News Articles

Taking oral contraceptives can lower a young women’s bone density according to research by LMU Professor of Natural Science Hawley Almstedt and Oregon State University Professor of Natural Science Christine M. Snow.
This is the first study to analyze 18-25 year old women oral contraceptives and bone density. It is critical for women to develop strong bone mass during their adolescence. Although women’s peak bone development occurs at the age of 16, women’s bones are still developing during their late teens and early twenties.

People with high blood pressure may find relief from Transcendental Meditation, a controversial alternative to medicine promoted by the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, where some of the co-authors sell their techniques.
Their meta-analysis was 107 published studies on stress reduction programs and high blood pressure and published in the December issue of Current Hypertension Reports.

A new study from the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that the presence of other people may enhance our movie-watching experiences. Over the course of the film, movie-watchers influence one another and gradually synchronize their emotional responses. This mutual mimicry also affects each participant’s evaluation of the overall experience – the more in sync we are with the people around us, the more we like the movie.
“When asked how much they had liked the film, participants reported higher ratings the more their assessments lined up with the other person,” explain Suresh Ramanathan and Ann L. McGill (both of the University of Chicago). “By mimicking expressions, people catch each other’s moods leading to a shared emotional experience.

Prominent claims from observational studies of the cardiovascular benefits of vitamin E often continue to be supported in medical literature despite strong contradictory evidence from randomized trials, according to a study in the December 5 issue of JAMA.
Similar findings were found for claims regarding the protective effects of beta-carotene on cancer and estrogen on Alzheimer disease.
“Some research findings that have received wide attention in the scientific community, as proven by the high citation counts of the respective articles, are eventually contradicted by subsequent evidence. A number of such high-profile contradictions pertain to differences between nonrandomized and randomized studies,” the authors write.

Elite athletes - often perceived as the epitome of health and fitness – may be more susceptible to common illness and are therefore proving useful in helping scientists understand more about the immune system.
Nic West, a PhD candidate at Griffith University, has enlisted elite rowers to help him study the role of salivary proteins that act as a barrier to infectious agents such as respiratory viruses.
He said salivary proteins such as lactoferrin and lysozyme act to prevent microbes from infecting the body and typically increase as the body fights off infection. They have a direct antimicrobial effect and also help modulate other aspects of the body’s immune response.

An international European research collaboration led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology reports evidence for a rapid developmental pattern in a 100,000 year old Belgian Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis). The Scladina juvenile, which appears to be developmentally similar to a 10-12 year old human, was estimated to be in fact about 8 years old at death, according to the new research.
The report, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (online edition early December), details how the team used growth lines both inside and on the surfaces of the child's teeth to reconstruct tooth formation time and its age at death.

University of British Columbia astronomer Harvey Richer and UBC graduate student Saul Davis have discovered that white dwarf stars are born with a natal kick, explaining why these smoldering embers of Sun-like stars are found on the edge rather than at the centre of globular star clusters.
White dwarfs represent the third major stage of a star’s evolution. Like the Sun, each star begins its life with a long stable state where nuclear reactions take place in the core supplying the energy. After the core fuel is depleted, it swells up and turns into a huge red giant.

The long-held idea that only vertebrates have sophisticated adaptive immune systems that can protect them for life against many pathogens after being infected by them just once has been revised in recent years.
It turns out that many insects also have a form of immune memory that protects them against reinvasion by a pathogen they have previously encountered. This was just one of the striking discoveries discussed at the recent conference on Innate Immunity and the Environment, organized by the European Science Foundation (ESF).

To ensure you have a green Christmas this season, Bluewater, the UKs leading shopping center, have devised an eco-friendly scientific formula on how to wrap a Christmas present after estimating British consumers will waste over one ton of wrapping paper this Christmas (see note 1 at the bottom).
Bluewater discovered that Brits continually overestimate the amount of paper they need to wrap their Christmas presents.

Life on Earth may have originated as the organic filling in a multilayer sandwich of mica sheets, according to Helen Hansma of the National Science Foundation and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In a presentation at the American Society for Cell Biology’s 47th annual meeting, she proposes that the narrow, confined spaces between nonliving mica layers could have provided exactly the right conditions for the rise of the first biomolecules.
The “mica hypothesis” provides possible answers to many questions about life’s origins, according to Hansma. This layered mineral could have provided support, shelter, and an energy source for the development of precellular life, while leaving artifacts in the structure of living things today, including the periodicity of RNA.

The data are in. Divorce is bad for the environment.
A novel study that links divorce with the environment shows a global trend of soaring divorce rates has created more households with fewer people, has taken up more space and has gobbled up more energy and water. The findings of Jianguo “Jack” Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University are published in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A statistical remedy: Fall back in love. Cohabitation means less urban sprawl and softens the environmental hit.

The price of oil nearly reached $100 a barrel recently, but a new University of Delaware prototype vehicle demonstrates how the cost of the black stuff could become a concern of the past.
A team of UD faculty has created a system that enables vehicles to not only run on electricity alone, but also to generate revenue by storing and providing electricity for utilities. The technology--known as V2G, for vehicle-to-grid--lets electricity flow from the car’s battery to power lines and back.
“When I get home, I’ll charge up and then switch into V2G mode,” said Willett Kempton, UD associate professor of marine policy and a V2G pioneer who began developing the technology more than a decade ago and who is now testing the new prototype vehicle.