Women are more attracted to men with masculine, low-pitched voices, even though they are more likely to cheat, a new study has found.

Women perceive men with low-pitched voices as those who are least likely to marry and most likely to cheat, so women are more attracted to them for short-term relationships, researchers at McMaster University, Canada, have found.

The study offers insight into the evolution of the human voice and how we choose our mates.

“The sound of someone’s voice can affect how we think of them,” said Jillian O’Connor, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behavior and lead author of the study.

“Until now, it’s been unclear why women would like the voices of men who might cheat. But we found that the more women thought these men would cheat, the more they were attracted to them for a brief relationship when they are less worried about fidelity,” O’Connor said.

For the study, 87 women listened to men’s voices that were manipulated electronically to sound higher or lower, and then chose who they thought was more likely to cheat on their romantic partner.

Researchers also asked the participants to choose the voice they thought was more attractive for a long-term versus a short-term relationship.

“From an evolutionary perspective, these perceptions of future sexual infidelity may be adaptive,” said David Feinberg, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behavior.

“The consequences of infidelity are very high whether it is emotional or financial and this research suggests that humans have evolved as a protection mechanism to avoid long-term partners who may cheat,” he added.

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences

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Infants detect unjustified emotional reactions from as early as 18 months

When your feelings and reactions don’t align, can kids tell there’s something wrong? New research from Concordia proves that they can — even when they’re as young as 18 months old.

In a study recently published in Infancy: The Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies, psychology researchers Sabrina Chiarella and Diane Poulin-Dubois demonstrate that infants can detect whether a person’s emotions are justifiable given a particular context. They prove that babies understand how the meaning of an experience is directly linked to the expressions that follow.

The implications are significant, especially for caregivers. “Our research shows that babies cannot be fooled into believing something that causes pain results in pleasure. Adults often try to shield infants from distress by putting on a happy face after a negative experience. But babies know the truth: from as early as 18 months, they can implicitly understand which emotions go with which events,” says Psychology Professor Poulin-Dubois.

She and PhD candidate Chiarella recruited 92 infants at the 15-month and 18-month mark. In a lab setting, the babies watched an actor perform several scenarios in which emotional reactions went with or against pantomimed experiences. In one of these, a researcher demonstrated mismatched emotion by acting sad when presented with a desired toy; in another, she expressed an emotion that went with the experience by pretending to be in pain from a hurt finger.

At 15 months, the infants did not show a significant difference in reactions to these events, physically empathizing with the researcher’s “sad face” whether it was justified or not. This indicates that the understanding of the link between an an emotional experience and a facial expression is an ability that has yet to develop at that stage.

At 18 months, however, the infants clearly detected when a facial expression did not match an experience. They spent more time looking at the researcher’s face, and checked back more frequently with the attendant caregiver to gauge the reaction of a trusted source. They also only showed empathy towards the researcher when her sad face was warranted — so when she acted unhappy or in pain in an appropriate situation.

Chiarella explains that the indiscriminate show of concern to sad faces in the 15-month-olds is an adaptive behavior. “The ability to detect sadness and then react immediately has an evolutionary implication. However, to function effectively in the social world, children need to develop the ability to understand others’ behaviors by inferring what is going on internally for those around them.”

The researchers are currently examining whether exposure to an emotionally unreliable individual will affect infants’ willingness to help or learn from that individual.

Partners in research: This research was supported by the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Both researchers are members of Concordia’s Centre for Research in Human Development.

Source: http://www.concordia.ca

SCIENTISTS have discovered a new type of botox they believe is the “deadliest substance known to man” and have withheld the DNA sequence because an antidote is not known.

 It is the first time the scientific community has made such a move to withhold such information but security concerns have dictated that they do so.

New Scientist reports that just 2 billionths of a gram, or inhaling 13 billionths of a gram, of the protein botulinum produced by the soil bacterium Clostridium botulinum will kill an adult.

The toxin blocks the release of acetylcholine, the chemical secreted by nerves that makes muscles work. People who accidentally ingest it, as can happen when the bacteria grows in food, develop botulism and often die of paralysis.

Victims are treated with antibodies that are produced artificially and react with the seven families of botulinum – named A to G – discovered so far.

Stephen Arnon and colleagues at the California Department of Public Health in Sacramento reported this week that they have found an eighth toxin – type H – in the faeces of a child who had the typical symptoms of botulism.

“Because no antitoxins as yet have been developed to counteract the novel C. Botulinum toxin, the authors had detailed consultations with representatives from numerous appropriate US government agencies,” editors of the Journal of Infectious Diseases said.

Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo tried to release Botulinum in downtown Tokyo in the 1990s.

 

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Many movies and novels speculate as to what it would be like to peek inside a person’s mind and know what he or she is thinking. But up until recently, such a skill has only existed in the realm of science fiction.

Now, scientists may be turning fantasy into reality, having created a novel brain monitoring technique that could lead to the development of “mind-reading” applications in the distant future.

Utilizing a series of electrodes attached to portions of a patient’s brain, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine were able to eavesdrop on a person’s brain activity as he or she performed normal, daily functions – a process they termed “intracranial recording.”

The team conducted a number of these recordings on three epilepsy patients who had been admitted to the hospital for observation, allowing the researchers to identify a brain region that is activated when a person performs mathematical calculations. Additionally, researchers were able to determine that this area of the brain is similarly activated when an individual uses numbers – or even quantitative expressions such as “more than” – in everyday conversation.

 

Detailed in the journal Nature Communications, the findings provide a new framework for studying how the brain works under normal day-to-day circumstances.

“The beauty of this paper is not just to report another experimental finding, but it is a breakthrough in terms of methodological advancement in terms of being able to record from brain activity in real life, natural conditions,” lead author Dr. Josef Parvizi, associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences and director of Stanford’s Human Intracranial Cognitive Electrophysiology Program (SHICEP), told FoxNews.com.

As the director of SHICEP, Parvizi was able to direct this research on seizure patients who had been admitted to the hospital for epilepsy surgery evaluations.  During these visits, patients have a portion of their skull temporarily removed so that intracranial electrodes can be attached to the exposed brain surface.  They are then monitored for up to a week as the electrodes pick up electrical activity in the brain, allowing neurologists to observe the patients’ seizures and pinpoint the exact portion of the brain from which the seizures are originating.

Throughout the course of their hospital stay, these patients are mostly confined to their rooms, as they cannot be disconnected from the monitoring apparatus.  However, they are comfortable, alert and free of pain – making them great test subjects for understanding how the human brain operates in everyday scenarios.

To test their intracranial recording technique, Parvizi and his team recruited three patient volunteers, asking them to solve mathematical equations and various true/false questions that appeared on a computer screen. Some of the true/false questions required the use of simple mathematical calculation, such as verifying whether or not 2 + 2 = 5.

“They had to press ‘1’ for correct or ‘2’ for incorrect for a statement like, ‘I had coffee today,” or, “I took a cab this morning,” Parvizi explained. “So the answer to the first question is ‘yes’ and the answer to the second question is of course ‘no,’ because they are in the hospital; they can’t take a cab.”

For posterity, the entirety of the patients’ stay at the hospital was monitored by a video camera.

After analyzing the volunteer’s electrode records from these experiments, the researchers saw a spike in the electrical activity of the brain’s intraperietal sulcus when the patients performed calculations.  They also found that activity in this brain region spiked several other times throughout the day, prompting Parvizi and his team to turn to their video surveillance to better understand what initiated the electrical bursts.

The footage revealed that when a patient mentioned a number – or even spoke in quantitative terms, such as saying the phrases “more than” or “many” – the same spikes were seen in the intraperietal sulcus.  This finding was mostly unexpected for the researchers.

Given the success of their study, Parvizi said their intracranial recordings could completely change the way researchers observe the brain.  He noted that current brain monitoring techniques, such as the use of functional magnetic resonance imagining (MRI), do not provide a very accurate picture of the human brain as it is in normal settings.

“The MRI scanner is several tons, and you can’t actually take an MRI scanner home, but this (apparatus) is something you can walk with – as a patient of course,” Parvizi said.  “So subjects that are implanted with these spying electrodes, they were walking and talking… We have a new method by which we can study the brain activity in natural environments, so it’s totally different than other experiments.”

Parvizi said this technique has the potential to lead to very beneficial medical applications, especially for patients whose brains or nervous systems have been severely damaged.

“If we’re able to decipher the code of brain activity, let’s say beyond mathematics, then patients who are unable to speak, for example (due to) stroke, or are unable to move, we could use this deciphering method to communicate with machines so that machines can do (the talking),” Parvizi said.  “Or we can somehow try to understand what’s going on in the brain activity without even patients talking.”

While some experts have speculated that Parvizi’s new technique could one day be used in a sinister way to read a patient’s private thoughts, Parvizi said that is still a very fictional concept.

“This is too far-fetched.  We are not there yet.  We are light years away from mind-reading,” Parvizi said. “I don’t want people to get scared (thinking) doctors are mind-reading their patients.”

