According to researchers at the University of Montreal, the regions of the brain below the cortex play an important role as we train our bodies' movements and, critically, they interact more effectively after a night of sleep. While researchers knew that sleep helped us the learn sequences of movements (motor learning), it was not known why. "The subcortical regions are important in information consolidation, especially information linked to a motor memory trace. When consolidation level is measured after a period of sleep, the brain network of these areas functions with ...

DURHAM, N.H. –- The moon appears to be a tranquil place, but modeling done by University of New Hampshire and NASA scientists suggests that, over the eons, periodic storms of solar energetic particles may have significantly altered the properties of the soil in the moon's coldest craters through the process of sparking—a finding that could change our understanding of the evolution of planetary surfaces in the solar system. The study, published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets, proposes that high-energy particles from uncommon, large solar storms ...

New feeding tube connectors, designed by an international standards process, will be available soon and will improve patient safety. According to an invited review published in the OnlineFirst version of Nutrition in Clinical Practice (NCP), the official journal of the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (A.S.P.E.N.), the new connectors will greatly reduce the occurrence of misconnection that can be harmful and even fatal to patients. Small-bore connectors, which are used to join medical devices, components, and accessories to deliver fluids or gases, ...

Emergency department nurses aren't like the rest of us – they are more extroverted, agreeable and open – attributes that make them successful in the demanding, fast-paced and often stressful environment of an emergency department, according to a new study by University of Sydney. "Emergency nurses are a special breed," says Belinda Kennedy from Sydney Nursing School, a 15 year critical care veteran who led the study. "Despite numerous studies about personalities of nurses in general, there has been little research done on the personalities of nurses in clinical specialty ...

RUSTON, La. – A team of researchers at Louisiana Tech University has developed an innovative method for using affordable, consumer-grade 3D printers and materials to fabricate custom medical implants that can contain antibacterial and chemotherapeutic compounds for targeted drug delivery. The team comprised of doctoral students and research faculty from Louisiana Tech's biomedical engineering and nanosystems engineering programs collaborated to create filament extruders that can make medical-quality 3D printing filaments. Creating these filaments, which have specialized ...

An Australian National University (ANU) team has successfully replicated one of the crucial steps in photosynthesis, opening the way for biological systems powered by sunlight which could manufacture hydrogen as a fuel. "Water is abundant and so is sunlight. It is an exciting prospect to use them to create hydrogen, and do it cheaply and safely," said Dr Kastoori Hingorani, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis in the ANU Research School of Biology. Hydrogen offers potential as a zero-carbon replacement for petroleum products, and is already ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a novel and versatile modeling strategy to simulate polyelectrolyte systems. The model has applications for creating new materials as well as for studying polyelectrolytes, including DNA and RNA. "Our new technique allows us to model much larger and more complex polyelectrolyte systems, and to do so much more quickly," says Nan Li, lead author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student in NC State's Department of Materials Science and Engineering. "This is a big step forward for this field." Polyelectrolytes ...

New results from the Nordic SYSDIET study show that it's possible to assess dietary compliance from a blood sample. This is especially useful in controlled dietary intervention studies investigating the health benefits of specific diets. So far, such studies have mainly relied on the participants' self-reported dietary intake, which is often biased, making it more difficult to assess the real health benefits. In the recently published study authored by Dr Matti Marklund and coworkers, the researchers were able to identify the study participants with the greatest apparent ...

Finnish researchers have found that the low-expression variant of fatty acid-binding protein 4 (FABP4), which is particularly common among Finns, reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke. The finding revealed a promising new way to customise a potentially preventive drug for atherosclerosis. Led by Professor Perttu Lindsberg, the long-term research project of the Department of Neurology at the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS) focuses on carotid atherosclerosis. It is a joint effort involving the University of Helsinki, the Helsinki University Central ...

LIVERPOOL, UK – 05 August 2014: Research by the University of Liverpool suggests that, contrary to popular opinion, it can be good to feel bad at work, whilst feeling good in the workplace can also lead to negative outcomes. In a Special Issue published in Human Relations, Dr Dirk Lindebaum from the University's Management School, together with his co-author Professor Peter Jordan, developed a new line of study, and commissioned research to further explore the role of emotions in the workplace. They found that the commonly-held assumption that positivity in the workplace ...

Counselling techniques used to help young people with drinking problems may be of limited benefit, a new study suggests. In a systematic review published in The Cochrane Library, researchers found that an approach known as motivational interviewing did not substantially reduce drinking or alter alcohol-related behaviour. Globally every year, around 320,000 young people between the ages of 15 and 29 die as a result of alcohol misuse. Most of these deaths are due to car accidents, murders, suicides or drowning. Motivational interviewing is a counselling technique developed ...

Monthly blood transfusions can substantially reduce the risk of recurrent strokes in children with sickle cell disease (SCD) who have already suffered a silent stroke, according to the results of an international study by investigators at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, Vanderbilt University and 27 other medical institutions. Results of the federally funded research described in the Aug. 21 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, show that children with preexisting silent strokes who receive monthly transfusions have 58 percent lower risk of suffering repeat ...

WASHINGTON – Conducting clinical studies of agents to treat Ebola and allowing compassionate use of those agents are not necessarily mutually exclusive, writes Georgetown University Medical Center's (GUMC) Jesse L. Goodman, M.D., M.P.H., in a perspective piece published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. In "Studying 'Secret Serums' — Toward Safe, Effective Ebola Treatments," Goodman describes the Ebola virus as "one of the world's most feared pathogens." The latest Ebola outbreak that began in West Africa in Dec. 2013 has infected more than 2,200 people ...

