Dasabuvir (trade name Exviera) and the fixed-dose drug combination ombitasvir/paritaprevir/ritonavir (trade name Viekirax) have been available since January 2015 for the treatment of adults with chronic hepatitis C infection. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) had examined their added benefit in a dossier assessment completed in April 2015. In an addendum, the Institute now assessed study data subsequently submitted by the drug manufacturer in the commenting procedure. According to the findings, the results of an indirect comparison ...

Why some planets, like Saturn or Jupiter, have their rings, while others like, the Earth or Mars do not? It turned out that "the size does not matter" -- not only giants as Saturn possess the rings, but even tiny asteroids do: According to the recent discovery of the Spitzer Space Telescope, the remote asteroid Chariklo, which is only 260 km in diameter, also has rings. A natural answer may be the following: Occasionally, in a far past, some planets had much more material in their vicinity then the other ones. The material was in a form of dust. Dust particles merged ...

UC Davis study should help guide patients and their oncologists (SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- Combing data collected on thousands of California ovarian cancer patients, UC Davis researchers have determined that almost one-third survived at least 10 years after diagnosis. The unprecedented findings upend the notion that women diagnosed with cancer of the ovary always face a poor chance of survival. In fact, while the study confirmed earlier findings on characteristics associated with ovarian cancer survival -- younger age, earlier stage and lower grade tumors at diagnosis ...

The dull black plastic of the device on Joshua Pearce's desk belies its usefulness. Pearce picks up the box, which has a switch on the side and a small opening on top. A handful of vials sit in a bag nearby, and each would fit snugly in the opening. The set-up seems generic, even bland, except that it could radically change how we deal with water quality issues. Pearce, who has a joint appointment as an associate professor of materials science and engineering as well as electrical and computer engineering, runs an open sustainability technology lab at Michigan Technological ...

COLLEGE STATION - Woody plant encroachment is one of the biggest challenges facing rangelands worldwide, but it consistently has been under-measured and poorly understood, said a Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientist in College Station. Dr. Matthew Berg, an AgriLife Research postdoctoral research associate in the Texas A&M department of ecosystem and science management, is trying to change both the understanding and measurement with his latest study, which was captured in the July issue of the Rangeland Ecology and Management publication, http://bit.ly/1JK8JhU. Berg ...

Accurately forecasting future electricity needs is tricky, with sudden weather changes and other variables impacting projections minute by minute. Errors can have grave repercussions, from blackouts to high market costs. Now, a new forecasting tool that delivers up to a 50-percent increase in accuracy and the potential to save millions in wasted energy costs has been developed by researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Performance of the tool, called the Power Model Integrator, was tested against five commonly used forecasting ...

Fundamental differences between how the brain forms during adolescence have been discovered in children with schizophrenia and their siblings, a new study shows. The study opens up new avenues for researchers to explore when developing treatment for the illness, which can be hugely debilitating for children. Researchers from the University of Melbourne and the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington DC used structural brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to map the brains of 109 children with childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS), from ages 12 to 24. They ...

The DZD-researchers at Helmholtz Zentrum München and German Diabetes Center Düsseldorf analyzed more than 1.800 blood samples of participants, who joined the German large-scale study KORA*. Using a comprehensive approach, the scientists investigated metabolic products (metabolites) as well as genetics of these participants. They found that the administration of Metformin** in patients suffering from Type 2 Diabetes led to a change in metabolite levels. According to the authors, this was associated with a significantly decreased level of LDL cholesterol***, which ...

First the scaffold is cracked, then defective parts are removed: Cells repair damaged DNA by a different mechanism than so far assumed, as chemists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have shown. Defects in DNA can cause serious harm to an organism, including cell death or the development of cancer. Efficient repair mechanisms are therefore of vital importance. LMU chemist Professor Christian Ochsenfeld, Chair of Theoretical Chemistry at LMU, and Dr. Keyarash Sadeghian from his group have explained for the first time in detail how a human DNA repair ...

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. (August 6, 2015) - There are times when emergency physicians can't be 100 percent sure a person is suffering from a severe allergic reaction, known as anaphylaxis, and may hesitate to use epinephrine. A new article says when in doubt - administer the epinephrine. An article in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, the scientific publication of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI), highlights recommendations from a panel discussion among allergists and emergency physicians. The panel of experts examined barriers ...

Scientists at the University of Newcastle, UK, have used a combination of small molecules to turn cells isolated from human skin into Schwann cells - the specialised cells that support nerves and play a role in nerve repair. This new method generates large and pure populations of Schwann cells and hence is a promising step forward for the repair of peripheral nerve injuries. This research has just been published in the scientific journal Development at http://dev.biologists.org/ Currently, nerve repair strategies involve taking grafts from patients and using these to ...

TORONTO, August 5 2015 -- The term "self-regulation" has started appearing in children's report cards of late, but what it means is often unclear to parents. Thanks to three York University researchers, who have created a clear-cut definition for learning this important psychological concept, parents and teachers can now have a better understanding of what "self-regulation" means and how they can help their children develop that capacity. "My hope is that every parent whose child has had a meltdown in a mall, and every teacher who has to work hard every day to prevent ...

PHILADELPHIA -- Moles are benign tumors found on the skin of almost every adult. Scientists have known for years that a mutation in the BRAF gene makes them start growing, but until now haven't understood why they stop. Now, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have identified a major genetic factor that keeps moles in their usual non-cancerous, no-growth state. The study was published online first this summer in the journal Cancer Discovery. "The BRAF mutation that stimulates the initial growth of moles also stimulates the ...

