ScienceBlog.com

People who chronically doubt their judgments lead psychologically impoverished lives in a variety of ways, a new study suggests.
Such individuals often feel anxious, are prone to sadness and mood swings, and are likely to procrastinate and avoid thinking about difficult problems. “People who are dubious about their judgment are highly vulnerable,” said Herbert Mirels, primary author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University. “They see every important decision they make as a trial in which they are likely to find themselves deficient or to be found deficient by others.”

Heart failure patients at the Ohio State University Heart Center may be seeing less of their doctors. And the doctors couldn’t be happier. A group of patients is testing a first-of-its-kind implantable monitor that transmits critical data from their heart over the telephone, eliminating travel to the doctor’s office for the same type of monitoring. Proven successful, the experimental device could herald a major breakthrough for the growing number of people diagnosed with heart failure. Those living with heart failure could enjoy an improved lifestyle with less dependency on frequent doctor visits, and for cardiac researchers it might be the most advanced bellwether device yet for detecting heart problems at their earliest stages.

A new study suggests that brief exposures to pure oxygen not only help chronic and other hard-to-heal wounds heal completely, such exposures also help wounds heal faster. Ohio State University surgical scientists used topical oxygen therapy to treat 30 patients with a total of 56 wounds. The therapy required placing a bag containing pure oxygen over the wound for 90 minutes a day. More than two-thirds of the difficult wounds healed with the oxygen treatment alone.

Supplementing the diet with a certain fatty acid may lead to better weight control and disease management in diabetics, a new study suggests. Diabetics who added an essential fatty acid called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) to their diets had lower body mass as well as lower blood sugar levels by the end of the eight-week study. Hyperglycemia, or high blood sugar, is a hallmark of diabetes. Researchers also found that higher levels of this fatty acid in the bloodstream meant lower levels of leptin, a hormone thought to regulate fat levels. Scientists think that high leptin levels may play a role in obesity, one of the biggest risk factors for adult-onset diabetes.

Research conducted at Ohio State University suggests that cell biologists may be exposing the cell cultures they study to too much oxygen. This finding could have broad implications for cellular biology research, which receives billions of dollars of funding nationally, said Ohio State scientist Chandan Sen. He is the lead author of a study which suggests that cells act differently depending on how much oxygen they are exposed to, especially when it is too much.

A new study has uncovered more evidence that black holes form before the galaxies that contain them. The finding could help resolve a long-standing debate, says the study’s lead scientist. Marianne Vestergaard, a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at Ohio State, came to this conclusion when she studied a collection of very energetic, active galaxies known as quasars as they appeared some 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only one billion years old. While the quasars were obviously young — they contained large stellar nurseries in which new stars were forming — each also contained a very massive, fully formed black hole.

Researchers have successfully tested micro-sized gelatin particles that may one day deliver therapeutic genes to treat a type of kidney disease. The biodegradable gelatin particles are so small that at least 10 would fit on the period at the end of this sentence. Researchers believe such particles could carry therapeutic genes to the glomerulus, a tiny cluster of capillaries within the kidney that filters toxins from the blood. This filtration system becomes blocked when patients develop glomerular disease.

Grape-seed extract may help skin wounds heal faster and with less scarring, a new study suggests. The extract seemed to aid wound healing in two ways: It helped the body make more of a compound used to regenerate damaged blood vessels, and it also increased the amount of free radicals in the wound site. Free radicals help clear potentially pathogenic bacteria from a wound.

Researchers believe that listening to music helped people with severe respiratory disease increase their fitness levels, based on the results of a new study. Subjects with serious lung disease who listened to music while walking covered an average of 19 total miles over the course of an eight-week exercise intervention study. In comparison, the group that didn’t listen to music only walked an average of 15 total miles ? 21 percent less – by the end of the study. That four-mile difference is significant, said Gerene Bauldoff, a study co-author and an assistant professor of nursing at Ohio State University. It suggests that participants in the music group may have felt less hindered by shortness of breath, the primary physical symptom of serious lung disease.

In an airplane hangar in Columbus, OH, some 80 tons of steel, electronics, and cryogenic equipment are about to come together — all to deposit one ounce of aluminum as a near-perfect, whisper-thin coating on a giant telescope mirror. The successful operation of the coating system will represent a milestone in the construction of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), and a critical phase in Ohio State University ‘s participation in the LBT project.

The nature of preteen friendships can play a key role in determining whether or not a child will engage in sexual activity early in adolescence, a new study suggests. For example, researchers found that boys who had mostly female friends when they were preteens were more likely to have had sex by age 16 than were other boys. However, the same wasn’t true for girls who as preteens had mostly male friends.

The health of indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere was on a downward trajectory long before Columbus set foot in the Americas, Ohio researchers say. The rise of agriculture is partly to blame as the demands of tending domestic crops encouraged people to settle in larger communities, where disease was more easily spread. The current research suggests that the overall health of the average person declined with the development of agriculture, government and urbanization.

Aluminum — one of nature’s best conductors of electricity conductors of electricity — may behave like a ceramic or a semiconductor in certain situations, according to an Ohio State University scientist and his colleagues. Among the findings that appear in the current issue of the journal Science: When it comes to forming tiny structures in computer chip circuits and nanotechnology, aluminum may endure mechanical stress more than 30 percent better than copper, which is normally considered to be the stiffer metal

Researchers analyzing ice cores taken from Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro say they’ve found evidence of several catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropic over the millennia, and strong signs the ice field itself will disappear within 20 years, the victim of global warming.

Researchers in Ohio say they’ve come up with a way to shape metal using powerful magnetic fields, a process that could help cut down on the use of toxic lubricants otherwise needed to stamp products as diverse as auto parts and kitchenware. Said one of the researchers: “The process has to be reliable, and require as little human intervention as possible…. In automobile production especially, manufactures need to make parts in as few steps as they possibly can. I think we can do a lot of good things for industry with this technique.”