the efforts researchers are making to understand this frequently fatal disease and to develop a vaccine. Staff member at CMP. Photo: Lars Hviid"We have found one likely explanation for the length of time it takes for the expectant mother's immune defences to discover the infection in the ...

PITTSBURGH, July 11 – A new method for scoring the severity of illness for patients after cardiac arrest may help to predict their outcomes, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Most importantly, their findings, published in the early online version of Resuscitation, also show that none of the severity categories rules out the potential for a patient's recovery. "Traditionally, we have used historical or event-related information, such as initial cardiac rhythm or whether someone witnessed the collapse, to categorize these patients ...

Rockville, Md. — Using owls as a model, a new research study reveals the advantage of stereopsis, commonly referred to as stereovision, is its ability to discriminate between objects and background; not in perceiving absolute depth. The findings were published in a recent Journal of Vision article, Owls see in stereo much like humans do. The purpose of the study, which was conducted at RWTH Aachen (Germany) and Radboud University (Nijmegen, Netherlands), was to uncover how depth perception came into existence during the course of evolution. "The reason why studying ...

Health care laws to protect patients' privacy make it nearly impossible for medical device designers to develop and test the safety and usability of medical products by observing use in an actual practitioner-patient setting. As a result, usability errors and hazards may be overlooked, with the potential for devastating consequences. In the recent issue of Ergonomics in Design, human factors/ergonomics researchers found that storytelling as a qualitative research method was a more effective—and stimulating—way for health care practitioners to provide valuable insights during ...

What accounts for the sounds we like to hear? Is it something about the properties of our auditory systems or brains? Or are such tastes learned? Two-month-old human infants show a preference for consonant, or gentler harmonies over more dissonant or harsher ones. But it's still impossible to know whether that preference is inborn, since the babies may have been exposed to certain sounds, even in utero. Birds show similar behaviors: they can distinguish between different kinds of sounds and certain species are attracted to certain sounds. But because no one had experimented ...

It's not just the words, but the sounds of words that have meaning for us. This is true for children and adults, who can associate the strictly auditory parts of language— vowels produced in the front or the back of the mouth, high or low pitch—with blunt or pointy things, large or small things, fast-moving or long-staying things. Do the same principles apply for young infants, and not just to things, but also to abstractions? A new study by Marcela Peña, Jacques Mehler, and Marina Nespor, working together at the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Physicists at the University of California, Riverside report that they have discovered a new way to create positronium, an exotic and short-lived atom that could help answer what happened to antimatter in the universe, why nature favored matter over antimatter at the universe's creation. Positronium is made up of an electron and its antimatter twin, the positron. It has applications in developing more accurate Positron Emission Tomography or PET scans and in fundamental physics research. Recently, antimatter made headlines when scientists at CERN, ...

AUDIO: Optic nerve damage from glaucoma seems to be at least partly related to damage from byproducts of oxygen in the eye. now, measuring oxygen levels during eye surgery, researchers at... Click here for more information. Measuring oxygen during eye surgery, investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered a reason that may explain why African-Americans have a higher risk of glaucoma than Caucasians. They found that oxygen levels ...

San Diego, CA, July 12, 2011 – Lack of physical exercise is often implicated in many disease processes. However, sedentary behavior, or too much sitting, as distinct from too little exercise, potentially could be a new risk factor for disease. The August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine features a collection of articles that addresses many aspects of the problem of sedentary behavior, including the relevant behavioral science that will be needed to evaluate whether initiatives to reduce sitting time can be effective and beneficial. "Epidemiologic and ...

07/07/11, Clearwater Beach, FL. Research to be presented at the upcoming annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, may explain why some antipsychotic drugs can promote overeating, weight gain, and insulin resistance. Olanzapine, an atypical antipsychotic drug approved by the FDA for the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, has been associated with body weight gain and impaired glucose homeostasis in humans and in experimental animals. As part ...

07/07/11, Clearwater Beach, FL. New research findings to be presented at the upcoming annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, finds that ghrelin, a natural gut hormone that stimulates feeding, also modulates the ability of tasty food and food-related cues to alter dopamine levels within the striatum, a critical component of the brain's reward system. Scientists measured dopamine in 'real-time' while rats ate sugar, a highly rewarding food. Administering ...