Focus: Hidden - Maryland

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When individuals suffer a spinal cord injury, they often lose bladder control, which causes infections that can lead to kidney damage. Scientists used spinal stimulation technology to enable spinal cord- injured rats to empty their bladders more fully and in a timelier manner. The promising results achieved in rats represent a significant step towards deployment of this novel approach in humans with paraplegia.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered young, massive, compact galaxies whose raucous star-making parties are ending early. The firestorm of star birth has blasted out most of the remaining gaseous fuel needed to make future generations of stars. Now the party's over for these gas-starved galaxies, and they are on track to possibly becoming so- called "red and dead galaxies," composed only of aging stars. An analysis of 12 merging galaxies is suggesting that energy from the star-birthing frenzy created powerful winds that are blowing out the gas, squelching future generations of stars. This activity occurred when the universe was half its current age of 13.7 billion years.

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New research in flies shows how cells in adult reproductive organs maintain their sexual identity. The study, published online on Nov. 13 in Developmental Cell, also identified a mutation that can switch the cells’ sexual identity. The findings could lead to new insights on how to alter cells for therapeutic purposes.

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Hospitalized premature infants are exposed to unsafe levels of a chemical found in numerous medical products used to treat them, raising questions about whether critically ill newborns may be adversely affected by equipment designed to help save their lives.

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The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is announcing the launch of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, which will develop and disseminate programs that encourage healthy behavioral change and train faculty and students in health promotion and advocacy. The center will be established in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society with a gift from Sid and Helaine Lerner, long-time friends of the school.

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Soldiers hospitalized with a psychiatric disorder have a significantly elevated risk for suicide in the year following hospital discharge, according to findings published in JAMA Psychiatry, Nov. 12, 2014. Although this has long been known in the civilian sector, it has never before been studied in the military population.

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Older women with disordered breathing during sleep were found to be at greater risk of decline in the ability to perform daily activities, such as grocery shopping and meal preparation, according to a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of California, San Francisco.

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Dr. Stuart Hamilton of Salisbury University’s Geography and Geosciences Department has earned a prestigious $83,000 Prometheus Fellowship from the Ecuadorian government to explore causes of sedimentation in that country’s Chone Estuary. He will produce a management plan to mitigate the issue.

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Conservation science is helping make big decisions about preservation methods to protect and save unique and historic U.S. government records—including the iconic and priceless Declaration of Independence—for future generations. During the AVS 61st International Symposium & Exhibition, Jennifer Herrmann, a research chemist and conservation scientist for the National Archives and Records Administration, will describe the role science plays in the preservation of the nation's documents.

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Geologist Timothy Rose of the Smithsonian Institution’s Analytical Laboratories is accustomed to putting his lab’s high-tech nanoscale scanning electron microscope (nanoSEM) to work evaluating the mineral composition of rocks and meteorites. Lately, though, the nanoSEM has been enlisted for a different kind of task: determining the authenticity of ancient Mesoamerican artifacts.

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Imagine being fortunate enough to get to study historical art up close, examining the details of every paint stroke applied to the canvases to gain knowledge about artists’ preferred materials and techniques. Then add a team of art scholars and scientists who can provide historical details or even help you to “see” beneath the painting to reveal anything hidden or painted over on its canvas and you will have a sense of the rich collaborations that some museum professionals enjoy every day.

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A team of University of Maryland researchers is growing vertically aligned “forests” of carbon nanotubes on three-dimensional (3-D) conductive substrates to explore their potential use as a cathode in next-gen lithium batteries.

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Silicon, which is one of the most common elements in the Earth’s crust, is also sprinkled abundantly throughout interstellar space. The only way to identify silicon-containing molecules in the far corners of the cosmos – and to understand the chemistry that created them – is to observe through telescopes the electromagnetic radiation the molecules emit.

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New research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that HIV-infected adults are at a higher risk for developing heart attacks, kidney failure and cancer. But, contrary to what many had believed, the researchers say these illnesses are occurring at similar ages as adults who are not infected with HIV.

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New technology allows you to print electronic devices in the same way your inkjet printer prints a document or photo. Now researchers at Palo Alto Research Center have used this technique to build a portable X-ray imager and small mechanical devices.

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The Genetics Society of America (GSA) announced today that it is partnering with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Press to assist authors in submitting unpublished manuscripts to bioRxiv, a fast-growing preprint server for the life sciences.

