A previously undiscovered species of crocodile-like amphibian that lived during the rise of dinosaurs was among Earth's top predators more than 200 million years ago, a study shows. Palaeontologists identified the prehistoric species - which looked like giant salamanders - after excavating bones buried on the site of an ancient lake in southern Portugal. The species was part of a wider group of primitive amphibians that were widespread at low latitudes 220-230 million years ago, the team says. The creatures grew up to 2m in length and lived in lakes and rivers during ...

Suicidal patients who are under observation may be put at risk by relying on inexperienced staff and agency nurses, according to a new report issued today. Commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership as part of the Clinical Outcome Review Programmes, researchers from The University of Manchester's National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness, found that 18 in-patients a year died by suicide while under observation. This usually meant checks every 10-15 minutes but in 9% the patient was supposed to be under constant ...

Effective tuberculosis control in India needs political will and commitment, backed by sufficient resources, says a senior doctor in The BMJ this week. Unless this happens, TB will continue to be India's silent epidemic and a death sentence for poor people, warns consultant physician and public health specialist, Zarir Udwadia. Twenty years ago it was widely believed that India was successfully on its way to controlling its alarming tuberculosis (TB) epidemic. Yet, each year, India has 2.2 million new cases, more than 300,000 deaths, and economic losses of $23bn (£14.9bn; ...

Conscientious children are less likely to smoke in later life and the personality trait could help explain health inequalities, indicates a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. It is well known that people belonging to lower socio-economic groups have lower life expectancy and more health problems than those who are in higher groups, and certain health behaviours, such as smoking, follow a similar pattern, suggesting they could be partly responsible for health inequalities. Recently, certain personality traits have been found to be associated ...

At least 30 dogs in England have been killed in less than 18 months by an unknown disease which causes skin lesions and kidney failure, reveals research published in Veterinary Record. The disease is believed to be Alabama rot (cutaneous and renal glomerular vasculopathy), a condition which has been seen in the USA in greyhounds for almost 30 years. While there have been occasional reports of the disease in individual dogs outside of the USA, this is the first report of a series of cases occurring in England. None of the 30 dogs in this English series of cases were greyhounds ...

On May 19, 2014, the 67th World Health Assembly (WHA) adopted WHO's "Global strategy and targets for tuberculosis prevention, care and control after 2015". This post-2015 global tuberculosis strategy, labelled the End TB Strategy, was shaped during the past 2 years. A wide range of stakeholders--from ministries of health and national tuberculosis programmes to technical and scientific institutions, financial and development partners, civil society and health activists, non-governmental organisations, and the private sector--contributed to its development. The strategy has ...

Microbiological confirmation of childhood tuberculosis is rare because of the difficulty of collection of specimens, low sensitivity of smear microscopy, and poor access to culture. This study, led by Dr Anne Detjen, from the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, aimed to establish summary estimates for sensitivity and specificity of the Xpert MTB/RIF assay compared with microscopy in the diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis in children. The researchers found that compared with microscopy, Xpert offers better sensitivity for the diagnosis of pulmonary ...

1. Task Force finds insufficient evidence to recommend routine screening for thyroid dysfunction The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) concludes that the current evidence is insufficient to recommend for or against screening for thyroid dysfunction in nonpregnant, asymptomatic adults. The recommendations are published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Thyroid gland disorders are among the most common endocrine conditions evaluated and treated by clinicians and may be asymptomatic. If left untreated, thyroid dysfunction could lead to fractures, cancer, or cardiovascular ...

Archaeologists working in Guatemala have unearthed new information about the Maya civilization's transition from a mobile, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary way of life. Led by University of Arizona archaeologists Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, the team's excavations of the ancient Maya lowlands site of Ceibal suggest that as the society transitioned from a heavy reliance on foraging to farming, mobile communities and settled groups co-existed and may have come together to collaborate on construction projects and participate in public ceremonies. The findings, ...

CLEMSON, S.C. -- Researchers have long believed that supercomputers give universities a competitive edge in scientific research, but now they have some hard data showing it's true. A Clemson University team found that universities with locally available supercomputers were more efficient in producing research in critical fields than universities that lacked supercomputers. A supercomputer that can do 551 trillion calculations per second is housed at Clemson's Information Technology Center. A supercomputer that can do 551 trillion calculations per second is housed at ...

DALLAS, March 23, 2015 -- Kids exposed to their parents' smoking may have a higher risk of developing heart disease in adulthood than those whose parents didn't smoke, according to research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. The study's results add to the growing evidence that exposure to smoking from parents has a lasting effect on children's cardiovascular health in adulthood. Researchers tracked participants in the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study, which included childhood exposure to parental smoking in 1980 and 1983. They collected carotid ...

A blood test that measures the number of cells shed from prostate tumours into the bloodstream can act as an early warning sign that treatment is not working, a major new study shows. Researchers showed that measuring the numbers of circulating tumour cells in the blood predicted which men were benefitting least from a prostate cancer drug after as little as 12 weeks of treatment. They hope their work will allow doctors to switch patients to alternative treatments earlier than is currently possible, if these results are confirmed by further studies. The research could ...