Source : Fox News

The latest study on labor and delivery for moms of multiples found that moms of twins can safely deliver their babies without having a c-section. The study, performed all over the world, is the latest to question the need for c-section births. Currently one-third of all births in the US are via c-section; three-fourths of which are twin births and studies, much like this one, continue to challenge the long-held beliefs that women delivering more than one baby should deliver by c-section and not vaginally.

Lead researcher Dr. Jon Barrett of Sunnybrook Health Sciences in Toronto pioneered a study in 25 countries on 2,800 women pregnant with twin babies. Of all the moms-to-be included in the study, 1,800 were scheduled to deliver via c-section and the remaining half planned to deliver vaginally. As their due dates approached, researchers noted that 40 percent of the moms who planned to deliver vaginally ended up having a c-section and about 10 percent of the moms in the c-section group ended up delivering their babies vaginally. Barrett and his team noted that though 2 percent of the newborns died at birth or were born with health problems, the method of birth made no difference and didn’t affect the rate of complications in moms.

The study was paid for by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and published in the New England Journal of Medicine and is the latest research performed that goes against the grain that moms of multiples must have a c-section. Though they’re still medically recommended for moms (or babies) at risk of complications, Dr. Michael Greene from Massachusetts General Hospital was quoted in the publication saying that though the findings don’t prove that all sets of twins should be delivered vaginally, it does give moms-to-be the room to plan to deliver vaginally so long as her personal doctor is experienced in twin deliveries and knows when a c-section is necessary.

Earlier research found that women pregnant with twins labor longer, which actually reduces their risk of c-section. Using the numbers from a national database of labor and delivery information from several clinical centers, lead researcher Dr. Heidi Leftwich and her colleagues found that twins required about one to three hours more than single babies in the first stage of labor. The researchers defined the first stage of labor as when the cervix opens until it is wide enough for the baby to pass through. They defined the second stage of delivery as the actual birth of the baby. Researchers then compared data from about 900 twin pregnancies with 100,500 singleton pregnancies. The single-birth pregnancies served as the control group. Researchers measured the time it took for a woman’s cervix to dilate to 1 centimeter and found that in twin pregnancies, it took an average of 12.7 hours for the cervix to progress from 4 to 10 centimeters (which was defined as fully dilated). In single birth pregnancies, it took an average of 9.6 hours. “Doctors could let twins labor longer before calling it ‘failure to progress’,” Dr. Heidi Leftwich said.

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Pancreatic cancer is cancer of the pancreas. The pancreas is a glandular organ in the digestive system and endocrine system that produces several important hormones including insulin, glucagon, somatostatin, and pancreatic polypeptide and that secretes pancreatic juice containing digestive enzymes. The survival rate for pancreatic cancer is less than 14 percent, usually around three to five percent after five years.

A link between obesity and pancreatic cancer had previously been posited but had never been confirmed. The inflammation and insulin resistance associated with obesity are thought to increase an obese person’s risk of developing deadly pancreatic cancer.

A new study published in the Cancer Prevention Journal is the first to show a direct causal link between obesity and pancreatic cancer risk in an animal model.

Researchers at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA created a state-of-the-art mouse model that resembles important clinical features of human obesity such as weight gain and metabolic disturbances. The researchers fattened mice with high-calorie, high-fat diets to the point of obesity.

Mice fed normal diets had mostly normal pancreases.

However, when fed the high-calorie, high-fat diets, the mice PanIN lesions and had fewer overall healthy pancreases. PanIN lesions, or pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia lesions, are the most common precursor lesions on the pancreas before pancreatic cancer. In addition to the development of PanIN lesions, a common precursor to pancreatic cancer, the mice on the unhealthy diets also gained significantly more weight and had abnormalities of their metabolism,, increased insulin levels, and marked pancreatic tissue inflammation.

As Dr. Guido Eibl, a professor-in-residence in the department of surgery at David Geffen School of Medicine, explains:

“The development of these lesions in mice is very similar to what happens in humans. These lesions take a long time to develop into cancer, so there is enough time for cancer preventive strategies, such as changing to a lower fat, lower calorie diet, to have a positive effect.”

The results of the study directly link obesity and pancreatic cancer risk. High-fat, high-calorie diets that often lead to obesity increase a person’s risk of developing deadly pancreatic cancer. Switching to a lower-fat, lower-calorie diet may mitigate the negative effects of obesity on pancreatic cancer.

Source: http://www.inquisitr.com

People with the most dangerous type of skin cancer tend to stay out of the sun and wear extra sunscreen the year after being diagnosed. But a new small study suggests those precautions don’t last.

Two to three years after being diagnosed with melanoma, people spent as many days in the sun and were exposed to at least as much UV radiation as their peers without the disease, researchers found.