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Scientists at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences have discovered a panel of small biological molecules called microRNAs, which can be utilized to diagnose mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), according to a study released in PLOS ONE, "Identification of Serum MicroRNA Signatures for Diagnosis of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in a Closed Head Injury Model," Nov. 7, 2014.

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Adam Riess, a professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and a Nobel laureate, has been named a recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the discovery of the continuing acceleration of the universe.

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Employers increasingly offer financial incentives to employees for participation in wellness activities; however whether these incentives lead to improved health behaviors and outcomes is unclear. This study gathered data on adult health plan members for three years, and compared the uptake of telephone health coaching among members who received employee incentives to those who did not. Results show those offered incentives were 33 times more likely to use the health coaching, and also did so sooner.

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Free content from this month's issue of Physics Today now available online.

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The Obesity Society (TOS) outgoing president, Steven Smith, MD, presented the first-ever presidential medals to influential public figures during the Opening Session of the Society’s annual meeting, ObesityWeekSM 2014, this week in Boston. The recipients include TOS past-president and pioneer in obesity research and treatment George Bray, MD; United States Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO); HBO’s John Oliver; and, former FDA leader, Eric Coleman, MD. This is the first time TOS recognized key public figures for efforts that support the Society’s goals and mission.

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After many generations, rats bred for their bad attitude behave differently from those selected for a calm demeanor around humans. Research published November 7 in the journal GENETICS identifies gene regions that contribute to differences between nasty and nice rats in their behavior and the activity of genes in the brain. These results may provide important clues as to which genes make tame animals like dogs behave so differently from their wild ancestors.

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The boards of Carroll Hospital Center and LifeBridge Health have approved a letter of intent to form a partnership.

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Over the past few years, astronomers have found an incredible diversity in the architecture of exoplanetary systems, as well as the planets themselves. A survey using the sharp view of the Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a similar diversity in the debris systems that coincide with the formation of exoplanets. These circumstellar dusty disks are likely generated by collisions between objects left over from planet formation around stars. The survey's results suggest that there is some sort of interdependence between a planet and the accompanying debris system.

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Researchers explored whether high- or low- protein diets might lead to less weight gain when consuming excess calories due to the ability of the body to burn extra energy with a high-protein diet. They found that study participants all gained similar amounts of weight regardless of diet composition; however, there was a vast difference in how the body stored the excess calories. Those who consumed normal- and high- protein diets stored 45% of the excess calories as lean tissue, or muscle mass, while those on the low-protein diet stored 95% of the excess calories as fat. Study results also show that the increase in metabolism tied to a high-protein diet was not sustainable when participants changed to a normal-protein diet, suggesting that the human body cannot be trained to maintain a higher metabolism.

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When some 18,000 runners cross Maryland's Chesapeake Bay Bridge during the inaugural Across the Bay 10K on Sunday, November 9, Salisbury University athletic training students will be there to help provide first aid.

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Improvements in verbal and written communication between health care providers during patient handoffs can reduce injuries due to medical errors. I-PASS, an original system of bundled communication and team-training tools for handoff of patient care between providers resulted in a 30% reduction in injuries due to medical errors after its implementation across 9 institutions, according to a study released Nov. 6, 2014 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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A diet high in fat can increase one’s risk for diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome; however few studies have assessed the effects of a maternal high fat diet on offspring. This research suggests that a high-fat maternal diet during pregnancy and while breastfeeding could have significant and lasting detrimental effects on the brain function and behavior of children. The study is one of few basic science studies conducted to measure the direct effect of a high-fat maternal diet on the cognitive functioning on offspring.

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This research evaluates the perception of obesity among both the American public and healthcare professionals during the past year. Results show a significant shift in perceptions of obesity in 2014, with the percent of Americans seeing obesity as a community problem increasing as much as 13% and the percent of healthcare professionals increasing 18%. Data also show differences among various demographic groups.

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Physiologists from across the country will visit classrooms to lead students in interactive activities that demonstrate how their bodies function and teach how medical discoveries are made during PhUn Week 2014 (November 3–7).

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Recent guidance from the United States’ Affordable Care Act and the United Kingdom’s Responsibility Deal encourage calorie labeling in chain restaurants, yet there have been mixed results as to the effects of calorie labeling on consumers’ meal choices and weight status. This first-ever, long-term study on calorie labeling shows that consistent exposure to prominent calorie labeling of main meals reduced the likelihood of young adults gaining any weight over a one-year period by 50%. This study will be presented as part of the Obesity Journal Symposium.

