Health News

Brain scans of jazz musicians unveil language and music similarities

Date: Feb-22-2014
Jazz fans will know that a defining characteristic of the genre - whose greats include Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus - are the spontaneous "musical conversations" that spark up when members of a jazz band improvise. This improvisation bears similarity to human speech, with the players often taking it in turns to trade lines that build up into a dialogue. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, have found that the brain interprets music and language in a similar way, by scanning the brains of improvising jazz musicians.

Medical devices with longer lasting nanoelectronics

Date: Feb-22-2014
The debut of cyborgs who are part human and part machine may be a long way off, but researchers say they now may be getting closer. In a study published in ACS' journal Nano Letters, they report development of a coating that makes nanoelectronics much more stable in conditions mimicking those in the human body. The advance could also aid in the development of very small implanted medical devices for monitoring health and disease.Charles Lieber and colleagues note that nanoelectronic devices with nanowire components have unique abilities to probe and interface with living cells.

Inherited predisposition to leukemia found in infants

Date: Feb-22-2014
Babies who develop leukemia during the first year of life appear to inherit an unfortunate combination of genetic variations that can make the infants highly susceptible to the disease, according to a new study at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Minnesota.The research is available online in the journal Leukemia.Doctors have long puzzled over why it is that babies just a few months old sometimes develop cancer. As infants, they have not lived long enough to accumulate a critical number of cancer-causing mutations.

Childhood viewing of violent media linked to genes

Date: Feb-22-2014
The lifelong debate of nature versus nurture continues - this time in what your children watch. A recent paper published in the Journal of Communication found that a specific variation of the serotonin-transporter gene was linked to children who engaged in increased viewing of violent TV and playing of violent video games.Sanne Nikkelen, Helen Vossen, and Patti Valkenburg of the University of Amsterdam's School of Communication Research, in collaboration with researchers at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, analyzed survey data of 1,612 parents of Dutch children ages 5-9.

Preventing zoonotic feline tularemia by finding influential geospatial factors

Date: Feb-22-2014
Kansas State University epidemiologist is helping cats, pet owners and soldiers stay healthy by studying feline tularemia and the factors that influence its prevalence.Ram Raghavan, assistant professor of diagnostic medicine and pathobiology, and collaborative researchers have found that a certain combination of climate, physical environment and socio-ecologic conditions are behind tularemia infections among cats in the region. More than 50 percent of all tularemia cases in the U.S. occur in Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas, Raghavan said.

Brain-training game improves vision and success of baseball players

Date: Feb-22-2014
In baseball, vision can play a key role in a player's success. If they have trouble seeing the ball, chances are they could be out after three strikes. But new research from the University of California, Riverside, suggests that a brain-training video game could help to improve the vision of baseball players and, in turn, help them win more games.The study findings were recently published in the journal Current Biology.The research team, including Prof.

We often blame fate when we face a hard decision

Date: Feb-22-2014
Life is full of decisions. Some, like what to eat for breakfast, are relatively easy. Others, like whether to move cities for a new job, are quite a bit more difficult. Difficult decisions tend to make us feel stressed and uncomfortable - we don't want to feel responsible if the outcome is less than desirable. New research suggests that we deal with such difficult decisions by shifting responsibility for the decision to fate.The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Crowd-sourced study: 'kids with involved parents become slimmer adults'

Date: Feb-21-2014
One of the first studies to use crowd-sourced information to uncover potential predictors of obesity has suggested that children whose parents are very involved in their young lives are more likely to be slim in adulthood. Results of the study, conducted by researchers at Cornell University in New York, are published in the journal PLOS ONE.The researchers say they used crowdsourcing in order to determine whether the method could produce well-documented predictors in obesity research and whether new avenues for research could be discovered.

'Largest ever' trial of adult stem cells in heart attack patients begins

Date: Feb-21-2014
The largest ever trial of adult stem cell therapy in heart attack patients has begun at The London Chest Hospital in the UK. Heart disease is the world's leading cause of death. Globally, more than 17 million people died from heart disease last year. In the US, over 1 million people suffer a heart attack each year, and about half of them die.Heart attacks are usually caused by a clot in the coronary artery, which stops the supply of blood and oxygen to the heart. If the blockage is not treated within a few hours, then it causes the heart muscle to die.

Daily multivitamin use could reduce cataract risk for men

Date: Feb-21-2014
New research from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston, MA, has found that long-term daily use of multivitamin supplements could reduce the risk of cataract for men.The study findings were recently published in the journal Opthalmology.According to the research team, led by Dr. William Christen of Harvard Medical School, previous research has shown an association between the use of nutritional supplements and eye health.