“Something tells us that they relax more when time passes by after diagnosis,” Dr. Luise Idorn, the study’s lead author from Bispebjerg Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark, said.

“We think they just regress back to old habits.”

Rates of melanoma have been rising in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society. It predicts over 76,000 new melanomas will be diagnosed in 2013.

People who have had melanoma have a higher than average chance of getting it again. But that risk can be reduced if they cover up and stay out of the sun, Idorn told Reuters Health.

To see how well patients protect themselves, she and her colleagues tracked 20 people during the three summers after they were diagnosed with melanoma.

They compared those patients to another 20 melanoma-free people who mirrored the patients in their age, gender and skin type.

All study participants recorded the time they spent in the sun and use of sunscreen in daily diaries. They also wore watches that measured UV radiation exposure.

During the first summer after patients were diagnosed with melanoma, they spent fewer days in the sun without sunscreen than people in the comparison group, the researchers found.

However, patients’ daily UV radiation dose rose by 25 percent from the first summer to the second, and increased again in the third summer. People without melanoma, on the other hand, were exposed to similar levels of radiation across all three years.

UV exposure tended to be higher among patients than people without skin cancer by the third summer. But that difference was small and could have been due to chance, Idorn and her colleagues reported Wednesday in JAMA Dermatology.

Half of the cancer-free group and 60 percent of people with melanoma reported getting sunburned at least once during the study period, they added.

“I would have thought that a diagnosis of melanoma would change their behavior. This study indicates they may be more cautious, but only the first year after diagnosis,” Idorn said.

“It’s disturbing results that these patients who are really at quite high risk of a second melanoma are not reducing their sun exposure,” Brenda Cartmel, from the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut, said.

“This is surprising,” added Cartmel, who has studied people’s behavior after a skin cancer diagnosis but wasn’t involved in the new study.

The researchers noted that their study was small and did not include information on sun exposure from before participants developed melanoma.

“It may be more difficult than we realize for people who really enjoy the sun to stay out of it,” Idorn said. “It may be a habit or a way of living that is difficult to abstain from, even after a cancer diagnosis.”

Dermatologist Dr. Brundha Balaraman from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis said she found the results “not entirely surprising” because skin cancer is more common among people who spend lots of time in the sun to begin with.

“It would be interesting to assess sun behaviors before and after the diagnosis of melanoma to determine whether a patient improves from his personal baseline,” Balaraman, who also didn’t participate in the new research, told Reuters Health in an email.

According to Idorn, there’s a need for more studies, including focus groups of people with melanoma, to figure out how doctors can help patients reduce their time in the sun.

Cartmel told Reuters Health she and her colleagues are working on those types of studies now.

“I don’t think what we are going to advise people to do is going to be different,” she said. “I just think somehow we need to get that message over maybe in a different way.”

Source: http://uswebdaily.com/news2/after-melanoma-people-head-back-to-the-sun-study

A commonly used blood pressure drug could help fight cancer by opening up blood vessels in solid tumors.

Used beside conventional cancer-fighting drugs, it could improve life expectancy, experts believe.

Following successful testing in mice, doctors plan to give losartan to patients with pancreatic cancer to see if it can tackle this hard-to-treat disease, Nature Communications reports.

Currently, only 5% of pancreatic cancer patients survive for at least 5 years.

This is partly because only one in 10 people with the disease has a tumor that is operable.

Future hope

Investigators at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the US are currently recruiting volunteer patients with inoperable pancreatic cancer to test out the new drug combination of chemotherapy plus losartan.

We don’t yet know if they work exactly the same way in people”

Although the treatment will not cure them, the researchers hope it will give the patients more months or years of life than they might otherwise get.

Losartan has been used for more than a decade as a safe blood pressure medication.

It works by making the blood vessels relax or dilate so that they can carry more blood, easing pressure.

The Massachusetts team found that the drug was beneficial in mice with breast and pancreatic cancer.

It improved blood flow in and around the tumors allowing more of the chemotherapy drugs to be delivered to their target.

Mice given this treatment, rather than standard chemotherapy alone, survived for longer.

Dr Emma Smith of Cancer Research UK said: “This interesting study in mice sheds light on why drugs for hypertension might improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy, but we don’t yet know if they work exactly the same way in people.

“The fact that these drugs are already widely used to treat high blood pressure will hopefully cut down the amount of time it will take to test their potential in treating cancer but they may not be safe for all patients or when combined with other cancer treatments, so we need to wait for the answers from clinical trials which are already under way.”

Source: bbc.co.uk/health