Feature Channels: All Journal News

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WASHINGTON -- It’s natural for parents to do whatever they can to keep their children safe and healthy, but children need space to learn and grow on their own, without Mom or Dad hovering over them, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. The study, published in the journal Developmental Psychology, found that overcontrolling parenting can negatively affect a child’s ability to manage his or her emotions and behavior.

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Almost anyone can relate to being afraid of needles and injections. A pilot study is the first to use a 3D virtual reality headset to test this tool as a distraction method in a pediatric setting. Children were given the choice of a roller coaster ride, helicopter ride or a hot-air balloon ride. Results show that anticipated versus actual pain and fear were reduced in 94.1 percent of the pediatric study subjects.

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A new study by Scripps Research, published today in Nature Communications, suggests scientists could build better drugs by learning from bacteria-derived molecules called thiocarboxylic acids.

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A diverse mix of species improves the stability and fuel-oil yield of algal biofuel systems, as well as their resistance to invasion by outsiders, according to the findings of a federally funded outdoor study by University of Michigan researchers.

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Evidence shows that people with existing heart problems or who are at risk of developing them, are ignoring medical advice and not taking enough exercise. New medical treatments have helped people to live longer despite these health problems, but this is causing an escalating burden on public health systems worldwide.

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SLAC and Stanford scientists have discovered how some archaea thrive where other organisms would starve: Their crystalline shells not only protect them from the environment, but they also draw in nutrients through nanosized pores. Those nutrients concentrate in the space between the shell and the microbial cell, so what looks like a famine turns into a feast.

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A new study from the Keck School of Medicine of USC shows that African-Americans and Latinos who are diagnosed with diabetes after age 50 have a more than threefold risk of developing pancreatic cancer.

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Like everyone, people with type 2 diabetes and obesity suffer from depression and anxiety, but even more so. Researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center now have demonstrated a surprising potential contributor to these negative feelings – and that is the bacteria in the gut or gut microbiome, as it is known.

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The 41st annual scientific meeting of the Research Society on Alcoholism (RSA) will take place in San Diego June 17-20. RSA 2018 provides a meeting place for scientists and clinicians from across the country, and around the world, to interact. The meeting also gives members and non-members the chance to present their latest findings in alcohol research through abstract and symposia submissions. Below are seven programming highlights. Full press releases available upon request.

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Benjamin A.Garcia, PhD, an expert in quantitative proteomics has been awarded the Biemann Medal by the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS). The early-career award recognizes significant achievement in basic or applied mass spectrometry. Garcia’s lab has develop

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For decades, biologists have believed a key enzyme in plants had one function—produce amino acids, which are vital to plant survival and also essential to human diets. But for Wellington Muchero, Meng Xie and their colleagues, this enzyme does more than advertised. They had run a series of experiments on poplar plants that consistently revealed mutations in a structure of the life-sustaining enzyme that was not previously known to exist.

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This study found that women with a blood level of >60 ng/ml had an 80 percent lower risk for breast cancer than those with levels of 20 ng/ml or less.

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Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine suggest higher levels of vitamin D are associated with decreasing risk of breast cancer. Their epidemiological study is published in the June 15 online issue of PLOS ONE, in collaboration with Creighton University, Medical University of South Carolina and GrassrootsHealth, an Encinitas-based nonprofit organization that promotes vitamin D research and its therapeutic benefits.

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Research by economists at Amherst College and Oregon State University is the first to study the social capital impacts of a national-scale, globally relevant forest conservation incentives program.

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The incidence of anal cancer continues to rise. Despite making the headlines with Farrah Fawcett, people are still reluctant to discuss this important cancer. The majority of patients with this cancer are cured by a combination of treatment of radiation and chemotherapy.

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Proteins commonly known as BRCA – short for BReast CAncer susceptibility gene– serve a critical role in cellular DNA repair, but when mutated they allow genetic errors to replicate, facilitating cancer development. If the BRCA repair system is disabled in cancer cells, the cells simply turn to backup repair mechanisms and adapt to alternative repair pathways, a survival mode that also underlies their ability to evade targeted drug therapies.

