GALVESTON, November 17, 2010 – A startling number of overweight and normal weight women of reproductive age inaccurately perceive their body weight, affecting their weight-related behaviors and making many vulnerable to cardiovascular and other obesity-related diseases, according to new research from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston. In the December issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the researchers report that nearly 25 percent of overweight and 16 percent of normal weight reproductive-age women misperceive their body weight. This is the first ...

Skin cells from humans can be revamped into pro-clotting cells called platelets, according to a study published on November 22 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine (www.jem.org). Patients with diseases causing thrombocytopenia—platelet deficiency—often require repeated transfusions with platelets obtained from healthy donors. But donor platelet isolation is expensive and labor intensive, and donor platelets can be attacked by the patient's immune systems as "foreign." Therefore, Koji Eto and colleagues sought a method for generating custom-made platelets from patients' ...

A sugar found in mouse breast milk promotes the generation of colitis in offspring, according to a study published online on November 22 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine (www.jem.org). Sugars in breast milk are essential for the development of the newborn immune system and the growth of beneficial commensal bacteria in the gut. But certain milk sugars in certain contexts could be bad news. A group led by Thierry Hennet at the University of Zurich found that newborn mice fostered by mothers lacking one particular milk sugar—sialyl(alpha2,3)lactose—were less susceptible ...

Boston, MA – A new study released today estimates that the global initiative to eradicate polio could provide net benefits of at least US$40-50 billion if transmission of wild polioviruses is interrupted within the next five years. The study provides the first rigorous evaluation of the benefits and costs of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI)—the single largest project ever undertaken by the global health community. The study comes at a crucial time—following an outbreak in the Republic of the Congo and one in Tajikistan earlier this year—that highlight the ...

There are 27 species of bats identified in the Basque Country today. Twenty years ago there were hardly any records. This data reflects the fruitful work on the ecology and behavioural development of bats by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) research team since the 90s. The director of the team, Mr Joxerra Aihartza, took the first steps when he began drawing up a complete atlas of the distribution of bat species in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country (CAV-EAE). There are now nine biologists on the team. As Mr Egoitz Salsamendi, member of the team, ...

Hospitals all over the world need to be aware of how to treat emergency blast injuries and military surgeons can provide valuable knowledge and advice to their civilian counterparts based on their experience of battlefield injuries. That is the driving force behind two papers published online by BJS, the British Journal of Surgery. "The current inquest into the 2005 London bombings - and the recent international security alerts - provide a timely reminder that surgeons could be called on at a moment's notice to deal with blast injuries" says consultant surgeon Mr Jonothan ...

ATLANTA, GA – 22 November, 2010 – The College of Direct Support (CDS), an internet-based curriculum for Direct Support Professionals (DSPs) and managed in partnership by Elsevier/MC Strategies and the University of Minnesota's Research and Training Center, has introduced its latest offering in the form of a new genre of its online learning content. The new Learning Session is called "R&R Arcade: Direct Support Professionalism: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)." This Learning Session is in a new memory-game format, based on the memory ...

Engineers have developed a new type of microchip muscle stimulator implant that will enable people with paraplegia to exercise their paralysed leg muscles. It is the first time that researchers have developed a device of this kind that is small enough to be implanted into the spinal canal and incorporates the electrodes and muscle stimulator in one unit. The implant is the size of a child's fingernail. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) project is being led by Professor Andreas Demosthenous from University College London. It includes engineers ...

Insomnia is bad news for software engineers' quality of life and deserves greater recognition and attention, according to new research by Sara Sarrafi Zadeh and Khyrunnisa Begum from the University of Mysore in India. Their work shows that poor sleep has a bearing on quality of life - affecting physical and mental health in particular - in this group with high levels of job-related stress. Their paper is published online in Springer's journal Applied Research in Quality of Life. Insomnia, a disorder of insufficient or poor quality sleep, has been shown to have adverse ...

A breakthrough in a University of Cincinnati engineering lab that could clear the way for a low-cost, even disposable, e-reader is gaining considerable attention. Electrical Engineering Professor Andrew Steckl's research into an affordable, yet high-performance, paper-based display technology is being featured this week as the November cover story of ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, one of the scientific journals for the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. In the research, Steckl and UC doctoral student Duk Young Kim demonstrated ...

UPTON, NY — A study to be published as the "Paper of the Week" in the Journal of Biological Chemistry this December details how zinc, an element fundamental to cell growth, enters the cell via zinc-specific uptake proteins. The research, conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, is the first to purify this kind of protein and study its role in zinc uptake. Zinc is crucial to the health of all living organisms. At the cellular level, zinc is responsible for cell growth, which in turn affects the health, growth, and reproduction ...

Another conclusion of the report is that the amount of money played is underestimated: on average, a gambler who thinks he has bet 22 euros a month, in reality has bet 40 euros. Regarding on line gambling, the player stands out more as an internaut than as a gambler. "They think that they are browsing the net, going into pages of this type and gambling, believing that they are still browsing. On the other hand, in the case of conventional gambling, if you are going to make a bet on football scores, playing instant lottery, buying a lottery ticket, or taking part in ...

