Big Girls Don’t Cry

A study to be published in the June 2012 issue of Journal of Adolescent Health looking at the relationships between body satisfaction and healthy psychological functioning in overweight adolescents has found that young women who are happy with the size and shape of their bodies report higher levels of self-esteem. They may also be protected against the negative behavioral and psychological factors sometimes associated with being overweight. A group of 103 overweight adolescents were surveyed between 2004 and 2006, assessing body satisfaction, weight-control behavior, importance placed on thinness, self-esteem and symptoms of anxiety and depression, among other factors. "We found that girls with high body satisfaction had a lower likelihood...

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Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief

A new University of British Columbia study finds that analytic thinking can decrease religious belief, even in devout believers. The study, which is published in the April 27 issue of Science, finds that thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers and skeptics alike, shedding important new light on the psychology of religious belief. “Our goal was to explore the fundamental question of why people believe in a God to different degrees,” says lead author Will Gervais, a PhD student in UBC’s Dept. of Psychology. “A combination of complex factors influence matters of personal spirituality, and these new findings suggest that the cognitive system related to analytic thoughts is one factor that can influence disbelief.” Researchers...

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Action Videogames Change Brains

A team led by psychology professor Ian Spence at the University of Toronto reveals that playing an action videogame, even for a relatively short time, causes differences in brain activity and improvements in visual attention. Previous studies have found differences in brain activity between action videogame players and non-players, but these could have been attributed to pre-existing differences in the brains of those predisposed to playing videogames and those who avoid them. This is the first time research has attributed these differences directly to playing video games. Twenty-five subjects -- who had not previously played videogames -- played a game for a total of 10 hours in one to two hour sessions. Sixteen of the subjects played...

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Mystery of Bacterial Growth and Resistance Solved

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have unraveled a complex chemical pathway that enables bacteria to form clusters called biofilms. Such improved understanding might eventually aid the development of new treatments targeting biofilms, which are involved in a wide variety of human infections and help bacteria resist antibiotics. The report, published online ahead of print on April 26, 2012, by the journal Molecular Cell, explains how nitric oxide, a signaling molecule involved in the immune system, leads to biofilm formation. "It is estimated that about 80 percent of human pathogens form biofilms during some part of their life cycle," said Scripps Research president and CEO Michael Marletta, PhD, who led the work. "In this study,...

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Long-held genetic theory doesn't quite make the grade

New York University biologists have discovered new mechanisms that control how proteins are expressed in different regions of embryos, while also shedding additional insight into how physical traits are arranged in body plans. Their findings, which appear in the journal Cell, call for reconsideration of a decades-old biological theory. The researchers investigated a specific theory—morphogen theory, which posits that proteins controlling traits are arranged as gradients, with different amounts of proteins activating genes to create specified physical features. This theory was first put forth in the 1950s by mathematician and World War II code breaker Alan Turing and refined in the 1960s by Lewis Wolpert. It has been used to explain why...

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Women have bigger pupils than men

From an anatomical point of view, a normal, non-pathological eye is known as an emmetropic eye, and has been studied very little until now in comparison with myopic and hypermetropic eyes. The results show that healthy emmetropic women have a wider pupil diameter than men.  The pupil regulates the amount of light that reaches the retina [Credit: Michael Dawes] Normal, non-pathological emmetropic eyes are the most common type amongst the population (43.2%), with a percentage that swings between 60.6% in children from three to eight years and 29% in those older than 66.  Therefore, a study determines their anatomical pattern so that they serve as a model for comparison with eyes that have refractive defects (myopia, hypermetropia...

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Researchers discover bats may be a common source of many viral diseases

International researchers under the aegis of the University of Bonn have discovered the probable cause of not just one, but several infectious agents at the same time. Paramyxoviruses originate from ubiquitous bats, from where the pathogens have spread to humans and other mammals. This could make eradicating many dangerous diseases significantly more difficult than had been thought. The results of this study have just been published in the current issue of Nature Communications.  [Image (c) Florian Gloza-Rausch/Uni Bonn/Noctalis Bad Segeberg] Where do viruses dangerous to humans come from, and how have they evolved? Scientists working with Prof. Dr. Christian Drosten, Head of the Institute for Virology at the Universitätsklinikum...

