PHILADELPHIA –A diagnosis of septic shock was once a near death sentence. At best, survivors suffered a substantially reduced quality of life. Penn Medicine researchers have now shown that while most patients now survive a hospital stay for septic shock, 23 percent will return to the hospital within 30 days, many with another life-threatening condition -- a rate substantially higher than the normal readmission rate at a large academic medical center. The findings are published in the new issue of Critical Care Medicine. "Half of patients diagnosed with sepsis ...

November 5, 2014 – Insomnia is a "prevalent and persistent" problem for patients in the early phases of recovery from the disease of addiction—and may lead to an increased risk of relapse, according to a report in the November/December Journal of Addiction Medicine, the official journal of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. "Treating sleep disturbance in early recovery may have considerable impact on maintenance of sobriety and quality of life," according ...

Despite great advances in understanding how the human brain works, psychiatric conditions, neurodegenerative disorders, and brain injuries are on the rise. Progress in the development of new diagnostic and treatment approaches appears to have stalled. In a special issue of the Cell Press journal Neuron, experts look at the challenges associated with "translational neuroscience," or efforts to bring advances in the lab to the patients who need them. "A variety of global impact studies have identified brain disorders as a leading contributor to disabilities and morbidity ...

DENVER – A risk stratification model based on lymph node characteristics confirms with a high level of confidence the true lack of lung cancer in lymph nodes adequately sampled with endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial needle aspiration and classified as negative. Lung cancer treatment and prognosis is critically dependent on accurate staging that takes into account the extent to which cancer has spread from the primary lung tumor to other locations. Examination of lymph nodes containing lung cancer cells that have spread can be done by surgical removal, ...

Stanford University School of Medicine scientists have found a new way to forecast which patients with age-related macular degeneration are likely to suffer from the most debilitating form of the disease. The new method predicts, on a personalized basis, which patients' AMD would, if untreated, probably make them blind, and roughly when this would occur. Simply by crunching imaging data that is already commonly collected in eye doctors' offices, ophthalmologists could make smarter decisions about when to schedule an individual patient's next office visit in order to optimize ...

Hurricane Vance was a hurricane on Nov. 4 when the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite and the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission satellite passed overhead and measured its rainfall from space. TRMM and GPM revealed areas of heavy rain within the storm before it weakened to a depression and made landfall on Nov. 5. The TRMM satellite flew over hurricane Vance on Nov. 4 at 0953 UTC (4:53 a.m. EST). Rainfall derived from TRMM's Microwave Imager (TMI) data collected were overlaid on a 1000 UTC (5 a.m. EST) image from NOAA's GOES-West satellite ...

Typhoon Nuri continued moving in a northeasterly direction passing the island of Iwo To, Japan when NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible picture of Typhoon Nuri on Nov. 5 at 4:10 UTC (11:10 p.m. EST, Nov. 4). At 1002 UTC (5:02 a.m. EST) a microwave image captured from NASA/JAXA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite showed that the low-level center of circulation was beginning to weaken. The strongest thunderstorms had become ...

DENVER – Pretreatment interstitial lung disease (ILD) is a significant risk factor for developing symptomatic and severe radiation pneumonitis in stage I non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients treated with stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) alone. ILD is a group of diseases that cause scarring and stiffing of the tissue and space around the air sacs in the lungs, which results in diminished gas exchange. The incidence of ILD among lung cancer patients is higher than in the general population as tobacco smoking is a common risk factor for both. Some ...

CLEVELAND—Artificial platelet mimics developed by a research team from Case Western Reserve University and University of California, Santa Barbara, are able to halt bleeding in mouse models 65 percent faster than nature can on its own. For the first time, the researchers have been able to integratively mimic the shape, size, flexibility and surface chemistry of real blood platelets on albumin-based particle platforms. The researchers believe these four design factors together are important in inducing clots to form faster selectively at vascular injury sites while ...

Alexandria, Va. — Earth's abundant silicate minerals are degraded over time by exposure to water, chemical dissolution, and physical and chemical weathering by tree roots and even insects such as ants and termites. Such weathering plays a significant role in decreasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as carbon dioxide is consumed in chemical weathering reactions and the resultant carbonate becomes sequestered in the form of limestone and dolomite. To study the effects of weathering over time, researchers buried basalt sand at multiple test sites and dug up the ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Empathy is among humanity's defining characteristics. Understanding another person's plight can inspire gentle emotions and encourage nurturing behaviors. Yet under certain circumstances, feelings of warmth, tenderness and sympathy can in fact predict aggressive behaviors, according to a recent study by two University at Buffalo researchers. But why? That an expression of kindness might be manifest as a punch in the nose can leave observers scratching their heads. The answer is that it's not about anger or feeling personally threatened, says ...

"New Rochelle, NY, November 5, 2014—The e-incubator, an innovative miniature incubator that is compatible with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), enables scientists to grow tissue-engineered constructs under controlled conditions and to study their growth and development in real-time without risk of contamination or damage. Offering the potential to test engineered tissues before human transplantation, increase the success rate of implantation, and accelerate the translation of tissue engineering methods from the lab to the clinic, the novel e-incubator is described ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana University School of Medicine researchers have identified a small protein with a big role in lowering plasma glucose and increasing insulin sensitivity. Their research appeared online today in Diabetes, the journal of the American Diabetes Association. The report indicates that Sestrin 3 plays a critical role in regulating molecular pathways that control the production of glucose and insulin sensitivity in the liver, making it a logical target for drug development for type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome, which can produce increased blood pressure, ...

