Writing in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, a team of researchers says that testing hair from Asian monkeys living close to people may provide early warnings of toxic threats to humans and wildlife.
In parts of South and Southeast Asia, macaques and people are synanthropic, which means they share the same ecological niche. They drink from identical water sources, breathe the same air, share food sources, and play on the same ground.
"Macaques are similar to humans anatomically, physiologically and behaviorally," said the senior author on the study, Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, a senior research scientist at the National Primate Research Center at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Children whose parents refuse to vaccinate them are nine times more likely to get chickenpox compared to fully immunized children, according to a new study led by a vaccine research team at Kaiser Permanente Colorado's Institute for Health Research. The study was published today in the January issue of the journal Archives of Pediatrics&Adolescent Medicine.
To assess the risk of varicella vaccine refusal, researchers reviewed the electronic health records of 86,993 children between the ages of 12 months and 8 years who were members of Kaiser Permanente Colorado between 1998 and 2008. First, investigators confirmed which children
had varicella infections. Next, they verified whether parents had refused some or all varicella vaccines for their children.
Although smoking is a well-known risk factor for type 2 diabetes, new research published in the January 5 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that quitting the habit may actually raise diabetes risk in the short term. Researchers found that people who quit smoking have a 70 percent increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the first six years without cigarettes as compared to people who never smoked.
The risks were highest in the first three years after quitting and returned to normal after 10 years. Among those who continued smoking over that period, the risk was lower, but the chance of developing diabetes was still 30 percent higher compared with those who never smoked.
Although running can confer many health benefits, the shoes runners wear while exercising may actually be doing them harm. In a study published in the December 2009 issue of PM&R: The journal of injury, function and rehabilitation, researchers compared the effects on knee, hip and ankle joint motions of running barefoot versus running in modern running shoes. They concluded that running shoes exerted more stress on these joints compared to running barefoot or walking in high-heeled shoes.
The authors of a new study featured in Annals of Internal Medicine say that kitchen spoons should be avoided when taking medicine, because it's easy to under or overdose when using them to measure.
During the study, former cold and flu sufferers were asked to pour one teaspoon of nighttime flu medicine into kitchen spoons of differing sizes. Depending upon the size of the spoon, the 195 former patients poured an average of eight percent too little or 12 percent too much medicine.
"When pouring into a medium-size tablespoon, participants under-dosed. But when using a larger spoon, they poured too much medicine," said Dr. Brian Wansink, Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, who led the study.
A team of researchers at Binghamton University who were able identify specific types of chronic wound bacteria and test their ability to produce cell-cell signaling molecules say listening in on bacterial conversations could be one way of improving chronic wound care. Their findings have been published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology.
"Bacteria, often viewed as simplistic creatures, are in fact very sociable units of life," said Alex Rickard, assistant professor of biological sciences. "They can physically and chemically interact with one another and are quite selective about who they hang out with. How bacteria might communicate in chronic wounds, however, was somewhat of a mystery."
Bacon and Eggs are delicious. And most people probably wouldn't mind having more of both in their diets for that reason alone. Pregnant women, however, may have a real reason to eat bacon and eggs: research published in the January 2010 print issue of the FASEB Journal shows that choline, found in pork as well as chicken eggs, plays a critical role in helping fetal brains develop regions associated with memory.
Researchers from the University of Texas and Shriners Hospitals for Children say a compound from licorice root (glycyrrhizin from Glycyrrhiza glabra) might be an effective treatment for antibiotic-resistant infections resulting from severe burns. Their new study featured in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology suggests that glycyrrhizin may improve the ability of damaged skin to create antimicrobial peptides, proteins that serve as the first line of defense against infection.
To make the discovery, the researchers used three groups of mice. The first group was normal, the second group was burned and untreated, and the third group was burned and treated with
New evidence uncovered by a team from Imperial College London and the University College London (UCL) suggests that during the Hesperian Epoch, approximately 3 billion years ago, Mars sustained lakes of melted ice, each around 20 km wide, along parts of its equator. The discovery challenges scientists' previous understanding of Mars during the Hesperian Epoch, a period which was previously thought to be too cold and arid to sustain water on the planet's surface. The findings appear in the journal Geology.
Women's minds and bodies respond differently to sexual arousal, whereas men's bodies and minds tend to be more in tune with each other, according to research conducted by an international team of scientists. The team's meta-analysis of the extent of agreement between subjective ratings and physiological measures of sexual arousal in men and women is published online this week in Archives of Sexual Behavior.
