Montreal, September 28, 2010 – The consumption of drugs and alcohol by teenagers is not just about rebellion or emotional troubles. It's about being one of the cool kids, according to a study by led by researchers at the Université de Montréal. "Our study highlights a correlation between popularity and consumption," says Jean-Sébastien Fallu, lead researcher and professor at the Université de Montréal's School of Psychoeducation. "The teenagers we studied were well-accepted, very sensitive to social codes, and understood the compromises that it takes to be popular." Link ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have identified a "tipping point" for national debt – the point at which national debt levels begin to have an adverse effect on economic growth. The findings could influence economic policy discussions globally, and will be distributed at the upcoming meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Group. "If a country's public debt reaches 77 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), bad things start to happen," says Dr. Mehmet Caner, professor of economics at NC State and co-author of the study. "There ...

September 28, 2010 (Geneva, Switzerland) – At the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG) summit in New York this week, world leaders gathered to review progress on the eight goals agreed in 2000 on alleviating world poverty and ill-health by 2015. As the summit came to a close, governments, businesses and aid organisations made commitments totaling $40bn to reach the goals, with particular emphasis on improving maternal and child health. A global strategy for women's and children's health, focused on reducing maternal and child deaths, empowering women and achieving equality, ...

Amyloid protein structures are best known for the troubles they pose in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. Now researchers are trying to exploit their presence in a very different place – in semen – to find a new way to stop HIV. Scientists have created a substance that targets amyloid structures in semen and have used it to weaken the ability of HIV to infect the body's immune cells in the laboratory. The experimental compound, originally designed to help Alzheimer's patients by disrupting the actions of amyloid in the brain, make it much more likely that HIV particles ...

Guest relationships can become collateral damage when hotel employees envy the relationships co-workers have with their bosses, according to an international team of researchers. In the study of front-line hotel employees -- desk staff, food and beverage workers, housekeepers -- workers who have poor relationships with their bosses were more likely to envy co-workers with better relationships with supervisors, said John O'Neill, associate professor, School of Hospitality Management, Penn State. The study showed that the envious workers were also less likely to help co-workers ...

RUSTON, La. – Geopolymer concrete, an innovative and environmentally-friendly building material developed at Louisiana Tech University's Trenchless Technology Center (TTC), will be featured in a transportation exhibition taking place at the Detroit Science Center. Developed by Dr. Erez Allouche, research director for the TTC, and his team, geopolymer concrete is an emerging class of cementitious materials that utilize "fly ash", one of the most abundant industrial by-products, as a substitute for Portland cement, the most widely produced man-made material on earth. "Presenting ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 28, 2010 – The Epinephrine Roundtable was convened during the 25th Annual Meeting of the Wilderness Medical Society (WMS) in 2008 to explore areas of consensus and uncertainty in the field treatment of anaphylaxis. The panel endorsed the administration of epinephrine to treat anaphylaxis in the field under emergency conditions by trained non-medical professionals. Anaphylaxis, an acute allergic reaction, is sudden in onset and requires immediate treatment. The recommendations of the panel are published in the September issue of Wilderness & Environmental ...

Stem cells that glow like fireflies could someday help doctors heal damaged hearts without cutting into patients' chests. In his University of Central Florida lab, Steven Ebert engineered stem cells with the same enzyme that makes fireflies glow. The "firefly" stem cells glow brighter and brighter as they develop into healthy heart muscle, allowing doctors to track whether and where the stem cells are working. Researchers are keenly interested in stem cells because they typically morph into the organs where they are transplanted. But why and how fast they do it is ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 28, 2010 -- Individual cancer-causing mutations have a minute effect on tumor growth, increasing the rate of cell division by just 0.4 percent on average, according to new mathematical modeling by scientists at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and other institutions. Their research, appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reinforces that cancer is the culmination of many accumulated mutations. It also highlights the fundamental heterogeneity and randomness of many cancers, consistent with the observations ...

Montreal September 28, 2010 – Loners and antisocial kids who reject other children are often bullied at school – an accepted form of punishment from peers as they establish social order. Such peer victimization may be an extreme group response to control renegades, according to a new study from Concordia University published in the Journal of Early Adolescence. "For groups to survive, they need to keep their members under control," says author William M. Bukowski, a professor at the Concordia Department of Psychology and director of its Centre for Research in Human Development. ...

A new study by University of Notre Dame ecologist Jennifer Tank and colleagues reveals that streams throughout the Midwest are receiving transgenic materials from corn crop byproducts, even six months after harvest. Transgenic maize (corn) has been genetically engineered to produce its own insecticide, a delta endotoxin from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Bt endotoxins deter crop pests, such as the European corn borer. In a 2007 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), Tank and a group of researchers demonstrated that transgenic ...

EAST PROVIDENCE, RI – Although research has shown that teens with mental health disorders are more likely to engage in high risk sexual behaviors, like unprotected sex, a new study from the Bradley Hasbro Children's Research Center suggests there is an additional risk associated with certain psychiatric diagnoses. According to researchers, teens who experience the manic phase of bipolar disorder – which is marked by dramatic mood swings from euphoria and elation to irritability – are more sexually active, have more sexual partners and are more likely to have a sexually ...