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A new Food-PRICE study finds persistent nutritional disparities within the food choices of those receiving assistance under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) compared to those not receiving SNAP assistance.

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Physicians from the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington undertook a prospective, randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial to see whether preemptive analgesia could help reduce pain and narcotic use following common anal rectal surgical procedures.

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Impulsivity is broadly described as the tendency to act without prior thought. It is often linked to alcohol misuse in college students. However, impulsivity is a complex concept and it is likely that different subtypes of this psychological construct are associated with different patterns of alcohol misuse. This study examined links among several categories of impulsivity with both the frequency of alcohol consumption and the frequency of alcohol intoxication.

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When are primary school children willing to share valuable resources with others and when are they not? A team of researchers from the University of Vienna lead by cognitive biologist Lisa Horn investigated this question in a controlled behavioural experiment. The motivation to share seems to be influenced by group dynamical and physiological factors, whereas friendship between the children seems to be largely irrelevant. The results of their study have been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

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The concept of non-human beings endowed with intelligence dates back to at least Homer in the late eighth or early seventh century B.C. As society has developed and our ability to tell stories enhanced by technology, the idea of intelligent machines has captured the minds of societies across the globe.

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A study by sociologists examines public views regarding the denial of services to same-sex and interracial couples. In a fictional scenario, respondents were asked whether they believed that a business owner should be allowed to deny service. Slightly more than half of the respondents (53%) said they supported the refusal of services to a gay couple.

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• Researchers have identified genetic variants linked to an increased risk of developing nephrotic syndrome, a pediatric kidney disease. • The variants are found in genomic regions involved in regulation of the immune response.

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Rapid expansion of human activity across the globe is causing wildlife to become more nocturnal, according to a new joint study conducted by researchers at Boise State University and the University of California, Berkley, and published in the journal, Science.

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Graphene electrodes could enable higher quality brain imaging thanks to new research by a team of engineers and neuroscientists at UC San Diego. The researchers developed a technique, using platinum nanoparticles, to lower the impedance of graphene electrodes by 100 times while keeping them transparent. In tests on transgenic mice, the electrodes were able to record and image neuronal activity (calcium ion spikes) at of large groups of neurons and individual brain cells.

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We’ve all experienced going to bed tired and waking up refreshed, yet how that happens at the molecular level remains a mystery. An international study published today in Nature sheds new light on the biochemistry of sleep need in the brain.

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Climate change is forcing fish species to shift their habitats faster than the world’s system for allocating fish stocks, exacerbating international fisheries conflicts, according to a study led by a Rutgers University–New Brunswick researcher. The study, published online in the journal Science today, showed for the first time that new fisheries are likely to appear in more than 70 countries all over the world as a result of climate change. History has shown that newly shared fisheries often spark conflict among nations.

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An emerging tool that can be used with just a sample of seawater may help scientists learn more about rare marine life than ever before. According to Ellen Pikitch, PhD, of Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, this tool is eDNA analysis. Her explanation will be published in a perspectives piece on June 15 in Science.

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A recent study published in American Psychiatric Association’s Psychiatric Services journal found previous research on youth hospitalizations associated with behavioral and mental disorders failed to adequately consider children exhibiting suicidality or self-harm. Previous studies assigned behavioral health disorders, such as depression, as the primary diagnosis, while identifying suicidality or self-harm as a secondary diagnosis. By looking closely at the data, the new study found that nearly 24 percent of all behavioral-related admissions are complicated by suicidality or self-harm.

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Using MRI measurements of the brain's neural connections, or “white matter,” UW researchers have shown that, in struggling readers, the neural circuitry strengthened — and their reading performance improved — after just eight weeks of a specialized tutoring program. The study, published June 8 in Nature Communications, is the first to measure white matter during an intensive educational intervention and link children's learning with their brains' flexibility.

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People react differently to positive events in their lives. For some, a small reward can have a large impact on their mood, while others may get a smaller emotional boost from the same positive event.These reactions can not only be objectively measured in a simple office evaluation, but researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago report that they can help clinicians determine whether a patient with anxiety or depression is responding to treatment and if they will do better on an antidepressant drug, or in talk therapy.

