A team of researchers has reported that chronic wasting disease (CWD) can be transmitted through environments contaminated by whole carcasses or excrement of animals infected with the pathogen that causes CWD. The research confirms long-held theories that CWD can be indirectly spread through environmental sources, in addition to direct interactions between infected and healthy mule deer. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health, the study

Variety may be the spice of life — and a key contributor to an expanding waistline.

Research by Brian Wansink, a professor of marketing and nutritional science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, challenges the conventional notion that a person’s ability to control eating and stick to a successful diet has solely to do with willpower.

Little-understood contextual cues — such as how food is displayed and its variety of colors — can lead people to overindulg

If it seems that there have been quite a few rationales for going to war in Iraq, that’s because there have been quite a few – 27, in fact, all floated between Sept. 12, 2001, and Oct. 11, 2002, according to a new study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. All but four of the rationales originated with the administration of President George W. Bush.

The study also finds that the Bush administration switched its focus from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein early on – only fiv

Computers, for all of their computational muscle, do not hold a candle to humans in the ability to recognize patterns or images. This basic quandary in computational theory – why can computers crunch numbers but cannot efficiently process images – has stumped scientists for many years.

Now, researchers at Arizona State University have come up with a model that could help unlock some of the secrets of how humans process patterns and possibly lead to smarter robots. The advance concerns oscil

While less educated people report fewer stressful days than those with more education, their stress is more severe and has a larger impact on their health, reports a researcher from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and his colleagues in the current issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Joseph G. Grzywacz, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, said studies on stress typically overlook daily stressors or hassles, which are

Many sexual partners, history of gonorrhea seen as risks for prostate cancer

Men who have had gonorrhea are more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer, new research from the University of Michigan Health System finds.

Having more than 25 lifetime sexual partners also increases odds of prostate cancer, by more than 2.5 times that of men with five or fewer sexual partners, the study found.

The conclusions are part of the Flint Men’s Health Study, a populat

Researchers, using a new combination of techniques, have discovered that dopamine levels in our brains vary the most in situations where we are unsure if we are going to be rewarded, such as when we are gambling or playing the lottery.

The research results, “Dopamine Transmission in the Human Striatum during Monetary Reward Tasks,” were published online April 28 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Dopamine has long been known to play an important role in how we experience rewards from

Mothers can be a positive influence in their children’s lives, whether or not they are single parents. A new multiethnic study at Cornell University has found that being a single parent does not appear to have a negative effect on the behavior or educational performance of a mother’s 12- and 13-year-old children.

What mattered most in this study, Cornell researcher Henry Ricciuti says, is a mother’s education and ability level and, to a lesser extent, family income and qualit

McGill University researchers design and test computer games that enhance self-esteem

Can computer games help raise self-esteem? Absolutely. In a world-first study, researchers from McGill University’s Department of Psychology have created and tested computer games that are specifically designed to help people enhance their self-acceptance.

Available for public consultation at www.selfesteemgames.mcgill.ca, the games have catchy names such as Wham!, EyeSpy: The Matrix a

Scientists at The Hospital for Sick Children (Sick Kids) and UCLA have pinpointed for the first time a region of the brain responsible for storing and retrieving distant memories. This research is reported in the May 7, 2004 issue of the journal Science.

“It was previously known that the hippocampus processes recent memory, but that the hippocampus did not store memories permanently. We were able to determine that it is the anterior cingulate cortex where older, or lifelong, memories are st

Highly purified soy foods and soy supplements marketed in the United States may stimulate the growth of pre-existing estrogen-dependent breast tumors, according to a study done at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“Soy has been correlated with low rates of breast cancer in Asian populations, but soy foods in Asia are made from minimally processed soybeans or defatted, toasted soy flour, which is quite different from soy products consumed in the U.S.,” said William G. Helferich

A novel method of predicting where home break-ins will occur that is 30 per cent more accurate than current crime mapping techniques has been developed by University College London crime sleuths.

Published online today in the British Journal of Criminology, researchers from UCL’s Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science show it’s possible to develop more effective crime hotspots maps by treating the spread of crime like a disease.

Previous work by the team has shown that the risk of h

In a study of dual-career couples with one child, researchers at Brown University have determined that the division of household labor affects the couple’s decision to have a second child.

Eighty-one percent of couples in which the husband does at least half of the housework will have a second child. For couples in which the wife does most or all of the housework, the figure is 74 percent. But when the wife does between 54 and 84 percent of the housework, the likelihood of the couple having

Practicing rapid deep breathing could help cyclists smash their personal bests. An article published this week in BMC Physiology shows how experienced cyclists can shave minutes off their race times by regularly putting their respiratory muscles through endurance training. The researchers, from University of Arizona, who carried out the study write: “We are unaware of other training methods that result in similar performance increments in experienced bicycle racers.” Twenty highly t

Half of patients treated for depression in primary care facilities during a recent study still suffered from the condition 18 to 24 months later, according to recent research.

Patients who were unemployed, had suicidal thoughts at the beginning of the study and who stopped taking antidepressant medication on their own, before their doctor told them to quit the treatment were more likely to suffer persistent depression symptoms than those who recovered from depression over the course of the

The International Council for Science (ICSU), one of the world’s oldest independent, non-governmental scientific organizations, has launched a completely new Web site (http://www.icsu.org). The diversified content and convivial style reflect ICSU’s interdisciplinary approach and longstanding commitment to international scientific cooperation.

This new site gives access to information on a wide spectrum of scientific topics relevant to both science and society. ICSU’s objective is to provide