Insulin resistance is a risk factor for developing both type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Almost one third of the U.S. population has some degree of insulin resistance, though it is undiagnosed in many of these individuals. Obesity is associated with reduced insulin sensitivity and the development of insulin resistance. However, recent large-scale genetic studies have indicated that insulin resistance is heritable. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation identifies a gene that is strongly associated with the presence of many features of insulin resistance. ...

Gliobststoma (GBM) is a highly aggressive brain tumor that is resistant to many conventional cancer therapies. The kinase mTOR induces pathways that are aberrantly activated in GBM. However, mTOR inhibitors have not shown much promise for treating GBM. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation indicates that mTOR inhibitor resistance in GBM is likely the result of compensatory glutamine metabolism. Kazuhiro Tanaka and colleagues at Kobe University determined that glutaminase and glutamine levels increase in GBM cells and xenografts in response to mTOR inhibition. ...

TORONTO, March 23, 2015 -- Across all income levels, Canadian moms in better socioeconomic standing have better health outcomes than moms in lower socioeconomic brackets. The same relationship between socioeconomic position and health outcomes holds true for these moms' newborn babies, according to a new study. A team of researchers placed 68,705 Canadian new moms and their babies along a socioeconomic spectrum by using factors about the moms such as education, whether she was living in poverty and the income of the neighbourhood she lives in. The researchers compared ...

(PHILADELPHIA) - Open the medicine cabinet of a senior and you're likely to find scores of pill bottles. Physicians are often unaware of all the medications a patient is taking, which can result in unnecessary additional prescriptions, non-prescription medications and potential drug-drug interactions that cause unexpected adverse effects. When a cancer diagnosis is thrown into the mix, the drug-drug interactions can become even more complex. A new study evaluates the currently available screening tools for determining if and when seniors with cancer are taking too many ...

In the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis (CF), the most severe symptoms are recurring episodes of lung inflammation and bacterial infection (known as "exacerbations") that happen from one to three times a year and cause ever-increasing amounts of lung damage through the course of a CF patient's life. While it is well understood that CF lung problems are ultimately due to bacterial infections encouraged by a CF patient's abnormally thick mucus, medical science has been unable to define specific causes that trigger the periodic flare-ups. In a recent article in the Journal ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Population growth could cause global demand for water to outpace supply by mid-century if current levels of consumption continue. But it wouldn't be the first time this has happened, a Duke University study finds. Using a delayed-feedback mathematical model that analyzes historic data to help project future trends, the researchers identified a regularly recurring pattern of global water use in recent centuries. Periods of increased demand for water -- often coinciding with population growth or other major demographic and social changes -- were followed ...

The World Health Organization and UNICEF have commissioned the first comprehensive, multi-country analysis on water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) services in health care facilities, calling for global action to push toward 100 percent coverage of these services through new policies, collaboration, monitoring and training. The report, released March 17, evaluated available WaSH data from 66,101 health-care facilities in 54 low- and middle-income countries and found that 38 percent of those facilities lack an improved water source, 19 percent lack improved sanitation, ...

Does taking a drug and then getting better mean that the drug made you better? Did that tax cut really stimulate the economy or did it recover on its own? The problem of answering such questions - of inferring causal relationships from correlations - reaches across the sciences, and beyond. Normally, correlation by itself does not imply causation. But new research from Perimeter and the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) has found that in the case of quantum variables, it sometimes can. The new work, just published in Nature Physics, is the result of a collaboration ...

Numerous studies have documented racial differences in deaths from cancer among non-Hispanic whites and African Americans, but little has been known about survival outcomes for Asian Americans who have been diagnosed with cancer, until now. A new study from Quoc-Dien Trinh, MD and colleagues at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) examined cancer patients in eight different Asian American subgroups and found their cancer-specific mortality (CSM) was substantially lower than that of non-Hispanic white patients. The findings are published in the March 20 issue of the Journal ...

Integer overflows are one of the most common bugs in computer programs -- not only causing programs to crash but, even worse, potentially offering points of attack for malicious hackers. Computer scientists have devised a battery of techniques to identify them, but all have drawbacks. This month, at the Association for Computing Machinery's International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present a new algorithm for identifying ...

MADISON, Wis. -- By figuring out how to precisely order the molecules that make up what scientists call organic glass -- the materials at the heart of some electronic displays, light-emitting diodes and solar cells -- a team of chemists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has set the stage for more efficient and sturdier portable electronic devices and possibly a new generation of solar cells based on organic materials. Writing this week (March 23, 2015) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by UW-Madison chemistry Professor Mark ...

Jupiter may have swept through the early solar system like a wrecking ball, destroying a first generation of inner planets before retreating into its current orbit, according to a new study published March 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings help explain why our solar system is so different from the hundreds of other planetary systems that astronomers have discovered in recent years. "Now that we can look at our own solar system in the context of all these other planetary systems, one of the most interesting features is the absence of planets ...

'Attractive' male birds that mate with many females aren't passing on the best genes to their offspring, according to new UCL research which found promiscuity in male birds leads to small, genetic faults in the species' genome. Although minor, these genetic flaws may limit how well future generations can adapt to changing environments. The study, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and funded by the European Research Council, shows for the first time the power of sexual selection - where some individuals are better at securing mates ...