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An international team led by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers has conducted what is believed to be the largest detailed published study of people with a poorly understood skin condition known as prurigo nodularis (PN). Such studies collect information on a whole subset of people at once and at a particular point in time.

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A new study suggests that the so-called “minority bias” exerts a powerful influence — important since one in five Americans is expected to identify as multiracial by 2050. University of Utah psychology professor Jacqueline M. Chen, lead author of the study published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, that found observers were most likely to categorize someone who is black-white multiracial as non-white. The findings are the first to document minority bias as a guiding principle in multiracial categorization.

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Could being more knowledgeable about finances help to keep you out of the hospital? Older adults with higher financial literacy are at lower risk of being hospitalized, reports a study in the July issue of Medical Care. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

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Working with hundreds of time-lapse videos of mouse tissue, a team of biologists joined up with civil engineers to create what is believed to be the first 3D computer model to show precisely how the tiny tubes that funnel milk through the breasts of mammals form.

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Every day, people are asked to find something – a familiar face in a crowd, a child in the park, a particular house on a street. While researchers have long-since known that the ability to effectively search and detect goal-relevant targets is controlled by top-down signals from the brain’s frontal area, a researcher from West Virginia University has found evidence that the human medial temporal lobe – or MTL – also plays an essential role in this process.

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Researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have captured the one cell that is capable of regenerating an entire organism.

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A new study shows that if current aquaculture and agriculture practices remain unchanged into the future, wild forage fish populations likely will be overextended by the year 2050, and possibly sooner. However, making sensible changes in aquaculture and agriculture production would avoid reaching that threshold.

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Researchers led by the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center have identified a new subtype of prostate cancer that occurs in about 7 percent of patients with advanced disease. This subset of tumors were responsive to immunotherapy treatment.

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New Technique that Shows How a Protein “Light Switch” Works May Enhance Biological Research

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Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland have developed a novel “melt-cast” explosive material that could be a suitable replacement for Trinitrotoluene, more commonly known as TNT.

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Distinct molecular mechanisms can generate the same features in different neurons, a team of scientists has discovered. Its findings enhance our understanding of brain cell development.

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Magnetic sensors play a key role in a variety of applications, such as speed and position sensing in the automotive industry or in biomedical applications. Within the framework of the Christian Doppler Laboratory "Advanced Magnetic Sensing and Materials" headed by Dieter Süss novel magnetic sensors have been realized that surpass conventional technologies in performance and accuracy in a cooperation between the University of Vienna, the Danube University Krems and Infineon AG. The researchers present the new development in the latest issue of the journal "Nature Electronics".

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A study led by UNC’s Sylvia Becker-Dreps, MD, MPH, reviewed more than 675,000 pregnancies in the U.S. to determine if the Tdap vaccine given to a mother will reduce the chances of her child developing pertussis during the first 18 months of life. The results show a decrease in overall cases of pertussis, and most notably, in pertussis hospitalization in infants whose mothers were immunized during pregnancy.

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Parents ranked cancer prevention as the most compelling reason health care providers can give for recommending the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, according to a survey led by University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers.

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A team of USC Viterbi engineers might aid in future CTE prevention and treat other sports injuries with 3-D printed body armor like helmets, other protective devices and prosthetics – all by learning from nature’s toughest structures.

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A new study co-led by University of Iowa researchers helps clarify how ammonia is present in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Using computer modeling, the researchers found ammonia molecules trapped in liquid cloud droplets are released during convection where these particles freeze and subsequently collide in the upper atmosphere.

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People with type 2 diabetes may have an increased risk of having a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease later in life, according to a large study published in the June 13, 2018, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. In addition, the risk may be higher for younger people and those with complications from the disease.

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A new nationwide study of obituaries has found that people with religious affiliations lived nearly four years longer than those with no ties to religion.

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Las bacterias genéticamente manipuladas se muestran esperanzadoras como nuevo tratamiento contra el estreñimiento, descubrieron los investigadores del Centro para Medicina Personalizada de Mayo Clinic en un estudio realizado en ratones.