People who offer love, listening and help to others may be rewarded with better mental health themselves, according to a new study of churchgoers in the September/October issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.

The study is one of the first to track the positive health benefits of altruistic behavior, say Carolyn Schwartz, Sc.D., of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and colleagues.

“The findings really emphasize how helping others can help oneself,” Schwartz says.

First use of disordered nanowires, organic molecules as programmable memory

Chemists at Rice University have demonstrated that disordered assemblies of gold nanowires and conductive organic molecules can function as non-volatile memory, one of the key components of computer chips.

“A large part of the cost associated with creating integrated circuits comes from the painstaking precision required to ensure that each of the millions of circuits on the chip are placed in exactl

Short people may be short-changed when it comes to salary, status and respect, according to a University of Florida study that found tall people earn considerably more money throughout their lives.

“Height matters for career success,” said Timothy Judge, a UF management professor whose research is scheduled to be published in the spring issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology. “These findings are troubling in that, with a few exceptions such as professional basketball, no one cou

A cellular sensor of dietary fats slows the development of lesions that lead to heart disease, a Salk Institute study has found.

The study, which appears in the Oct. 17 edition of Science and is posted on the journal’s web site, uncovers a unique pathway that significantly curbs the development of atherosclerosis – the accumulation of fatty deposits on arterial walls. The pathway could be used to develop drugs to treat heart disease, currently the number one killer of Americans.

Adding to the paradox of prion diseases, Dartmouth Medical School researchers have discovered that RNA plays a role in converting a normal prion protein into a mutant that leads to mad cow disease and other fatal brain illnesses.

Their study, reported in the Oct. 16 issue of Nature, provides important clues to understanding the role of prions, unorthodox infectious agents whose ability to transmit disease has confounded physicians and scientists. The work, by Dr. Surachai Supattapone, assis

Zero-G flying is just like throwing a football through the air, explains test pilot Captain Gilles Le Barzic as he briefs an audience about to leave gravity behind: “Except instead of a ball we have an aircraft.”

Le Barzic is one of three expert pilots on ESA’s A-300 ’Zero-G’ Airbus, billed by its operator Novespace as ’the plane that removes gravity’. The aircraft has been specially strengthened to fly parabolic arcs enabling researchers to carry out experiments in weightlessness without

The citizens of Kuwait became more supportive of democracy during the mid- to late-1990s, but that did not include a desire for closer ties with the United States and other Western countries, a new study found.

A survey of 1,500 Kuwaiti citizens conducted in 1994, 1996, and 1998 found that the citizens became less interested in trade alliances with the West and less likely to pay attention to Western media over that time period.

The long-term survey is one of the first in the Arab

Almost two out of three children with severe asthma are boys. But women account for more than two out of three adults with severe asthma. And no one really knows why. Those are some of the most striking results of a cross-sectional study of severe asthma by researchers from National Jewish Medical and Research Center being published in the October issue of the journal Chest. The research team, led by Joseph Spahn, M.D., also found that children with severe asthma had surprisingly good airflow in and

In 1905, American astronomer Percival Lowell predicted the existence of a new planet he called Planet X. Lowell proved that this new planet existed even though no one had been able to see it in the sky. Twenty-five years later, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh stumbled on images of X photographed from the Flagstaff Observatory in Arizona. Today, that planet is known as Pluto.

While it took twenty-five years for astronomers to go from theory to confirmation of Pluto’s existence, it took genome sci

Will spacecraft travelling through interplanetary space be able to determine their positions by using signals from dead stars as astronomical clocks?

What is the likelihood of artificial muscles made from electro-active polymers replacing mechanical parts in spacecraft? Will it ever be possible to conceive an interstellar highway in which spacecraft journey across the galaxy using the delicate gravitational balance between neighbouring stars?

These are just some of the imaginative,

Different parts of brain are activated

In the first study ever to examine how the brain functions when making judgments about forgivability and empathy, researcher Tom Farrow, B.Sc. (Hons.), Ph.D., found that different regions of the brain are activated when a person makes judgments about forgiving.

The findings will be presented at the Scientific Conference on Forgiveness along with studies from over 40 of the top scientists in the world who study forgiveness. The conferen

New evidence gathered in a study funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences suggests that asthmatic children who use maintenance medication are particularly vulnerable to the effects of ground-level ozone, even at levels well below the federal standard set by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Their research results were published Oct. 8 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study was conducted at the Yale University School of Medicine. NIEHS is on

A new study in the Oct. 9 issue of the journal Nature describes three distinct stages in the life of a memory, and helps explain how memories endure – or are forgotten – including the role that sleep plays in safeguarding memories.

“To initiate a memory is almost like creating a word processing file on a computer,” explains the study’s first author, Matthew Walker, Ph.D., instructor of psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. “Once the file has bee

New findings by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicate tiny footpaths traveled by Costa Rican people 1,500 years ago were precursors to wide, deep and ritualistic roadways 500 years later leading to and from cemeteries and villages.

During the past two years, a team of graduate students, NASA archaeologists and remote sensing specialists led by Professor Payson Sheets spent much of their time mapping the small footpaths, many of which are invisible on the ground but visible by sate

One year after miscarrying, two-thirds of women say their relationships with their husbands or partners stayed the same or improved, according to a recent study. The remaining third said their relationships grew more distant over the same time span.

“It seems that when miscarriage affects couples, it may stimulate growth or, conversely, unearth inability to support each other through troubling times,” says Kristen M. Swanson, R.N., Ph.D., F.A.A.N., professor of family and child nursing at

Even as the genetic blueprint for Shadow the poodle was being completed in Maryland, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had been engaged in a long-term study that they hope will add functional gene information to the dog genome as well as benefit both canine and human health.

The still-in-progress Illinois study, in which researchers are measuring the effects of diet on gene expression in both weanling and geriatric dogs, is described in a paper in the October iss