PROVIDENCE, R.I. - A new study from The Miriam Hospital's Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine found that smokers who received a text messaging intervention were more likely to abstain from smoking relative to controls. The paper is published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research mHealth and uHealth.

"Tobacco use is one of the leading preventable global health problems, and text messaging has the promise to reach a wider audience with minimal costs and fewer resources," said Lori Scott-Sheldon, Ph.D., a senior research scientist in The Miriam Hospital's Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine and an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University.

Imagine, for a moment, you are a parent trying to limit how much dessert your sugar-craving young children can eat.

"You can have cake or ice cream," you say, confident a clear parental guideline has been laid out.

But your children seem to ignore this firm ruling, and insist on having both cake and ice cream. Are they merely rebelling against a parental command? Perhaps. But they might be confusing "or" with "and," as children do at times, something studies have shown since the 1970s. What seems like a restriction to the parent sounds like an invitation to the child: Have both!

Numerous confounding factors reduce the likelihood of replicating psychological studies, which are rarely replicated anyway. For example, the race of participants in an experiment or the geography of where the experiment was run can reduce the likelihood of getting the same result, and if it's a survey of college students, forget about it.

It's known that many patients die after getting sepsis but it's unclear if the increased risk of death (30 days to 2 years after sepsis) is because of sepsis itself or because of pre-existing health conditions the patient had before acquiring the complication. Patients with more medical problems are more likely to develop sepsis.

Sepsis is a complication of infection. The body releases chemicals in the bloodstream to help fight off infection, but sometimes those chemicals can damage the body, leading to organ failure and a dramatic drop in blood pressure. Sepsis is treated with antibiotics and fluids.

As our technology downsizes, scientists often operate in microscopic-scale jungles, where modern-day explorers develop new methods for transporting microscopic objects of different sizes across non uniform environments, without losing them. Now, Pietro Tierno and Arthur Straube from the University of Barcelona, Spain, have developed a new method for selectively controlling, via a change in magnetic field, the aggregation or disaggregation of magnetically interacting particles of two distinct sizes in suspension in a liquid. Previous studies only focused on one particle size. These results, just published in EPJ E, show that it is possible to build long chains of large particles suspended in a liquid, forming channels that drive the small particles to move along.

Boston, MA -- Women with elevated levels of common types of flame retardant chemicals in their blood may be at a higher risk for thyroid disease--and the risk may be significantly higher among post-menopausal women, according to a new study from researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The new paper is the first to suggest a link between polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and increased risk of thyroid problems in post-menopausal women in a nationally representative sample of women in the U.S. Thyroid problems include hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism, goiter, or Hashimoto's disease.

The study was published online May 23, 2016 in the journal Environmental Health.