Recommendation for vitamin D intake was miscalculated, is far too low, experts say

Researchers at UC San Diego and Creighton University have challenged the intake of vitamin D recommended by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Institute of Medicine (IOM), stating that their Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for   vitamin D underestimates the need by a factor of ten.

In a letter published last week in the journal Nutrients the scientists confirmed a calculation error noted by other investigators, by using a data set from a different population. Dr. Cedric F. Garland, Dr.P.H., adjunct professor at UC San Diego's Department of Family Medicine and Public Health said his group was able to confirm findings published by Dr. Paul Veugelers from the University of Alberta School of Public Health that were reported last October in the same journal.

"Both these studies suggest that the IOM underestimated the requirement substantially," said Garland. "The error has broad implications for public health regarding disease prevention and achieving the stated goal of ensuring that the whole population has enough vitamin D to maintain bone health."

The recommended intake of vitamin D specified by the IOM is 600 IU/day through age 70 years, and 800 IU/day for older ages. "Calculations by us and other researchers have shown that these doses are only about one-tenth those needed to cut incidence of diseases related to vitamin D deficiency," Garland explained.

Robert Heaney, M.D., of Creighton University wrote: "We call for the NAS-IOM and all public health authorities concerned with transmitting accurate nutritional information to the public to designate, as the RDA, a value of approximately 7,000 IU/day from all sources."

"This intake is well below the upper level intake specified by IOM as safe for teens and adults, 10,000 IU/day," Garland said. Other authors were C. Baggerly and C. French, of GrassrootsHealth, a voluntary organization in San Diego CA, and E.D. Gorham, Ph.D., of UC San Diego.

Culled from Creighton University

Caring youth-parent relations can be vital to preventing adolescent suicide attempts

Positive relations between youth and their parents can be key to preventing adolescent suicide attempts, according to research. Suicide is the third-leading cause of adolescent death worldwide.

Positive relations between youth and their parents can be key to preventing adolescent suicide attempts, according to the University of British Columbia (UBC) research.

Suicide is the third-leading cause of adolescent death worldwide, and is responsible for a quarter of all adolescent deaths in Canada. The research examines the link between parental bonding -- a term describing the quality of a parent-child relationship -- and a history of suicidal thoughts and attempts.

Numerous studies suggest that positive parental relationships reduce adolescents' risk of experiencing depression, loneliness and suicide. "However, it has been unclear whether positive adolescent-parent relations protect against suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts or both," says Boaz Saffer, the study's lead author and a graduate student in clinical psychology at UBC. "This is a crucial distinction, given that most people who think about suicide do not act on their thoughts."

The research used two U.S.-based samples: adolescent psychiatric patients and high school students. Parental bonding was divided into two categories: parental care and parental overprotection. The patients and students completed several questionnaires measuring parental care and overprotection, as well as other known suicide risk factors such as loneliness, emotional distress, and self-worth.

Results indicated that adolescents with a history of suicide attempts reported lower parental care than non-suicidal adolescents and adolescents with a history of suicidal thoughts. The other variables assessed -- parental overprotection, loneliness, emotional distress and self-worth -- were no different in those who made suicide attempts compared to those who only thought about suicide.

"These findings indicate that caring parent-adolescent relationships reduce the likelihood that suicidal thoughts lead to suicide attempts," says Saffer. "Therefore, increasing parental care might represent an important opportunity to reduce suicide risk in adolescents, especially in adolescents already experiencing suicidal thoughts."

Story Source: University of British Columbia.

Parents Play Key Role In Whether Teen Tobacco Use Becomes A Daily Habit

Researchers have found new evidence showing that parents play a key role in whether or not their adolescent children who experiment with tobacco progress to become daily smokers before they graduate from high school.

A study published on-line and in the September issue of journal Pediatrics shows that parents can be a positive or negative influence on their children's future smoking habit.

"If parents really don't want their children to smoke they need to communicate that by establishing clear guidelines in their families about not smoking and discuss them with their school-age children." said Min Jung Kim, a research scientist with the University of Washington's Social Development Research Group and lead author of the study.

At the same time, parents can increase their children's chances of smoking by their own use of tobacco.

"If parents smoke, teens have more access to cigarettes than teens who have non-smoking parents. A second preventive measure for smoking parents is to quit smoking themselves," said Kim.

The study included 270 adolescents who had begun smoking by the eighth grade but had not advanced to daily smoking at that time. Daily smoking was defined as smoking one cigarette a day for the past 30 days prior to annual interviews. By the time the students were in the 12th grade, 156, or 58 percent, had become daily smokers.

The children in the study were 51 percent male and 85 percent white. They were drawn from a larger study looking at the development of healthy and problem behaviors among children at 10 suburban schools in the Pacific Northwest. Information about their smoking habits was collected during annual interviews from the seventh through 12th grades.

