CHICAGO – Patients with a recent onset of Parkinson disease have a high prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency, but vitamin D concentrations do not appear to decline during the progression of the disease, according to a report in the March issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Vitamin D is now considered a hormone that regulates a number of physiological processes. "Vitamin D insufficiency has been associated with a variety of clinical disorders and chronic diseases, including impaired balance, decreased muscle strength, mood and cognitive ...

CHICAGO – Regular consumption of fish and omega-3 fatty acids found in fish is associated with a significantly reduced risk of developing age-related macular degeneration in women, according to a report posted online today that will appear in the June issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. "An estimated nine million U.S. adults aged 40 years and older show signs of age-related macular degeneration (AMD)," the authors write as background information in the article. "An additional 7.3 million persons have early age-related macular degeneration, ...

CHICAGO – Patients with a disease known as retinal vein occlusion (RVO) have a significantly higher incidence of stroke when compared with persons who do not have RVO, according to a report in the March issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. "Retinal vein occlusion (RVO) is a retinal vascular disease in which a retinal vein is compressed by an adjacent retinal artery, resulting in blood flow turbulence, thrombus formation, and retinal ischemia," the authors write as background information in the article. "Although RVO is a significant cause ...

Children express the stereotype that mathematics is for boys, not for girls, as early as second grade, according to a new study by University of Washington researchers. And the children applied the stereotype to themselves: boys identified themselves with math whereas girls did not. The "math is for boys" stereotype has been used as part of the explanation for why so few women pursue science, mathematics and engineering careers. The cultural stereotype may nudge girls to think that "math is not for me," which can affect what activities they engage in and their career ...

Scientists from Monash University have uncovered a new understanding of how male puberty begins. The key to their findings lies with a protein known as SMAD3 and the rate at which it is produced. Researchers, Associate Professor Kate Loveland and Dr Catherine Itman from the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences have discovered through laboratory testing that half as much SMAD3 protein results in faster maturation than the norm, and an inability to create SMAD3 results in abnormal responses to testosterone. "SMAD3 is a protein that translates signals from ...

Alum is an adjuvant (immune booster) used in many common vaccines, and Canadian researchers have now discovered how it works. The research by scientists from the University of Calgary's Faculty of Medicine is published in the March 13 online edition of Nature Medicine. The new findings will help the medical community produce more effective vaccines and may open the doors for creating new vaccines for diseases such as HIV or tuberculosis. "Understanding alum properties will help other vaccines because we are one step deeper into the mechanistic insight of adjuvants, ...

Research into how the brain transmits messages to other parts of the body could improve understanding of disorders such as epilepsy, dementia, multiple sclerosis and stroke. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have identified a protein crucial for maintaining the health and function of the segment of nerve fibres that controls transmission of messages within the brain. The study, published in the journal Neuron, could help direct research into neurodegenerative disorders, in which electrical impulses from the brain are disrupted. This can lead to inability to ...

Research commissioned by Cerebra, the charity that helps to improve the lives of children with brain conditions, and carried out by the Cerebra Research Unit (CRU) at the Peninsula College of Medicine & Dentistry, has found little evidence to suggest that cranial osteopathy is of benefit to children with cerebral palsy. The research is published on-line in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. Osteopathy has, over recent years, become a popular complementary treatment for children with cerebral palsy. Cerebra initially asked researchers at the CRU to investigate existing ...

The first major study of the wellbeing and inclusion of former politically motivated prisoners in Northern Ireland will be launched by Queen's University today (Monday 14 March). Ageing and Social Exclusion among Former Politically Motivated Prisoners in Northern Ireland and the border region of Ireland investigated the well being and social and economic inclusion of loyalist and republican former prisoners (aged 50 and over) as older people in Northern Ireland. The report will be launched at Parliament Buildings at Stormont this afternoon. The research was led by ...

International climate negotiations are deadlocked between the affluent global North and "developing" South, between political Left and Right, and between believers and deniers. Now, authors writing in the latest issue of the International Journal of Water argue that a more integrative analysis of climate should help resolve these conflicts. Land use changes and water management are highly relevant to climate change. To quote hydrologists Juraj Kohutiar and Michal Kravcik of the Slovak People and Water NGO: "Water evaporation is the most important agent of energy transformation ...

Potsdam/Bremerhaven, March 14th, 2011. Unusually low temperatures in the Arctic ozone layer have recently initiated massive ozone depletion. The Arctic appears to be heading for a record loss of this trace gas that protects the Earth's surface against ultraviolet radiation from the sun. This result has been found by measurements carried out by an international network of over 30 ozone sounding stations spread all over the Arctic and Subarctic and coordinated by the Potsdam Research Unit of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association ...

Calling it the "new periodic table for flies," researchers at North Carolina State University and collaborators across the globe have mapped the evolutionary history of flies, providing a framework for further comparative studies on the insects that comprise more than 10 percent of all life on Earth. The research, published today in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, plugs gaps in the 260-million-year history of the fly order Diptera, says Dr. Brian Wiegmann, NC State professor of entomology and primary investigator of the fly tree ...

Electric cars are the future – a view shared by government and the automotive industry alike. The German federal government aims to establish Germany as the lead market for electromobility. By 2020, a million passenger cars with an electric drive should be on the roads in Germany. The prospects of achieving that aim look good: As the ADAC, the German motoring organization, found out in a survey, 74 percent of those surveyed would buy an electric car if they did not have to compromise in terms of cost, comfort and safety. Consumers are not willing to compromise one iota ...

