DURHAM, N.C. -- It's a long-simmering debate in juvenile justice: Do young offenders become worse because of their experience with the justice system, or are they somehow different than people who don't have their first criminal conviction until later in life?

"There seems to be a lot of evidence that people who are convicted early are more heavily involved in crime," says postdoctoral researcher Amber Beckley at Duke University, who has a new study out on the topic that appears online in the Journal of Criminal Justice.

Using data from a study that has tracked nearly 1,000 New Zealanders from birth to age 38, Beckley looked at patterns that would distinguish youthful offenders from what she calls "adult-onset offenders."

New York, NY, April 14, 2016. In a recent study, researchers found evidence of a compromised dopamine system in heavy users of marijuana. Lower dopamine release was found in the striatum - a region of the brain that is involved in working memory, impulsive behavior, and attention. Previous studies have shown that addiction to other drugs of abuse, such as cocaine and heroin, have similar effects on dopamine release, but such evidence for cannabis was missing until now.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - Research strongly suggests that sleep, which constitutes about a third of our lives, is crucial for learning and forming long-term memories. But exactly how such memory is formed is not well understood and remains, despite considerable research, a central question of inquiry in neuroscience.

Neuroscientists at the University of California, Riverside report this week in the Journal of Neuroscience that they now may have an answer to this question. Their study provides for the first time a mechanistic explanation for how deep sleep (also called slow-wave sleep) may be promoting the consolidation of recent memories.

The University of Exeter Medical School has led an analysis of more than 3,000 people in Scotland who each had blood pressure measurements taken from both arms, published today in the British Journal of General Practice. Researchers say the findings show the importance of routinely measuring blood pressure in both arms.

SEATTLE-- Global inequities in health spending are expected to persist and intensify over the next 25 years, according to a new study that estimates total health financing in countries around the world.

Published in The Lancet on April 13, 2016 "National spending on health by source for 184 countries
between 2013 and 2040" draws from a joint research collaboration between the World Bank Group and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

In the fall, eastern North American monarch butterflies take the biggest trip of their lives to their wintering grounds in Mexico. The butterflies are genetically hardwired to fly southwest mainly using a time-compensated sun compass, which combines the time of day and the position of the sun to navigate. To understand how this information connects in the butterfly brain, researchers reporting April 14 in Cell Reports created a mathematical model that can reproduce the animals' internal calculations.

Our brains work on inductance, that is why electricity can take us to a very weird place. But safe levels of electrical stimulation can enhance your capacity to think more creatively, according to a new paper in Cerebral Cortex.

Scientists from MIPT's Laboratory of the Biophysics of Excitable Systems have discovered how to control the behaviour of heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) using laser radiation; this study will help scientists to better understand the mechanisms of the heart and could ultimately provide a method of treating arrhythmia. The paper has been published in the journal PLOS ONE.

"Right now this result may be very useful for clinical studies of the mechanisms of the heart, and in the future we could potentially stop attacks of arrhythmia in patients at the touch of a button," says the corresponding author of the study and head of MIPT's Laboratory of the Biophysics of Excitable Systems, Prof. Konstantin Agladze.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- University of Florida Health researchers have slowed a notoriously aggressive type of brain tumor in mouse models by using a low-carbohydrate diet.

A high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that included a coconut oil derivative helped reduce the growth of glioblastoma tumor cells and extended lifespan in mouse models by 50 percent, researchers found. The results were published recently in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

Glioblastoma, the most common brain tumor in adults, has no effective long-term treatment and on average, patients live for 12 to 15 months after diagnosis, according to the National Cancer Institute.

How did the eruptions of Katmai, Taupo and Santorini grow into a massive blast that spewed fine ash, sulfur and crystal-poor magma into the atmosphere? New research from Georgia Institute of Technology and Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich (ETH) suggests they occurred due in part to how light vapor bubbles migrate and accumulate in some parts of shallow volcanic chambers. The findings are published online by Nature.