News Articles

Benjamin Franklin, Socrates, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa: All well-recognized names. In a recent study from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, researchers studying Americans and Canadians found preferences for practical wisdom when people were asked to name important figures and tell stories about their wisdom.
Psychologists Nic Weststrate and Michel Ferrari (University of Toronto) along with Sociologist Monika Ardelt (University of Florida) studied average people to determine how everyday people understand wisdom and uncovered a set of characteristics shared across North America that shape today's prototypical vision of "wisdom."

Increasing temperatures will enlarge Europe's seasonal window for the potential spread of mosquito-borne viral disease, expanding the geographic areas at risk for a dengue epidemic to include much of Europe. The findings by researchers at Umeå University in Sweden are published in the journal EBioMedicine.
Researchers at Umeå University's Unit for Global Health have calculated the risk for dengue outbreaks in Europe based on a set of different climate change predictions. Climate change-related temperature variations and overall warmer mean temperatures both have profound growth impacts on the ability of vectors - Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopicturs - to transmit dengue. The Aedes mosquitos, especially Aedes aegypti, are associated with most major dengue epidemics.

Eating meals from restaurants has become routine for many American children, often contributing excess calories, solid fats, sodium, and added sugar to diets already lacking in fruit, vegetables, and dairy. 

Use of cannabis during pregnancy is linked to low birthweight and the need for intensive care, reveals an analysis of the available evidence, published in the online journal BMJ Open.
As cannabis becomes more socially acceptable, it's important that prospective mums-to-be and clinicians are fully up to speed on the potential harms of using the drug during pregnancy, caution the researchers.
Cannabis "remains the drug of choice in developed and developing countries," with up to 5% of 15-64 year olds around the world thought to use it, the researchers point out.

Nearly 14 percent of veterans reported suicidal thinking at one or both phases of a two-year Veterans Affairs (VA) study.
The study, now online, is slated for publication in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders.
The finding is based on a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 U.S. veterans who were surveyed twice as part of the National Health and Resilience in Veterans Study, led by Dr. Robert Pietrzak of the Clinical Neurosciences Division of VA's National Center for PTSD. The first wave was conducted in 2011, the second in 2013.

BURLINGTON, VT - Smoking during pregnancy is the leading preventable cause of poor pregnancy outcomes. Studies further indicate that in-utero smoke exposure contributes to respiratory and cardiac illnesses later in life.
The good news is that the prevalence of smoking during pregnancy has decreased. The bad news is that economically disadvantaged pregnant women continue to smoke at much higher rates than affluent women.

Quebec City, March 5, 2016--A study published in the April edition of Health Affairs reveals that one-sided comments posted on online news articles may influence readers' opinions about health-related topics. This raises questions about how health social media should be moderated, especially considering the potentially polarized nature of these forums.

The salivary gland secretes saliva that helps us chew and swallow the food we eat while the pancreas secretes digestive juices that enable our bodies to break down the fat, protein, and carbohydrates in the food.
Secretions like these are important in countless activities that keep our bodies running day and night. A new study uncovers a previously mysterious process that makes these secretions possible - and it involves calcium, which is sure to set off a new supplement fad among the Dr. Oz, Mark Hyman, Joe Mercola sect.  

Popular culture may suggest we live in an era where men and women have achieved sexual equality. But new research finds that, when it comes to oral sex, disparities persist - and young men and women tend to gloss over these gender inequalities.
The study, conducted in England by University of the Pacific sociologist Ruth Lewis and Cicely Marston of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, appears online in the Journal of Sex Research.
The researchers interviewed 71 men and women ages 16 to 18, and conducted follow-up interviews a year later. The study focused on accounts of oral sex between men and women, rather than same-sex partners.

On March 29, Nature Genetics published a research article entitled "Genetic lineage tracing identifies endocardial origin of liver vasculature", from Prof. ZHOU Bin's lab at the Institute for Nutritional Sciences (INS), Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, CAS.
Taking advantage of genetic lineage tracing and tissue specific gene knockout technology, researchers found that part of the liver vasculature is derived from the endocardium in the developing heart. During this process, endocardial VEGF/VEGFR2 signaling plays an important role in liver angiogenesis and organogenesis.

Working with human breast cancer cells, a team of scientists from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago have successfully turned off a misbehaving protein that fuels the growth of a particularly aggressive, drug-resistant form of the disease known as triple-negative breast cancer.
In a set of lab experiments, the team managed to neutralize the protein, called Nodal, a growth factor already known for its role in early embryonic development.
A description of the work is published in the March 23 issue of the journal Cell Cycle.

CHICAGO (April 4, 2016) -- Patients taking losmapimod, an anti-inflammatory drug currently being developed, for 12 weeks following a heart attack did not show improvements in the trial's primary endpoint, the rate of cardiovascular death, subsequent heart attack or urgent coronary revascularization, which includes placement of a stent or coronary artery bypass surgery, according to research presented at the American College of Cardiology's 65th Annual Scientific Session.