A happy worker is a productive worker. That adage may be true, according to a new study from The University of Texas at Dallas. Two UT Dallas public affairs researchers found that family-friendly policies are beneficial for increasing productivity of employees in public organizations, and the authors said the finding likely lends itself to job satisfaction and commitment. The study, published in the Public Personnel Management, investigated the effects of family-friendly human resources policies in public organizations. Using the Korea Workplace Panel Survey data from ...

New school and office workspace designs created by a group of Penn State engineering students are intended to allow users to share space and materials while maintaining their own work areas -- a dual purpose the researchers say has been neglected. The research began in 2010 as a class project, according to Joseph M. Mahoney, former Penn State graduate student, now assistant professor of mechanical engineering, Penn State, Berks. "There's a lot of interest from an ergonomics perspective and workplace efficiency perspective of designing workstations for single users," Mahoney ...

In the depths of the Arctic Ocean, buried deep in the sediment, an ancient creature waited for over a million years to be discovered. Paul Valentich-Scott, from the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History (California), and three scientists from the United States Geological Survey (USGS, Menlo Park, California), Charles L. Powell, Brian D. Edwards, and Thomas D. Lorenson were up to the challenge. Each with different expertise, they were able to collect, analyze, and identify a new genus and new species of bivalve mollusk. The path to discovery is seldom simple or easy. ...

Breast cancer is the most common in women. One in nine will suffer breast cancer over their lifetime. Progress in prevention and early detection, and the use of chemotherapy after surgery (adjuvant chemotherapy), have achieved significantly increase survival in this disease in the last ten years, but much remains to be done. The identification of patients with high-risk breast cancer is key to knowing whether a patient will require only the removal of the tumor by surgery or whether if she will need additional chemotherapy to make sure the removal of breast cancer cells. ...

Malaria is one of the most serious health problems worldwide, registering 200 million clinical cases and more than 600,000 attributable deaths per year, according to information from the World Health Organization in 2013. Given the emerging resistance to the standard treatment most widely used throughout the world, which is based on artemisinin and its analogs, there is a need for new antimalarial compounds. In this regard, scientists headed by Lluís Ribas de Pouplana, ICREA researcher at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), report on a new ...

This news release is available in German. FRANKFURT. Frankfurt physicists have once again contributed to resolving a disputed matter of theoretical physics. Science has long since known that, contrary to the old school of thought, helium forms molecules of two, three or even more atoms. Exactly what helium consisting of three atoms looks like, however, has been disputed by theoretical physicists for about 20 years. Besides the intuitive assumption that the three identical components form an equilateral triangle, there was also the hypothesis that the three atoms are ...

Patients suffering from the world's most common heart rhythm disorder can have their long-term outcomes significantly improved with an aggressive management of their underlying cardiac risk factors, according to University of Adelaide researchers. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is increasingly responsible for dementia, stroke and death, and has a significant impact on healthcare costs. With electrical "short circuits" believed to be responsible for the abnormal beating of the heart in AF patients, one currently used treatment is to burn the tissue surrounding the problem area, ...

Mammals that lived during the time of the dinosaurs are often portrayed as innocuous, small-bodied creatures, scurrying under the feet of the huge reptiles. In reality, this wasn't the case, and a new fossil from Madagascar further underscores this point, revealing fascinating perspectives on the growing diversity of Mesozoic mammals. Vintana sertich had previously been described in a preliminary note in November of this year, but a new memoir in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology delves far deeper into the morphology and paleoecology of this amazing fossil animal. ...

A simple supplement could be a safe and cost-effective way of reducing heart disease in individuals born with a low birth weight, suggests research from the University of Cambridge. The study, carried out in rats, also raises the possibility of developing a blood test to indicate how much damage there is in the aortas of these individuals. Researchers at the Institute of Metabolic Science fed low birth weight rats a supplement of the molecule co-enzyme Q (CoQ) and found that in those rats that grew quickly after birth, the supplement prevented cells in the aorta from ...

Techniques now used to reconstruct 3D models based on multiple photos of a building, object or scene can also be leveraged to automatically estimate illumination conditions depicted in a collection of photographs, scientists at Disney Research and Université Laval report. Everyone knows that objects can look markedly different depending on lighting conditions, the physical characteristics of the objects and the angle at which they are viewed. That makes it difficult for photo editors to insert 3D objects into imagery and make them appear as if they are reflecting ...

The Taj Mahal's iconic marble dome and soaring minarets require regular cleaning to maintain their dazzling appearance, and scientists now know why. Researchers from the United States and India are pointing the finger at airborne carbon particles and dust for giving the gleaming white landmark a brownish cast. Knowing the culprits in the discoloration is just the first step in cleaning up the Taj Mahal. Scientists now must determine where the particles are coming from to develop strategies for controlling them. "Our team was able to show that the pollutants discoloring ...

New York, NY, December 9, 2014 - Fourteen years after the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC), a case study in the current issue of Annals of Global Health identifies several elements that have had a critical impact on the evolution of the WTC response and, directly or indirectly, on the health of the WTC-exposed population. The case study also recounts and assesses post-disaster monitoring efforts, recent scientific findings from the World Trade Center Health Program (WTCHP), and explores the implications of these experiences for ongoing and future environmental disaster ...

