Culture

URBANA – With the global recession and the food price spike of 2008, one would expect migrants to be particularly affected, but a recent University of Illinois study revealed migrants in at least one Central Illinois county to be surprisingly resilient in their ability to control their environment through work, particularly women.

"Women appear to be more flexible and resourceful. When they lose their jobs, they start looking for other options," said Gale Summerfield, U of I community development and gender specialist.

Los Angeles, CA (April 12, 2012) Police officers are always trying to control the misconduct of those who are on parole in order to control crime in the community, but what types of behaviors land them back in jail and what can law enforcement officials do about it? A recent article in the Journal of Correctional Health Care (JCHC), published by SAGE, discusses how to target the most common risky behaviors among specific groups of parolees in order to lower crime in the community.

Our obsession with multiple forms of media is not necessarily all bad news, according to a new study by Kelvin Lui and Alan Wong from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Their work shows that those who frequently use different types of media at the same time appear to be better at integrating information from multiple senses - vision and hearing in this instance - when asked to perform a specific task. This may be due to their experience of spreading their attention to different sources of information while media multitasking.

Casanova's notion is that stem cells emerge not because of the presence of factors that confer capacity to the stem cell but because of factors that repress the cellular signals for differentiation and specialization. Casanova believes that somehow all non-differentiated cells intrinsically carry the qualities of the stem cell by default and that there are factors at work that remove these capacities. Said another way: a stem cell is a stem cell because it has evaded differentiation.

An international study found that bone marrow transplants are not the best option for some young patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) who fail to attain clinical remission after the initial weeks of intense chemotherapy known as induction therapy.

People who speak Cantonese, a tonal language, demonstrate enhance musical pitch perception relative to Canadian French and English speakers, according to an Apr. 11 report in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

UCLA anthropologists asked hundreds of Americans to guess the size and muscularity of four men based solely on photographs of their hands holding a range of easily recognizable objects, including handguns.

The research, which publishes today in the scholarly journal PLoS ONE, confirms what scrawny thugs have long known: Brandishing a weapon makes a man appear bigger and stronger than he would otherwise.

ANN ARBOR, MICH. -- A study in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine shows a serious complication of ERCP, a procedure commonly used to diagnose and treat problems of the bile and pancreatic ducts, may be eliminated with a single dose medication.

The finding is significant in helping patients avoid a condition known as post-ERCP pancreatitis, a disabling complication that affects up to 1 in 4 high-risk patients who undergo the gastrointestinal procedure.

Today's anti-depressant medications can ease depression in Parkinson's patients without worsening other symptoms of the disease, according to a study published online in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The presence of big-box retailers, such as Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Target, may alter a community's social and economic fabric enough to promote the creation of hate groups, according to economists.

The number of Wal-Mart stores in a county is significantly correlated with the number of hate groups in the area, said Stephan Goetz, professor of agricultural economics and regional economics, Penn State, and director of the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development.

The brave new world of stem cell research dangles the exciting potential for a host of leading-edge treatments that may one day help cure debilitating diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, maladies that today cannot be treated with modern medicine.

However, not much thought has been given to how those products might be regulated and how issues of legal liability may be addressed in a way that encourages scientific innovation but also protects the patients for whom these treatments might provide great relief.

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Patients who went to the emergency room with chest pain but were at low risk for a heart attack were less likely to seek more tests after their conditions were explained to them using an educational tool known as a decision aid, a Mayo Clinic study found. The findings are published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, an American Heart Association journal.

Chest pain is the No. 2 reason people seek emergency care at U.S. hospitals. It accounts for about $8 billion in health care costs annually, researchers estimate.

Although the drug metformin is considered the gold standard in the management of type 2 diabetes, a study by a group of French researchers published in this week's PLoS Medicine suggests that the long-term benefits of this drug compared with the risks are not clearly established—an important finding given that currently, thousands of people around the world are regularly taking metformin to help control their blood sugar levels in the belief that it also has long-lasting health benefits.

CHICAGO – In a study that included elderly men and women without preexisting cardiovascular disease, major and minor electrocardiographic abnormalities were associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) events and improved the prediction of CHD events such as heart attack, beyond traditional cardiovascular risk factors, according to a study in the April 11 issue of JAMA.

CHICAGO – Although observational studies have suggested that losartan, a drug used primarily for the treatment of hypertension, may be associated with an increased risk of death among patients with heart failure compared with other medications in the same class of drugs (angiotensin II receptor blockers [ARBs]), an analysis that included nearly 6,500 patients found that overall, use of losartan was not associated with increased all-cause death or cardiovascular death compared with use of the ARB candesartan, according to a study in the April 11 issue of JAMA.