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News | Archive (3 January 2011)
Queen's study debunks myth about popular optical illusion
— 20:14 GMT | HealthA psychology professor has found that the way people perceive the Silhouette Illusion, a popular illusion that went viral and has received substantial online attention, has little to do with the viewers' personality, or whether they are left- or right-brained, despite the fact that the illusion is often used to test these attributes in popular e-quizzes…
Researchers train software to help monitor climate change
— 20:11 GMT | EnvironmentA computer program that automatically analyses mounds of satellite images and other data could help climate scientists keep track of complex, constantly changing environmental conditions, according to an international team of researchers…
Quitting menthol cigarettes may be harder for some smokers
— 20:08 GMT | HealthMenthol cigarettes may be harder to quit, particularly for some teens and African-Americans, who have the highest menthol cigarette use, according to a study by a team of researchers…
'Food of the gods' genome sequence could make finest chocolate better
— 20:05 GMT | BiologyThe production of high quality chocolate, and the farmers who grow it, will benefit from the recent sequencing and assembly of the chocolate tree genome, according to an international team led by Claire Lanaud of CIRAD, France, with Mark Guiltinan of Penn State, and including scientists from 18 other institutions…
Infant hydrocephalus, seasonal and linked to farm animals in Uganda
— 20:02 GMT | HealthHydrocephalus in Ugandan children and other developing countries is seasonal, linked to farm animals and in part, caused by previous bacterial infection, according to an international team of researchers from Uganda and the United States, who believe that the best approach to this problem is prevention…
Spread of TB in prisons increases the incidence of TB in the general population
— 19:59 GMT | HealthThe risk of tuberculosis (TB) and latent TB (in which the bacteria that cause TB lie dormant but can reactivate later to cause active TB disease) is higher in the prison population than in the general population. And importantly, the spread of TB and latent TB within prisons can substantially increase their incidence in the general population. These key findings from a systematic review by Iacopo Baussano from the University 'Amedeo Avogadro,' Italy, and the Imperial College, London, UK, and colleagues and published in this week's PLoS Medicine, suggest that improvements in prison TB control would not only help to protect prisoners and staff from within-prison spread of TB, but would also reduce national TB burdens…
Movement and threat of RNA viruses widespread in pollinator community
— 19:56 GMT | BiologyPenn State researchers have found that native pollinators, like wild bees and wasps, are infected by the same viral diseases as honey bees and that these viruses are transmitted via pollen. Their research published on December 22nd in PLoS ONE, an online open-access journal for the communication of all peer-reviewed scientific and medical research…
Health systems strengthening needs 10 guiding principles
— 19:53 GMT | HealthDespite the growing recognition of the importance of strengthening health systems around the world, there is a considerable lack of shared definitions and guiding principles that are threatening the ability to form strategic policy, practice and evaluations. In this week's PLoS Medicine, Robert Chad Swanson from Brigham Young University, USA and colleagues present a set of 10 guiding principles for health systems strengthening to address this problem, developed from a comprehensive review of the literature and consultation with experts…
Earlier initiation of antiretroviral therapy should be highest priority for expansion of HIV care
— 19:50 GMT | HealthEarlier initiation of antiretroviral therapy should be the highest priority for global expansion of HIV patient care. This finding, from a paper published in this week's PLoS Medicine, should help resource-limited nations to phase in the implementation of the new 2010 WHO recommendations for HIV treatment. 'Immediate scale-up of the entire WHO guideline package may be prohibitively expensive in some settings,' said lead author Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA. 'In many resource-limited settings, the relevant policy question is: What to do first?'…
Biomarkers could predict death in AIDS patients with severe inflammation
— 19:47 GMT | HealthA study in this week's PLoS Medicine suggests that AIDS patients with cryptococcal meningitis who start HIV therapy are predisposed to immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (IRIS) - an exaggerated inflammatory immune response that kills up to one-third of affected people - if they have biomarkers (biochemicals) in their blood showing evidence of a damaged immune system that is not capable of clearing the fungal infection…
NASA and the Beatles celebrate anniversaries by beaming song 'Across the Universe' into deep space
BRCA1 mutation linked to breast cancer stem cells