See it for yourself: a new breakthrough in imaging technology using a combination of light and sound will allow health care providers to see microscopic details inside the body. Access to this level of detail potentially eliminates the need for some invasive biopsies, but it also has the potential to help health care providers make diagnoses earlier than ever before—even before symptoms arise. Details describing this advance are published online in the FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2010/11/19/fj.10-171728.abstract). In the online research report, ...

The link between sleeping and obesity is drawn tighter as a new research published online in the FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2010/11/19/fj.10-172080.abstract) study shows that what your mother ate when she was pregnant may make you obese or overweight by altering the function of genes (epigenetic changes) that regulate circadian rhythm. In the report, pregnant primate females consuming a high-fat diet altered the function of fetal genes that regulate circadian rhythm (including appetite and food intake) during development. The offspring also had non-alcoholic ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Late-preterm babies – those born between 34 and 36 weeks – are at an increased risk for cognitive and emotional problems, regardless of maternal IQ or demographics, according to new research published by Michigan State University researchers in the current edition of the journal Pediatrics. While late-preterm births (full-term pregnancies last at least 37 weeks) have been associated with such problems before, the study represents one of the most rigorous looks at the issue by accounting for other potential causes, said the study's lead author, Nicole ...

Most patients who take anti-depressants give up their treatment in less than six months, the minimum period recommended for treating severe depression and other derived pathologies. This is the conclusion of a new study carried out by Catalan researchers, which reveals that only 25% continue their treatment for more than 11 months. "Only one in every five patients properly completes their treatment", Catalina Serna, co-author of the study, and an expert at the Jordi Gol Primary Care Research Institute (IDIAP) in Lleida, tells SINC. From 2003 to 2007, researchers from ...

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that eventually destroys most motor neurons, causing muscle weakness and atrophy throughout the body. There is no cure and the current treatment has only a moderate effect on the march of the disease, which typically kills within three to five years. This week in PNAS, a team of Brandeis scientists reports an innovative approach to treating the most common form of familial ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. In the study, researchers studied mutations in the gene that makes a particular ...

Nov. 22, 2010 -- More than 170 participants gathered this week for the eighth annual National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) conference in Irvine, Calif. This year's topic, imaging science, a field of study that uses physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, and cognitive sciences to understand the many factors that influence and enable image capture and analysis. At the conference, top researchers from different fields discussed imaging science and its far-reaching applications -- such as astronomy, environmental monitoring, education, and health ...

Johns Hopkins Children's Center scientists have discovered that high blood levels of a protein commonly found in the central nervous system can predict brain injury and death in critically ill children on a form of life support called extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation or ECMO. ECMO, used to temporarily oxygenate the blood of patients whose heart and lungs are too weak or damaged to do so on their own, is most often used as a last resort because it can increase the risk for brain bleeding, brain swelling, stroke and death in some patients. A detailed report of the ...

HIV infected patients whose treatment is delayed not only become sicker than those treated earlier, but also require tens of thousands of dollars more in care over the first several years of their treatment. "We know that it's important clinically to get people into care early because they will stay healthier and do better over the long run," says Kelly Gebo, M.D., M.P.H., an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the study's senior author. "But now we know it's also more costly to ...

You detect an object flying at your head. What do you do? You probably first move out of the way -- and then you try to determine what the object is. Your brain is able to quickly switch from detecting an object moving in your direction to determining what the object is through a phenomenon called adaptation. A new study in the Nov. 21 advance online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience details the biological basis of this ability for rapid adaptation: neurons located at the beginning of the brain's sensory information pathway that change their level of simultaneous ...

MIAMI – November 22, 2010 – This October more than 60 guides and anglers in the Florida Keys poled across the flats from Biscayne Bay to the Marquesas, assisting in the annual bonefish census. This year's count, held in extremely difficult weather with lowered visibility, was down by 25-percent from an 8-year mean estimate of 316,805 bonefish to a new low of about 240,000 bonefish, according to Professor Jerry Ault, a fisheries scientist with the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science. "Since 2003 we have conducted an annual bonefish ...

In the future, tiny air vehicles may be able to fly through cracks in concrete to search for earthquake victims, explore a contaminated building or conduct surveillance missions for the military. But today, designing the best flying mechanism for these miniature aerial machines is still a challenging task. Creating micro-scale air vehicles that mimic the flapping of winged insects or birds has become popular, but they typically require a complex combination of pitching and plunging motions to oscillate the flapping wings. To avoid some of the design challenges involved ...

From fad diets to exercise programs, Americans continue to fight the battle of the bulge. Now they'll have help from recent Tel Aviv University research that has developed a new method to look at how fat cells -- which produce the fat in our bodies -- respond to mechanical loads. This might be the key to understanding how to control the amount of fat produced by fat cells, the holy grail of weight loss researchers, says Prof. Amit Gefen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Biomedical Engineering. His research is driven by the theory that fat cells, like bone or muscle ...

Fresh insight into how biological clocks adjust to having less sunlight in the winter could help us better understand the impact of jet lag and shift work. Scientists studying the daily activity cycle in plants – known as circadian rhythms – have discovered a finely tuned process that enables the plant's genes to respond to the times of dawn and dusk each day, as well as the length of daylight in between. This system helps the plant to reset its internal clock every day in response to seasonal changes in daylight, which helps the plant control the timing of key activities ...