West Orange, NJ. August 15, 2014. Kessler stroke researchers and colleagues have identified an association between over-optimistic estimation of one's own ability to take medications accurately, and memory loss among stroke survivors. Results indicate that assessing patients for their ability to estimate medication skills accurately may predict memory disorder. The article, "Stroke survivors over-estimate their medication self-administration ability (MSA), predicting memory loss," was epublished ahead of print on May 28 by Brain Injury (doi:10.3109/02699052.2014.915984). ...

Following another person's gaze can reveal a wealth of information critical to social interactions and also to safety. Gaze following typically emerges in infancy, and new research looking at preterm infants suggests that it's visual experience, not maturational age, that underlies this critical ability. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study showing that some aspects of the early development of social cognition is influenced by experience, even ...

NASA's Terra satellite passed over Hurricane Karina before it weakened to a tropical storm early on August 15 and imagery showed the vertical wind shear was already taking its toll. NASA's Terra satellite passed over Karina on August 14 at 2:40 p.m. EDT when it was still clinging to hurricane status and noticed that wind shear was already having an effect on the storm's structure. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument captured an image that showed that the bulk of Karina's clouds were being pushed to the western side of the storm. That ...

Tropical Storm Julio doesn't have any strong thunderstorms or strong convection left in it according to infrared satellite imagery from NASA. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Julio on August 14 at 12:23 UTC (8:23 a.m. EDT), the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder known as AIRS analyzed the clouds and temperatures of the storm. The AIRS data showed that cloud tops had warmed and dropped lower in the atmosphere. That indicates that the strength behind rising air had weakened and was not forming strong, high thunderstorms with cold cloud tops. There was a ...

People living in countries with governments that spend more on social services report being more contented, according to a Baylor University study. "The effect of state intervention into the economy equals or exceeds marriage or employment status — two traditional predictors of happiness — when it comes to satisfaction," said Patrick Flavin, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences. The study — "Assessing the Impact of the Size and Scope of Government on Human Well-Being" — is published in the journal Social Forces. The researchers ...

Tissue engineering technologies offer new treatment strategies for the repair of peripheral nerve injury, but cell loss between seeding and adhesion to the scaffold remains inevitable. In a study reported on the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 14, 2014), a thermosensitive collagen hydrogel remained as a liquid when kept at temperatures below 10°C and gelled when the temperature was increased to 37°C in an incubator for 30 minutes, which was used as an extracellular matrix and combined with bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells to construct tissue-engineered peripheral ...

Over the past decades, the economic sciences have seen fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of human responses to incentives in the face of uncertainty and strategic interactions. But what is the scope and what are the limits for applying these models in the design of better institutions and better policies? And to what extent can they teach us what is needed to encourage the innovation that drives economic growth and social wellbeing? These are among the questions to be debated among 17 Nobel Laureates in Economic Sciences and approximately 450 aspiring young ...

An international team of scientists has shown that an antibody against the protein EphA3, found in the micro-environment of solid cancers, has anti-tumour effects. As EphA3 is present in normal organs only during embryonic development but is expressed in blood cancers and in solid tumours, this antibody-based approach may be a suitable candidate treatment for solid tumours. The researchers from Monash University and Ludwig Cancer Research, in Australia, and KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, in the US, have had their findings published in the journal Cancer Research. The ...

Girls with cancer who are most likely to become infertile after treatment can be identified using guidelines developed almost 20 years ago, new research shows. The criteria – developed in Edinburgh – will help to select which girls should be offered the opportunity to freeze some tissue from their ovaries for use in the future. Doctors are optimistic that the frozen tissue could one day help young cancer survivors to have children of their own. Some cancer treatments can affect female fertility by bringing on early menopause. Freezing samples of ovary tissue before ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Amid a neuroscience debate about how people and animals focus on distinct objects within cluttered scenes, some of the newest and best evidence comes from the way bats "see" with their ears, according to a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. In fact, the perception process in question could improve sonar and radar technology. Bats demonstrate remarkable skill in tracking targets such as bugs through the trees in the dark of night. Brown University neuroscience Professor James Simmons, the review paper's author, has long ...

There has been much recent interest, especially among cosmologists, in theories known as galileons. Galileons are an interesting and novel, though still hypothetical, class of effective scalar fields which are extremely universal and have attracted much recent attention. They arise generically in describing the short distance behavior of the new degrees of freedom introduced during the process of modifying gravity, and in describing the dynamics of extra dimensional brane worlds. Modified gravity and brane worlds are just some of the ideas that have been studied as possible ...

August 15, 2014 – Patients with low blood levels of vitamin D are at increased risk of death and serious complications after noncardiac surgery, suggests a study in Anesthesia & Analgesia. "Vitamin D concentrations were associated with a composite of in-hospital death, serious infections, and serious cardiovascular events," according to the new research by Dr Alparslan Turan and colleagues of the Cleveland Clinic. They believe their results warrant further study to see if giving vitamin D supplementation before surgery can reduce the risk of these adverse outcomes. Lower ...

According to the CDC, unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death for adolescents. Compared to the two leading causes of death for all Americans, heart disease and cancer, a pattern of questionable decision-making in dire situations comes to light in teen mortality. New research from the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas investigating brain differences associated with risk-taking teens found that connections between certain brain regions are amplified in teens more prone to risk. "Our brains have an emotional-regulation network that ...

