Dr. James Sublett, chairman of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology Public Relations Committee, said by planning ahead, seeing an allergist and knowing the causes of allergy and asthma, even those with the most sensitive noses and lungs can enjoy summer fun.

“Although symptoms may not always be severe, summertime allergies and asthma are serious and, in some cases, deadly,” Sublett said in a statement.

Sublett said some surprising asthma triggers include:

– An otherwise healthy snack can mean an oral allergy syndrome for people whose lips begin to tingle after sinking their teeth into a peach, melon, apple, celery, and other fresh fruits and vegetables.

– Sudden changes in the weather can trigger an asthma attack.

– Smoke is a common asthma trigger. Sit upwind of the smoke and avoid getting too close.

– Stinging insects. It is possible to develop a life-threatening allergic reaction to the sting of yellow jackets, honey bees, wasps, hornets and fire ants. Cover up when outdoors, avoid brightly colored clothing, forget perfume and take caution when eating or drinking anything sweet.

– Although not an allergen, the smell of chlorine from pools or hot tubs can be an irritant and cause flare-ups of either allergy-like eye and nose symptoms or asthma in some people.

Phil Lempert, a food industry analyst, trend watcher and creator of supermarketguru.com, said flaxseed and walnut oils have the highest amounts of omega-3s.

However, coconut oil is a wonderful source of medium chain fatty acids, used by the body for energy, he said.

Different oils fit better with different foods. Lempert advises:

– For salads use unrefined avocado oil; hazelnut, almond or walnut oil; use sesame or flaxseed sparingly to add nuttiness.

– For light sauteing, or in sauces, use coconut, peanut or dark-toasted sesame oils.

– For baking, can use apricot kernel oil, coconut, hazelnut, macadamia, peanut, light un-toasted sesame or refined walnut and almond oils. These also work well in roasted dishes.

– For grilling or high-heat frying, peanut oil is the best, or choose refined almond, avocado, sesame, apricot kernel, or coconut oil because they have high burning points and considerable flavor.

– Add a few drops of toasted sesame oil in Asian inspired dishes.

“These are luxury oils. A little goes a long way,” Lempert said in a statement. “Oils that are packaged in dark-colored bottles or tins will last longer. All oils will spoil over time, so it’s best to buy the quantity that you will use in a reasonable amount of time — up to three months.”

Josh Jackson of Washington University in St. Louis looked at data on people with an average age of 73 who had 16 weeks of training, including figuring out patterns and doing Sudoku and crossword puzzles.

Jackson said the important finding was the elderly did better because they learned to do new things.

“It looks like those things are positive. So to the extent that people can get out in the world, try new things, exercise their minds — that’s all for the best,” Jackson said in a statement. “Older people trained in thinking on how to use skills to solve puzzles then felt more open to other experiences.”

The study was published in the journal Psychology and Aging.

Fernando Gomez-Pinilla of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said high-fructose corn syrup — an inexpensive liquid six times sweeter than cane sugar — is commonly added to processed foods, including soft drinks, condiments and baby food.

Gomez-Pinilla and study co-author Rahul Agrawal, a UCLA visiting postdoctoral fellow from India, studied two groups of rats that each consumed a fructose solution as drinking water for six weeks. The second group also received omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which protects against damage to the synapses — the chemical connections between brain cells that enable memory and learning.

The animals were fed standard rat chow and trained on a maze twice daily for five days before starting the experimental diet. The scientists placed visual landmarks in the maze to help the rats learn and remember the way.

Six weeks later, the researchers tested the rats’ ability to recall the route and escape the maze.

“The second group of rats navigated the maze much faster than the rats that did not receive omega-3 fatty acids,” Gomez-Pinilla said. “The DHA-deprived animals were slower, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity. Their brain cells had trouble signaling each other, disrupting the rats’ ability to think clearly and recall the route they’d learned six weeks earlier.”

The findings were published in the Journal of Physiology.

Dr. Christopher Callahan of Indiana University School of Medicine, who is also Regenstrief Institute investigator, said the finding challenges the commonly held view that most individuals with dementia in the United States eventually move to nursing homes and die there.

“This is a study on what it is like to live with dementia over a five- to 10-year period,” Callahan said in a statement. “You probably won’t proceed on a straight line from home to hospital to nursing home. You will experience multiple transitions as you progress from mild to moderate to advanced dementia.”

Most people with dementia, even advanced dementia, die of a physical condition such as heart disease, cancer or pneumonia, Callahan said.

People with dementia go to a nursing home after hospitalization 74 percent of the time but they don’t remain there. Approximately one-quarter will return to the hospital in less than a month and many of the remainder will return home, Callahan said.

The researchers determined a majority of care for those with dementia, even advanced dementia, is provided in the community by families, the study said.

The findings were published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

The finding is possible bad news for those who use the structures to guide them to stars in their search for distant planets, and may raise questions about the existence of a controversial candidate exoplanet.

