GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- UF Health researchers have found that care linked to heart attacks and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, among disabled adults covered by Medicaid has improved with the expansion of a new health care program in Texas over the last decade. This approach to health care delivery is growing in popularity across the country, with the number of states implementing similar programs increasing from eight in 2004 to 18 in 2014. These programs have two components: managed care and home- and community-based health services. Managed care is reputed ...

Toxic is bad. Or is it? New studies of seagrasses reveal that they are surprisingly good at detoxifying themselves when growing in toxic seabed. But if seagrasses are stressed by their environment, they lose the ability and die. All over the world seagrasses are increasingly stressed and one factor contributing to this can be lack of detoxification. Seagrass meadows grow along most of the world's coasts where they provide important habitats for a wide variety of life forms. However in many places seagrass meadows have been lost or seriously diminished and in several places, ...

Increasing the number of female speakers at a scientific conference can be done relatively quickly by calling attention to gender disparities common to such meetings and getting more women involved in the conference planning process, suggests a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researcher. Reporting online Aug. 4 in the journal mBio, Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, professor and chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Bloomberg School, lays out how the American Society of Microbiology General Meeting was able ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - New mothers take a close look at their personal relationship with their husband or partner when deciding how much they want him involved in parenting, new research finds. The study found that mothers limited the father's involvement in child-rearing when they perceived their couple relationship to be less stable. Mothers also limited fathers who were less confident in their own ability to raise children. The bottom line is that new mothers are assessing their partners' suitability to be a parent, said Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, co-author of the study and ...

When it comes to courting, one common spider species is quick to learn, and that learning process involves eavesdropping on the visual cues of rivals to win their mate. The latest discovery in a research partnership represented by Alma College, The Ohio State University at Newark and the University of Cincinnati is the featured article in the August issue of the international research journal Animal Behaviour. Previous studies by the researchers explored how brush-legged wolf spiders (Schizocosa ocreata) used visual eavesdropping to try to outdo a male rival's leg-tapping ...

Cholera is a diarrhoeal disease that is caused by an intestinal bacterium, Vibrio cholerae. Recently an outbreak of cholera in Haiti brought public attention to this deadly disease. In this work, the goal of our differential equation model is to find an effective optimal vaccination strategy to minimize the disease related mortality and to reduce the associated costs. The effect of seasonality in pathogen transmission on vaccination strategies was investigated under several types of disease scenarios, including an endemic case and a new outbreak case. This model is an extension ...

WASHINGTON -- Chronic marijuana use by teenage boys does not appear to be linked to later physical or mental health issues such as depression, psychotic symptoms or asthma, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Rutgers University tracked 408 males from adolescence into their mid-30s for the study, which was published in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors. "What we found was a little surprising," said lead researcher Jordan Bechtold, PhD, a psychology research fellow ...

HIV can continue to grow in patients who are thought to be responding well to treatment, according to research by the University of Liverpool. During treatment for HIV the virus hides in blood cells that are responsible for the patient's immune response. The virus does this by inserting its own genetic information into the DNA of the blood cells, called CD4 Tlymphocytes. The study by the University's Institute of Infection and Global Health measured the levels of integrated HIV in the CD4 cells of patients undergoing uninterrupted treatment for up to 14 years, and ...

A super-dense star formed in the aftermath of a supernova explosion is shooting out powerful jets of material into space, research suggests. In a study published today, a team of scientists in the Australia and the Netherlands has discovered powerful jets blasting out of a double star system known as PSR J1023+0038. It was previously thought that the only objects in the Universe capable of forming such powerful jets were black holes. PSR J1023+0038 contains an extremely dense type of star astronomers call a neutron star, in a close orbit with another, more normal ...

Flight simulators for the training of air pilots are well known. But what about riding simulators? Although the first horse simulator was used at the French National Equestrian School in Saumur already in the 1980s, riding simulators for dressage, show jumping, polo or racing, have become available only recently. They look like horses and respond to the aids of the rider via sensors which measure the force exerted by the reins and the rider's legs. Via a screen in front of the simulator, the rider immerses himself into a virtual equestrian world. Simulators are aimed ...

Scientists first had to re-think death before they could develop a way of testing the potential harm to the environment caused by thousands of chemicals humankind uses each day. Researchers led by Dr Roman Ashauer, of the Environment Department at the University of York, refined the technique of survival analysis used routinely by toxicologists, biologists, medical researchers and engineers. The research could pave the way for testing the estimated 15,000 substances discovered daily. Survival analysis which helps to predict a huge range of functions such as the survival ...

New research by scientists at New Zealand's University of Otago and GNS Science is helping to solve the puzzle of how bacteria are able to live in nutrient-starved environments. It is well-established that the majority of bacteria in soil ecosystems live in dormant states due to nutrient deprivation, but the metabolic strategies that enable their survival have not yet been shown. The researchers took an extreme approach to resolving this enigma. They studied a strain of acidobacteria named Pyrinomonas methylaliphatogenes that was cultivated from heated and acidic geothermal ...

