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Study Confirms Link Between Advanced Maternal Age and Autism

motherhood-88 Advanced maternal age is linked to a significantly elevated risk of having a child with autism, regardless of the father’s age, according to an exhaustive study of all births in California during the 1990s by UC Davis Health System researchers. Advanced paternal age is associated with elevated autism risk only when the father is older and the mother is under 30, the study found.

Published online today in the February issue of the journal Autism Research, the study, “Independent and Dependent Contributions of Advanced Maternal and Paternal Ages to Autism Risk,” is one of the largest population-based studies to quantify how each parent’s age — separately and together — affects the risk of having a child with autism.

The study found that the incremental risk of having a child with autism increased by 18 percent — nearly one fifth — for every five-year increase in the mother’s age. A 40-year-old woman’s risk of having a child later diagnosed with autism was 50 percent greater than that of a woman between 25 and 29 years old.

Advanced parental age is a known risk factor for having a child with autism. However, previous research has shown contradictory results regarding whether it is the mother, the father or both who contribute most to the increased risk of autism. For example, one study reported that fathers over 40 were six times more likely than fathers under 30 to have a child with autism. (more…)

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Feb 08, 2010 | Categories: Frontiers of Scientific Exploration | Tags: autism | Leave A Comment »

Research Reveals Link Between Beer and Bone Health

beer-fest A new study suggests that beer is a significant source of dietary silicon, a key ingredient for increasing bone mineral density. Researchers from the Department of Food Science & Technology at the University of California, Davis studied commercial beer production to determine the relationship between beer production methods and the resulting silicon content, concluding that beer is a rich source of dietary silicon. Details of this study are available in the February issue of the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Society of Chemical Industry.

“The factors in brewing that influence silicon levels in beer have not been extensively studied” said Charles Bamforth, lead author of the study. “We have examined a wide range of beer styles for their silicon content and have also studied the impact of raw materials and the brewing process on the quantities of silicon that enter wort and beer.”

Silicon is present in beer in the soluble form of orthosilicic acid (OSA), which yields 50% bioavailability, making beer a major contributor to silicon intake in the Western diet. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), dietary silicon (Si), as soluble OSA, may be important for the growth and development of bone and connective tissue, and beer appears to be a major contributor to Si intake. Based on these findings, some studies suggest moderate beer consumption may help fight osteoporosis, a disease of the skeletal system characterized by low bone mass and deterioration of bone tissue. (more…)

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Feb 08, 2010 | Categories: Frontiers of Scientific Exploration | Tags: beer, bone health | Leave A Comment »

Researchers Develop Technology to Make Energy-Efficient Lighting

Solid-State Lighting: These device prototypes produce full-spectrum white light more efficiently than standard incandescent or fluorescent lights and also provide excellent color-rendering performance.

RTI International has developed a revolutionary lighting technology that is more energy efficient than the common incandescent light bulb and does not contain mercury, making it environmentally safer than the compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulb.

At the core of RTI’s breakthrough is an advanced nanofiber structure that provides exceptional lighting management. Nanofibers are materials with diameters and surface features much smaller than the human hair but with comparable lengths.

RTI’s technology, which was funded in part by the Department of Energy’s Solid-State Lighting program, centers around advancements in the nanoscale properties of materials to create high-performance, nanofiber-based reflectors and photoluminescent nanofibers (PLN). When the two nanoscale technologies are combined, a high-efficiency lighting device is produced that is capable of generating in excess of 55 lumens of light output per electrical watt consumed. This efficiency is more than five times greater than that of traditional incandescent bulbs.

“By using flexible photoluminescent nanofiber technologies for light management, RTI has opened the door to the creation of new designs for solid-state lighting applications,” says Lynn Davis, Ph.D., director of RTI’s Nanoscale Materials Program. “This new class of materials can provide cost-effective, safe and efficient lighting solutions.” (more…)

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Feb 08, 2010 | Categories: Human Ecology, Climate Change, Sustainability | Tags: energy-efficient lighting | Leave A Comment »

TV Drama Can Be More Persuasive Than News Program

television-persuasion A fictional television drama may be more effective in persuading young women to use birth control than a news-format program on the same issue, according to a new study.

Researchers found that college-age women who viewed a televised drama about a teen pregnancy felt more vulnerable two weeks after watching the show, and this led to more support for using birth control.

However, those who watched a news program detailing the difficulties caused by teen pregnancies were unmoved, and had no change in their intentions to use birth control.

The results show the power that narratives like TV shows can have in influencing people, said Emily Moyer-Gusé, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.

“A message that is hidden inside of a story may overcome some of the resistance people have to being told how to behave,” Moyer-Gusé said.

“The impact that dramatized stories have on people’s beliefs and intentions depends a lot on the individual viewers, and not just the message – but our results suggest the effect can be there.” (more…)

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Feb 08, 2010 | Categories: Future Trends & New Paradigms | Tags: propaganda, television | Leave A Comment »

New Facility Expected to Clarify Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change

Chippewa National Forest bog.

Scientists hope to get a glimpse of the future with a proposed experiment facility in northern Minnesota that would allow them to adjust temperatures and levels of carbon dioxide across a broad range of possibilities projected by climate models.