Sharply defined or elongated rings seen in the disk of dust and gas around stars had been assumed to be caused by unseen planets carving paths through the disk.

“I call it the dark matter argument,” Wladimir Lyra at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told NewScientist.com. “There is something you are seeing that you cannot explain, and you blame the gravity of something you cannot see.”

Now Lyra, with NASA colleagues, has shown interactions between dust and gas alone can account for the rings.

Dust concentrates in regions of high-pressure gas that when heated by the star expands, creating higher pressure which then concentrates more dust, the researchers said.

Lyra and his colleagues simulated this feedback process and, with no planets in their computer model, created several types of structure, including elongated rings and clumps.

The work calls into question a bright dot in the disc around the star Fomalhaut thought to be a planet, but which could be due to the dynamics of dust and gas alone, the researchers said.

Markus Janson of Princeton University in New Jersey, who has studied the Fomalhaut system, says it’s still too soon to tell what the bright dot is and why the nearby dust ring appears so sculpted.

“I’m now more open to the idea that maybe there are no planets [around Fomalhaut] at all,” he said.

The Elektro-L is orbiting Earth on a geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles above the equator, sending photographs of the entire planet every 30 minutes, Gizmodo.com reported.

The images combine multiple light wavelengths, both visible and infrared.

“The images posted … are a combination of visible and near-infrared wavelengths, so they show the Earth in a way not visible to human eyes,” Robert Simmon, a scientist at the NASA Earth Observatory at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said.

The highest resolution image of our home planet consists of 121 megapixels, a resolution of 0.62 miles per pixel, Gizmodo reported.

The Elektro-L is similar to NASA’s GOES satellites, but Elektro-L uses three bands in reflected light — red and two near infrared bands — while GOES does not scan in near-infrared.

After emerging from their underground nests on the beaches of eastern Florida, the turtles begin an epic migration that eventually returns then to North American coastal waters.

Researchers looking at precisely how young loggerheads navigate their transoceanic migration say the 2-inch-long hatchlings likely advance along their open-sea routes through a combination of strategic swimming interspersed with passive drifting on favorable ocean currents that allow the young turtles to migrate long distances on limited energy stores.

“Young turtles probably rely on a strategy of ‘smart swimming’ to optimize their energy use during migrations,” University of North Carolina marine biologist Kenneth J. Lohmann said. “The new results tell us that a surprisingly small amount of directional swimming in just the right places has a profound effect on the migratory paths that turtles follow and on whether they reach habitats favorable for survival.”

Once in the open ocean, rafts of plants often provide young loggerheads with food, resting places and camouflage from large fish and birds, the scientists said.

“Most researchers have assumed that, because ocean currents in some places move faster than young turtles can swim, the turtles cannot control their migratory paths,” Lohmann said. “This study shows otherwise.”

Astrophysicists at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute said up until now it was thought it had taken billions of years for stars to form and create galaxies with a high content of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium — like carbon and oxygen — necessary for the formation of planets and life as we know it.

But this process went surprisingly quickly in some galaxies, they said.

“We have studied 10 galaxies in the early universe and analyzed their light spectra. We are observing light from the galaxies that has been on a 10-12 billion year journey to Earth, so we see the galaxies as they were then,” Johan Fynbo from the Dark Cosmology Center at the Niels Bohr Institute said.

“Our expectation was that they would be relatively primitive and poor in heavier elements, but we discovered somewhat to our surprise that the gas in some of the galaxies and thus the stars in them had a very high content of heavier elements,” he said.

“The gas was just as enriched as our own sun.”

The findings suggest galaxies from the very early universe had a surprisingly large quantity of heavier elements, researchers said, noting one of the galaxies studied was especially interesting.

“For one of the galaxies, we observed the outer regions and here there was also a high element content. This suggests that large parts of the galaxy are enriched with a high content of heavier elements and that means that already in the early history of the universe there was potential for planet formation and life,” Fynbo said.

That is the conclusion of a study to be presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

“The preliminary results of our study suggest that people are more likely to disclose sensitive information via text messages than in voice interviews,” said Fred Conrad, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.

“This is sort of surprising,” Conrad said, “since many people thought that texting would decrease the likelihood of disclosing sensitive information because it creates a persistent, visual record of questions and answers that others might see on your phone and in the cloud.”

Researchers conducted the study to see whether responses to the same questions varied depending on whether the questions were asked via text or voice, whether a human or a computer asked the questions, and whether the environment, including the presence of other people and the likelihood of multitasking, affected the answers.

“We’re in the early stages of analyzing our findings,” psychology Professor Michael Schober said.

“But so far it seems that texting may reduce some respondents’ tendency to shade the truth or to present themselves in the best possible light in an interview — even when they know it’s a human interviewer they are communicating with via text.”