A study including researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago found evidence that gut microbes affect circadian rhythms and metabolism in mice. We know from studies on jet lag and night shifts that metabolism--how bodies use energy from food--is linked to the body's circadian rhythms. These rhythms, regular daily fluctuations in mental and bodily functions, are communicated and carried out via signals sent from the brain and liver. Light and dark signals guide circadian rhythms, but it appears that microbes ...

The more than 200 species in the family Mormyridae communicate with one another in a way completely alien to our species: by means of electric discharges generated by an organ in their tails. In a 2011 article in Science that described a group of mormyrids able to perceive subtle variations in the waveform of electric signals, Washington University in St. Louis biologist Bruce Carlson, PhD, noted that another group of mormyrids are much less discriminating (see illustration). The fish with nuanced signal discrimination can glean a stunning amount of information from ...

Cleaning up municipal and industrial wastewater can be dirty business, but engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed an innovative wastewater treatment process that not only mitigates carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but actively captures greenhouse gases as well. The treatment method, known as Microbial Electrolytic Carbon Capture (MECC), purifies wastewater in an environmentally-friendly fashion by using an electrochemical reaction that absorbs more CO2 than it releases while creating renewable energy in the process. "This energy-positive, carbon-negative ...

(BOSTON) - Super productive factories of the future could employ fleets of genetically engineered bacterial cells, such as common E. coli, to produce valuable chemical commodities in an environmentally friendly way. By leveraging their natural metabolic processes, bacteria could be re-programmed to convert readily available sources of natural energy into pharmaceuticals, plastics and fuel products. "The basic idea is that we want to accelerate evolution to make awesome amounts of valuable chemicals," said Wyss Core Faculty member George Church, Ph.D., who is a pioneer ...

Some neutron stars may rival black holes in their ability to accelerate powerful jets of material to nearly the speed of light, astronomers using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have discovered. "It's surprising, and it tells us that something we hadn't previously suspected must be going on in some systems that include a neutron star and a more-normal companion star," said Adam Deller, of ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Black holes and neutron stars are respectively the densest and second most dense forms of matter known in the Universe. ...

From an early age, human infants are able to produce vocalisations in a wide range of emotional states and situations - an ability felt to be one of the factors required for the development of language. Researchers have found that wild bonobos (our closest living relatives) are able to vocalize in a similar manner. Their findings challenge how we think about the evolution of communication and potentially move the dividing line between humans and other apes. Animal vocalisations are usually made in relatively narrow behavioural contexts linked to emotional states, such ...

Washington, DC-- Climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions will alter the way that Americans heat and cool their homes. By the end of this century, the number of days each year that heating and air conditioning are used will decrease in the Northern states, as winters get warmer, and increase in Southern states, as summers get hotter, according to a new study from a high school student, Yana Petri, working with Carnegie's Ken Caldeira. It is published by Scientific Reports. "Changes in outdoor temperatures have a substantial impact on energy use inside," Caldeira ...

A team of scientists believe they have shown that memories are more robust than we thought and have identified the process in the brain, which could help rescue lost memories or bury bad memories, and pave the way for new drugs and treatment for people with memory problems. Published in the journal Nature Communications a team of scientists from Cardiff University found that reminders could reverse the amnesia caused by methods previously thought to produce total memory loss in rats. . "Previous research in this area found that when you recall a memory it is sensitive ...

Dogs have a specialized region in their brains for processing faces, a new study finds. PeerJ is publishing the research, which provides the first evidence for a face-selective region in the temporal cortex of dogs. "Our findings show that dogs have an innate way to process faces in their brains, a quality that has previously only been well-documented in humans and other primates," says Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University and the senior author of the study. Having neural machinery dedicated to face processing suggests that this ability is hard-wired ...

Trauma may cause distinct and long-lasting effects even in people who do not develop PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), according to research by scientists working at the University of Oxford's Department of Psychiatry. It is already known that stress affects brain function and may lead to PTSD, but until now the underlying brain networks have proven elusive. Led by Prof Morten Kringelbach, the Oxford team's systematic meta-analysis of all brain research on PTSD is published in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews. The research is part of a larger ...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (AUGUST 4, 2015). Researchers at the University of Virginia (UVa) examined the number and severity of subconcussive head impacts sustained by college football players over an entire season during practices and games. The researchers found that the number of head impacts varied depending on the intensity of the activity. Findings in this case are reported and discussed in "Practice type effects on head impact in collegiate football," by Bryson B. Reynolds and colleagues, published today online, ahead of print, in the Journal of Neurosurgery. The researchers ...

August 4, 2015 -- Treating maternal psychiatric disorder with commonly used antidepressants is associated with a lower risk of certain pregnancy complications including preterm birth and delivery by Caesarean section, according to researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University Medical Center, and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. However, the medications -- selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs -- resulted in an increased risk of neonatal problems. Findings are published online in the American Journal of Psychiatry. "To ...

Chestnut Hill, MA (August 4, 2015): It's been said that "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it," but even if you know your own history, that doesn't necessarily help you with self-control. New research published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology shows the effectiveness of memory in improving our everyday self-control decisions depends on what we recall and how easily it comes to mind. "Despite the common belief that remembering our mistakes will help us make better decisions in the present," says the study's lead author, Hristina Nikolova, Ph.D., an ...