A new study analysing how complex, highly-evolved societies are organised in nature has found that it is workers that play a pivotal role in creating well-ordered societies where conflict is minimised. For when it comes to determining who reproduces in ants, University of Leicester biologists have found the humble worker is queenmaker – it is they who choose their queen. This information is key to understanding the evolution of complex interdependent societies - over 100 millions years old - that have evolved mechanisms ensuring stable cohabitation and conflict resolution. What ...

A study by Yale School of Medicine researchers reveals that the illnesses and injuries that can restrict the activity of older adults or land them in the hospital are linked to worsening functional ability, especially among those who are physically frail. The report appears in JAMA's November 3 theme issue on aging. Thomas M. Gill, M.D., the Humana Foundation Professor of internal medicine (geriatrics), investigative medicine and epidemiology and public health at Yale, will present the findings at a JAMA media briefing at the National Press Club November 2 at 10 a.m. ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered that a multi-tasking protein called FoxO1 has another important but previously unknown function: It directly interacts with macrophages, promoting an inflammatory response that can lead to insulin resistance and diabetes. Contrarily, it also generates a negative feedback loop that can limit damage from excessive inflammation. The findings by Jerrold M. Olefsky, MD, Associate Dean for Scientific Affairs and professor of Medicine, and colleagues are published in the November 2 issue ...

Brain damage continues to develop and evolve for months after a traumatic brain injury (TBI), revealing a potential target for treatments to improve brain trauma, new research led by the University of Melbourne, Australia has found. The study funded by the Victorian Neurotrauma Initiative is published in the latest issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine (JNM). Around 400,000 Australians have a disability related to traumatic brain injury with cognitive, psychiatric and epileptic problems the most common symptoms. The major cause of TBI is motor vehicle accidents. ...

While the risk remains low the authors are surprised at the results and say "a critical evaluation of the obstetrical care system in the Netherlands is urgently required." Despite the high level of medical care in the Netherlands, the perinatal mortality rate (death of fetus or new born baby) is one of the highest in Europe, says the study. The management of childbirth delivery in the Netherlands is divided into two independent systems – midwife-led care for low risk pregnancies and obstetrician-led care for high-risk pregnancies. This differs to all other obstetric ...

The mysterious origins of Australia's bizarre and secretive marsupial moles have been cast in a whole new and unexpected light with the first discovery in the fossil record of one of their ancestors. The find reveals a remarkable journey through time, place and lifestyle: living marsupial moles are blind, earless and live underground in the deserts of the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia, yet their ancestors lived in lush rainforest far away in north Queensland. In the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team led by Professor Mike ...

Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have shown that they may be able to monitor the aging process in the brain, by using MRI technique to measure the brain lactic acid levels. Their findings suggest that the lactate levels increase in advance of other aging symptoms, and therefore could be used as an indicator of aging and age-related diseases of the CNS. "It's exciting to think that we are one step closer to understanding what happens as the brain ages, and how a change of brain metabolism may be important during the onset of age-related ...

A new breakthrough by scientists at the University of Sheffield has shed light on how the Earth's first plants began to colonise the land over 470 million years ago by forming a partnership with soil fungi. The research, which was published today (2 November 2010) in Nature Communications, has provided essential missing evidence showing that an ancient plant group worked together with soil-dwelling fungi to 'green' the Earth in the early Palaeozoic era, nearly half a billion years ago. The research, which also involved experts from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Imperial ...

A new study from North Carolina State University finds that anti-immigrant practices – such as anti-immigrant legislation or protests – are likely to backfire, and spur increased political action from immigrant communities. The study examined political activity in 52 metropolitan areas across the United States. "U.S. Census data indicate that 60 percent of the foreign-born in the U.S. are not citizens," says Dr. Kim Ebert, an assistant professor of sociology and co-author of a paper describing the research. "Non-citizens can't vote, so we wanted to determine how they ...

SAN DIEGO -- A third of breast cancer survivors who received the breast-conserving treatments lumpectomy and radiation rate the appearance of their post-treatment breast as only "fair" or "poor" in comparison to their untreated breast, according to a new University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine study that will be presented today at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) in San Diego. In addition, one fifth of patients report complications including chronic pain in their breast or arm and loss of arm or shoulder flexibility following ...

A pre-school language intervention programme can significantly improve the educational lives of children with poorly developed speech and language skills, according to new research by psychologists at the University of York. In the Language 4 Reading project, a team from the University's Department of Psychology at the University of York have evaluated the benefits of a pre-school language intervention programme for children who enter school with poorly developed speech and language skills. The project, which involved 15 schools and feeder-nurseries across Yorkshire, ...

The report by Jeanne Lenzer, a medical investigative journalist in New York, and Shannon Brownlee from the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in New Hampshire, looks at the FDA's approval of a device to prevent or reduce seizures in patients with epilepsy who do not respond to drug treatment. The device, manufactured by Cyberonics, is implanted under the skin and sends electrical impulses to stimulate the vagus nerve in the neck. It was approved by the FDA in 1997 on the condition that Cyberonics carried out a post-approval study to examine the ...

