News Articles

Cluttered and chaotic environments can cause stress, which can lead us to grab more of the indulgent snacks-- twice as many cookies according to this new study!
Conducted at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and published in Environment and Behavior, the study shows that cluttered kitchens are caloric kitchens. When stressed out females were asked to wait for another person in a messy kitchen -- with newspapers on the table, dishes in the sink, and the phone ringing - they ate twice as many cookies compared to women in the same kitchen when it was organized and quiet. In total they ate 65 more calories more in 10 minutes time.

With the attacks in Paris and in California recently, all linked to Muslim terrorists, where is the line between being factual about who is committing terrorist acts and fueling anti-Muslim sentiment?
Craig Anderson, Distinguished Professor of psychology at Iowa State University, and colleagues think they can find out, by surveying college students.
According to their results, published in the journal Communication Research, there is a link between negative media stories of Muslims and support for military action and restrictions against Muslims. And since conservatives in America are mostly likely to be strong on topics like crime and military defense, they say it was entirely predictable that GOP candidates would take strong stands against terrorism. 

MIAMI--A University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science-led study shows that the North Atlantic absorbed 50 percent more man-made carbon dioxide over the last decade, compared to the previous decade. The findings show the impact that the burning of fossil fuels have had on the world's oceans in just 10 years.

Taking benzodiazepines (widely used drugs to treat anxiety and insomnia) is not associated with an increased dementia risk in older adults, finds a study published by The BMJ today.
These results do not support a direct (causal) association between benzodiazepine use and dementia, say the researchers. However, healthcare providers are still advised to avoid benzodiazepines in older adults to prevent important adverse health outcomes.
Benzodiazepines are widely prescribed among older adults to manage sleep, anxiety and depressive disorders. Some studies have suggested that benzodiazepine use could be associated with an increased risk of dementia, but results are conflicting.

The system that awards national and academic honors to doctors is called into question by a senior doctor writing in The BMJ this week.
Consultant cardiologist, Peter Wilmshurst, tells the story of Anjan Kumar Banerjee, a surgeon who spent the years 2002 to 2008 erased from the medical register for serious professional misconduct related to research fraud, financial misconduct, and substandard care.
Yet in 2014 he was awarded an MBE "for services to patient safety."

Insects are astonishingly diverse, accounting for nearly three-quarters of all named animal species living today, and their diversity is widely thought to have increased steadily over evolutionary time. A new study, however, finds that insect diversity actually has not changed much over the past 125 million years.
It's not that no new insects have evolved. Rather, as new insects have evolved, others have gone extinct, leaving the overall diversity relatively unchanged, according to paleontologist Matthew Clapham, associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, whose team published the new findings February 3 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Washington, D.C.--January 26, 2016-- Researchers have uncovered potent antimicrobial activity in a natural clay deposit found on the central coast of British Columbia, Canada. The research, published this week in mBio, an online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, shows that the clay can kill members of the ESKAPE group of bacterial pathogens, the culprits behind some of the deadliest and most antibiotic-resistant hospital-acquired infections.

The little penguin species (popularly known as little blue penguins) found in southern New Zealand is a surprisingly recent invader from Australia, according to a new study led by University of Otago researchers.
Following the recent discovery that little penguins in the southern province of Otago belong to an Australian species, a team of researchers from New Zealand and the United States set out to determine when the Aussies first arrived.
The Marsden and Allan Wilson Centre-funded study was carried out by Dr Stefanie Grosser as part of her PhD research, and led by Professor Jon Waters from Otago's Department of Zoology.

ATLANTA (Feb. 1, 2016)--In a study to be presented on Feb. 6 at 8:45 a.m. EST, at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's annual meeting, The Pregnancy Meeting™, in Atlanta, researchers will present findings from a study titled, The NICHD Fetal Growth Studies: Development of a contemporary formula for estimating gestational age from ultrasound fetal biometrics.

An interdisciplinary group of researchers at UC Santa Barbara has taken strides in the development of an underwater adhesive that has the potential for a variety of biomedical and non-biological applications. Areas such as tissue repair, dental adhesives and other surface adhesion applications -- which are often required under adverse conditions, such as salty sea water and in aqueous solutions containing organic impurities -- could benefit from this glue, which replicates the adhesion strategy of the Sandcastle worm (Phragmatopoma californica), a segmented marine invertebrate commonly found along the California coast.

Oklahoma City (February 1, 2016) When the audio on your television set or smart phone is too loud, you simply turn down the volume. What if we could do the same for the signaling in our bodies that essentially causes normal cells to turn cancerous?
New discoveries by researchers at the Stephenson Cancer Center at the University of Oklahoma may point to new ways to do just that.
Hiroshi Y. Yamada, Ph.D., and his team zeroed in on chromosome instability as a potential precursor to colon cancer.

Unless you are seeing a homeopath, or a naturopath or anything else that ends in "path", you probably believe your treatment is evidence-based. 
That may not be true. Hospitals are not under even more pressure to contain costs, but they may need to look at the staff to find out why expenses are high and results don't always match.  Use of evidence-based practice among chief nurses and their hospitals is relatively low, according to a survey led by Bernadette Melnyk, dean of the College of Nursing at The Ohio State University.
And many of the hospitals in the study reported poor scores on key performance measures, such as falls and pressure ulcers.