Laser physicists have found a way to make atomic-force microscope probes 20 times more sensitive and capable of detecting forces as small as the weight of an individual virus. The technique, developed by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU), hinges on using laser beams to cool a nanowire probe to minus 265 degrees Celsius. "The level of sensitivity achieved after cooling is accurate enough for us to sense the weight of a large virus that is 100 billion times lighter than a mosquito," said Dr Ben Buchler from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. The ...

Stem cell researchers at the Blond McIndoe Laboratory, University of Manchester, UK, led by Dr Adam Reid, present a review of the current literature on the suitability of adipose-derived stem cells in peripheral nerve repair. Injuries to peripheral nerves are common and cause life-changing problems for patients alongside high social and health care costs for society. Current clinical treatment relies on sacrificing a nerve from elsewhere in the body to provide a nerve graft at the injury site, but much work has been done to develop a bioengineered nerve graft that would ...

Transport accounts for 30% of CO2 emissions in the EU, with emissions rising 36% between 1990 and 2007. The research, carried out by Lund University and the University of Surrey a found a need to dissect the widely-held view that new technologies, such as biofuel and improved aircraft design, will result in carbon reduction targets being met. In the paper, researchers highlight the fact that policy makers are turning to the perceived benefits of such technologies to drive decarbonisation policy, despite contrary evidence. They argue that in order to cut damaging carbon ...

Researchers at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have discovered that the conductivity at the edges of graphene devices is different to that of the central material. Local scanning electrical techniques were used to examine the local nanoscale electronic properties of epitaxial graphene, in particular the differences between the edges and central parts of graphene Hall bar devices. The research was published in Scientific Reports, an open access publication from Nature Publishing Group. The researchers found that the central part of the graphene channel demonstrated ...

Port scanners are programs that search the Internet for systems that exhibit potential vulnerabilities. According to the report published today by journalists at Heise Online, Hacienda is one such port scanning program. The report says that this program is being put into service by the "Five Eyes," a federation of the secret services of the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. "The goal is to identify as many servers as possible in other countries that can be remotely controlled," explains Dr. Christian Grothoff, Emmy Noether research group leader at the TUM ...

Washington, DC (August 12, 2014) – Determining deception is a tool of the trade for law enforcement. The Good Cop/Bad Cop routine is etched in our minds as an effective method of finding out the truth. But prior research has shown that lie detecting is a 50/50 shot for experts and non-experts alike. So what exactly can we do to find out the truth? A recent study published in Human Communication Research by researchers at Korea University, Michigan State University, and Texas State University - San Marcos found that using active questioning of individuals yielded near-perfect ...

The physical properties of the ultra-white scales on certain species of beetle could be used to make whiter paper, plastics and paints, while using far less material than is used in current manufacturing methods. The Cyphochilus beetle, which is native to South-East Asia, is whiter than paper, thanks to ultra-thin scales which cover its body. A new investigation of the optical properties of these scales has shown that they are able to scatter light more efficiently than any other biological tissue known, which is how they are able to achieve such a bright whiteness. ...

Much has been assumed about the private and public damage of scientific misconduct. Yet few have tried to measure the costs to perpetrators and to society. A recent study calculated some of the career impacts, as well as federal funding wasted, when biomedical research papers are retracted. The results appear in the Aug. 15 issue of the journal eLife. In questioning common assumptions, the study authors determined that scientific misconduct typically, but not always, exacts a personal toll in derailing careers. On the public side, the cost to federal funding sources ...

Links between a number of common respiratory diseases and an increased risk of developing lung cancer have been found in a large pooled analysis of seven studies involving more than 25,000 individuals. "Associations between various respiratory diseases and lung cancer have been shown in earlier studies, but few of these studies considered multiple respiratory diseases simultaneously," said researcher Ann Olsson, PhD, of the International Agency for Research in Cancer in Lyon, France. "In our pooled analysis of seven case-control studies involving more than 12,500 cases ...

HOUSTON – (August 15, 2014) – For premature infants, adequate growth while in the neonatal intensive care unit is an indicator of better long-term health and developmental outcomes. Researchers at the USDA/ARS Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital have now successfully incorporated a cream supplement into premature infants' diets that improved their growth outcomes in the NICU. The report appears today in the Journal of Pediatrics. "For premature babies who weigh less than 1,000 grams (about 2 pounds, 2 ounces), ...

A handful of genes arm the woodrat against the toxic chemicals in its foodstuff, the creosote plant, according to research published in the open access journal BMC Ecology. It's long been a mystery exactly how the woodrat developed the ability to handle the chemicals in the creosote plant, which are toxic to other rodents. Previous research has suggested that they are protected by factors such as gut bacteria. But the new study identifies the genes switched on in two species of woodrat with resistance to the plant poisons, showing that the genes that they are born with ...

An experimental vaccine to prevent the mosquito-borne viral illness chikungunya elicited neutralizing antibodies in all 25 adult volunteers who participated in a recent early-stage clinical trial conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The results are reported in the current issue of The Lancet. The most distinctive symptom of chikungunya infection is severe joint pain accompanied by headache and fever. There are currently no vaccines or specific drug treatments for chikungunya. ...