Brain Images Reveal the Secret to Higher IQ
By Emily Singer
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
New research suggests that the layer of insulation coating neural wiring in the brain plays a critical role in determining intelligence. In addition, the quality of this insulation appears to be largely genetically determined, providing further support for the idea that IQ is partly inherited.
The findings, which result from a detailed study of twins' brains, hint at how ever-improving brain-imaging technology could shed light on some of our most basic characteristics. |
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Want to survive a bomb? Don't run, take cover.
By SciencePunk
March 24, 2009 5:23 AM
There's an old adage for bomb technicians - if you see them running, try to keep up. But preliminary research carried out by the Florida Institute of Technology suggests that bolting for the exit when confronted by a suicide bomber is a poor choice of strategy. |
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Single embryo best for fertility treatment: study
By Michael Kahn
Tue Mar 24, 2009 8:42pm EDT
Implanting a single embryo is the cheapest and most effective way for women to have a healthy baby through fertility treatment, Finnish researchers said on Wednesday.
The findings from the long-running study counter fears that relying on just one embryo could drive up treatment costs and reduce a woman's chances of giving birth to a full-term baby, the researchers said in the journal Human Reproduction. |
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Red meat raises risk of all kinds of death
By Maggie Fox
Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:29pm EDT
People who eat the most red meat and the most processed meat have the highest overall risk of death from all causes, including heart disease and cancer, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.
The National Cancer Institute study is one of the largest to look at the highly controversial and emotive issue of whether eating meat is indeed bad for health.
Rashmi Sinha and colleagues looked at the records of more than 500,000 people aged 50 to 71 who filled out questionnaires on their diet and other health habits.
Even when other factors were accounted for -- eating fresh fruits and vegetables, smoking, exercise, obesity -- the heaviest meat-eaters were more likely to die over the next 10 years than the people who ate the least amount of meat. |
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Antibiotic ban on livestock may hurt U.S. food safety
By Christopher Doering
Tue Mar 24, 2009 11:53am EDT
A bill that would ban the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animals would hurt the health of livestock and poultry while compromising efforts to protect the safety of the country's food supply, the leader of the largest U.S. farm group said on Tuesday.
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Industry groups that oppose the ban contend animal deaths would go up, producer costs would rise, meat output would drop and consumers would see prices climb. They contend there is no evidence that a public health threat has occurred because of the use of antibiotics in animals.
Introduced in the House of Representatives by Louise Slaughter and in the Senate by Edward Kennedy, the legislation, would ban the use of antibiotics important to human health from being used on cattle, hogs, sheep and poultry unless animals are ill. |
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Group says 5.3 million in U.S. have Alzheimer's
By Maggie Fox
Tue Mar 24, 2009 11:44am EDT
An estimated 5.3 million Americans have Alzheimer's, and each patient on average costs Medicare three times more than patients without the disease, the Alzheimer's Association reported on Tuesday.
In its annual report on the brain-wasting illness, the group projected that by 2010, nearly a half-million new cases of Alzheimer's will develop each year as the population ages and by 2050 a million new cases will be diagnosed annually.
"Direct and indirect costs of Alzheimer's and other dementias amount to more than $148 billion annually," the group said in a statement. |
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Malaria map shows where to target the disease
By Michael Kahn
Tue Mar 24, 2009 4:00am EDT
Eliminating malaria in many parts of the world where risk of the disease is high may be less difficult than previously thought, international researchers said on Tuesday.
Using data collected from nearly 8,000 local surveys of infection rates, the team built a global map pinpointing areas where malaria remains the biggest threat.
They found that in many areas transmission rates are below the level at which controlling the disease with things such as bed nets is a real possibility |
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Children's sweet tooth explained
By Victoria Gill
14:07 GMT, Tuesday, 24 March 2009
A compulsion for sweets is a well-known part of childhood, and research could have now explained why children love sugar quite so much.
The study, carried out in the US, found a direct link between children's growth and their preference for sugary drinks.