In the UK, medical students are 4.5 to 7.2 times more likely to come from the wealthier socio-economic groups 1-3 than 4-7, write Professor Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and Lucy Stephenson, a medical student. Selection to a medical course should not depend on the applicants' financial status. However, with "grade inflation" at A level, choosing between applicants can involve other criteria that may depend on ability to pay, they say. They calculate that the activities required as part of the selection process ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. — Value-Based Insurance Design — a concept created at the University of Michigan and incorporated in the nation's new health care reform law — is the focus of an upcoming national policy journal. Health Affairs, the nation's premier health policy journal, is featuring a cluster of papers in its November issue about growing interest in and adoption of Value-Based Insurance Design (V-BID). The concept was first developed and named by U-M faculty A. Mark Fendrick, M.D., and Dean Smith, Ph.D., along with Michael Chernew, Ph.D., formerly of U-M and now at ...

Strengthening routine influenza vaccination and health programs may help states improve their vaccination coverage against future pandemics or other health emergencies, a new study suggests. The study -- conducted by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) -- examined factors that may have contributed to the striking state-by-state variation in U.S. H1N1 flu vaccination rates. The results of the study were revealed on Oct. 26 at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision ...

The GOES-13 satellite keeps a continuous eye on the eastern half of the U.S. and Atlantic Ocean basin, and has provided meteorologists with an infrared look at a strengthening Tropical Storm Tomas this morning. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites like GOES-13 are managed by NOAA. The NASA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. creates images and animations from the GOES satellite data. When GOES-13 provided an infrared image (because it was taken at night) today, Nov. 2 at 0845 UTC (4:45 a.m. EDT), Tropical Storm Tomas ...

NJIT Associate Professor Victor Matveev, PhD, in the department of mathematical sciences, was part of a research team that published "N-type Ca2+ channels carry the largest current: Implications for nanodomains and transmitter release," in Nature Neuroscience on Oct. 17, 2010. http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v13/n11/abs/nn.2657.html Leading the project, Elise Stanley, PhD, a senior scientist at the Toronto Western Research Institute, said that Matveev's mathematical modeling showed that calcium influx through a single N-type calcium channel is sufficient to trigger ...

Faster and more widely available internet access has improved our lives in many ways but healthcare is lagging behind, according to researchers writing in the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics. The US team suggests that there is immense potential for the utilization of digitized personal health records (PHR) in chronic disease management. They have reviewed the state of the art in healthcare portals, assessed the standardization and the legality of health record s and point to a need to improve interoperability, which still represents a major ...

WHAT: Secondary infections with bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia, were a major cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic and may be important in modern pandemics as well, according to a new article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases co-authored by David M. Morens, M.D., senior advisor to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The researchers examined 13 studies published between 1918 and 1920. During this time, many scientists erroneously believed that ...

Gastric bypass surgery decreases the preference for sweet-tasting substances in obese rats, a study finding that could help in developing safer treatments for the morbidly obese, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. "Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery is the most common effective treatment for morbid obesity," said Andras Hajnal, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Neural and Behavioral Science and Surgery. "Many patients report altered taste preferences after having the procedure." This surgery involves the creation of a small gastric ...

This year's Salary Survey saw drops in salaries across the board with almost every speciality suffering a setback, some with dips as large as $20,000 (ecology) and $28,000 (virology). However, a few select fields, namely bioinformatics, biophysics, biotechnology, and neuroscience, bucked the trend and actually posted salary increases this year. Whilst it is not easy to determine why these specialities saw salaries rise and others saw salaries cut, Mark Musen, head of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at Stanford University commented: "I've noticed ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers have learned the structure that results when an antibody binds to the West Nile virus, neutralizing the virus by locking up its infection mechanism. The information could help scientists develop a vaccine against the mosquito-borne disease. The findings show precisely how a key part of the antibody, called the antigen binding fragment, or Fab, attaches to two adjacent protein molecules that make up the virus's outer shell. This "crosslinking" attachment between molecules is repeated over the entire shell, interlocking the 30 molecular ...

Winston-Salem, N.C. – Researchers for the first time have shown that drinking beet juice can increase blood flow to the brain in older adults – a finding that could hold great potential for combating the progression of dementia. The research findings are available online in Nitric Oxide: Biology and Chemistry, the peer-reviewed journal of the Nitric Oxide Society and will be available in print soon. (Read the abstract.) "There have been several very high-profile studies showing that drinking beet juice can lower blood pressure, but we wanted to show that drinking beet ...

TORONTO, Ont., Nov. 2, 2010-Severely injured patients should be transported directly from the scene of an accident to a trauma center, even if it means bypassing a closer hospital, according to new research that shows this results in a nearly 25 per cent lower death rate. However, even though 80 to 85 per cent of people in North America live within a one-hour drive or flight of a trauma center, 30 to 60 per cent of severely injured patients are still taken to the nearest hospital. Researchers led by Dr. Avery Nathens, trauma director at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, ...

A study by the team headed by Lluís Ribas de Pouplana, ICREA professor at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), has been chosen as "Paper of the week" in the December issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, which is already available online. The article describes the discovery of a new protein in the fly Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) that is crucial for mitochondria. The removal of SLIMP in these flies leads to aberrant mitochondria and loss of metabolic capacity, thus causing death. The study, whose first author is Tanit Guitart, a PhD ...