This news release is available in French. Commuting length, distance, and means are stress factors that can lead to burnout, says Annie Barreck of the University of Montreal's School of Industrial Relations. "A correlation exists between commuting stress factors and the likelihood of suffering from burnout. But their importance varies according to the individual, the conditions in which their trips take place, and the place where the individual works," she explained. Barreck will present her research today at the 83rd congress of the Association francophone pour ...

In a new national survey of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients, Health Union found a severe impact on quality of life, employment, and ability to afford treatment. The autoimmune condition attacks the body, resulting in joint inflammation, pain, stiffness, and swelling, but may also harm other organs. About 1.3 million Americans or about one percent of the global population have RA. Ninety-four percent of respondents with RA said they cannot do as much as they were able before acquiring the disease. Additionally, 67% said others do not understand the severity of their ...

Protected areas are the cornerstone to prevent species extinctions. The Convention on Biological Diversity have set a target to protect 17% of all terrestrial land by 2020. Many of the international recommendations concerning protection goals are provided for single countries to take action individually. Researchers in the University of Helsinki, Finland, stress the importance of international collaborations in the protected area expansion process. "It has been shown that working at the country level is less efficient than promoting transnational collaborations. As ...

New UK research has challenged the assumption that people with rheumatoid arthritis always take their medication as prescribed. Researchers from the Arthritis Research UK Centre for Epidemiology at The University of Manchester found that 40% of patients scored low on an adherence questionnaire at least once during their time in a recent study, indicating that they might not be taking their expensive biological therapies as regularly as prescribed. Their research is published online in the journal Rheumatology. The findings have prompted Arthritis Research UK's head ...

Cough treatments could change dramatically after the herpes virus helped researchers discover that the respiratory tract links to two different parts of the nervous system. A research team led by The University of Queensland's Dr Stuart Mazzone made the important breakthrough after setting out to learn more about the triggers behind excessive coughing. "Different physical sensations arise from the upper and lower respiratory tracts in people with respiratory diseases," said Dr Mazzone, from the School of Biomedical Sciences. "The irritating sensations from the upper ...

Polymer solar cells are a hot area of research due to both their strong future potential and the significant challenges they pose. It is believed that thanks to lower production costs, they could become a viable alternative to conventional solar cells with silicon substrates when they achieve a power conversion efficiency--a measure that indicates how much electricity they can generate from a given amount of sunlight--of between 10 and 15 percent. Now, using carefully designed materials and an "inverted" architecture, a team of scientists has achieved efficiency of 10 percent, ...

Giant strides have been taken in the early care of very premature infants in postnatal intensive care units during the past two decades. Doctors can now support the function of especially the lungs, heart and the circulatory system so as to guarantee the survival of most of even extremely premature infants. Despite a good start, many of these may still have lifelong problems with brain function, such as attention deficit disorders or difficulty with visual function. For this reason, the primary focus of developing care for premature infants has been on securing brain ...

HANOVER, N.H. - If you're a college student wondering how your study and party habits will affect your GPA, wonder no longer. Dartmouth researchers and their colleagues have built the first app that automatically predicts college students' grade point average based on their smartphone data. The findings offer new ways to improve students' performance, providing real-time feedback on their studying, partying, sleeping, exercising and other conscious and unconscious behaviors to help them stay on track academically. Dartmouth computer science Professor Andrew Campbell, ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Air pollution regulations issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are estimated to save thousands of lives annually. A new study by researchers at Indiana University says these estimates are more uncertain than commonly believed. Researchers Kerry Krutilla, David H. Good and John D. Graham of the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs analyzed the costs and expected lifesavings of nine regulations issued between 2011 and 2013. The bulk of these regulations require national emissions standards for hazardous air pollutants. The analysis ...

PITTSBURGH, May 26, 2015 - Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have identified two new classes of RNAs that are closely associated with a protein known to be a prognostic biomarker for breast cancer and could play a role in progression of prostate cancer. Their findings were published in the June issue of the scientific journal RNA. Levels of human Y-box binding protein 1 (YB-1), which is involved in many cellular functions, have been shown to correlate with drug resistance and poor patient outcomes in a variety of cancers. The observation that ...

When Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse, he didn't give much thought to how he might bring his character to life in the real world. But robotics now puts that possibility within reach, so Disney researchers have found a way for a robot to mimic an animated character's walk. Beginning with an animation of a diminutive, peanut-shaped character that walks with a rolling, somewhat bow-legged gait, Katsu Yamane and his team at Disney Research Pittsburgh analyzed the character's motion to design a robotic frame that could duplicate the walking motion using 3D-printed links and ...

College Park, Md and Annapolis, Md -- A new study from researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) demonstrates that the highly contentious debate on climate change is fueled in part by how information flows throughout policy networks. The UMD and SESYNC researchers found that "echo chambers"--social network structures in which individuals with the same viewpoint share information with each other--play a significant role in climate policy communication. The researchers say that echo chambers may help ...

Ask any molecular plant biologist about RNA extractions and you might just open up the floodgates to the woes of troubleshooting. RNA extraction is a notoriously tricky and sensitive lab procedure. New protocols out of the University of Florida are quicker, more effective, and more reliable than previous methods. "Obtaining pure and intact RNA samples is essential for sequencing the active genes, or the transcriptome, of a plant," explains botanist Ingrid Jordon-Thaden, who developed the protocols. The protocols are given in bench-ready form with detailed notes and ...

