A pregnant woman's immune response to viral infections may induce subtle neurological changes in the unborn child that can lead to an increased risk for neurodevelopmental disorders including schizophrenia and autism. Research published in the online journal mBio® provides new insights into how this may happen and suggests potential strategies for reducing this risk. "Infection during pregnancy is associated with increased risk of damage to the developing nervous system. Given that many agents have been implicated, we decided to focus on mechanisms by which the maternal ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Research led by a Michigan State University psychologist is playing a key role in the effort to change the way mental health clinicians classify personality disorders. The study by Christopher Hopwood and colleagues calls for a more scientific and practical method of categorizing personality disorders – a proposal that ultimately could improve treatment, Hopwood said. "We're proposing a different way of thinking about personality and personality disorders," said Hopwood, MSU assistant professor of psychology and an experienced clinician. "There's ...

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Bocas del Toro Research Station and Galeta Point Marine Laboratory are reporting an anomalous sea temperature rise and a major coral bleaching event in the western Caribbean. Although the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, issued an advisory in July announcing above-average sea surface temperatures in the wider Caribbean region, there had been no clear indication of increased sea temperatures in Panama and the western Caribbean until late August-early September. Scientists and local dive operators first ...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12, 2010 — Key articles in a special print edition of the American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science & Technology (ES&T), one of the world's premier environmental journals, are now available online. The articles will appear Jan. 1, 2011 in an ES&T issue on environmental policy. The topics range from the mysterious disorder decimating honey bee colonies to ways to capture and store carbon and mitigate greenhouse effect. Those marked "Feature" are written in a less technical style and suitable for general readers, including students and non-scientists. ...

Montreal, October 12, 2010 – Five American teenagers, all bullied because they were gay, have committed suicide over the past few weeks. The deaths have caused a media storm and raised a critical question: Did the social or healthcare system fail these adolescents? "Absolutely," says Concordia University Professor Deborah Dysart-Gale. "Bullying and such resulting suicides are avoidable. Healthcare workers have tools that can help queer teens – no one needs to die because of their sexual orientation." As Chair of the General Studies Unit of the Faculty of Engineering ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel, October 12, 2010 — A research team at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Soroka University Medical Center in Beer-Sheva, Israel has detected a genetic mutation resulting in a progressive disease of severe mental retardation and epilepsy beginning at infancy. The research was just published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. The team, led by BGU Prof. Ohad Birk of the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev determined that the defect is associated with the production of the 21st amino acid, selenocysteine (SEC), which leads to ...

Air Force Office of Scientific Research-supported physicists at the University of California, Berkeley in collaboration with researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, became the first researchers to observe the motion of an atom's valence or outermost electrons in real-time by investigating the ejection of an electron from an atom by an intense laser pulse. In the experiments, an electron in a krypton atom is removed by a laser pulse that lasts less than four femtoseconds (one ...

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago are the first to use brain imaging to examine the effects of emotion on working memory function in children with pediatric bipolar disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The study is published in the October issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. PBD and ADHD are very severe developmental disorders that share behavioral characteristics such as impulsivity, irritability and attention problems. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers at UIC examined ...

(Boston) - Investigators from the Slone Epidemiology Center at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have reported that African American women who consume more vegetables are less likely to develop estrogen receptor-negative breast cancer than women with low vegetable intake. The study results, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, were based on data from the Black Women's Health Study (BWHS), a large follow-up study of 59,000 African American women from across the U.S. conducted by investigators at the Slone Epidemiology Center since 1995. The investigators ...

Despite modest economic gains, gloomy unemployment numbers and low workplace morale still loom large within corporate America. Whether or not companies can capitalize on the momentum of this fragile financial revitalization is dependent on more than enhancing consumer confidence or introducing new products to the marketplace—it falls largely on employees working for organizations and their level of commitment to corporate success. Researchers from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the Haas School of Business at the University of California, ...

VIDEO: Rotating image of circulating tumor cell cluster isolated from the blood of a patient with metastatic prostate cancer using the HB-Chip. Click here for more information. A redesigned version of the CTC-Chip – a microchip-based device for capturing rare circulating tumor cells (CTCs) – appears to be more effective and should be easier to manufacture than the original. Called the HB-(herringbone) Chip, the new device also may provide more comprehensive and easily ...

Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers have found that a gene associated with the onset of Type 2 diabetes also is found at lower-than-normal levels in people with Alzheimer's disease. The research, led by Giulio Maria Pasinetti, MD, PhD, The Saunder Family Professor in Neurology, and Professor of Psychiatry and Geriatrics and Adult Development at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, was published this month in Aging Cell. The new study provides insight into a potential mechanism that might explain the relationship between Type 2 diabetes and the onset and progression ...

Xenotropic murine leukemia virus–related virus (XMRV) has been the subject of many studies since its discovery in 2006, but conflicting reports have created an unclear picture of XMRV's role in human disease. In three recent studies published in the November 15 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online, the evidence supports a possible link between XMRV and prostate cancer but not other links involving chronic fatigue syndrome, HIV infection, or hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. (Please see below for links to these articles online.) In one of ...

