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Food stores abundance puts low-income women in small cities at higher obesity risk

March 11, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 10 (ANI): The availability of supermarkets, rather than the lack of them, increases the risk of obesity for low-income women living in small cities, claims a new study.

To reach the conclusion, K-State researchers studied the availability of food stores for low-income women in Kansas to see whether there was a link to obesity.

The findings showed that limited availability of grocery stores did not contribute to an increased risk of obesity in metropolitan or rural areas, but it was associated with an increased risk of obesity in micropolitan areas in Kansas, defined as cities with fewer than 40,000 people.

“This study was one of the first to look at supermarket availability across the urban-rural continuum, and the findings suggest that policies to increase healthful food availability may need to differ depending on urban influence,” said David Dzewaltowski, K-State professor and department head of kinesiology.

Dzewaltowski and Paula Ford, assistant professor of public health sciences at the University of Texas at El Paso, published the study in the January issue of Obesity, a research journal. Ford led the project as a doctoral student at K-State. (ANI)

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Why we sleep – ‘science-wise’

August 21, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, Aug 21 (ANI): From animals to humans, everybody requires a good night sleep. However, the function of sleep still remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science, say researchers.

While many theories suggest that sleep helps in brain “maintenance” – including memory consolidation and pruning- reverse damage from oxidative stress suffered while awake and promote longevity, none of them are well established.

Now, researchers from University of California, Los Angeles have come up with a new theory that sleep’s primary function is to increase animals’ efficiency and minimize their risk by regulating the duration and timing of their behaviour.

“Sleep has normally been viewed as something negative for survival because sleeping animals may be vulnerable to predation and they can’t perform the behaviors that ensure survival,” Nature quoted Jerome Siegel, professor of psychiatry and director of the Centre for Sleep Research at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour at UCLA as saying,iegel said.

“These behaviours include eating, procreating, caring for family members, monitoring the environment for danger and scouting for prey.

“So it’s been thought that sleep must serve some as-yet unidentified physiological or neural function that can’t be accomplished when animals are awake,” he added.

In the study conducted using platypus, walrus, and echidna – a small, burrowing, egg-laying mammal covered in spines, the researchers showed that sleep itself is highly adaptive, much like the inactive states seen in a wide range of species, starting with plants and simple microorganisms; these species have dormant states – as opposed to sleep – even though in many cases they do not have nervous systems.

That challenges the idea that sleep is for the brain, said Siegel.

“We see sleep as lying on a continuum that ranges from these dormant states like torpor and hibernation, on to periods of continuous activity without any sleep, such as during migration, where birds can fly for days on end without stopping,” he said.

In humans, the most notable thing about sleep is that it reduces body and brain metabolism while still allowing high level of responsiveness to the environment, such as parent arousing at a baby’s whimper but sleeping through a thunderstorm.

“This Darwinian perspective can explain age-related changes in human sleep patterns as well,” said Siegel.

“We sleep more deeply when we are young, because we have a high metabolic rate that is greatly reduced during sleep, but also because there are people to protect us.

“Our sleep patterns change when we are older, though, because that metabolic rate reduces and we are now the ones doing the alerting and protecting from dangers,” the expert added.

The study appears in journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience. (ANI)

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Dual nutrient strategy vital to improve aquatic ecosystems

May 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 19 (ANI): A scientist has stressed on the need for a dual nutrient strategy to improve aquatic ecosystems.

Excess phosphorus and nitrogen produced by human activities on neighboring land is making its way into coastal waters and degrading both water quality and aquatic life.

Although historically the priority has been to control phosphorus, Professor Hans Paerl, from the University of North Carolina in the US, argues that nitrogen imbalance is equally damaging.

According to Professor Paerl, a dual nutrient strategy, which tackles both phosphorus and nitrogen surplus, is necessary to manage effectively this nutrient over-enrichment and resulting habitat degradation of coastal waters in the long-term.

The combination of human population growth, urbanization, and agricultural and industrial expansion is causing unprecedented and alarming rates of nutrient over-enrichment and accelerated plant growth in receiving waters worldwide.

The increasing levels of nitrogen and phosphorus are of particular concern because an excess of these two nutrients promotes accelerated production of plant-based organic matter (or eutrophication) to the extent that excessive production, including harmful algal blooms, contributes to the expansion of marine ‘dead zones’ and leads to the destruction of fisheries habitat.

The negative consequences of eutrophication have been apparent in freshwater habitats for a long time and phosphorus has been identified as the key nutrient responsible.

While freshwater lakes have, over the past few decades, received continual doses of phosphorus, many coastal systems have experienced ever-increasing nitrogen loads from rapidly growing human sources, with severe negative impacts on ecosystem structure and function.

This has led to the need for nitrogen control measures.

Professor Paerl shows that the argument for reducing surplus phosphorus alone, to control eutrophication, is idealized and conceptually and technically inapplicable to many freshwater and marine ecosystems.

He added that focusing on phosphorus alone ignores the fact that natural and human influences that affect upstream waters have significant adverse consequences on downstream waters.

Therefore, it is essential to look at nutrient control measures and their effects across the entire freshwater to marine continuum, not each one in isolation.