Researchers from Northeastern University's Marine Science Center and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have found that moderate ocean acidification and warming can actually enhance the growth rate of one reef-​​building coral species. Only under extreme acidification and thermal conditions did calcification decline. Their work, which was published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, is the first to show that some corals may benefit from moderate ocean acidification. Justin Ries, an associate professor ...

WASHINGTON, DC—November 4, 2014—An international team of bioengineers has boosted the ability of bacteria to produce isopentenol, a compound with desirable gasoline properties. The finding, published in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, is a significant step toward developing a bacterial strain that can yield industrial quantities of renewable bio-gasoline. The metabolic engineering steps to produce short-chain alcohol solvents like isopentenol in the laboratory bacteria Escherichia coli have been worked on ...

From water marks to colored threads, governments are constantly adding new features to paper money to stay one step ahead of counterfeiters. Now a longhorn beetle has inspired yet another way to foil cash fraud, as well as to produce colorful, changing billboards and art displays. In the journal ACS Nano, researchers report a new kind of ink that mimics the beetle's color-shifting ability in a way that would be long-lasting and difficult to copy. Zhongze Gu, Zhuoying Xie, Chunwei Yuan and colleagues explain that some U.S. bills have color-changing features to help thwart ...

Researchers from MIPT and the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) have predicted the possibility of negative turbophoresis, a phenomenon where impurity particles inside a turbulent flow move in an "impossible" direction. The study by Sergei Belan (a postgraduate at MIPT), Grigory Falkovich and Itzhak Fouxon was published in the journal Physical Review Letters in the Editors' Suggestions section, which features the most important and interesting studies from the editorial board's point of view. The researchers studied the behavior of inertial particles in different ...

An international study has devised a new measure for the "livability" of major cities across the world. The Global Liveable Cities Index (GLCI) takes into account the sensibilities of ordinary working people from 64 cities, balancing work and play, environmental awareness, localism, globalism and many other factors. Details are published in the World Review of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development. According to Tan Khee Giap of the National University of Singapore and colleagues at University of California, Davis, and Curtin University, in Bentley, Australia, ...

In a recent paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, Joel Moser and ICFO colleagues of the NanoOptoMechanics research group led by Prof. Adrian Bachtold, together with Marc Dykman (Michigan University), report on an experiment in which a carbon nanotube mechanical resonator exhibits quality factors of up to 5 million, 30 times better than the best quality factors measured in nanotubes to date. Imagine that the host of a dinner party tries to get his guests' attention by giving a single tap of his oyster spoon on his crystal glass. Now, imagine, to the amazement of all, ...

New Danish-led research suggests that signs of brain aging can be postponed in mice if placed on a high-fat diet. In the long term, this opens the possibility of treatment of children suffering from premature aging and patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. The research project is headed by the Center for Healthy Aging, University of Copenhagen and the National Institute of Health. When we get older, defects begin to develop in our nervous system, our brain loses some of its intellectual capacity, and the risk of developing diseases such as Parkinson's and ...

Using DESY's ultrabright X-ray source PETRA III, researchers have observed in real-time how football-shaped carbon molecules arrange themselves into ultra-smooth layers. Together with theoretical simulations, the investigation reveals the fundamentals of this growth process for the first time in detail, as the team around Sebastian Bommel (DESY and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) and Nicola Kleppmann (Technische Universität Berlin) reports in the scientific journal Nature Communications. This knowledge will eventually enable scientists to tailor nanostructures ...

Researchers at the Cognition and Brain Plasticity group of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the University of Barcelona have been tracking the traces of implicit and explicit memories of fear in human. The study has been published in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and describes how in a context of fear, our brain differently encodes contextual memory of a negative event (the place, what we saw...) and emotional response associated. The study measures electrodermal activity of 86 individuals in a fearful generated in the laboratory ...

Bethesda, MD (Nov. 5, 2014) — Up to 15 percent of the general adult population is affected by irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and most patients struggle to find effective drug therapy. A new guideline from the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) provides these patients and their physician's guidance. The new guideline and accompanying technical review have been published in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the AGA Institute. "Because no IBS therapy is uniformly effective, many patients describe a history of a variety of treatments alone or in ...

What sounds counter-intuitive to an activity commonly perceived as quiet is the broad recommendation of scientists at Michigan State University (MSU) recommending that small-scale fishing in the world's freshwater bodies must have a higher profile to best protect global food security. In this month's journal Global Food Security, scientists note that competition for freshwater is ratcheting up all over the world for municipal use, hydropower, industry, commercial development, and irrigation. Rivers are being dammed and rerouted, lakes and wetlands are being drained, fish ...

Noonan syndrome is a rare disease that is characterised by a set of pathologies, including heart, facial and skeletal alterations, pulmonary stenosis, short stature, and a greater incidence of haematological problems (mainly juvenile myeloid leukaemia, or childhood leukaemia). There is an estimated incidence of 1 case for every 1,000–2,500 births, and calculations show some 20,000–40,000 people suffer from the disease in Spain. From a genetic point of view, this syndrome is associated to mutations in 11 different genes —the K-Ras gene among them— ...