One of astronomy's big questions is why galaxies forming as recently as 1 billion years after the Big Bang contain so much dust. The leading hypothesis is that supernovae, stars that explode at the end of their lives, contain large amounts of metal-enriched material that, in turn, harbors key ingredients of dust, like silicon, iron and carbon.
Adults of many animal species play a crucial role in the social development of youngsters. A new study published March 18 in the online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal PLoS ONE, reveals that the ratio of adults to young plays a much more important role in social development than the mere presence of adults.
They say a picture tells a thousand stories, but can it also tell how smart you are? Actually, say UCLA researchers, it can.
In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience Feb. 18, UCLA neurology professor Paul Thompson and colleagues used a new type of brain-imaging scanner to show that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain's axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. The faster the signaling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain's wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine have discovered a mode of action for mysterious but diagnostic protein snarls found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients that suggests a one-two punch of therapy may be needed to combat the neurodegenerative disease.
Alzheimer's disease, which may affect as many as 5 million Americans and is among the most costly diseases to society in the United States and Europe, is characterized by two distinctive protein malformations: amyloid plaques and tau tangles. Amyloid plaques are sticky deposits made up of a short protein called amyloid beta, and tau tangles are made of short filaments of the tau protein.
Yale researchers investigating the genetic causes of blood pressure variation have identified a previously undescribed syndrome associated with seizures, a lack of coordination, developmental delay and hearing loss.
The findings, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, illustrate the power of genetic studies not only to find causes of chronic ailments, but also to identify a common cause in a seemingly unrelated set of symptoms in different parts of the body.
Toronto, Canada – March 16, 2009 – A new study published in Epilepsia finds that the prevalence of depression is almost twice as high in people with epilepsy compared to the general population. Among those with epilepsy, racial minorities have seven times the odds of depression in comparison to the majority Caucasian population. The findings also show that 40 percent of depressed respondents with epilepsy were not accessing mental healthcare services.
Nearly four per cent of ACT kindergarten children have a peanut allergy and while the region's schools are well prepared to cope with this, some parents are taking inappropriate action when dealing with their child's allergy, according to a new study.
The research was a co-operative study by the Academic Unit of General Practice and Community Health at The Australian National University's Medical School and ACT Health. It surveyed 3851 children in the region to discover the prevalence of peanut and nut allergies, what management systems were in place in schools and how parents viewed and reacted to their child's allergy.
WASHINGTON, D.C., MARCH 17, 2009 – The medical costs that businesses pay to care for one premature baby for a year could cover the costs for nearly a dozen healthy, full-term infants, according to new statistics from the March of Dimes.
The average medical cost for healthy full-term babies from birth through their first birthday was $4,551 in 2007 dollars, of which more than $3,800 is paid for by health plans, according to the new data. For premature and/or low birthweight babies (less than 37 completed weeks gestation and/or less than 2500 grams), the average cost was nearly $50,000, of which more than $46,000 was borne by the health plan.
The unexpected behaviour of a family of "superbugs" called the Burkholderia cepacia complex (Bcc) could have implications for the treatment of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients. CF patients produce large quantities of sticky mucus in their lungs that is difficult to expel and is easily infected by bacteria. A recent treatment for CF, inhalation of a sugar called mannitol, works by attracting moisture into the lungs. This thins the mucus making it easier to disperse.
Autosub, a robot submarine built and developed by the UK's National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, has successfully completed a high-risk campaign of six missions travelling under an Antarctic glacier.
Autosub has been exploring Pine Island Glacier, a floating extension of the West Antarctic ice sheet, using sonar scanners to map the seabed and the underside of the ice as it juts into the sea. Scientists hope to learn why the glacier has been thinning and accelerating over recent decades. Pine Island Glacier is in the Amundsen Sea, part of the South Pacific bordering West Antarctica. Changes in its flow have been observed since the early 1970s, and together with neighbouring glaciers it is currently contributing about 0.25 mm a year to global sea level rise.
(PHILADELPHIA) – Although most Americans live close to some type of emergency room, as many as one in four Americans are more than an hour away from the type of hospital that's most prepared to save their life during a time-sensitive medical emergency, according to a new University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine study published in the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine. Since little is known about which U.S. hospitals are best equipped and staffed to tackle emergent illnesses like stroke, cardiac arrest, heart attack and the severe bloodstream infection sepsis, many more Americans may be in peril because no system exists to transport them to the right hospital at the right time.
USA300—the major epidemic strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) causing severe infections in the United States during the past decade—inherits its destructiveness directly from a forefather strain of the bacterium called USA500 rather than randomly acquiring harmful genes from other MRSA strains. This finding comes from a new study led by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health.