According to Professor Paerl, “The dual nutrient approach represents an evolutionary step in arresting eutrophication, with consideration of the larger scale freshwater-marine continuum being the driving force.” (ANI)

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“Noise” from space may help reveal mass of near-Earth asteroids

April 5, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 4 (ANI): Planetary scientists are all set to turn “noise” from the data obtained by NASA/ESA LISA satellites’ mission into useful information about the mass of near-Earth asteroids.

LISA is on a mission to detect gravitational waves – a warping of the space/time continuum that scientists hope to see directly for the first time.

Slated for launch no earlier than 2018, LISA will include three satellites connected by laser beams. The distance between the satellites should change as a gravitational wave passes.

Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicts that gravitational waves from exploding stars or colliding black holes ripple across the universe, causing other bodies to wobble like driftwood in a motorboat’s wake.

In 2006, planetary scientists realized that Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) also would make the spacecraft wobble as they passed nearby, creating a distinct signature in the data being collected.

Pasquale Tricarico, a scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, expanded on that work to predict the number of asteroid encounters LISA can expect and how those encounters can be used to determine the mass of passing asteroids.

According to Tricarico, LISA can expect to see one or two known near-Earth asteroids a year, and a total of around ten during the expected mission lifetime.

When an encounter with a known asteroid shows up in the data, scientists will already know its trajectory.

“So from the signal, we can indirectly measure the asteroid’s mass because that’s the only uncertainty in the equation,” Tricarico said.

“These mass measurements are important because we only know the mass of asteroids that have been visited by spacecraft or the mass of a few binary asteroids observed from Earth,” he added.

“We always wonder about the porosity, the density, and this will give us measurements from additional asteroids,” he explained.

If a known asteroid passes one of the satellites and doesn’t leave a signature, “that allows us to put an upper limit on the mass of that asteroid,” Tricarico added.

Tricarico also has predicted the number of potential encounters with smaller, unknown NEAs.

If LISA starts detecting five asteroids a year instead of two or three, this could modify theories concerning the distribution of sizes in the NEA population. (ANI)

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Sexual lyrics in popular songs linked to underage sex

February 24, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 24 (ANI): Teenagers who prefer popular songs with degrading sexual references are more likely to engage in intercourse or in pre-coital activities, according to a new study.

“This study demonstrates that, among this sample of young adolescents, high exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex in popular music was independently associated with higher levels of sexual behaviour,” Brian A. Primack, MD, EdM, MS, Center for Research on Health Care at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said.

“In fact, exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex was one of the strongest associations with sexual activity…These results provide further support for the need for additional research and educational intervention in this area,” Primack added.

Surveys were completed by 711 ninth-grade students at three large urban high schools. These participants were exposed to over 14 hours each week of lyrics describing degrading sex. About one third had previously been sexually active.

The researchers found that compared to those with the least exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex, those with the most exposure were more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse.

The relationship between exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex and sexual experience held equally for both young men and women.

Similarly, among those who had not had sexual intercourse, those in the highest third of exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex were nearly twice as likely to have progressed along a non-coital sexual continuum compared to those in the lowest third. Finally, the relationships between exposure to lyrics describing non-degrading sex and sexual outcomes were not significant.

Primack concluded that these findings build on those of previous studies suggesting that exposure to sex in media messages may be a risk factor for early sexual progression.

The study is published in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. (ANI)

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Sexual lyrics in popular songs linked to underage sex

February 24, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 24 (ANI): Teenagers who prefer popular songs with degrading sexual references are more likely to engage in intercourse or in pre-coital activities, according to a new study.

The researchers found that compared to those with the least exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex, those with the most exposure were more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse.

The relationship between exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex and sexual experience held equally for both young men and women.

Primack concluded that these findings build on those of previous studies suggesting that exposure to sex in media messages may be a risk factor for early sexual progression.

The study is published in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. (ANI)

Sexual lyrics in popular songs linked to underage sex

February 24, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 24 (ANI): Teenagers who prefer popular songs with degrading sexual references are more likely to engage in intercourse or in pre-coital activities, according to a new study.

The researchers found that compared to those with the least exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex, those with the most exposure were more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse.

The relationship between exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex and sexual experience held equally for both young men and women.

Primack concluded that these findings build on those of previous studies suggesting that exposure to sex in media messages may be a risk factor for early sexual progression.

The study is published in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. (ANI)

Sexual lyrics in popular songs linked to underage sex

February 24, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 24 (ANI): Teenagers who prefer popular songs with degrading sexual references are more likely to engage in intercourse or in pre-coital activities, according to a new study.

The researchers found that compared to those with the least exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex, those with the most exposure were more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse.

The relationship between exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex and sexual experience held equally for both young men and women.

Primack concluded that these findings build on those of previous studies suggesting that exposure to sex in media messages may be a risk factor for early sexual progression.

The study is published in the April 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. (ANI)

Food stores abundance puts low-income women in small cities at higher obesity risk

Why we sleep – ‘science-wise’

Dual nutrient strategy vital to improve aquatic ecosystems

“Noise” from space may help reveal mass of near-Earth asteroids

Sexual lyrics in popular songs linked to underage sex

Sexual lyrics in popular songs linked to underage sex

Sexual lyrics in popular songs linked to underage sex

Sexual lyrics in popular songs linked to underage sex

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