Glenview, Ill. (August 5, 2015)-- Researchers may be closer to finding the mechanism responsible for loss of lung elastic recoil and airflow limitation in nonsmokers with chronic asthma. The study published today in the journal CHEST Unraveling the Pathophysiology of the Asthma-COPD Overlap Syndrome reported that both nonsmokers and smokers with chronic asthma share features of COPD. This conundrum, often referred to as asthma-COPD overlap syndrome (ACOS), has been assumed to be due to large and especially small airway remodeling. The study found that many patients with ...

PITTSBURGH, Aug. 5, 2015 - Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have figured out how to objectively quantify the beating action of cilia, the tiny, hair-like projections on cells that line nasal passages, the lungs and almost every other body tissue, according to a study published online today in Science Translational Medicine. Such digital signatures could help doctors more quickly and accurately diagnose ciliary motion (CM) defects, which can cause severe respiratory airway clearance defects and also developmental defects including congenital ...

ROSEMONT, Ill.-- Most patients younger than age 50 with a torn or severely damaged meniscus experienced reduced pain and improved knee function following transplant surgery, according to a study in the August 5 issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS). However, many patients required additional surgery within 10 years. The meniscus is a wedge-shaped piece of fibrocartilage in the knee that acts as a shock absorber between the thighbone and shinbone. A meniscus can be torn during sports or wear away over time as the body ages. For younger patients with knee ...

Using photosynthetically active microorganisms, researchers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have succeeded in manufacturing several biocatalysts suitable for industrial application: a crucial step towards sustainable chemical processes, according to Dr Marc Nowaczyk from the Chair for Plant Biochemistry and Jun.-Prof Dr Robert Kourist, Junior Research Group Microbial Biochemistry. Sustainable manufacture of enzymes for the industry Seeing as our planet's fossil resources are limited, researchers are looking for new methods for the production of certain substances, ...

If you want to form very flexible chains of nanoparticles in liquid in order to build tiny robots with flexible joints or make magnetically self-healing gels, you need to revert to childhood and think about sandcastles. In a paper published this week in Nature Materials, researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill show that magnetic nanoparticles encased in oily liquid shells can bind together in water, much like sand particles mixed with the right amount of water can form sandcastles. "Because oil and water don't ...

Disney Research has developed a new method of rendering high-quality graphics for animated features that efficiently corrects for erroneous pixels while preserving the crisp detail in images, significantly increasing the efficiency of producing animated images. The new approach enhances the performance of Monte Carlo ray tracing, a method for rendering 3-D scenes by randomly tracing the possible light paths for each pixel in an image. The images produced by ray tracing can be highly realistic, but can require large amounts of computer time to render. The Disney researchers ...

The elaborate costumes worn by Rapunzel, the heroine of Disney's "Tangled," are testament to the growing sophistication of cloth animation, but for art directors, who must tweak tens or hundreds of technical parameters, achieving a desired look for simulated clothing can be laborious. To ease this process, Disney Research and Walt Disney Animation Studios have developed a tool that enables technical directors who must create garments that are soft, silky, wrinkly, heavy, or flowing, to use those same terms to control the computer programs that fashion simulated cloth. The ...

Little details, such as the wrinkling or twitching of an eyelid, can have a big impact on whether a digitally rendered face looks real in a film or videogame. Now scientists at Disney Research have devised the first method to capture these subtleties of the eyelids in detail. Their method, to be presented at ACM SIGGRAPH 2015, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, in Los Angeles Aug. 9-13, captures detailed, dynamic skin features and creates plausible folding and stretching in areas that aren't directly captured during data collection. Artists ...

Obtaining the aerodynamic properties necessary to simulate falling leaves or a tumbling box caught by the wind can be as simple as dropping the object off of a balcony and recording the fall, thanks to OmniAD, a data-driven technique developed at Disney Research. You would not want to design an airplane with this method, but the results are good enough for simulating aerodynamic effects of light, 3-D objects in videogames and animations, said Nobuyuki Umetani of Disney Research and Tobias Martin of ETH Zurich. The system can even be used to design kites that actually ...

The same sort of video processing effects that usually require video to be shot in controlled environments where 3-D positions of cameras and objects are precisely known can be achieved with real-world, handheld video shot from consumer-grade cameras using a new approach pioneered by Disney Research. The technique, developed with Braunschweig University of Technology, compensates for the lack of exact 3-D information about a scene by taking advantage of the fact that most elements of a scene are visible many times in a video. The researchers found they could sample pixels ...

A 3D-printed teddy bear can have a stiff head, a pliable tummy and bendable arms, even though all of it is made of the same relatively stiff material, using a new method developed by Disney Research. By using the printer to alter the small-scale structure of the material, the Disney researchers showed they could vary its elasticity dramatically within the same object. They developed families of compatible microstructures with varying elastic properties, enabling designers to select the properties desired for each region of an object. The team demonstrated their new ...

Computer graphics researchers have developed a way to efficiently render images of sand castles, gravel roads, snowmen, salt in a shaker or even ocean spray - any object consisting of randomly oriented, but discernible grains - that look realistic whether viewed from afar or up close. The new method, developed by Disney Research in collaboration with researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, Cornell University and Dartmouth College, employs three different types of rendering techniques depending on the scale at which the object is viewed. A sand ...