It showed that youngsters who preferred the sweetest drinks were the ones that were growing the fastest. |
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Optogenetics controls brain signalling and sheds light on Parkinson's therapy
By Mo
March 24, 2009 6:50 AM
Optogenetics is a recently developed technique based on a group of light-sensitive proteins called channelrhodopsins, which which were isolated recently from various species of micro-organism. Although relatively new, this technique has already proven to be extremely powerful, because channelrhodopsins can be targeted to specific cells, so that their activity can be controlled by light, on a millisecond-by-millisecond timescale.
A group of researchers from Stanford University now report a new addition to the optogenetic toolkit, and demonstrate that it can be used to precisely control biochemical signalling pathways in the mouse brain and to manipulate complex reward-related behaviour. They have also used the existing channelrhodopsins to probe the neural circuitry implicated in Parkinson's Disease and thus gain a better understanding of why deep brain stimulation is effective in treating the disease. |
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Auditory Regions Of Brain Convert To Sense Of Touch, Hearing Loss Study Finds
By (ScienceDaily)
Mar. 25, 2009
Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine researchers have discovered that adult animals with hearing loss actually re-route the sense of touch into the hearing parts of the brain.
In the study, published online in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 23, the team reported a phenomenon known as cross-modal plasticity in the auditory system of adult animals. Cross-modal plasticity refers to the replacement of a damaged sensory system by one of the remaining ones. In this case, the sense of hearing is replaced with touch. |
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Evolution Of Fins And Limbs Linked With That Of Gills
By
The genetic toolkit that animals use to build fins and limbs is the same genetic toolkit that controls the development of part of the gill skeleton in sharks, according to a new study.
This new finding is consistent with an old theory, often discounted in science textbooks, that fins and (later) limbs evolved from the gills of an extinct vertebrate, Gillis added. "A dearth of fossils prevents us from definitely concluding that fins evolved from gills. Nevertheless, this research shows that the genetic architecture of gills, fins and limbs is the same." |
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Deep-sea Corals May Be Oldest Living Marine Organism
By
Researchers from Lawrence Livermore, Stanford University and the University of California at Santa Cruz have determined that two groups of Hawaiian deep-sea corals are far older than previously recorded.
Using the Lab's Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, LLNL researchers Tom Guilderson and Stewart Fallon used radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of Geradia sp., or gold coral, and specimens of the deep-water black coral, Leiopathes sp. The longest lived in both species was 2,740 years and 4,270 years, respectively. At more than 4,000 years old, the deep-water black coral is the oldest living skeletal-accreting marine organism known.
"And to the best of our knowledge, the oldest colonial organism yet found," |
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New View Of The Way Young Children Think
By
For parents who have found themselves repeating the same warnings or directions to their toddler over and over to no avail, new research from the University of Colorado at Boulder offers them an answer as to why their toddlers don't listen to their advice: they're just storing it away for later.
. . .
"The good news is what we're saying to our kids doesn't go in one ear and out the other, like people might have thought," said CU-Boulder psychology Professor Yuko Munakata, who conducted the study with CU doctoral student Christopher Chatham and Michael Frank of Brown University. "It also doesn't go in and then get put into action like it does with adults. But rather it goes in and gets stored away for later." |
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Vaccine To Prevent Colon Cancer Being Tested In Patients
By
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have begun testing a vaccine that might be able to prevent colon cancer in people at high risk for developing the disease. If shown to be effective, it might spare patients the risk and inconvenience of repeated invasive surveillance tests, such as colonoscopy, that are now necessary to spot and remove precancerous polyps. |
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Earliest Evidence Of Domesticated Maize Discovered: Dates Back 8,700 Years
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Maize was domesticated from its wild ancestor more than 8700 years according to biological evidence uncovered by researchers in the Mexico's Central Balsas River Valley. This is the earliest dated evidence -- by 1200 years -- for the presence and use of domesticated maize.
