Body

Athens, Ga. - The amount of weight a woman gains during pregnancy can be vitally important--especially if she's carrying a boy--according to a study by researchers at the University of Georgia released today in PLOS ONE, an open access peer-reviewed journal published by the Public Library of Science.

Research by associate professor Kristen Navara in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences found that male fetuses are more likely to die if their mothers don't gain enough weight during pregnancy.

A new study out today in the journal Neurology shows that pregabalin is not effective in controlling the pain associated with lumbar spinal stenosis, the most common type of chronic lower back pain in older adults.

Researchers have long debated how and what our ancestors ate. Charles Darwin hypothesized that the hunting of game animals was a defining feature of early hominids, one that was linked with both upright walking and advanced tool use and that isolated these species from their closest relatives (such as ancestors of chimpanzees); modified versions of this hypothesis exist to this day. Other scholars insist that while our ancestors' diets did include meat, it was predominantly scavenged and not hunted.

LA JOLLA--You've misplaced your cell phone. You start by scanning where you remember leaving it: on your bureau. You check and double-check the bureau before expanding your search around and below the bureau. Eventually, you switch from this local area to a more global one, widening your search to the rest of your room and beyond.

Loyola researchers and collaborators have reported promising results from a novel therapeutic approach for women with estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer.

The new approach, a new drug class called gamma secretase inhibitors (GSI), specifically inhibits Notch and shuts down critical genes and cancer cells responsible for tumor growth.

Kathy Albain, MD, FACP, who led the study, will present findings Dec. 11 during the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Everything you know about crowdfunding is wrong, at least according to researchers at UC Santa Barbara. And that, they add, is good news for scientists. Crowdfunding is the practice of financing a project or venture through contributions from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.

Many children who sustain so-called open bone fractures in the forearm or lower leg can, and do, heal safely without surgery, according to the results of a small study led by investigators at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center.

Open fractures occur when the broken bone protrudes through the skin, causing a puncture wound.

Children exposed during pregnancy to elevated levels of two common chemicals found in the home--di-n-butyl phthalate (DnBP) and di-isobutyl phthalate (DiBP)--had an IQ score, on average, more than six points lower than children exposed at lower levels, according to researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

The study is the first to report a link between prenatal exposure to phthalates and IQ in school-age children. Results appear online in the journal PLOS ONE.

Scientists have named the first definite horned dinosaur species from the Early Cretaceous in North America, according to a study published December 10, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Andrew Farke from Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology and colleagues.

Nearly 269,000 tons of plastic pollution may be floating in the world's oceans, according to a study published December 10, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Marcus Eriksen from Five Gyres Institute and colleagues.

ANN ARBOR--As if holiday travel isn't stressful enough. Now University of Michigan researchers say we're likely sharing that already overcrowded airline cabin with countless tiny creatures including house dust mites.

"What people might not realize when they board a plane is that they can share the flight with a myriad of microscopic passengers-- including house dust mites--that take advantage of humanity's technological progress for their own benefit," said U-M biologist Pavel Klimov.

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators have identified two compounds that appear, in cellular and animal models, to block the cardiac damage caused by the important chemotherapy drug doxorubicin. Their report in the Dec. 10 issue of Science Translational Medicine indicates that inhibiting the action of an enzyme that is key to the generation of cellular energy in mitochondria could prevent doxorubicin-induced damage to cardiac cells without reducing the drug's anti-tumor effects.

Rats that received thyroid hormones had a reduced risk for dangerous heart arrhythmias following a heart attack, according to a new study by a team of medical researchers at New York Institute of Technology.

In the NIH-funded study, published in the Journal of Cardiac Failure, the team found that thyroid hormone replacement therapy significantly reduced the incidence of atrial fibrillation - a specific kind of irregular heartbeat, or arrhythmia -- in the rats, compared to a control group that did not receive the hormones.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Researchers for the first time have developed a method to track through the human body the movement of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, as extraordinarily tiny amounts of these potential carcinogens are biologically processed and eliminated.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Using a gene-editing system originally developed to delete specific genes, MIT researchers have now shown that they can reliably turn on any gene of their choosing in living cells.