Aug. 20, 2014 -- An imaging study of chronic users of codeine-containing cough syrups (CCS) has found deficits in specific regions of brain white matter and associates these changes with increased impulsivity in CCS users. Researchers used diffusuion tensor imaging (DTI) (an MR imaging technique), coupled with fractional anisotropy, to investigate the white matter integrity of chronic CCS users. Deficits were found in multiple regions of the brain, including the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, which other studies have found to be abnormal in other forms of addiction, ...

DALLAS (SMU) – Two Dallas high school students discovered five stars as members of a Southern Methodist University summer physics research program that enabled them to analyze data gleaned from a high-powered telescope in the New Mexico desert. All five stars discovered by Lake Highlands High School seniors Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are eclipsing contact binary stars, pairs of stars that orbit around each other so closely that their outer atmospheres touch. As the stars eclipse, they dim and then brighten as one emerges from behind the other. These stars are categorized ...

VIDEO: This NASA video discusses new research that shows Earth's atmosphere contains an unexpectedly large amount of an ozone-depleting compound from an unknown source decades after the compound was banned worldwide.... Click here for more information. NASA research shows Earth's atmosphere contains an unexpectedly large amount of an ozone-depleting compound from an unknown source decades after the compound was banned worldwide. Carbon tetrachloride (CCl4), which was once used ...

SALT LAKE CITY— Researchers at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah have identified and characterized mutated forms of the gene that encodes BCR-ABL, the unregulated enzyme driving the blood cancer chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). According to the American Cancer Society, nearly 6,000 new cases of CML will be diagnosed in 2014. Drugs already in use, called tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), target BCR-ABL and are effective at controlling the disease. They do not cure CML but control it in a way that allows patients to get back to normal life and a ...

RICHLAND, Wash. -- Trying to understand the chemistry that turns plant material into the same energy-rich gasoline and diesel we put in our vehicles, researchers have discovered that water in the conversion process helps form an impurity which, in turn, slows down key chemical reactions. The study, which was reported online at the Journal of the American Chemical Society, can help improve processes that produce biofuels from plants. The study examines the conversion of bio-oil, produced from biomass such as wood chips or grasses, into transportation fuels. Researchers ...

Sockeye salmon that sprint to spawning grounds through fast-moving waters may be at risk, suggests new research by University of British Columbia scientists. When salmon encounter turbulent, fast-moving water – such as rapids or areas downstream of dams – they must move upstream using a behaviour known as "burst swimming" that is similar to sprinting for humans. "Days after sockeye passed through extremely fast-moving water, we started to see fish dying only a short distance from their spawning grounds," said Nicholas Burnett, a research biologist at UBC and lead author ...

University of Adelaide researchers have discovered that the immune system is defective in people suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, which is a major reason why sufferers have ongoing issues with pain. The research – the first of its kind in the world – could also help to explain why some painkillers may not offer satisfactory relief to sufferers. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) affects up to 10% of the community. There are different forms of IBS but all of them involve unexplained gut pain, which often has the greatest impact on sufferers' quality of life. Scientists ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – In a study of 158 pregnant teenagers in Rochester, NY, nearly half engaged in pica – the craving and intentional consumption of ice, cornstarch, vacuum dust, baby powder and soap, and other nonfood items, reports a new Cornell study. Moreover, such teens had significantly lower iron levels as compared with teens who did not eat nonfood substances. Pregnant teens, regardless of pica, are at higher risk for low hemoglobin, which can lead to iron deficiency and anemia. Low iron in pregnant teens raises the risk of premature births and babies with low birth ...

New research co-written by a University of Illinois expert in urban economics indicates that tax benefits for housing, including the ever-popular mortgage interest deduction and the property tax deduction, are not as distortionary as previous research and some prominent critics suggest. The existing system of tax benefits for housing caused the typical house to be 4 percent too large in 2007, creating a national economic waste of $7 billion per year – a figure that is substantially smaller than recent estimates by other economists, including some who have pegged the figure ...

Advances in the treatment of muscular dystrophy: For the first time, a research team has succeeded in restoring a missing repair protein in skeletal muscle of patients with muscular dystrophy. Researchers from the University and the University Hospital of Basel, Department of Biomedicine and Clinic of Neurology, report their recent findings in the scientific journal Science Translational Medicine. When muscle cell membranes are damaged, the repair protein dysferlin is activated and reseals muscle membrane tears. If this repair protein is altered due to a genetic mutation, ...

NEW YORK -- The most common cause of endophthalmitis, a potentially blinding condition that can occur after eye trauma, eye surgery, and eye injections, are the well-known staphylococci ("staph") and streptococci ("strep") bacterial strains, according to a study published in the August issue of Ophthalmology and based on a review of 25 years of cases at New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai (NYEE). The new study found that gram-positive bacteria, which include staph and strep infections, accounted for 95 percent of endophthalmitis cases. The findings could lead ...

In contrast to evidence that the amygdala stimulates stress responses in adults, researchers at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University have found that the amygdala has an inhibitory effect on stress hormones during the early development of nonhuman primates. The results are published this week in Journal of Neuroscience. The amygdala is a region of the brain known to be important for responses to threatening situations and learning about threats. Alterations in the amygdala have been reported in psychiatric disorders such as depression, post-traumatic ...