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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Commitment to family is both a driving force and source of hardship for Latino immigrants, according to a Florida State University researcher.

Threats to familismo -- deeply held cultural beliefs about the centrality of family in daily life -- are often a major source of stress for immigrants and can have a negative impact on their overall health and well-being as they move forward in a new country.

Joseph Grzywacz, the Norejane Hendrickson professor of Family and Child Sciences at Florida State, outlined those findings in an article that will be published in an upcoming issue of Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. It is available now online.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Using DNA collected from corn grown by immigrant farmers in Los Angeles and Riverside, researchers at the University of California, Riverside have found the genetic diversity of corn in some home and community gardens in Southern California far exceeds levels found in commercially available seeds.

The researchers cautioned that this is a preliminary study with a small sample size. Future research would expand to include a greater number of gardens, and focus on characteristics of the corn, such as tolerance to drought, difference in cob size and flowering time.

The fungal pathogen Batrachochrytrium dendrobatridis (Bd), which has been known to cause the disease chytridiomycosis and decimate frog populations for close to half a century, is causing frogs to evolve around it, according to a new study which took a step toward identifying the genetic mechanisms that makes some frogs resistant to Bd infections in their study of lowland leopard frogs in Arizona. 

DURHAM, N.C. -- The bearcat. The binturong. Whatever you call this shy, shaggy-haired creature from Southeast Asia, many people who have met one notice the same thing: it smells like a movie theater snack bar.

Most describe it as hot buttered popcorn. And for good reason -- the chemical compound that gives freshly made popcorn its mouthwatering smell is also the major aroma emitted by binturong pee, finds a new study.

Most people have never heard of a binturong, let alone caught a whiff of one up close. But for many zookeepers, the smell wafting from the binturong enclosure is so striking that they name their resident binturongs after the popular snack.