CORAL GABLES, FL (October 12, 2010)--Still hampered by workforce shortages and barriers that impede their ranks from delivering health care to the full extent of their education and training, nurses may have gotten the much-needed shot in the arm they need to transform their profession with the release of an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report recommending sweeping changes for improving their profession. The report, the product of a special committee chaired by University of Miami President Donna E. Shalala, recommends everything from higher levels of education and training ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Scientists have found that a synthetic molecule they designed can block activation of a gene in liver cancer cells, halting a process that allows some of those cancer cells to survive chemotherapy. Without the interference of this gene's function, certain liver cancer cells appear to be protected from the toxic effects of chemotherapy drugs. Blocking the oncogene, called STAT3, prevents a protein from protecting the cells, the research suggests. As a result, more liver cancer cells succumb to treatment. Researchers hope an anti-cancer drug based ...

OAKLAND, Calif. — Cardio-metabolic risk factors such as high blood sugar and insulin, and low high density lipoprotein cholesterol that are present before pregnancy, predict whether a woman will develop diabetes during a future pregnancy, according to a Kaiser Permanente study in the current issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. The study suggests that metabolic screening of all women before pregnancy, particularly overweight women, could help identify those more likely to develop gestational diabetes mellitus, known as GDM, in a subsequent pregnancy and help ...

In two studies published today in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, the risk factors for readmission to the hospital are examined based upon general medicine inpatients and those with at least two admissions in a six-month period. Alongside clinical factors such as having cancer, chronic diseases such as heart failure or lung disease, or being on high-risk medications, the studies identified other factors which increase the likelihood of a patient being readmitted which could help hospitalists focus in on these groups. In the first study, Nazima Allaudeen, MD, and colleagues ...

Freemake Video Converter (http://www.freemake.com/free_video_converter) has recently integrated CUDA technology that can speed up the conversion process by many times. Thus, the videos can be converted to AVI, iPod, iPhone, PSP, and Android devices in a few minutes instead of hours. Freemake Video Converter, version 1.2, features much higher conversion speed and significant gains in performance due to CUDA technology. Therefore, this free converter can be considered one of the pioneers among video tools. Now PC users can convert long videos to HD formats much faster ...

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Women with epilepsy may be more likely to experience infertility, according to new research published in the October 12, 2010, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study of women in India found that women with epilepsy experienced infertility at more than twice the rate of that found in the general population. The research also found that women who were taking multiple epilepsy drugs were more likely to be infertile than those taking fewer drugs or no drugs for epilepsy. The study involved 375 women ...

"You don't have to go out into the woods anymore," says tick expert Brian F. Allan, PhD, who just completed a postdoctoral appointment at Washington University in St. Louis. "The deer are bringing tick-borne disease to us." So, it stands to reason that anything deer like, might increase the risk of tick-borne disease for people. The invasive plant bush honeysuckle, for example. Yes, that leafy shrub with the lovely egg-shaped leaves on arching branches, fragrant white or yellow flowers and the dark red berries so attractive to birds. Called bush or Amur honeysuckle, ...

Some bacteria grow electrical hair that lets them link up in big biological circuits, according to a University of Southern California biophysicist and his collaborators. The finding suggests that microbial colonies may survive, communicate and share energy in part through electrically conducting hairs known as bacterial nanowires. "This is the first measurement of electron transport along biological nanowires produced by bacteria," said Mohamed El-Naggar, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. El-Naggar was ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Persistent exposure to light at night may lead to weight gain, even without changing physical activity or eating more food, according to new research in mice. Researchers found that mice exposed to a relatively dim light at night over eight weeks had a body mass gain that was about 50 percent more than other mice that lived in a standard light-dark cycle. "Although there were no differences in activity levels or daily consumption of food, the mice that lived with light at night were getting fatter than the others," said Laura Fonken, lead author of ...

BOULDER--Changes in population growth and composition, including aging and urbanization, could significantly affect global emissions of carbon dioxide over the next 40 years, according to a new study out next week. The research, appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), was conducted by an international team of scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. It was funded by a European Young Investigator's ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Scientists have long sought the ability to regenerate nerve cells, or neurons, which could offer a new way to treat spinal-cord damage as well as neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. Many chemicals can regenerate neurons grown in Petri dishes in the lab, but it's difficult and time-consuming to identify those chemicals that work in live animals, which is critical for developing drugs for humans. Engineers at MIT have now used a new microchip technology to rapidly test potential drugs on tiny worms called C. elegans, which are often ...

VIDEO: Gardeners could help maintain bumblebee populations by growing plants with red flowers or flowers with stripes along the veins, according to field observations of the common snapdragon, Antirrhinum majus, at... Click here for more information. Gardeners could help maintain bumblebee populations by growing plants with red flowers or flowers with stripes along the veins, according to field observations of the common snapdragon, Antirrhinum majus, at the John Innes Centre ...