Testing Guam infants for hearing loss remotely

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Venerannda Leon Guerrero cradled her slumbering infant in her arms in a CEDDERS testing center at the University of Guam as she watched an audiologist in Colorado conduct a diagnostic test to determine whether or not her baby has a hearing loss. The remote test was held on October 19 and marked the first technology-enabled distance diagnostic testing for hearing loss on very young infants on the island.This event was made possible through the Teleaudiology Project,...

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Poorer countries, those spending less on health care have more strokes, deaths

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Poorer countries and those that spend proportionately less money on health care have more stroke and stroke deaths than wealthier nations and those that allocate more to health care, according to new research in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.Poorer countries also had a greater incidence of hemorrhagic stroke -- caused by a burst blood vessel bleeding in or near the brain -- and had more frequent onset at younger ages.Regardless of overall wealth,...

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Hard times during adolescence point to health problems later in life

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Being hard up socially and financially during adolescence and early adulthood takes its toll on the body, and leads to physiological wear and tear in middle aged men and women, irrespective of how tough things have been in the interim. According to Dr. Per E. Gustafsson from Umeå University in Sweden and colleagues, experience of social and material stressors around the time of transition into adulthood is linked to a rise in disease risk factors in middle age, including...

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Yeast model connects Alzheimer's disease risk and amyloid beta toxicity

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — In a development that sheds new light on the pathology of Alzheimer's disease (AD), a team of Whitehead Institute scientists has identified connections between genetic risk factors for the disease and the effects of a peptide toxic to nerve cells in the brains of AD patients.The scientists, working in and in collaboration with the lab of Whitehead Member Susan Lindquist, established these previously unknown links in an unexpected way. They used a very simple cell...

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Curiosity is critical to academic performance

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it's good for the student. That's the conclusion of a new study published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors show that curiosity is a big part of academic performance. In fact, personality traits like curiosity seem to be as important as intelligence in determining how well students do in school.Intelligence is important to academic performance, but it's...

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Natural killer cells could be key to anthrax defense

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — One of the things that makes inhalational anthrax so worrisome for biodefense experts is how quickly a relatively small number of inhaled anthrax spores can turn into a lethal infection. By the time an anthrax victim realizes he or she has something worse than the flu and seeks treatment, it's often too late; even the most powerful antibiotics may be no help against the spreading bacteria and the potent toxins they generate.Now, though, University of Texas Medical...

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Researchers build largest protein interaction map to date

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Researchers have built a map that shows how thousands of proteins in a fruit fly cell communicate with each other. This is the largest and most detailed protein interaction map of a multicellular organism, demonstrating how approximately 5,000, or one third, of the proteins cooperate to keep life going."My group has been working for decades, trying to unravel the precise connections among the proteins and gain insight into how the cell functions as a whole," says...

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