News Articles

A video game designed by McGill University researchers to help train people to change their perception of social threats and boost their self-confidence has now been shown to reduce the production of the stress-related hormone cortisol.

Envisat satellite image captures fierce easterly desert winds blowing smoke from wildfires in Southern California. Gale-force winds have fed more than a dozen fires from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border since breaking out on Sunday, killing one person and forcing the evacuation of a quarter of a million people.
In the full image below, sand is visible being blown from Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula over the Gulf of California to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west.

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In America, religion and politics or science and politics or politics and anything else don't mix well. According to a new University of Missouri-Columbia study, though, religion and health care work together just fine.
Research shows that religion and spirituality are linked to positive physical and mental health but most studies have focused on people with life threatening diseases. The new study determines that religion can help individuals with disabilities adjust to their impairments and give new meaning to their lives.
Persons facing impending death may use religion to help them accept their condition, come to terms with unresolved life issues, and prepare for death.

A new neurobiological study has found that a synthetic form of THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, is an effective anti-depressant at low doses. However, at higher doses, the effect reverses itself and can actually worsen depression and other psychiatric conditions like psychosis.
The study, published in the October 24 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, was led by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi of McGill University and Le Centre de Recherche Fernand Seguin of Hôpital Louis-H. Lafontaine, affiliated with l'Université de Montréal. First author is Dr. Gobbi's McGill PhD student Francis Bambico, along with Noam Katz and the late Dr.

In a landmark test flight, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and a team of research partners this month successfully launched a solar telescope to an altitude of 120,000 feet, borne by a balloon larger than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. The test clears the way for long-duration polar balloon flights beginning in 2009 that will capture unprecedented details of the Sun's surface.
"This unique research project will enable us to view features of the Sun that we've never seen before," says Michael Knölker, director of NCAR's High Altitude Observatory and a principal investigator on the project.

Different cultures have different standards and norms for appropriate body size and shape, which can effect how children perceive their body image.
Some cultures celebrate a fuller body shape more than others, but researchers at the Center for Obesity Research and Education (CORE) at Temple University have found that an overweight or obese child can still be unhappy with his or her body, despite acceptance from within their ethnic group.
“This unhappiness is yet another consequence of childhood obesity,” said Gary Foster, Ph.D., director of CORE and president-elect of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity.

Scientists have obtained core samples from deep inside California's San Andreas Fault for the first time, a finding that may lead to a better understanding of the underground molecular events associated with earthquakes, according to an article in the Oct. 22 issue of Chemical&Engineering News.
The 800-mile-long fault that bisects California is infamous as the source of the region's most devastating earthquakes. Conventional sampling of the fault yields slurries of rock chips that are fragmented and difficult to study.

A preliminary, exploratory study based on a small sample called “Sexual knowledge and attitudes of men with intellectual disability who sexually offend,” published in Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability in June 2007 did not find that sex education made sexual offenders with an intellectual disability more dangerous.
The study is based on a comparison of 43 individuals with an intellectual disability who committed a sexual offence, with 43 individuals also with an intellectual disability who did not commit a sexual offence. The study did not conduct a comparison of individuals with and without an intellectual disability, and findings cannot be generalized to sex offenders without intellectual disabilities.

Larry Aidem, President & CEO, Sundance Channel announced today that the network will participate in the NBC Universal weeklong programming initiative "Green is Universal."
As part of NBC Universal's unprecedented corporate-wide focus on environmental issues, Sundance Channel will reprise its popular series "It's Not Easy Being Green" and "Big Ideas for a Small Planet" each night beginning at 8pm e/p from November 4 through 10 as well as broadcast its regularly scheduled destination THE GREEN on Tuesday November 6 at 9pm e/p. Sundance Channel is a venture of NBC Universal, CBS and Robert Redford.

Gold really does make you feel better, and not just because you can buy things to make misery more tolerable. Scientists at Duke University Medical Center say new insight into the healing properties of gold may renew interest in gold salts as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory diseases.
Physicians first used injections of gold salts in the early 1900s to ease the pain and swelling associated with arthritis. But treatment came at a high cost: The shots took months to take effect and side effects included rashes, mouth sores, kidney damage and occasionally, problems with the bone marrow’s ability to make new blood cells.

Are elections decided by looks? A Princeton University study says even a split-second glance at two candidates' faces is often enough to determine which one will win an election.
Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov has demonstrated that quick facial judgments can accurately predict real-world election returns. Todorov has taken some of his previous research that showed that people unconsciously judge the competence of an unfamiliar face within a tenth of a second, and he has moved it to the political arena.
His lab tests show that a rapid appraisal of the relative competence of two candidates' faces was sufficient to predict the winner in about 70 percent of the races for U.S. senator and state governor in the 2006 elections.

A new global study revealed that 40 percent of men and 30 percent of women are overweight, while 24 percent of men and 27 percent of women are obese, researchers reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
In the study, 168,159 people (69,409 men, 98,750 women) from 18 to 80 years old (average age 48) in 63 countries across five continents were evaluated by their primary care physicians.
"This is the largest study to assess the frequency of adiposity (body fat) in the clinic, providing a snapshot of patients worldwide," said study lead author Beverley Balkau, Ph.D., director of research at INSERM in Villejuif, France. (INSERM is the French equivalent of the U.S.