According to a paper in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, obesity may be a socially transmitted disease. Something has to explain why Samoa leads the world in obesity at 75 percent of the population - and they are proud of it

A previous study of European Caucasian patients with sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis demonstrated that a polymorphism in the microtubule-associated protein Tau (MAPT) gene was significantly associated with sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis pathogenesis. To examine this in a different population, Daojun Hong and colleagues from Nanchang University further investigated the association of the MAPT gene with sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in the Chinese Han population. Researchers detected two genetic variations in MAPT (105788 A > G in intron 9 and 123972 T > A in intron 11) in sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients but not controls.

Following its recent synonymisation with Meloidogyne ulmi, a species known to parasitize elm trees in Europe, it has become clear that M. mali has been in the Netherlands for more than fifty years.

Evidences given by the authors suggest that M. mali was probably introduced during the breeding program on Elms against the Dutch Elm Disease (DED) during which large numbers of Elm rootstocks and seeds were imported from several different countries. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

This news release is available in Spanish.

A study begun in Mexico with the collaboration of university students analysed the effect of weekend alcohol consumption on the lipids comprising cell membrane and its genetic material, i.e. DNA. Until now, the damage to the packaging of nuclear material in the early stages of alcohol abuse has never been documented, perhaps because most of the studies are done at later stages with people who have been consuming alcohol in an addictive way for many years. The results have been published in the journal Alcohol.

Do you remember the CDF Dijet bump at 145 GeV? In 2010, CDF published a paper that showed how the same data sample of W + jet events where they had previously isolated the "single-lepton" WW+WZ signal also presented an intriguing excess of events in the dijet mass distribution, in a region where the background -dominated by QCD radiation produced in association with a W- fell smoothly. That signal generated some controversy within the collaboration, and a lot of interest outside of it. It could be interpreted as some signal of a new technicolor resonance !

When you think of crocodiles, you usually envision them climbing trees.

Probably not. Most people imagine them in water or waddling on the ground, but a study has found that the reptiles can climb trees as far as the crowns. 

Vladimir Dinets, a research assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, says he is the first to thoroughly study the tree-climbing and basking behavior. 

The risk of a kidney donor developing kidney failure in their kidney is much lower than in the population at large, even when compared with people who have two kidneys, according to new Johns Hopkins research.

A recent analysis found that DietBet, a web-based commercial weight loss program that pairs financial incentives with social influence, delivers significant weight loss to participants.

On Dietbet.com, players join a game to lose weight while betting money on themselves. Players all have four weeks to lose four percent of their starting weight. At the end of week four, all players who have lost at least 4 percent of their initial body weight are deemed "winners" and split the pool of money collected at the start of the game.

To verify weight losses, players submit photo-based evidence of their weigh-ins to DietBet's referees at the start and end of each game.

The Affordable Care Act has a lot of costs and requirements that don't seem to make sense - requiring that plans include maternity coverage for post-menopausal women and single men comes to mind - and adding social workers into health care teams would seem to be another example of that.

Not so, said former Harvard Pilgrim Health Care CEO and current gubernatorial candidate Charles D. Baker Jr., keynote speaker at the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work Forum "Health Care Reform: From Policy to Practice", who believes that the social workers in his audience were going to bring an expansive view of care options under a "team-based care" approach.

Recent decades may have been the wettest in 3,500 years in North East Tibet – according to climate researchers at the University of East Anglia (UK) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Lanzhou, China).

Researchers looked at 3,500-year-long tree ring records from North East Tibet to estimate annual precipitation. They found that recent decades have likely been the wettest on record in this semi-arid region.

The precipitation records have been reconstructed using sub-fossil, archaeological and living juniper tree samples from the north-eastern Tibetan Plateau. They reveal a trend towards wider growth rings, implying moister growing conditions – with the last 50 years seeing increasing amounts of rainfall.