Las Vegas, NV - How best to treat and recover from complicated hip injuries is a growing field in orthopaedic medicine. While diagnostic hip injections are commonly performed for patients with labral tear to confirm the pain etiology, research presented today at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Specialty Day suggests that pain relief from this diagnostic injection may not predict better outcomes following arthroscopic hip surgery. "Our study looked to assess if the amount of pain relief from a preoperative diagnostic intra-articular (IA) ...

Las Vegas, NV - An individual's meniscus (cushion in the knee) is one of the most important ligaments in the leg providing stability, load bearing and preservation of the knee joint. It is also one of the most easily injured areas and difficult to fully heal. Researchers presenting their study at today's Specialty Day meeting of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM) utilized MRI data to determine the potential for biologic healing following a meniscus tear. "Little is currently understood about the healing of meniscus tears when a root repair is ...

Las Vegas, NV - One in three young athletes who undergo ACL surgery experiences re-injury, according to research presented today at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Specialty Day. The study examined the long term success of surgery for patients aged 18 years and younger. "We examined survey data from 242 patients who underwent ACL reconstruction between 1993 and 1998," noted lead author Justin P. Roe, MBBS, FRACS, from North Sydney Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Centre. "Of this group, 75, or 31% sustained a further injury after at least ...

Las Vegas, NV - Pitching speed, player's height, and pitching for multiple teams may correlate with a history of shoulder and elbow injuries, according to new research released today at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Specialty Day. "Our findings indicate that a 10 inch increase in height is associated with a 20% increase in likelihood of a history of injury, a 10 mile per hour increase in velocity is associated with a 12% increase likelihood of a history of injury, and playing for more than one team is associated with a 22% increase in ...

A study published today in the journal Science found that government biofuel policies rely on reductions in food consumption to generate greenhouse gas savings. Shrinking the amount of food that people and livestock eat decreases the amount of carbon dioxide that they breathe out or excrete as waste. The reduction in food available for consumption, rather than any inherent fuel efficiency, drives the decline in carbon dioxide emissions in government models, the researchers found. "Without reduced food consumption, each of the models would estimate that biofuels generate ...

HOUSTON - (March 27, 2015) - Saudi Arabia's role in global energy markets is changing, according to a new paper from an energy expert at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. The researcher found that the kingdom is reshaping itself as a supplier of refined petroleum products while moving beyond its long-held role as a simple exporter of crude oil. "A Refined Approach: Saudi Arabia Moves Beyond Crude" examines the growth of Saudi refining, the country's increased domestic demand for crude oil and the geopolitical effects of this development. The paper was ...

In the world of bird fashion, the guys seem to have all the fun: brighter feathers, sharper accessories, more pizzazz. Researchers going back to Charles Darwin have focused on the contrast between the sexes, attributing the males' brighter colors to their need to attract mates. A group of researchers at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee took a different approach, testing a hypothesis that evolution has actually resulted in similarities among the sexes as much as differences. Looking at nearly 1,000 species of birds, they found that while males often have brighter ...

TAMPA, Fla. - Moffitt Cancer Center researchers are using integrative approaches to study cancer by combining mathematical and computational modeling with experimental and clinical data. The use of integrative approaches enables scientists to study and model cancer progression in a manner that conventional experimental systems are unable to do. Alexander Anderson, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Integrated Mathematical Oncology (IMO) and Mark Robertson-Tessi, an applied research scientist in IMO, recently published a commentary on an integrative approach used to study ...

The promising new material molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) has an inherent issue that's steeped in irony. The material's greatest asset--its monolayer thickness--is also its biggest challenge. Monolayer MoS2's ultra-thin structure is strong, lightweight, and flexible, making it a good candidate for many applications, such as high-performance, flexible electronics. Such a thin semiconducting material, however, has very little interaction with light, limiting the material's use in light emitting and absorbing applications. "The problem with these materials is that they are ...

Scientists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have devised and demonstrated a new, shape-shifting probe, about one-hundredth as wide as a human hair, which is capable of sensitive, high-resolution remote biological sensing that is not possible with current technology. If eventually put into widespread use, the design could have a major impact on research in medicine, chemistry, biology and engineering. Ultimately, it might be used in clinical diagnostics. To date, most efforts to image highly ...

March 27, 2015 - For people with low vision who need bioptic telescopic glasses to drive, previous driving experience and the need for more training hours are the main factors affecting performance on driver's license road tests, according to a study in the April issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer. After driving experience is taken into account, visual factors have no significant effect on road test scores in drivers using bioptic devices, report Bradley E. Dougherty, ...

Cold snaps like the ones that hit the eastern United States in the past winters are not a consequence of climate change. Scientists at ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology have shown that global warming actually tends to reduce temperature variability. Repeated cold snaps led to temperatures far below freezing across the eastern United States in the past two winters. Parts of the Niagara Falls froze, and ice floes formed on Lake Michigan. Such low temperatures had become rare in recent years. Pictures of icy, snow-covered cities made their way around ...

University of Notre Dame applied mathematician Mark Alber and environmental biotechnologist Robert Nerenberg have developed a new computational model that effectively simulates the mechanical behavior of biofilms. Their model may lead to new strategies for studying a range of issues from blood clots to waste treatment systems. "Blood clotting is a leading cause of death in the United States at this point," said Alber, who is The Vincent J. Duncan Family Professor of Applied Mathematics in the College of Science and an adjunct professor of medicine at the Indiana University ...