Aside from parenting and parental tobacco use, other factors that predicted teen smoking were having friends who smoked and involvement in other problems behaviors such as skipping school, getting into fights and engaging in vandalism.

Kim said most smoking prevention programs to not directly address the role of parental smoking or the link between anti-social behavior and smoking, which commonly occur together.

"Parents need to know that they are still important and can make their children feel good when they do something right and also know that there are consequences when they do something wrong. Many parents think adolescence is the time for children to have their independence. But it is important to maintain good supervision of your teen. Parents who smoke also need to understand that they are modeling behavior and if they quit smoking they send a strong message to their teenager," said Kim.

She recommends that parents "should not ignore children's experimental smoking at any age because it put them at great risk of progressing to daily smoking." To do that, parents should:

• Set and enforce clear guideline about tobacco.
• Monitor to ensure that your children are following your guidelines.
• Know and monitor your children's friends.
• Provide clear, consistent and positive consequences for following those guidelines and appropriate, consistent negative consequences for violating them.

Culled from University of Washington

How color images can influence consumers

When it comes to buying things, our brains can’t see the big, black-and-white forest for all the tiny, colorful trees. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which found that people who were shown product images in color were more likely to focus on small product details -- even superfluous ones -- instead of practical concerns such as cost and functionality.

The findings, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, mesh well with notions of how vision evolved in the brain, and suggest that viewing objects in black and white helps our brains focus on what's most important.

"Color images help us notice details," said Xiaoyan Deng, an author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at Ohio State. "But black-and-white images let us see the 'big picture' without getting bogged down by those details."

The findings also suggest how marketers can strategically use color -- or its absence -- to change how we feel about a product.

"Marketers may take it for granted that color is always the best presentation format for advertising," Deng added. "This study shows that while color is desirable in most situations, it's not desirable in all situations."

If a product has broad features that set it apart from the competition, then black-and-white images will help customers cast aside minor details and focus on those key features, the researchers found. If a product's details are what set it apart, color images will make those details stand out.

In one part of the study, 94 college students were asked to imagine that they were traveling to a remote campsite where they could receive only one radio station. There, the campsite manager offered two radios for rent: a basic analog radio for $10 a day, or a fancy digital radio with many station preset buttons for $18 a day. Not only was the digital radio more expensive, but its preset buttons would be useless at the campsite.

Students who saw pictures of the radios in black and white tended to make the practical choice -- the analog radio. Only 25 percent chose the digital radio.

But among students who saw the radios in color, twice as many chose the digital radio. In that scenario, 50 percent of students were willing to pay a higher price for a radio with features that they could not use.

"Color drew their focus away from the most important features to the less important features, and their choice shifted to the more expensive radio," Deng said. "I think that's surprising -- that just by manipulating whether the product presentation is in color or black and white, we can affect people's choice."

Color also proved to be a distraction when study participants were asked to sort objects into groups. The researchers recruited people through Amazon Mechanical Turk, a service that provides online study participants.

The 287 participants were shown pictures of shoes and asked to sort them. Each grouping contained two types of shoes that differed greatly in form and function, such as open-toe high heels and rain boots. In that particular example, half of the high heels and the boots were a solid red color, and the other half were red with white polka dots.

When people viewed the shoes in black and white, they sorted the high heels into one group and the rain boots into another 97 percent of the time. But when they saw the shoes in color, that number dropped to 89 percent, with 11 percent sorting the solid-color high heels and boots into one group and the polka-dot heels and boots into another.

The polka dots were clearly visible in black and white, but they had more impact on participants' decision-making when they were seen in color.

Study co-author Kentaro Fujita, associate professor of psychology at Ohio State, has an idea why. It has to do with the origin of our visual systems, and how our brains process night vision.

Of the light-sensitive rod and cone structures in the retina, it's the cones that detect color and the rods that give us night vision, peripheral vision and motion detection. Rods outnumber cones in the eye 20 to 1, and at night, when the cones don't receive enough light to let us distinguish colors properly, we rely on the rods to see what's happening around us -- in black and white.

This would have been especially true for early humans, who didn't have sources of artificial light. At night, being able to tell the difference between objects by shape would have been key to survival.

"Our visual systems evolved to work in both optimal and suboptimal conditions," Fujita explained. "Optimal conditions might be during the day, when I want to distinguish a red apple from a not-so-red apple. The form of the object tells me it's an apple, but I can focus on the color because that's what's important to me. Suboptimal conditions might be at night, when I have to tell whether that object that's moving toward me is my friend or a hungry lion. Then the form of the object is critical."

He suspects that when our eyes see black-and-white images, our brains interpret them in ways similar to night vision: We focus on form and function, and tend to ignore details.