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For years, a multidisciplinary team of Johns Hopkins researchers has tracked an elusive creature, a complex of proteins thought to be at fault in some cases of sudden cardiac death. As they report Nov. 5 in the online edition of Nature Communications, they have finally captured images of the complex. Those images reveal the connection between some genetic mutations and electrical abnormalities of the heart and provide a starting point for designing therapies.

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Recent research from The Johns Hopkins University suggests that in situations like this, performance depends on two factors: the framing of the incentive in terms of a loss or a gain, and a person’s aversion to loss.

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While recent studies indicate that added sugar consumption has begun to decline, no research has examined whether these changes have persisted, or are consistent across critical subpopulations. Researchers examined five nationally representative surveys about food intake in the U.S. from 1977 to 2010, and found that added sugar consumption by American adults has increased by about 30% in the last three decades. This study will be recognized by TOS Pediatric Obesity Section with a Poster of Excellence Award, an honor given each year to the most outstanding abstracts in the research area.

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It turns out that in certain situations, combining messes can actually reduce the disorder of the whole; an international team of researchers from Slovenia and Iran has identified a set of conditions in which adding disorder to a system makes it more orderly. This behavior is known as antifragility, a concept introduced recently to describe similar phenomena in statistics, economics and social science.

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This study adds evidence to the current thinking that individuals with obesity can successfully reduce cravings using distract tasks. For this study, researchers tested the effects of three, 30-second distraction techniques to reduce cravings for the study participant’s favorite foods. They found that the effect of tapping one’s own forehead and ear with their index finger, tapping one’s toe on the floor, or a control task of staring at a blank wall, all worked significantly to reduce the cravings; however, forehead tapping worked best out of all techniques.

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This study adds evidence to the current thinking that individuals with obesity can successfully reduce cravings using distract tasks. For this study, researchers tested the effects of three, 30-second distraction techniques to reduce cravings for the study participant’s favorite foods. They found that the effect of tapping one’s own forehead and ear with their index finger, tapping one’s toe on the floor, or a control task of staring at a blank wall, all worked significantly to reduce the cravings; however, forehead tapping worked best out of all techniques.

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Recently released Census Bureau data show that the number of people commuting by bike has increased by 60% over the past decade - but until now, the increase has not been closely tied to a supportive city infrastructure. Researchers evaluated how the development of the Minneapolis Greenway affected the commute of residents over a ten-year period. The research found that bike-friendly infrastructure changes were tied to increases in “active commuting” by bike-riding residents, which can promote healthy weight and reduce cardiac risk.

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Service members diagnosed with chronic insomnia had a two times higher risk of developing hypertension and type II diabetes than military personnel who had not been diagnosed with the condition, according to a newly released health surveillance report of a study of the associations between these diseases.

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Mercy Medical Center vascular surgeon Dr. Paul Lucas performed a new angioplasty treatment for peripheral artery disease this afternoon, using a tiny drug-coated balloon that reopens clogged arteries.

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Researchers used data from the 2007 - 2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to estimate the proportion of adults in the United States recommended for treatment based on The Obesity Society (TOS), The American Heart Association (AHA) and The American College of Cardiology Guidelines (2013) for Managing Overweight and Obesity in Adults, released in November 2013. Data show 131 million American adults – about 65 percent – are recommended for behavioral weight-loss treatment, with 83% of those (or 116 million) also recommended for pharmacotherapy. Another 25% (or 32 million) of adults recommended for both pharmacotherapy and behavioral treatment are also potential candidates for bariatric surgery.

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Sargent College of Boston University researchers look for the root cause of age-related aortic stiffness—an early sign cardiovascular disease—and uncover a potential therapeutic target for reducing or preventing its development. The article is published in AJP-Heart and Circulatory Physiology and is highlighted as part of the APSselect program.

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Johns Hopkins engineers have invented a lab device to give cancer researchers an unprecedented microscopic look at metastasis, the complex way that tumor cells spread through the body, causing more than 90 percent of cancer-related deaths.

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After you roll your clocks back by an hour this Sunday, you may feel tired. That's because our bodies—more specifically, our circadian rhythms—need a little time to adjust. These daily cycles are run by a network of tiny, coordinated biological clocks. NIH's Mike Sesma tracks circadian rhythm research being conducted in labs across the country, and he shares a few timely details about our internal clocks.