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Researchers create synthetic DNA/RNA that can evolve

Researchers have created artificial genetic material known as Xenonucleic acids, or XNAs, that can store information and evolve over generations in a comparable way to DNA.  The research, reported Friday in the journal Science, has implications for the fields of molecular medicine and biotechnology, and sheds new light on how molecules first replicated and assembled into life billions of years ago.  Living systems owe their existence to the information-carrying molecules DNA and RNA.  These fundamental chemical forms have two features essential for life: they display heredity, meaning they can encode and pass on genetic information, and they can adapt over time.  Whether these traits could be performed by molecules...

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Teamwork linked to intelligence

Learning to work in teams may explain why humans evolved a bigger brain, according to a new study published on Wednesday.  Learning to work in teams may explain why humans evolved a bigger brain [Credit: AFP] Compared to his hominid predecessors, Homo sapiens is a cerebral giant, a riddle that scientists have long tried to solve.  The answer, according to researchers in Ireland and Scotland, may lie in social interaction.  Working with others helped Man to survive, but he had to develop a brain big enough to cope with all the social complexities, they believe.  In a computer model, the team simulated the human brain, allowing a network of neurons to evolve in response to a series of social challenges.  There...

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Do I look bigger with my finger on a trigger? Yes, says study

UCLA anthropologists asked hundreds of Americans to guess the size and muscularity of four men based solely on photographs of their hands holding a range of easily recognizable objects, including handguns.  Photo from study. Holding a gun like this makes a man appear taller and stronger than he would otherwise, UCLA anthropologists have found [Credit: Daniel Fessler/UCLA] The research, which publishes April 11 in the scholarly journal PLoS ONE, confirms what scrawny thugs have long known: Brandishing a weapon makes a man appear bigger and stronger than he would otherwise.  "There's nothing about the knowledge that gun powder makes lead bullets fly through the air at damage-causing speeds that should make you think that a gun-bearer...

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Does religious faith lead to greater rewards here on Earth?

Delayed gratification: People who are good at overcoming their immediate impulses to take small rewards now — in favor of larger rewards down the road — do better in many areas of life, including academic achievement, income, job performance and health. What life experiences develop this ability? A new study published online, ahead of print, by the journal of Evolution and Human Behavior, finds that religious people are better able to forgo immediate satisfaction in order to gain larger rewards in the future. The study is the first to demonstrate an association between religious commitment and a stronger preference for delayed, but more significant, rewards.  "It's possible to analyze virtually all contemporary social concerns, from...

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Keep aging brains sharp

Exercising, eating a healthy diet and playing brain games may help you keep your wits about you well into your 80s and even 90s, advises a new book by researchers at George Mason University.  "These are all cheap, easy things to do," says Pamela Greenwood, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology on Mason's Fairfax, Va. campus. "We should all be doing them anyway. You should do them for your heart and health, so why not do them for your brain as well?"  For the past 20 years, Greenwood and Raja Parasuraman, University Professor of Psychology, have studied how the mind and brain age, focusing on Alzheimer's disease. Their book, "Nurturing the Older Brain and Mind" published by MIT Press, came out in March. The cognitive...

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Death anxiety increases atheists' unconscious belief in God

New research suggests that when non-religious people think about their own death they become more consciously skeptical about religion, but unconsciously grow more receptive to religious belief.  The research, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, also found that when religious people think about death, their religious beliefs appear to strengthen at both conscious and unconscious levels. The researchers believe the findings help explain why religion is such a durable feature of human society.  In three studies, which involved 265 university students in total, religious and non-religious participants were randomly assigned to "death priming" and control groups. Priming involved asking participants...

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DNA sequencing lays foundation for personalized cancer treatment

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are using powerful DNA sequencing technology not only to identify mutations at the root of a patient's tumor – considered key to personalizing cancer treatment – but to map the genetic evolution of disease and monitor response to treatment.  The Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer project released its first results on July 15th. Researchers released a first dataset from a study that will expose 1,000 cancer cell lines (including ovarian) to 400 anticancer treatments [Washington University] "We're finding clinically relevant information in the tumor samples we're sequencing for discovery-oriented research studies," says Elaine Mardis, PhD, co-director of The Genome...

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