News Articles

The New York State Supreme Court recently upheld a New York City law requiring restaurants to put a special label on menu items containing more than "the recommended daily allowance" for salt.
This will once again lead to consumer confusion regarding how these salt allowances are created by government, what salt does in the body, and if it is as toxic as some groups have claimed.

WASHINGTON D.C., Feb. 28, 2016 -- The development of every animal in the history of the world began with a simple step: the fusion of a spermatozoon (the male gamete) with an oocyte, or egg (the female gamete). Despite the ubiquity of this process, the actual mechanisms through which fertilization occurs remain poorly understood. A new tool developed by a team of French biophysicists may soon shed light on this still-mysterious process, and has already captured highly detailed images of what happens when sperm and egg first touch.

Cat owners tare familiar with their pets’ individual personalities, habits and preferences, and they can tell when the behavior is different than normal, but understanding what these changes mean can be much more difficult.

The substance that provides energy to many of the cells in our bodies, Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), may also be able to power the next generation of supercomputers, according to an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which they describe a model of a biological computer that they have created that is able to process information very quickly and accurately using parallel networks in the same way that massive electronic super computers do.Except that the model bio supercomputer they have created is a whole lot smaller than current supercomputers, uses much less energy, and uses proteins present in all living cells to function.

Overweight young adults may have poorer episodic memory - the ability to recall past events - than their peers, suggests new research from the University of Cambridge, adding to increasing evidence of a link between memory and overeating.
In a preliminary study published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers from the Department of Psychology at Cambridge found an association between high body mass index (BMI) and poorer performance on a test of episodic memory.

Research led by investigators in veterinary and human medicine has identified genetic pathways that exacerbate severity of canine compulsive disorder in Doberman pinschers, a discovery that could lead to better therapies for obsessive compulsive disorder in people. The discovery appears online in advance of print on Feb. 29, 2016 in the International Journal of Applied Research in Veterinary Medicine.

Women who prefer physically formidable and dominant mates (PPFDM) tend to feel more at risk of crime regardless of the situation or risk factors present, according to research from the University of Leicester.
Previous research suggests that women who grow up in high-crime areas and perceive they are at risk of criminal victimisation find dominant men more appealing, perhaps because of the protection they can offer.
However, the University of Leicester team suggests that women who are attracted to dominant men generally feel more at risk of victimisation, even when their risk of victimisation is actually low.

Stanford, CA -- During the daytime, plants convert the Sun's energy into sugars using photosynthesis, a complex, multi-stage biochemical process. New work from a team including Carnegie's Mark Heinnickel, Wenqiang Yang, and Arthur Grossman identified a protein needed for assembling the photosynthetic apparatus that may help us understand the history of photosynthesis back in the early days of life on Earth, a time when oxygen was not abundant in the atmosphere. Their work is published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

February 26, 2016 - Uncorrected refractive error (URE)--nearsightedness, farsightedness, and other focusing problems correctable by prescription lenses--is responsible for moderate to severe vision impairment in 101 million people and blindness in seven million people worldwide, reports a study in the March issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer.

In the article "Police Violence: A Two Way Street"," retired police officer and psychologist Matthew Logan, PhD, explores the "untold story" behind accounts of police violence in the media. He provides insights into why a small percentage of violent incidents involving the police dominate the headlines, encourages greater public airing of the police perspective, and predicts how policing might change in the new climate of hatred and distrust. The article appears in the Journal Violence and Gender.

Dispositional, or “everyday” mindfulness, is being aware of one’s present thoughts and feelings and a new paper measured health indicators of 399 people, including dispositional mindfulness and blood glucose, and found those with higher scores for mindfulness were significantly more likely than people with low scores to have healthy glucose levels.

New Haven, Conn. -- A pregnant Brazilian woman infected with the Zika virus had a stillborn baby in January who had signs of severe tissue swelling as well as central nervous system defects that caused the cerebral hemispheres of the brain to be absent. It is the first report to indicate a possible association of congenital Zika virus and damage to tissues outside the central nervous system.
Researchers led by Albert Ko, M.D. of the Yale School of Public Health and Dr. Antônio Raimundo de Almeida at the Hospital Geral Roberto Santos in Salvador, Brazil, describe the case in the current issue of the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.