Young drivers who use cell phones at the wheel drive like the elderly - with slower reaction times and an increased risk of accidents - a new study shows. And what's more, hands-free phones are no safer than handheld ones, scientists behind the study say.
"If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone," said David Strayer, a University of Utah psychology professor and principal author of the study.
"For five years or so we've been interested in what happens when someone picks up a cell phone and starts to drive," Strayer said.
One thing that appears to happen is that phone-using drivers of all ages have significantly diminished reaction times. They are slower to hit the brakes and more likely to get into accidents.
Subjects took "freeway drives" in a simulator, using a hands-free mobile phone for half of the drive.
Every day we are confronted with positive and negative statements. By combining the new, incoming information with what we already know, we are usually able to figure out if the statement is true or false. Previous research has suggested that including negative words, such as "not," in the middle of a sentence can throw off our brains and make it more difficult to understand.
Psychologists Mante S. Nieuwland and Gina R. Kuperberg from Tufts University investigated how different types of negative statements are processed in the brain. In this study, the researchers measured event related potential responses (ERPs) while participants read statements containing critical, mid-sentence words that made the statement true or false. An ERP is an electrical brain response, as measured at the scalp with electrodes, that is directly related to something that is seen or heard. ERP studies have been used to provide us with information about how language is initially processed in the brain before any noticeable behavior occurs. Previous studies have shown that when reading affirmative statements, large ERPs occur at the words which make the statement false.
In this study, participants read statements that were either pragmatically licensed or pragmatically unlicensed. Pragmatically licensed statements are informative and sound natural. For example, "In moderation, drinking red wine isn't bad for your health" is a pragmatically licensed statement. Pragmatically unlicensed statements, on the other hand, are unnatural and not helpful. An example of this type of statement would be, "Vitamins and proteins aren't very bad for your health." This statement is unlicensed because including the negative word "aren't" implies that vitamins and proteins may be bad for your health, which we know is not true. In this case, the negative word makes the statement trivial and not very useful.
To contain U.S. disease outbreaks spread by prairie dogs to ferrets, it's Kazakhstan's giant gerbils to the rescue.
Plague conjures images of Gothic horror - rough wooden carts piled high with pestilent bodies - but it is more than a medieval memory. The disease, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, kills several hundred people every year by attacking the lungs, lymph nodes or blood. Less obviously, plague also ravages wildlife around the world.
Introduced to the U.S. a century ago, it is creeping into the upper Midwest, wiping out prairie dogs and threatening the black-footed ferret, one of North America's rarest species. Confined to rural regions, the disease so far is not a major threat to people - only a few Americans die from it annually. But things could change if the bacterium spreads to urban-loving rodents such as rats. Now some researchers think that another species could provide the information needed to contain plague's spread in the U.S.: the giant gerbils of Kazakhstan.
Inhabitants of the vast steppes of Central Asia, the gerbils grow to one foot in length. They are natural hosts for Yersinia, and many researchers believe that the plague bacterium, carried by fleas hitching rides on the Mongols centuries ago, spread from these gerbils. Until World War II, plague killed scores of people every year in Kazakhstan. "Whole villages were being wiped out," recounts Stephen Davis, an Australian researcher who recently joined Yale University's School of Public Health.
Results of a recent study conducted by researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and colleagues show that cognitive functioning abilities drop as average blood sugar levels rise in people with type 2 diabetes.
The study appears in this month's issue of Diabetes Care.
The ongoing Memory in Diabetes (MIND) study, a sub-study of the Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes Trial (ACCORD), found a statistically significant inverse relationship between A1C levels (average blood glucose levels over a period of two to three months) and subjects' scores on four cognitive tests. No association, however, was found between daily blood glucose levels (measured by the fasting plasma glucose test) and test scores.
For the study, researchers at 52 of the 77 ACCORD sites throughout the United States and Canada administered a 30-minute battery of cognitive tests to nearly 3,000 individuals ages 55 years and older.
Many children's vitamins contain so few nutrients in such low doses that they are no healthier than candy, according to a study conducted by researchers from the Center for Nutritional Education in conjunction with www.supplementscompared.com.
"Parents need to be aware that a lot of the supplements for children contain only a very small number of vitamins," researcher Kate Neil said. "They look like sweets, taste like sweets and in a sense they are sweets."
Parents would be better off spending money to provide a healthier diet than buying many of the supplements, the researchers said.
The ability to empathize with others is partially determined by genes, according to new research on mice from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU).
In the study, a highly social strain of mice learned to associate a sound played in a specific cage with something negative simply by hearing a mouse in that cage respond with squeaks of distress. A genetically different mouse strain with fewer social tendencies did not learn any connection between the cues and the other mouse's distress, showing that the ability to identify and act on another's emotions may have a genetic basis. The new research will publish Wednesday, Feb. 11, in the
Public Library of Science ONE journal at
here.
Like humans, mice can automatically sense and respond to others' positive and negative emotions, such as excitement, fear or anger. Understanding empathy in mice may lead to important discoveries about the social interaction deficits seen in many human psychosocial disorders, including autism, schizophrenia, depression and addiction, the researchers say. For example, nonverbal social cues are frequently used to identify early signs of autism in very young children.
Patients with the AIDS virus got no benefit from a Novartis AG drug that sparks the creation of immune cells to replace those destroyed by the disease.
Two studies, one involving patients with high numbers of immune CD4 cells, and the other involving patients with fewer of the cells, failed to show benefit from the treatment, doctors said today at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Montreal. Novartis sells the interleukin-2 drug as Proleukin to treat cancer.
Australia is host to a meeting of World health experts which aims to find ways of eradicating malaria, one of the world's most dangerous killer diseases.
Though malaria was wiped out in Australia in the 80's it continues to wreak havoc elsewhere in the world and kills more than one million people every year and continues to flourish in 109 countries worldwide.
Although malaria is preventable and curable, according to the World Health Organisation, a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds and in 2006 there were 247 million cases of malaria, which caused around 880,000 deaths, mostly among African children.
Multiple, interacting genetic risk factors may influence the severity of autism, a new study suggests.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers said they've pinpointed two genes that cause autism-like symptoms in mice. The findings support a long-held theory that more than one gene is involved in people with genetic-based autism.
The researchers said their discovery could lead to the development of drugs that target signaling mechanisms between genes that interact to cause some symptoms of autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs).
James Turner, the chairman of the national consumer education group Citizens for Health, has expressed shock and outrage after reading a new report from scientists outlining the dangers of the artificial sweetener Splenda (sucralose).
In animals examined for the study, Splenda reduced the amount of good bacteria in the intestines by 50 percent, increased the pH level in the intestines, contributed to increases in body weight and affected P-glycoprotein (P-gp) levels in such a way that crucial health-related drugs could be rejected.
The P-gp effect could result in medications used in chemotherapy, AIDS treatment and treatments for heart conditions being shunted back into the intestines, rather than being absorbed by the body.
According to Turner, "The report makes it clear that the artificial sweetener Splenda and its key component sucralose pose a threat to the people who consume the product. Hundreds of consumers have complained to us about side effects from using Splenda and this study ... confirms that the chemicals in the little yellow package should carry a big red warning label."
Sources:
Globe Newswire September 28, 2008
Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health Part A 2008;71(21):1415-2