While many young adults will share the details of their daily lives with dozens – sometimes hundreds – of friends on Facebook, communicating with their health care providers about mental illness is another story. "Roughly one in every five young adults between 18 and 25 has a mental illness," says Melissa Pinto-Foltz, a postdoctoral scholar and instructor at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University. "Seventy percent of them don't receive treatment. Of those that do receive treatment, they have trouble managing the illness and often ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – University of Missouri researchers believe they have found a critical piece of the puzzle for the treatment of Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) – the leading genetic cause of infantile death in the world. Nearly one in 6,000 births has SMA, and it is estimated that nearly one in 30 to 40 people have the trait that leads to SMA. In a new study in Human Molecular Genetics, Christian Lorson, professor in the Department of Veterinary Pathobiology and the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, has found prenatal cardiac defects in mice with SMA. Lorson ...

Montreal September 28, 2010 – Multicultural education in classrooms has failed to produce a deeper understanding across cultures, according to a Concordia University researcher. Education professor Adeela Arshad-Ayaz blames teacher training for failing to address issues of diversity and equity. Her recent presentation at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, in Montreal, calls for an alternative approach. "The way we currently teach multiculturalism fails to bring divergent groups together," says Dr. Arshad-Ayaz. "Our present approach is alienating minority ...

CINCINNATI—Firefighters are exposed to potentially dangerous levels of ultrafine particulates at the time they are least likely to wear protective breathing equipment. Because of this, researchers believe firefighters may face an increased risk for heart disease from exposures during the fire suppression process. Coronary heart disease is the No. 1 killer of American firefighters, with many of these incidents taking place during or just after a firefighting incident. Researchers say exposure to these harmful ultrafine air particulates could predispose firefighters to ...

PHILADELPHIA (September 28, 2010) – Scientists at the Monell Center have used a well-known example of individual differences to identify a genetic contribution to the sense of smell. Most people detect a distinct sulfurous odor in their urine shortly after eating asparagus. However, there are some who seemingly do not notice the unpleasant odor. Up until now, it has been unclear whether this is because these individuals do not produce the odor or because they cannot smell it. Addressing this mystery from several angles, scientists from the Monell Center first used ...

HIV-infected individuals who begin antiretroviral therapy (ART) soon after acquiring the virus may have stronger immune responses to other pathogens than HIV-infected individuals who begin ART later, a new study from the National Institutes of Health has found. This finding suggests that early initiation of ART may prevent irreversible immune system damage and adds to the body of evidence showing significant health benefits from early ART. Scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of NIH, measured the quantity and qualities of B cells ...

Dairy farmers can greatly reduce ammonia emissions from their production facilities by injecting liquid manure into crop fields below the soil surface, according to research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). These findings, which resulted from a study conducted by soil scientist April Leytem and agricultural engineer David Bjorneberg with USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS), could help Idaho dairy farmers increase nitrogen capture in the soil and protect air quality from agricultural ammonia emissions. ARS is USDA's principal intramural scientific ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Duke University bioengineers have not only figured out a way to sneak molecular spies through the walls of individual cells, they can now slip them into the command center -- or nucleus -- of those cells, where they can report back important information or drop off payloads. Using silver nanoparticles cloaked in a protein from the HIV virus that has an uncanny ability to penetrate human cells, the scientists have demonstrated that they can enter the inner workings of the nucleus and detect subtle light signals from the "spy." In order for these nano-spies ...

A study conducted at Copenhagen University Hospital showed that treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) with disease modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs), glucocorticoids, biologic agents, or a combination of agents significantly reduced radiographic evidence of joint destruction, with a relative effect of 48%󈞴% as compared with placebo. A direct comparison between the combination of a biologic agent plus methotrexate and the combination of 2 DMARDs plus initial glucocorticoids revealed no difference. Study findings are published in the October issue of Arthritis ...

Social rejection isn't just emotionally upsetting; it also upsets your heart. A new study finds that being rejected by another person makes your heart rate drop for a moment. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Research has shown that the brain processes physical and social pain in some of the same regions. Bregtje Gunther Moor, Eveline A. Crone, and Maurits W. van der Molen of the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University in the Netherlands wanted to find out how social pain affects you physically. ...

Results from a 12-month multi-center clinical trial did not show therapeutic benefit of abatacept over placebo in patients with non-life threatening systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Abatacept failed to prevent new disease flares in SLE patients tapered from corticosteroids in an analysis where mild, moderate and severe disease flares were evaluated together. Full details of the phase IIb clinical trial are published in the October issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR). The ACR estimates that 161,000 to 322,000 adults ...

The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), an international public-private partnership that aims to determine three dimensional structures of medically important proteins, announced today the release into the public domain of its 1000th high resolution protein structure. The 1000th structure – known as JmjD2C – belongs to a class of proteins involved in epigenetic signalling, a key research area for the SGC. Epigenetics is the study of inherited changes in gene expression caused by proteins such as JmjD2C which 'switch' genes on or off. It is believed that a better understanding ...

HOUSTON, Sept. 28, 2010 – A large section of northwestern Harris County – particularly the Jersey Village area – is sinking rapidly, according to a University of Houston (UH) geologist who has analyzed GPS data measuring ground elevation in the Houston area. Some points in Jersey Village are subsiding by up to 5.5 centimeters (about 2 inches) a year, said Shuhab Khan, an associate professor of geology at UH. Khan, along with UH geology professor Kevin Burke and former Ph.D. student and UH alumnus Richard Engelkemeir, studied a decade's worth of detailed GPS data measuring ...