Deng pointed out another circumstance in which people "see" in black and white: when we imagine the distant future. Other studies have shown that people who are asked to think of an event from the near or distant future and then presented with a series of photographs tend to pick less colorful photos as most closely matching their vision.

"It's almost like seeing in black and white is a vehicle for time travel," she said. "When you need to visualize ambiguous, uncertain future events, you want to get away from all those details, to construct that future event in your mind in a meaningful way. Seeing in black and white allows you to construct that event."

Marketers can take advantage of our ability to time travel, too. Deng said that black-and-white images would probably work well in ads for products that will be used in the distant future, such as retirement plans, investments or insurance.

Co-authors on the paper included marketing doctoral student Hyojin Lee, who performed this research for her dissertation, and H. Rao Unnava, senior associate dean and W. Arthur Cullman Professor of Marketing in Ohio State's Fisher College of Business.

Story Source: Ohio State University

Women in science: Leak in the pipeline

By Subhra Priyadarshini

A new study by UNESCO outlining the involvement of women in science has some stark figures for India. The Unesco Institute for Statistics (UIS) has put together an interactive infographic on women in science to highlight the global gender gap in higher education and scientific research. They aptly call it the “leaky pipeline”.

Data compiled from across the world shows more women are enrolling in university but relatively few pursue careers in research. There are many leaks in the pipeline – from stereotypes encountered by girls to the family-caring responsibilities and bias women may face when choosing a career.

In India, according to the UIS data, 44% of bachelor students are female while 41% get till the doctoral level. What happens beyond that has not been chronicled for India, though there are figures from many other countries in the dataset. Women researchers show a tendency to work in the academic and government sectors while men dominate the private research sector, which offers better salaries and opportunities for advancement.

Many factors compel women to drop off the research radar.

In most countries, women researchers seem to be focusing on the social sciences and remain under-represented in engineering and technology. Unesco suggests that in order to level the playing field, girls must be encouraged to pursue math and science. Globally, just one in five countries had achieved somewhat of a gender parity with 45% to 55% of their researchers being women.

In all, just about 30% of the world’s researchers were found to be women. A growing number of women enrol in universities but many opt out at the highest levels required for a research career. There were some surprising exceptions though. For example, in Bolivia, women accounted for 63% researchers, compared to France with a rate of 26% or Ethiopia at 8%.

A Nature Special on Women in Science last year also came up with similar stories. It spoke about how women are deterred from pursuing a career in science at the highest levels and what must be done to address the reasons behind this potential waste of human talent. The special issue showed how despite improvements, female scientists continue to face discrimination, unequal pay and funding disparities. Also, why women in biotechnology are stilled barred from the boardroom.

Nature India‘s previous coverage has looked at what India is doing to woo its women scientists, why women scientists in India need affirmative action and why we can’t ignore women’s role in science. The Nature Indiaforum has also seen heated exchanges and concrete suggestions on how the leaky pipeline can be fixed.

The gender inequality in science can not be emphasised enough. And call for action can never be too late.

A tool to predict crowd turbulence

Recent crowd disasters, such as those seen in 2006 during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and in 2010 at the Love Parade in Duisburg, have underlined the need to better understand what determines the collective behavior of crowds. In a study published in PNAS on 18 April, scientists from CNRS and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Zurich managed to simulate collective movements resulting from interactions between pedestrians within a crowd. Their work enables them to predict potentially dangerous situations and to propose a regulation of movements in the event of a proven risk.

Until now, models for crowd dynamics were mainly constructed based on analogies with physicochemical systems. The behavior of a pedestrian was formalized using a combination of the forces attracting him to his destination and the forces repelling him from other individuals and obstacles. However, these models are difficult to calibrate and only imperfectly reflect reality. To overcome these problems, Mehdi Moussaïd and Guy Theraulaz from the Centre de Recherche sur la Cognition Animale (CNRS / Université Toulouse 3-Paul Sabatier), working in collaboration with Dirk Helbing at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Zurich, have proposed a novel approach based both on cognitive sciences and the physics of complex systems that closely combines experimentation and modeling.

Their model suggests that a pedestrian seeks simply to minimize congestion in his visual field by walking towards the empty spaces he can see, while at the same time adjusting his speed in order to maintain a safe distance from the nearest obstacle. Digital simulations using this model have demonstrated that these two simple rules are sufficient to reproduce a broad range of the collective behaviors observed in crowds, such as the spontaneous formation of unidirectional lanes in opposite directions. Furthermore, as the density of pedestrians increases, the model can predict the emergence of new phenomena, such as the accordion effect characterized by successive forward waves of movement, interspersed with periods during which the pedestrians stand still (stop-and-go). Above a critical density threshold, a combination of these rules with the effect of physical contacts between pedestrians can spontaneously provoke gigantic, collective crushes. This phenomenon, referred to as turbulence, was observed during the accidents that occurred in Mecca in 2006 and characterizes the dynamics of a crowd in a dangerous situation, where pedestrians are overwhelmed by chaotic movement.

