Allergies occur when the defence mechanisms of the immune system malfunction and misread normal substances entering the body as invading pathogens. Antibodies are part of our biochemical arsenal for combating viruses, bacteria, parasites and other alien substances, but during an allergic reaction the antibody, known as IgE, is directed against usually harmless substances such as grass pollen, nuts, pets or eggs. Asthma and allergies are chronic diseases that reduce quality of life and pose an economic burden on society. New parents have therefore previously been asked if ...

Light drinking during pregnancy does not harm a young child's behavioural or intellectual development, reveals research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. A previous study of 3 year olds drew similar conclusions, but the authors wanted to rule out possible delayed "sleeper" effects in older children. They used data from the Millennium Cohort Study - a large study tracking the long term health of children born in the UK - drawing on a representative sample of 11,513 children born between September 2000 and January 2002. Participants' ...

The provision of made-to-order drugs ("specials") in primary care is expensive, often unnecessary, and associated with legal pitfalls, says the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin (DTB). It calls for a major overhaul of the practice, in a review of the evidence in this month's issue. Bespoke drugs or "specials" are medicines made specifically to meet the needs of individual patients, so may be prepared in formulations and strengths which differ from those of standard licensed medicines. They might be prescribed, for example, when a patient can't or won't swallow tablets ...

A persistently noisy workplace more than doubles an employee's risk of serious heart disease, suggests research published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Young male smokers seemed to be particularly at risk, the findings showed. The researchers base their findings on a nationally representative sample of more than 6,000 employees, aged from 20 upwards, who had been part of the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 1999 and 2004. This involved detailed household interviews, to include lifestyle and occupational health, ...

Therapeutic antibodies can be an efficient alternative when common drugs do not work anymore. However, antibodies obtained from blood of animals such as mice could not be used: The human immune system recognizes them as foreign and rejects them. In an international cooperation, scientists from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany have now succeeded in developing a promising approach to solve this problem; with the help of human stem cells they generated mice with a human immune system, which were then vaccinated to produce human monoclonal ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. – The most toxic free radical appears responsible for much of the lung damage that can result from oxygen therapy in the critically ill or injured, Medical College of Georgia researchers report. Within just a few days, ventilators and oxygen chambers used to significantly increase oxygen levels can also dramatically increase levels of peroxynitrite, an oxidant powerful enough to break down DNA and cause proteins to malfunction, said Dr. Yunchao Su, pharmacologist in the MCG Schools of Medicine and Graduate Studies. Oxygen toxicity is the most severe side ...

Montreal, October 05, 2010 – Working nine-to-five may be the way to make a living, but it may be padding more than the wallet. According to a new study from the Université de Montréal, office-workers have become less active over the last three decades and this decreased activity may partly explain the rise in obesity. Their findings, published in the early online edition of Preventive Medicine, may have health implications for the millions of people toiling behind their desks. "People eat better and exercise more today than they did in the 1970's, yet obesity rates ...

Today's Oct. 4 issue of the high-impact journal, Applied Physics Letters, contains a new electrofluidics design from the University of Cincinnati and start-up company Gamma Dynamics that promises to dramatically reshape the image capabilities of electronic devices. This patent-pending electrofluidics breakthrough by the Novel Devices Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati and partner companies Gamma Dynamics, Dupont and Sun Chemical follows about seven years of work. According to lead researcher Jason Heikenfeld, UC associate professor of electrical and computer engineering ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Fish oil – long encouraged by doctors as a supplement to support heart and joint health, among other benefits – induced severe colitis and colon cancer in mice in research led by Michigan State University and published this month in the journal Cancer Research. Jenifer Fenton, a food science and human nutrition researcher at MSU, led the research that supports establishing a dose limit for docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), one of the omega-3 fatty acids present in fish oil, particularly in people suffering from chronic conditions such as inflammatory bowel ...

A balloon angioplasty device that sucks up dangerous plaque debris could trigger a "paradigm shift" in how physicians treat peripheral artery disease, researchers write in the current issue of Endovascular Today. "We will see a shift in how we treat lesions," write Dr. Robert Dieter of Loyola University Health System and Dr. Aravinda Nanjundappa of West Virginia University. In two clinical trials totaling 123 patients, the device had a success rate of 97 percent to 99 percent and consistently outperformed filter devices typically used to capture debris particles, Dieter ...

GRAND RAPIDS, MICH., Oct. 5, 2010 – Only about a third of American women are meeting their fruit and vegetable intake recommendations, which means they are likely missing out on potentially important breast and ovarian health benefits (1). Along with vitamins, minerals and fiber, fruits and vegetables contain a type of phytonutrient called carotenoids, which research suggests help support women's health including breast and ovarian health. Based on a new report called America's Phytonutrient Report: Women's Health by Color, older women have total carotenoid intakes ...

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Oct. 5, 2010 -- By installing wireless sensors and replacing faulty traps along the 12 miles of steam lines at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, officials expect to save as much as $675,000 per year. With 1,600 steam traps, which normally open slightly to discharge condensed steam with a negligible loss of live steam, the problem occurs when a trap fails and that failure goes undetected and unrepaired, said Teja Kuruganti, a member of the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. Manual inspections of each trap is a daunting and sometimes dangerous ...

