Feature Channels: All Journal News

• share
• favorite_border

Divorcing parents, a car accident, a job layoff or any other major stressful event can provoke adolescents to quit their studies, a new UdeM study shows .

• share
• favorite_border

Diverse immigrant populations do more than enrich a city’s cultural fabric. According to geographers from the University at Buffalo and Southampton University, they also boost wages -- by as much as 21 percent.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers in Germany have developed a transgenic mouse that could help scientists identify new influenza virus strains with the potential to cause a global pandemic. The mouse is described in a study, “In vivo evasion of MxA by avian influenza viruses requires human signature in the viral nucleoprotein,” that will be published April 10 in The Journal of Experimental Medicine.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago have identified a molecular switch that converts skin cells into cells that make up blood vessels, which could ultimately be used to repair damaged vessels in patients with heart disease or to engineer new vasculature in the lab.

• share
• favorite_border

Wellness coaching, administered in advance, could reduce a surgical patient’s average hospital stay two days, from seven down to five, when compared to a control group.

• share
• favorite_border

Although adults can beat children at most cognitive tasks, new research shows that children’s limitations can sometimes be their strength. In two studies, researchers found that adults were very good at remembering information they were told to focus on, and ignoring the rest. In contrast, 4- to 5-year-olds tended to pay attention to all the information that was presented to them – even when they were told to focus on one particular item.

• share
• favorite_border

UT Southwestern Medical Center pediatric researchers have harnessed an analytical tool used to predict the weather to evaluate the effectiveness of therapies to reduce brain injury in newborns who suffer oxygen deprivation during birth.

• share
• favorite_border

Wildfire experts predict that by 2041, there will be four large, high-intensity forest fires for every three that occur now, with the number of days when conditions are conducive to fires increasing.

• share
• favorite_border

When DNA is hit with ultraviolet light, it can lose excess energy from radiation by ejecting the core of a hydrogen atom — a single proton — to keep other chemical bonds in the system from breaking. To gain insight into this process, researchers used X-ray laser pulses from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to investigate how energy from light transforms a relatively simple molecule, 2-thiopyridone.

• share
• favorite_border

When “the dress” went viral in 2015, millions were divided on its true colors: gold and white or black and blue? In a new study, an NYU neuroscientist concludes that these differences in perception are due to our assumptions about how the dress was illuminated.

• share
• favorite_border

Using computational tools inspired by financial math models developed to predict changes in stock prices, University of Iowa researchers were able to accurately predict how different properties of the HIV surface protein (Env) evolved in the population of Iowa over the course of 30 years. The ability to predict such changes by testing a small number of patients could potentially allow tailoring of vaccines to the specific forms of HIV present in different populations worldwide.

• share
• favorite_border

A new study of Peruvian frogs living at a wide variety of elevations—from the Amazon floodplain to high Andes peaks—lends support to the idea that lowland amphibians are at higher risk from future climate warming.

• share
• favorite_border

In patients with chronic kidney disease, low urine ammonium excretion identified individuals at high risk of kidney disease progression or death.

• share
• favorite_border

Upper atmosphere pattern may open window to long-term prediction

• share
• favorite_border

UC San Diego researchers published a systematic analysis of microgrids in Southern California to better understand business cases for private investment in microgrids. From the abstract: “Decentralization [of the electric power grid] could radically reduce customer energy costs, but without the right policy framework it could create large numbers of small decentralized sources of gas-based carbon emissions that will be difficult to control if policy makers want to achieve deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.”

• share
• favorite_border

Berkeley Lab researchers have, for the first time, captured the ephemeral electron movements in a transient state of a chemical reaction using ultrafast, tabletop X-ray spectroscopy. The researchers used femtosecond pulses of X-ray light to catch the unraveling of a ring molecule that is important in biochemical and optoelectronic processes.

• share
• favorite_border

Biologists have discovered that communities of bacteria have been employing a social timesharing strategy for millions of years. Bacteria facing limited nutrients enter an elegant timesharing strategy--a concept used for vacation homes and social applications--in which communities alternate feeding periods to maximize efficiency.

• share
• favorite_border

Infection with reovirus, a common but otherwise harmless virus, can trigger the immune system response to gluten that leads to celiac disease, according to new research from the University of Chicago and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

• share
• favorite_border

A new Scientific Statement issued by the Endocrine Society advises healthcare providers on ways to spot hormonal causes of high blood pressure that can be cured with surgery or treated effectively with medication.

• share
• favorite_border

Differences in opinions between parents and children and executives of restaurant chains represent a challenge in terms of promoting healthy eating habits. In order to better understand those opinions, researchers surveyed parents and children dining at participating restaurants, as well as executives of restaurant chains, to obtain more information on healthy children’s meals.