This recent work enables a clearer understanding of the dynamics of a moving crowd and opens the way to the development of new risk planning tools. For example, the model designed by these scientists can identify potentially dangerous areas in an environment where are large number of people may gather. It may therefore help urban planners in developing pedestrian precincts in town centers, or engineers to design public buildings (stadiums, concert halls, stations, etc.), or even assist security experts during the organization of major events.

Culled from M. Moussaid, D. Helbing, G. Theraulaz. How simple rules determine pedestrian behavior and crowd disasters. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016507108

Predicting human crowds with statistical physics

A general law of how pedestrians interact in a crowd can be used to create realistic crowds in virtual reality games and to make public spaces safer. For the first time researchers have directly measured a general law of how pedestrians interact in a crowd. This law can be used to create realistic crowds in virtual reality games and to make public spaces safer.

People intuitively know how to navigate through crowds in a way that both minimizes distance travelled and avoids collisions. But the 'force' that governs human interactions has been previously unknown. If humans behave like charged particles, a simple repulsive force across distance might be appropriate. But simulations based on the distance between pedestrians have failed to fully replicate known crowd behaviors.

Ioannis Karamouzas of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues analyzed video footage of crowds in both an outdoor campus and an indoor bottleneck setting, and found that people interact in a consistent and universal way if their "time until a possible collision" is taken into account. In other words, unlike charged particles, humans can anticipate collisions and this is the key to describing crowd interactions.

Based on the data, the researchers found a simple mathematical law for the interaction force between two pedestrians that depends only on the "time until collision" factor. They used this law to simulate realistic crowds in a range of urban settings.

Familiar crowd patterns emerged from the new simulations: people walking on an on-coming collision course veer well in advance, but people traveling in the same direction tend to walk close together. These real-life patterns were difficult to reproduce with previous crowd models.

This work is at the cross roads of sociology and statistical physics. "It is very exciting to me to think about how psychology affects our motion and how people are different from the systems physicists normally model," said Stephen Guy of the University of Minnesota and co-author on the study.

The researchers hope their crowd model can be used to foresee potential dangers in sporting events and festivals in order to avoid stampedes. Their simulations might also be used to test the crowd safety of new buildings well before any construction takes place.

"The universality of our law is really surprising, and understanding this can lead to safer building designs and shed some light into the anticipatory nature of human interactions," said Karamouzas, who will present his work during a talk at the American Physical Society's March Meeting on Friday, March 6.

---

Culled from American Physical Society

Injectables to anti-ageing treatments

It has been one of the most widely embraced cosmetic procedures of all time, but it seems our love affair with botox may finally be coming to an end. British women are turning away from using botox and fillers after several recent celebrity horror stories.

More women are choosing so called notox facials and spa treatments instead of injectables – and sales up three times higher in 2014 than previous year. 

Many are now turning to safer non-invasive anti-ageing treatments and facials which don't have any negative side-effects. Beauty industry expert Dean Nathanson said: 'There has been massive switch from injectables to anti-ageing treatments clearly because women are concerned about the effects certainly for over-use of injectables.

'The move to using facials like the Skinbreeze micro-dermabrasion and oxygen infusion facial which was seen a 200 per cent increase in orders this year, and the CACI micro-current facial which has been dubbed the non-surgical facelift. 

'Both have seen massive rises in numbers of new clients, and we hear from many of our new clients that they are concerned about over-use of injectables and so in terms of anti-ageing treatments they are turning to preventative measures.'

Industry insiders have said that the use of fillers and botox is on the decline now for the first time in over 10 years and women are starting to move away, or at least significantly reduce the amount of injectables they have on their faces.

They appear to be turning instead to procedures such as Skinbreeze, which is a facial that includes a combined micro-dermabrasion and LED light treatment followed by an oxygen infusion of neo-peptide rich serums that inhibit muscle responses and therefore attempts to mimic the effects of botox.

The news that Botox use may be in decline comes after recent research revealed  that a shocking 84 per cent of youth-seekers admitted to having absolutely no idea what was going into their faces when under-going the procedure - or even if the injection given actually contained key ingredient Botulinum toxin.

Transform Cosmetic Surgery, who conducted the research also have seen an alarming 15 per cent rise in the number of patients seeking help following ineffective treatments with non-registered 'faux-tox' salons. Worryingly, they say patients come to them after being treated in a non-clinical environment, despite being given a prescription-only medicine.

Culled from Dailymail UK