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Families with a child completing elementary school this year are now preparing their registration for high school, a transition that is often stressful for children. A new program has demonstrated that it is possible to significantly reduce stress in some of these children thanks to a new educational tool designed under the leadership of Sonia Lupien, Director of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress (CSHS) and professor at the University of Montreal.

A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) led by Professor Loh Kian Ping, Head of the Department of Chemistry at the NUS Faculty of Science, has successfully altered the properties of water, making it corrosive enough to etch diamonds. This was achieved by attaching a layer of graphene on diamond and heated to high temperatures. Water molecules trapped between them become highly corrosive, as opposed to normal water.

AMHERST, Mass. – For hundreds of years, naturalists and scientists have identified new species based on an organism's visible differences. But now, new genetic techniques are revealing that different species can show little, to no visible differences.

Many Europeans are fretting these days over what they eat, and whether horse meat might have adulterated their pork chops. Food fraud has been dominating headlines globally - calling for new policies in law enforcement and more robust methods for successful food identification and authentication. As companies and manufacturers resort to fraudulent practices to extract more cash from the gullible public, it is estimated that up to 7% of the consumer supply chain contains hidden ingredients (i.e. – not disclosed on the label).

These findings are the result of a new study carried out at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. In the study, women who took folic acid supplements from four weeks before conception to eight weeks into pregnancy had a 40 per cent lower risk of giving birth to children with childhood autism (classic autism).

"It appears that the crucial time interval is from four weeks before conception to eight weeks into pregnancy," states Pål Surén, MD and doctoral fellow at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

In recent years, a body of pub­li­ca­tions in the micro­bi­ology field has chal­lenged all pre­vious knowl­edge of how antibi­otics kill bac­teria. "A slew of papers came out studying this phe­nom­enon, sug­gesting that there is a gen­eral mech­a­nism of killing by antibi­otics," said Kim Lewis, Northeastern Uni­ver­sity Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor in the Depart­ment of Biology and director of Northeastern's Antimi­cro­bial Dis­covery Center.

In a long-term study, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Margraf, Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the RUB, investigated the psychological effects of plastic surgery on approximately 550 patients in cooperation with colleagues from the University of Basel. Patients demonstrated more enjoyment of life, satisfaction and self-esteem after their physical appearance had been surgically altered. The results of the world's largest ever study on this issue are reported by the researchers in the journal "Clinical Psychological Science".

Extensive shell fishing and sewerage discharge in river estuaries could have serious consequences for the rare Icelandic black-tailed godwits that feed there. But it is the males that are more likely to suffer, according to new research from the University of East Anglia.

Research published today in the journal Ecology and Evolution reveals very different winter feeding habits between the sexes.

Drinking just two cups of coffee a day is associated with the risk of low birth weight. Researchers at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have conducted a study on 59,000 women in collaboration with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators have described what may be a newly identified disease that appears to explain some cases of widespread chronic pain and other symptoms in children and young adults. Their report that will appear in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics, and has received early online release, finds that most of a group of young patients seen at the MGH for chronic, unexplained pain had test results indicating small-fiber polyneuropathy, a condition not previously reported in children.

Shenzhen, China, March 11, 2013- BGI Tech Solutions Co., Ltd., also referred to as "BGI Tech", introduced today its novel assembly solution for facilitating heterozygous genomes research. This marks another technological breakthrough for BGI in heterozygous genome assembly after the completed genome sequencing of oyster, diamondback moth and pear.

Two University of Colorado Cancer Center studies show that the protein receptor Mer is overexpressed in many leukemias, and that inhibition of this Mer receptor results in the death of leukemia cells – without affecting surrounding, healthy cells.

The first study, published today in the journal Oncogene, worked with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), for which current chemotherapies offer a cure rate of only about 55 percent.

PHILADELPHIA — A new immunoassay that tests for the presence of three biomarkers appears to be a valid screening method for the early detection of malignant kidney cancer, according to data published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Philadelphia, PA, March 11, 2013 – Once the initial episode of influenza has passed, the chronic effects tend to be overlooked. The results of a new study indicate that the cytokine interleukin-22 (IL-22) plays a critical role in normal lung repair following influenza infection. This study is published in the April 2013 issue of the American Journal of Pathology.