TEMPE, Ariz. (March 27, 2015) - As more people move to different regions of the country it will require planners to use as many tools as they can to develop urban areas that satisfy population demands and not over burden the environment. A new study from Arizona State University (ASU) details some of the dynamics at play as one region of the country, the Central Valley of California, braces for substantial population growth and all it entails. The study, based on computer simulations using the ASU Advanced Computing Center, of rural to urban land conversion shows that ...

March 27, 2015--A study by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and colleagues in the Netherlands evaluated the relationship between nutritional conditions in very early life and adult health, and found that famine exposure during the first pregnancy trimester was associated with increases in mortality from a variety of causes other than cancer or cardiovascular disease. This is the first study to quantify the possible long-term effects of nutrition deprivation at different stages of pregnancy and long-term mortality from causes of death ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - A big bowl of mashed potatoes. What about spaghetti and meatballs? Sushi? Regardless of what you identify as comfort food, it's likely the attraction to that dish is based on having a good relationship with the person you remember first preparing it, according to the results of a new study by a University at Buffalo research team. The findings have implications for better understanding how social factors influence our food preferences and eating behavior. "Comfort foods are often the foods that our caregivers gave us when we were children. As long we ...

Milan, Italy - March 28, 2015 Research looking at risk of early mortality of British middle-aged women and osteoarthritis was presented today at the World Congress on Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases. It shows that any painful knee osteoarthritis is strongly associated with early overall and cardiovascular mortality. Interestingly these findings are independent to most of the known risk factors linked with early mortality. The study was based on the data from the Chingford Study. This is community based data from a cohort of middle-aged women followed ...

TORONTO, ON - What do butterflies, spiders and lobsters have in common? They are all surviving relatives of a newly identified species called Yawunik kootenayi, a marine creature with two pairs of eyes and prominent grasping appendages that lived as much as 508 million years ago - more than 250 million years before the first dinosaur. The fossil was identified by an international team led by palaeontologists at the University of Toronto (U of T) and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, as well as Pomona College in California. It is the first new species to be described ...

Reclusive giant pandas fascinate the world, yet precious little is known about how they spend their time in the Chinese bamboo forests. Until now. A team of Michigan State University (MSU) researchers who have been electronically stalking five pandas in the wild, courtesy of rare GPS collars, have finished crunching months of data and has published some panda surprises in this month's Journal of Mammalogy. "Pandas are such an elusive species and it's very hard to observe them in wild, so we haven't had a good picture of where they are from one day to the next," said ...

Music performance is known to induce structural and functional changes to the human brain and enhance cognition. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying music performance have been so far unexplored. A Finnish research group has now investigated the effect of music performance (in a 2 hr concert) on the gene expression profiles of professional musicians from Tapiola Sinfonietta (a professional orchestra) and Sibelius-Academy (a music university). Playing music enhanced the activity of genes involved in dopaminergic neurotransmission, motor function, learning and ...

In a new paper, a team of Yale researchers assesses the "criticality" of all 62 metals on the Periodic Table of Elements, providing key insights into which materials might become more difficult to find in the coming decades, which ones will exact the highest environmental costs -- and which ones simply cannot be replaced as components of vital technologies. During the past decade, sporadic shortages of metals needed to create a wide range of high-tech products have inspired attempts to quantify the criticality of these materials, defined by the relative importance of ...

A new study from SciLifeLab at Uppsala University published in PLOS ONE shows that genes crucial for vision were multiplied in the early stages of vertebrate evolution and acquired distinct functions leading to the sophisticated mechanisms of vertebrate eyes. One striking feature of vertebrates is the prominent role that vision plays in almost all major animal groups. The vertebrate eye has a unique organization and is known to have arisen at the time of the first vertebrates over 500 million years ago. A new study by the research team led by Xesús Abalo and Dan ...

Antioxidants provide long-term protection against the chain reactions of free radical processes, in other words, of the molecules that are capable of causing cell damage and generating various diseases. Free radicals harm our body by causing, in the best of cases, ageing and, in the worse, serious diseases. Lettuce is rich in antioxidants, as it contains compounds like phenolic acids, flavonoids, anthocyanins, and vitamins A and C, among other things. Green, semi-red and red leaves To conduct this research, which started in 2011 and in which researchers of the UPV/EHU ...

Washington, DC, March 27, 2015 - Patients with Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) are twice as likely to be readmitted to the hospital as patients without the deadly diarrheal infection, according to a study published in the April issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). Researchers from the Detroit Medical Center (DMC), a seven-hospital system in southeastern Michigan, conducted a large study to understand the epidemiology of CDI readmissions, analyzing ...

Two scientific studies led by researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet are expected to form the basis of new international recommendations for the treatment of medical abortions and miscarriages. One of the studies, both of which are being published in the journal The Lancet, shows that it is possible to replace the clinical follow-up examinations recommended today with medical abortions that include a home pregnancy test. The other study shows that midwives can safely and effectively treat failed abortions and miscarriages in rural districts of Uganda. The term ...