Adam C. Levine, M.D., an emergency medicine physician at Rhode Island Hospital found that the World Health Organization's current weight-based guidelines for assessing malnutrition in children with diarrhea are not as reliable as measuring the child's upper arm circumference. His research was published in the Journal of Nutrition. Diarrhea is common among children who visit health facilities in developing nations. The traditional measures for determining whether a child is moderately or severely malnourished are based on assessing the child's weight directly. Levine found ...

Old-school field work meets cutting-edge technology! For decades, researchers have been making artificial eggs out of plaster, wood, and other materials to test how birds identify and reject the eggs that invading "brood parasites" sometimes sneak into their nests. But these methods have many limitations, and a new study published in the open-access journal PeerJ is the first to test the usefulness of 3D printed eggs for research on egg rejection. Brood parasites are birds that don't build nests of their own. Instead, they slip their eggs into the nests of other species, ...

Scientists at the Molecular Medicine Institute in Lisbon, Portugal, and at the University College London Ear Institute, United Kingdom, have developed a simple and efficient protocol to generate inner ear hair cells, the cells responsible for our hearing and sense of balance. This study is an important step for the future production of large numbers of these cells for use in cell transplantation therapies or large-scale drug screens. The research has just been published in the scientific journal Development at http://dev.biologists.org/. Sensory hair cells located in ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - If you're watching television while using a second screen - like a smartphone or tablet - new research suggests that some of the most expensive marketing messages aimed at you are missing their mark. While the trend of "second screen" use has become pervasive, this is the first study to show that viewers have trouble recalling brands they see (or hear) on TV if they're using such devices. "Viewers don't even remember that your brand was there on TV because they were busy posting on Facebook or Twitter or reading email," said Jonathan Jensen, who led ...

Irvine, Calif., May 26, 2015 - The Millennium Drought in southeastern Australia forced Greater Melbourne, a city of 4.3 million people, to successfully implement innovations that hold critical lessons for water-stressed regions around the world, according to findings by UC Irvine and Australian researchers. It wasn't a new pipeline over the mountains, special rate hikes or a $6 billion desalination plant that kept faucets running. Rather, integrated outreach by utilities and agencies required to work together led to a culture shift among ordinary water users, according ...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (MAY 26, 2015). A surgical skills laboratory and corresponding dissection curricula were established in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Cleveland Clinic in the 2011-2012 academic year. The authors describe how this came about and what it has meant for neurosurgical resident training and assessment of residents' surgical skills in the following paper: "Establishing a surgical skills laboratory and dissection curriculum for neurosurgical residency training" by James K. C. Liu, MD, and colleagues, published today online, ahead of print in the Journal ...

A new study has shed light on how cancer patients' attitudes and beliefs drive the use of complementary and alternative medicine. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the findings may help hospitals develop more effective and accessible integrative oncology services for patients. Although many cancer patients use complementary and alternative medicine, what drives this usage is unclear. To investigate, a team led by Jun Mao, MD and Joshua Bauml, MD, of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman ...

This news release is available in French. Hormone therapy (HT) is prescribed to alleviate some of the symptoms of menopause in women. Menopausal women are more likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease but not other forms of dementia, and HT has been prescribed to treat cognitive decline in post-menopausal women with variable degrees of effectiveness. New research by Dr. Liisa Galea, at the University of British Columbia, suggests the form of estrogens used in HT and previous motherhood could be critical to explain why HT has variable effects. Research in ...

Being very overweight in your teens may double the risk of developing bowel cancer by the time you are middle aged, suggests research published online in the journal Gut. And a high level of an indicator of systemic inflammation--erythrocyte sedimentation rate, or ESR for short--at this age is also linked to heightened risk of the disease in later life, the study shows. Adult obesity and inflammation have been associated with an increased risk of bowel cancer, which is the third most common form of cancer among men, worldwide. However, less is known about how obesity ...

Road traffic noise is linked to a heightened risk of developing a mid-riff bulge, indicates research published online in Occupational & Environmental Medicine. Exposure to a combination of road traffic, rail, and aircraft noise may pose the greatest risk of acquiring a spare tyre--otherwise known as central obesity, and thought to be one of the most harmful types of fat deposition around the body--the findings suggest. The researchers assessed how much road traffic, rail, and aircraft noise 5075 people living in five suburban and rural areas around Stockholm, Sweden, ...

Patients aged 80 and above are significantly less likely to be investigated or aggressively treated after surgery than their younger counterparts, reveals a national audit of hospital deaths, published in the online journal BMJ Open. This is despite the fact that the oldest old have higher rates of trauma and multiple underlying conditions on admission, say the Australian researchers. Care in the oldest old may be less aggressive, or scaled down because the outcome is expected to be poor or treatment considered futile, they say. Perceived future quality of life issues ...

1. Appropriate duration of dual antiplatelet therapy still unclear Free abstract: http://www.annals.org/article.aspx?doi=10.7326/M15-0083 URL goes live when embargo lifts A systematic review of published evidence does little to clarify the appropriate duration of dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT) following drug eluting stent placement. The evidence suggests that longer duration therapy decreases the risk for myocardial infarction, but increases the risk for major bleeding events, and may provide a slight increase in mortality. The results are published in Annals of Internal ...