Futurity.org » Tulane University

Fast-food diners say, ‘Downsize me’

Keith Brannon-Tulane — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:55:27 +0000

TULANE (US) — Asking consumers if they would like a smaller portion may be a better approach to curb overeating than posting calorie counts.

The study from Tulane University found that when servers asked customers whether they’d like to “downsize” starchy side dishes at a Chinese fast-food restaurant as many as a third gladly cut back—saving an average 200 calories each meal.

“Our goal was to test whether the invitation to downsize a meal component would be embraced by consumers and, importantly, whether the approach would be more effective than a purely information-based approach—in this case calorie labeling,” says lead study author Janet Schwartz, assistant professor of marketing at Tulane University.

Bacteria turn newspapers into biofuel

Kathryn Hobgood-Tulane — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:21:17 +0000

TULANE (US) — A novel bacterial strain uses recycled newspaper to produce butanol, a biofuel that can serve as a substitute for gasoline.

TU-103 is the first bacterial strain from nature that produces butanol directly from cellulose, an organic compound.

Kids with HIV living well longer

Arthur Nead-Tulane — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:09:36 +0000

TULANE (US) — Children born with HIV are living well into adolescence and adulthood, according to a new study that also finds advances in treatment have all but eradicated mother-to-baby transmission of the disease.

“About two thirds of these kids, at this point, don’t have virus detectable in the blood,” says Russell Van Dyke, professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Tulane University. “While they are still infected and they are not cured, it’s surprising how well they’re doing, considering what they’ve been through.”

New stint for hypertension meds

Arthur Nead-Tulane — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:04:33 +0000

TULANE (US) — High blood pressure medication may reduce the risk of stroke and congestive heart failure in patients with a history of cardiovascular disease but who don’t have hypertension.

The analysis of previously published clinical studies appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Tricking cancer cells to go suicidal

Belinda Lacoste-Tulane — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:39:56 +0000

TULANE (US) — A new treatment that causes cancer cells to self-destruct while sparing surrounding healthy cells, has been successful in animal models.

The method takes a gene from a cancer cell, extracts the current DNA message from the gene and replaces it with a code that instructs the cell to kill itself.

Fish offer lesson in movement

Kathryn Hobgood-Tulane — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 18:30:07 +0000

TULANE (US) — A computational model of a swimming fish offers important insight into the interaction of internal and external forces on locomotion.

Researchers simulated how a fish’s flexible body bends, depending on both the forces from the fluid moving around it and the muscles at work inside.

HIV’s 30,000-year-old ancestor

Keith Brannon-Tulane — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 17:19:23 +0000

TULANE / ARIZONA (US) — The HIV-like virus that infects monkeys is thousands of years older than previously thought, according to a new study.

Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which is the ancestor to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is between 32,000 and 75,000 years old and may even be more than a million years old, according to genetic analysis of unique SIV strains found in monkeys on Bioko, an island off the coast of Africa.

Amazon megastorm felled half a billion trees

Keith Brannon-Tulane — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:21:04 +0000

TULANE (US)—A single, violent storm that swept across the Amazon forest in 2005 killed half a billion trees, far more than previously suspected, according to the first study to produce an actual body count of the losses.

Amazon rainforests, which are thought to absorb a significant portion of carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere, are an important bellwether for climate change researchers.

Fish morphs as neighborhood changes

Kathryn Hobgood-Tulane — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:31:04 +0000

TULANE (US)—Scientists have found a species of river fish that is able to change into a new shape as its river environment gets dammed up and goes from a fast-flowing river current to the still waters of a reservoir.

“The public hears that dams do things like prevent salmon from migrating upstream to spawn, or that some species are wiped out entirely within a stream when a dam goes in,” says Travis Haas, doctoral student of ecology and evolutionary biology at Tulane University.

Could melting ice cause a cold snap?

Kathryn Hobgood-Tulane — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:11:46 +0000

TULANE (US)—Earth was just coming out of an ice age 9,300 years ago when a cataclysmic event occurred that plunged the planet into a cold “snap” that lasted for centuries.

Scientists have suspected that water melted from snow and ice introduced into the North Atlantic Ocean was the cause—but the source and volume were a mystery.