Endoscopy has gone through amazing advancements in recent years. Microcameras on the tip of endoscopes supply images from the inside of the human body in ever higher resolution, which often makes it possible to identify tumors at an early stage. Endoscopes to date have some downsides, since they are expensive and, because of their multiple usages, have to be put through time-consuming and exhaustive cleaning procedures every time they are used. This problem might be solved by a new microcamera that the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (IZM) in Berlin, ...

The study analyzes the actions adopted by a dozen countries after suffering disasters similar to that of the Prestige, the oil tanker which sank off the coast of Galicia towards the end of 2002, provoking a spill of fuel-oil which turned out to be one of the biggest ecological disasters in the history of Spain. "We have seen that our country has not adopted technical nor legal preventative measures, as opposed to what happened in Germany with the shipwreck of the Pallas, for example, which produced a movement of a centralizing nature, in detriment to the federal spirit ...

Scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, have shown how the O157:H7 strain of Escherichia coli causes infection and thrives by manipulating the host immune response. The bacterium secretes a protein called NleH1 that directs the host immune enzyme IKK-beta to alter specific immune responses. This process not only helps the bacterium evade elimination by the immune system, it also works to prolong the survival of the infected host, enabling the bacterium to persist and ultimately spread to ...

Earthquakes are one of the world's biggest enigmas — impossible to predict and able to wreak untold damage within seconds. Now, a new tool from Tel Aviv University may be able to learn from earthquakes of the ancient past to better predict earthquakes of the future. Prof. Shmuel Marco of Tel Aviv University's Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences in the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences and his colleagues have invented a new tool which he describes as a "fossil seismograph," to help geophysicists and other researchers understand patterns ...

New research shows that the Wnt receptor Frizzled-9 (Fzd9) promotes bone formation, providing a potential new target for the treatment of osteoporosis. The study appears online on March 14 in The Journal of Cell Biology (www.jcb.org). Adult bones are maintained by a balance of bone-forming osteoblasts and bone-resorbing osteoclasts. Although Wnt signaling affects this balance in mice and humans, the Wnt receptors involved remain unknown. A team of researchers led by Thorsten Schinke found that the Wnt receptor Fzd9 was upregulated during osteoblast differentiation and ...

Tiny magnets organize themselves in vortices in the researchers' mini disks. The individual magnets can twist either in a clockwise or a counterclockwise direction in the disk. These two different states can be used in data processing just like switching the electricity "on" and "off" in conventional computers. In contrast to conventional memory storage systems, these magnetic vortices can be switched by the electrons' intrinsic spin and with far less power consumption. In the exterior section of a vortex the magnetic particles align nearly parallel to one another while ...

CHICAGO (March 14, 2011) – Research has shown that playing a musical instrument can help nourish, cultivate, and increase intelligence in children, but playing a used instrument also can pose a potentially dangerous health risk. Used woodwind and brass instruments were found to be heavily contaminated with a variety of bacteria and fungi, many of which are associated with minor to serious infectious and allergic diseases, according to a study published in the March/April 2011 issue of General Dentistry, the peer-reviewed clinical journal of the Academy of General Dentistry ...

PITTSBURGH, March 14 – If all eligible patients filled their prescriptions through a $4 generic drug program, the societal savings could amount to nearly $6 billion, according to a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) study. Published in the March 14 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, the study is the first to evaluate the potential national savings from a broad use of discounted generic medication programs that are available at many retail stores' pharmacies. The study examined a large group of people who used generic medications or their ...

Toronto – Improved financial reporting at private firms benefits not only potential outside investors but will help the firm make better business decisions for itself too, says a new study. The study is authored by Ole-Kristian Hope, the Deloitte Professor of Accounting and an associate professor of accounting at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, uses World Bank data on small private firms in 21 emerging market countries – Thailand, Brazil and Pakistan having the largest samples. The data includes financing sources and information on tax environments. ...

A revolutionary type of personal power pack now in development could help our troops when they are engaged on the battlefield. With the aim of being up to fifty per cent lighter than conventional chemical battery packs used by British infantry, the solar and thermoelectric-powered system could make an important contribution to future military operations. The project is being developed by the University of Glasgow with Loughborough, Strathclyde, Leeds, Reading and Brunel Universities, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers have constructed a 226-year history of fire in southern Illinois by looking at fire scars in tree stumps. Their study, the most in-depth fire history reported for the upper Midwest, reveals that changes in the frequency of fires dating back to the time of early European settlement permanently altered the ecology of the region. The researchers took advantage of a 1996 timber harvest of old growth post oak trees in Hamilton County. "I was just amazed at the fire scars in these trees," said William McClain, a botanist with the Illinois State ...

The Hospital Clínic of Barcelona presented today the results of the telemedicine program "Hospital VIHrtual", coordinated by Dr. Felipe Garcia and Dr. Agata León, from the Hospital Clínic Service of Infectious Diseases directed by Dr. Josep M ª Gatell. The tool has been created by a team from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, led by Prof. Enrique J. Gómez and César Cáceres. Through a direct connection via a webcam, Dr. Garcia showed a virtual consultation and explained the benefits of the project, which does not replace the classic face to face visits but complements ...