According to Ranere, recent studies have confirmed that maize derived from teosinte, a large wild grass that has five species growing in Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua. The teosinte species that is closest to maize is Balsas teosinte, which is native to Mexico's Central Balsas River Valley. |
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Extensive Patient Sharing Among Hospitals Could Impact Spread Of Infectious Diseases
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Findings from the first in-depth study of patient sharing show that hospitals share large numbers of patients with other acute care facilities without knowing it. In the new study released today at the annual meeting of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), researchers found that only one in nine shared patients is directly transferred from one hospital to another, whereas most patients were discharged before being readmitted to another hospital. |
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Black Girls Are 50 Percent More Likely To Be Bulimic Than White Girls
By
. . . girls who are African American are 50 percent more likely than girls who are white to be bulimic, the researchers found, and girls from families in the lowest income bracket studied are 153 percent more likely to be bulimic than girls from the highest income bracket.
"As it turns out, we learned something surprising from our data about who bulimia actually affects, not just who is diagnosed," says USC economist Michelle Goeree. |
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Pilot Study Shows Effectiveness Of New, Low-cost Method For Monitoring Hand Hygiene Compliance
By
Epidemiologists and computer scientists at the University of Iowa have collaborated to create a new low-cost, green technology for automatically tracking the use of hand hygiene dispensers before healthcare workers enter and after they exit patient rooms. This novel method of monitoring hand hygiene compliance, which is essential for infection control in hospitals, was released March 18 at the annual meeting of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA).
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This new technology marks a major shift from the current method of monitoring hand hygiene compliance that involves direct human observation, which is both costly and labor intensive. With human observation there is also the potential for a "Hawthorne Effect," which means workers will only clean their hands when being actively observed. Older automated monitoring technology, called radio-frequency identification (RFID) infrastructure, is available, but can be prohibitively costly and consumes far more power than Polgreen's method. |
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Epilepsy: Seizures Caused By Intractable Epilepsy Reduced By More Than 50 Percent
By
Epilepsy is a common medical condition characterized by convulsions and short periods of confusion. It affects more than 50 million people worldwide. But intractable epilepsy, which affects more than 1 million Americans and is often resistant to drug treatment and surgery, is arguably worse.
But in a just completed clinical trial, a unique nerve-stimulation treatment for intractable epilepsy reduced the number of seizures by more than 50 percent. In the March edition of the journal Neurology, UCLA neurology professor Christopher M. DeGiorgio and colleagues report the results of the long-term pilot trial, which demonstrated the effectiveness of the new treatment, called trigeminal nerve stimulation (TNS). |
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'Master Regulator' Of Skin Formation Discovered
By
Researchers at Oregon State University have found one gene in the human body that appears to be a master regulator for skin development, in research that could help address everything from skin diseases such as eczema or psoriasis to the wrinkling of skin as people age.
Inadequate or loss of expression of this gene, called CTIP2, may play a role in some skin disorders, scientists believe, and understanding the mechanisms of gene action could provide a solution to them. |
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Thailand: The future home of stem cell research?
By Patrick Winn
March 24, 2009 16:07 ET
. . . in Thailand, worlds away from the political din surrounding stem cells in America, more and more parents are choosing to bank the cord blood of their newborns to use, perhaps, in future medical treatments.
Thailand could be well-positioned to cash in on the trend, as the business of storing stem cells relies on two factors: high birth rates and a class of moneyed parents. Thailand, already a regional healthcare mecca, has both.
A handful of start-ups — Thai StemLife, Cyroviva Thailand, Cordlife and others — are now vying to store stem cells from the roughly 800,000 babies born each year in Thailand. |
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The secret of Black Sea sexagenarians
By Fazile Zahir
Mar 25, 2009
Turkey's coastal inhabitants always knew that they had it good, health-wise, but a study published by Antalya's Akdeniz University this week made it clear exactly how good. The study found that the average Turk living on the mountainous Black Sea coast lives five years longer than the national average of 64 years for a man and 68 years for a woman.
. . .
When the death rates were analyzed, however, they revealed that the mountain village residents lived longer and had rates of death from heart disease than their peers in the lowlands.
The researchers concluded, like their Turkish colleagues, that the exertion required to walk uphill regularly on rugged terrain gives the heart a better work out. They also speculated that living at moderately high altitude produces long-term physiological changes in the body that enable it to cope with lower levels of oxygen. |
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