Researchers believe that the experimental facility, proposed to be built in a high-carbon spruce bog within the Chippewa National Forest, would provide answers to key questions about the effects climate change could have on vegetation and ecosystems while addressing critical uncertainties related to the carbon cycle. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working in cooperation with the Department of Agriculture, are hopeful that construction of the facility could begin in December 2011.

Scientists are calling the multi-year experiment SPRUCE, which stands for Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Climatic and Environmental change. The carefully selected 20-acre site is located in a representative black spruce bog forest about 25 miles from Grand Rapids in the Forest Service Northern Research Station’s Marcell Experimental Forest.

“The experimental site includes an ecosystem considered especially vulnerable to climate change and thought to be near its tipping point with respect to logical projections of climate change,” said Paul Hanson, a member of ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division and the lead researcher for the project. (more…)

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Feb 05, 2010 | Categories: Human Ecology, Climate Change, Sustainability | Tags: climate change, environment, global warming | Leave A Comment »

Renewable Oil Companies Could Be Sustainability Barrier

Jack Reardon of the Department of Management & Economics, at Hamline University.

The entry of oil companies into the realm of renewable energy could present major obstacles for the development of a sustainable economy that is not based on carbon resources, according to a report in the International Journal of Green Economics.

Jack Reardon of the Department of Management & Economics, at Hamline University, in St. Paul, Minnesota, explains that how the transition from carbon to renewable proceeds will depend on whose values are solicited and whose voices are listened to in the process. He suggests that should the large international oil companies (IOCs) endeavor to enter this arena in a significant way that will present a possible obstacle to the transition that will preclude the emergence of democratic, distributed and green economics based on wind, solar, and other renewable resources.

Ideally, green economics will see a switch from an energy intensive and consumption-focused society economy that perpetuates poverty, gender inequalities and environmental degeneration to one of sustainability that circumvents the carbon-based energy regime. If, however, present trends continue, then by 2030, global energy demand will increase 45%, with China and India accounting for just over half the increase and oil consumption will increase from 85 million barrels per day to 106 with all of the projected increase from non-OECD countries and four-fifths of the projected increase from China. (more…)

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Feb 05, 2010 | Categories: Human Ecology, Climate Change, Sustainability | Tags: oil companies, sustainability | Leave A Comment »

Princeton Scientist Makes a Leap in Quantum Computing

Princeton University's Jason Petta.

A major hurdle in the ambitious quest to design and construct a radically new kind of quantum computer has been finding a way to manipulate the single electrons that very likely will constitute the new machines’ processing components or “qubits.”

has discovered how to do just that — demonstrating a method that alters the properties of a lone electron without disturbing the trillions of electrons in its immediate surroundings. The feat is essential to the development of future varieties of superfast computers with near-limitless capacities for data.

Petta, an assistant professor of physics, has fashioned a new method of trapping one or two electrons in microscopic corrals created by applying voltages to minuscule electrodes. Writing in the Feb. 5 edition of Science, he describes how electrons trapped in these corrals form “spin qubits,” quantum versions of classic computer information units known as bits. Other authors on the paper include Art Gossard and Hong Lu at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Previous experiments used a technique in which electrons in a sample were exposed to microwave radiation. However, because it affected all the electrons uniformly, the technique could not be used to manipulate single electrons in spin qubits. It also was slow. Petta’s method not only achieves control of single electrons, but it does so extremely rapidly — in one-billionth of a second. (more…)

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Feb 05, 2010 | Categories: Frontiers of Scientific Exploration | Tags: quantum computer, quantum physics | Leave A Comment »

Oceans Reveal Further Impacts of Climate Change

Antarctic marine biologist Jim McClintock.

The increasing acidity of the world’s oceans - and that acidity’s growing threat to marine species - are definitive proof that the atmospheric carbon dioxide that is causing climate change is also negatively affecting the marine environment, says world-renowned Antarctic marine biologist Jim McClintock, Ph.D., professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Biology.

“The oceans are a sink for the carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere,” says McClintock, who has spent more than two decades researching the marine species off the coast of Antarctica. Carbon dioxide is absorbed by oceans, and through a chemical process hydrogen ions are released to make seawater more acidic.

“Existing data points to consistently increasing oceanic acidity, and that is a direct result of increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere; it is incontrovertible,” McClintock says. “The ramifications for many of the organisms that call the water home are profound.”

A substance’s level of acidity is measured by its pH value; the lower the pH value, the more acidic is the substance. McClintock says data collected since the pre-industrial age indicates the mean surface pH of the oceans has declined from 8.2 to 8.1 units with another 0.4 unit decline possible by century’s end. A single whole pH unit drop would make ocean waters 10 times more acidic, which could rob many marine organisms of their ability to produce protective shells - and tip the balance of marine food chains.

“There is no existing data that I am aware of that can be used to debate the trend of increasing ocean acidification,” he says. (more…)

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Feb 04, 2010 | Categories: Human Ecology, Climate Change, Sustainability | Tags: climate change, global warming, human ecology, impact of technology, oceans | Leave A Comment »

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