DALLAS (SMU) – New research produced by Southern Methodist University's Geothermal Laboratory, funded by a grant from Google.org, suggests that the temperature of the Earth beneath the state of West Virginia is significantly higher than previously estimated and capable of supporting commercial baseload geothermal energy production. Geothermal energy is the use of the Earth's heat to produce heat and electricity. "Geothermal is an extremely reliable form of energy, and it generates power 24/7, which makes it a baseload source like coal or nuclear," said David Blackwell, ...

Under the Water Framework Directive (WFD) (Directive 2000/60/CE), member states are required to achieve Good Water Status for water (continental, estuarine, subterranean and coastal water bodies) in Europe by 2015. Surface water quality is assessed taking into account the ecological and chemical status. The quality of aquatic systems is more accurately assessed using the status of both the water column and the underlying sediment. A recent study by researchers of AZTI-Tecnalia concluded that water bodies risk being misclassified if, on evaluating their chemical status, ...

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new "templated growth" technique for fabricating nanometer-scale graphene devices. The method addresses what had been a significant obstacle to the use of this promising material in future generations of high-performance electronic devices. The technique involves etching patterns into the silicon carbide surfaces on which epitaxial graphene is grown. The patterns serve as templates directing the growth of graphene structures, allowing the formation of nanoribbons of specific widths without the use of ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Wind power is likely to play a large role in the future of sustainable, clean energy, but wide-scale adoption has remained elusive. Now, researchers have found wind farms' effects on local temperatures and proposed strategies for mediating those effects, increasing the potential to expand wind farms to a utility-scale energy resource. Led by University of Illinois professor of atmospheric sciences Somnath Baidya Roy, the research team will publish its findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper will appear in the journal's ...

PHILADELPHIA –- Physicists and neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania have linked the cell structure of the retina to the light and dark contrasts of the natural world, demonstrating the likelihood that the neural pathways humans use for seeing are adapted to best capture the world around us. Researchers found that retinal ganglion cells that see darkness are more numerous and cluster closer together than those that see light, corresponding to the fact that the natural world contains more dark spots than light. Now physicists, and not just pessimists, ...

Phishing scams are making the leap from email to the world's voice systems, and a team of researchers in the Georgia Tech College of Computing has found a way to tag fraudulent calls with a digital "fingerprint" that will help separate legitimate calls from phone scams. Voice phishing (or "vishing") has become much more prevalent with the advent of cellular and voice IP (VoIP) networks, which enable criminals both to route calls through multiple networks to avoid detection and to fake caller ID information. However each network through which a call is routed leaves its ...

DENVER (October 5, 2010) - With over 500 million users worldwide, Facebook has become a global phenomenon, a vast cyber neighborhood where friends meet to share photos, news and gossip. But when those relationships sour, another phenomenon often occurs – unfriending. In what may be the first comprehensive study of its kind, a University of Colorado Denver Business School student has revealed the top reasons for Facebook unfriending, who is unfriended and how they react to being unfriended. "Researchers spend a lot of time examining how people form friendships online ...

Optical gyroscopes, also known as rotation sensors, are widely used as a navigational tool in vehicles from ships to airplanes, measuring the rotation rates of a vehicle on three axes to evaluate its exact position and orientation. Prof. Koby Scheuer of Tel Aviv University's School of Physical Engineering is now scaling down this crucial sensing technology for use in smartphones, medical equipment and more futuristic technologies. Working in collaboration with Israel's Department of Defense, Prof. Scheuer and his team of researchers have developed nano-sized optical gyroscopes ...

ST. LOUIS – Thanks to a discovery by a Saint Louis University researcher, scientists have identified an important microRNA that may allow us to better control cholesterol levels in blood. Led by Ángel Baldán, Ph.D., assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Saint Louis University and published in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the study found that the microRNA miR-33, may be key to controlling HDL, or "good" cholesterol levels. In the U.S., heart attack, stroke, and peripheral ...

Causal relationship between rainfall and earthquakes detailed This review article explores natural crustal earthquakes associated with the elements of the hydrologic cycle, which describes the continuous movement of water on, above and below the surface of the Earth, including hurricanes and typhoons. The theory of hydroseismicity, first articulated in 1987, attributes most intraplate and near-intraplate earthquakes, to the dynamics of the hydrological cycle. The Hydroseismicity hypothesis suggests variations in rainfall affect pore-fluid pressure at depth and can ...

WASHINGTON, DC, October 5, 2010 — In a study of earnings inequality among white women, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst find that having children reduces women's earnings, even among workers with comparable qualifications, experience, work hours and jobs. While women at all income levels suffer negative earnings consequences from having children, the lowest-paid women lose the most from motherhood. This earnings penalty ranges from 15 percent per child among low-wage workers to about 4 percent among the highly paid. The findings are published in the ...

JUPITER, FL, October 5, 2010 - Scripps Research Institute scientists have shown for the first time that the neurotransmitter serotonin uses a specialized signaling pathway to mediate biological functions that are distinct from the signaling pathways used by hallucinogenic substances. The new findings could have a profound effect on the development of new therapies for a number of disorders, including schizophrenia and depression. The study was published in the October 6, 2010 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Serotonin has tremendous influence over several brain ...

Chemists at Vanderbilt University have created a new class of liquid crystals with unique electrical properties that could improve the performance of digital displays used on everything from digital watches to flat panel televisions. The achievement, which is the result of more than five years of effort, is described by Professor of Chemistry Piotr Kaszynski and graduate student Bryan Ringstrand in a pair of articles published online on Sept. 24 and Sept. 28 in the Journal of Materials Chemistry. "We have created liquid crystals with an unprecedented electric ...