The global spread of Ebola is due to the complex interactions between individuals, societies, and transportation and trade networks. Understanding and building appropriate statistical and mathematical models of these interactions is vital to responding to the challenges of living in a networked world. There are, of course, many other examples of complex networks -- from national power grids and airline networks to social networks, neuronal networks and protein-protein interactions. In a new study published in the Beijing-headquartered journal National Science Review, ...

This news release is available in Japanese. New research published in the Proceedings of The Royal Society A by members of the Mathematical Soft Matter Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University examines the energies at work in a closed flexible loop spanned by a soap film. While the underlying experiments are simple enough to be replicated in a kitchen sink, the research generates potentially important questions and changes how we think about different disciplines from material science to vertebrate morphogenesis. Aisa Biria and Professor ...

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS -Too many vehicles on the highway inevitably slow down traffic. On the Internet information highway, consumers value high-speed Internet service, but there is little reason to think broadband traffic congestion will improve if the Federal Communications Commission abandons net neutrality, according to economic research. In their paper, "The Economics of Network Neutrality," Ben Hermalin, Haas Economics Analysis and Policy Group, and Nicholas Economides, Berkeley-Haas visiting professor from NYU'S Stern School ...

Scientists at the University of Strathclyde and City University of New York have created methods that dramatically simplify the discovery of biological gels for food, cosmetics and biomedicine, as published in the journal Nature Chemistry. Strathclyde's Dr Tell Tuttle and Professor Rein Ulijn, the director of nanoscience at City University New York's new advanced research centre who also holds a position at Strathclyde, believe their team's breakthrough dramatically simplifies discovery of functional gels that can be used in a wide range of applications. Until now, ...

The drug daclatasvir (trade name Daklinza) has been available since August 2014 for the treatment of adults with chronic hepatitis C (CHC) infection. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether this new drug offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapy. The drug manufacturer presented data for patients without cirrhosis of the liver who are infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotype 1, and for patients with HCV genotype 4. However, these data are unsuitable in various aspects to ...

Pioneering new research by the University of Exeter could revolutionise global diagnostic procedures for one of the most common forms of epilepsy. Scientists from Exeter have investigated using mathematical modelling to assess susceptibility to idiopathic generalised epilepsy (IGE) by analysing electrical activity of the brain while the patient is in a resting state. Current diagnosis practices typically observe electrical activities associated with seizures in a clinical environment. The ground-breaking research has revealed differences in the way that distant regions ...

"A tree must be bent while it is young," as one saying about learning a foreign language goes. In other words, the earlier you start learning a foreign language systematically, the better the language level will be in the long run. The second widely held view is that you need to be solid in your first language (L1) in order to develop good literacy skills in the foreign language. Linguist Simone Pfenninger from the University of Zurich has been examining these two myths in her five-year study involving Swiss high-school children in order to identify the optimal starting ...

Reston, Va. (December 9, 2014) - Cancer therapy can be much more effective using a new way to customize nuclear medicine treatment, researchers say in the December 2014 issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. The process could also be useful for other diseases that could benefit from targeted radiation. Targeted therapy with radiopharmaceuticals--radioactive compounds used in nuclear medicine for diagnosis or treatment--has great potential for the treatment of cancer, especially for cancer cells that have migrated from primary tumors to lymph nodes and secondary organs ...

London, United Kingdom, December 9, 2014 - As the Ebola Virus Diseases (EVD) epidemic continues to rage in West Africa, infectious diseases experts call attention to the striking lack of treatment guidelines. With over 16,000 total cases and more than 500 new infections reported per week, and probable underreporting of both cases and fatalities, the medical community still does not have specific approved treatment in place for Ebola, according to an editorial published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. Not only are treatment guidelines lacking, but ...

Studying the social interaction of bears through the use of camera traps and visual observations requires that humans be able to tell individuals apart. A study done using volunteers to study the vulnerable Andean bear indicates that people can learn to identify individual bears, given a little practice. The research, done by San Diego Zoo conservationists with international collaborators using photos spanning many years, also indicates that young bears usually retain many of their unique markings as they grow older. "Knowing, scientifically, that people who have been ...

Researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg are proposing potential new active substances for treating the dengue virus. Just like Ebola, dengue fever is also caused by a virus for which there is currently no cure and no vaccine and can be fatal. In the quest for medication to treat the dengue virus, the scientific community is focusing on a particular enzyme of the pathogen, the protease known as NS2B/NS3. The reason for this is that inhibitors of similar proteases have been revealed to be very effective ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- A marker of immune function that predicts for better outcomes in patients treated with chemotherapy for triple negative breast cancer is also linked to improved prognosis in patients treated with chemotherapy for HER2-positive breast cancer. But that marker -- the quantity of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (S-TILs) in a biopsy -- appears irrelevant when trastuzumab is used. And since trastuzumab, and not chemotherapy alone, is the standard of care for the HER2-positive sub-class of breast cancer, there is no need to test for these lymphocytes in ...

In patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer--a disease with no approved targeted therapies--infusion of pembrolizumab produced durable responses in almost one out of five patients enrolled in a phase-Ib clinical trial, according to data presented Dec. 10, at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. The multi-center, non-randomized trial was designed to evaluate the safety, tolerability and antitumor activity of bi-weekly infusions of pembrolizumab (MK-3475, marketed as Keytruda®). The researchers enrolled 27 patients, aged 29 to 72 years, who had ...