Working 12+ hour shifts is linked to a heightened risk of burnout, job dissatisfaction, and intention to leave among hospital nurses in 12 European countries, finds research published in the online journal BMJ Open. The findings run counter to the perceived value among both nurses and employers of working longer shifts, which are increasingly common practice in England, Ireland, and Poland, say the researchers. Job satisfaction and burnout are global concerns in the nursing workforce, because of the potential impact they have not only on the quality and safety of patient ...

A wide range of avoidable risk factors to health - ranging from air pollution to poor diets to unsafe water - account for a growing number of deaths and a significant amount of disease burden, according to a new analysis of 79 risks in 188 countries. High blood pressure was the number-one individual risk factor associated with global deaths in 2013, contributing to 10.4 million deaths around the world that year. High blood pressure's impact on mortality grew by 49.1% between 1990 - when it was also the number-one global risk - and 2013. While this risk heavily impacts ...

DALLAS, Sept. 10, 2015 -- Are you getting enough quality sleep? Are you sleeping longer than you should? Poor sleep habits may put you at higher risk for early signs of heart disease when compared to those who get adequate, good quality sleep, according to a study published in the American Heart Association journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology. "Inadequate sleep is a common problem and a likely source of poor health, including visible signs of disease, such as heart attack," said Chan-Won Kim, M.D., study co-lead author and clinical associate professor ...

DALLAS, Sept. 10, 2015 - For better cardiovascular health, check your gut. Bacteria living in your gut may impact your weight, fat and good cholesterol levels, factors necessary to help maintain a healthy heart, according to new research in Circulation Research, an American Heart Association journal. "Our study provides new evidence that microbes in the gut are strongly linked to the blood level of HDL (good cholesterol) and triglycerides and may be added as a new risk factor for abnormal blood lipids, in addition to age, gender, BMI and genetics," said Jingyuan Fu, Ph.D., ...

They're the latest rage in jewelry and gadgetry, but like all computer devices, smart watches are vulnerable to hackers, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Using a homegrown app on a Samsung Gear Live smart watch, the researchers were able to guess what a user was typing through data "leaks" produced by the motion sensors on smart watches. The project, called Motion Leaks through Smartwatch Sensors, or MoLe, has privacy implications, as an app that is camouflaged as a pedometer, for example, could gather data from emails, search queries ...

Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have released details of a deep-sea site roughly 48 kilometers (30 miles) west of Del Mar (just north of San Diego, Calif.) where methane is seeping out of the seafloor, the first such finding in the region. Scripps graduate students on a 2012 UC Ship Funds Program expedition aboard Scripps's research vessel Melville off San Diego County discovered the "Del Mar Seep" during the San Diego Coastal Expedition. Such methane seeps are fascinating environments because of their extraordinary chemical features, ...

Many of the drugs we take today to treat pain, fight cancer or thwart disease were originally identified in plants, some of which are endangered or hard to grow. In many cases, those plants are still the primary source of the drug. Now Elizabeth Sattely, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, and her graduate student Warren Lau have isolated the machinery for making a widely used cancer-fighting drug from an endangered plant. They then put that machinery into a common, easily grown laboratory plant, which was able to produce the chemical. The technique ...

The Southern Ocean has begun to absorb more atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) according to new research from an international team, including the University of East Anglia. A decade ago scientists announced that the amount of CO2 being absorbed by the Southern Ocean had not increased since the late 1980s. And it was feared that this 'carbon sink' might have begun to saturate. But new research to be published tomorrow (Friday) in the journal Science reveals that rather than stalling, the amount of CO2 being absorbed is on the rise again. It is thought that changes ...

This news release is available in Japanese. Inconveniently, the only current method to synthesize the chemotherapy agent etoposide is by using extracts from a plant, but researchers have successfully manipulated Nicotiana benthamiana (tobacco) to create a more immediate and potent precursor. Etoposide is a topoisomerase inhibitor used to treat a variety of malignancies, including lung cancer and leukemia. There is currently no way to produce etoposide without one of its precursors, podophyllotoxin, which is found in the slow-growing Himalayan Mayapple plant. Four ...

This news release is available in Japanese. In this Policy Forum, Jonas Meckling et al. discuss the need to close the gap between climate science and policy, arguing that targeted policies and economic incentives are the answer, rather than broad carbon taxes. As policymakers convene at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December, pinpointing the best policies is critical for a more sustainable future. In theory carbon pricing poses as an efficient solution, but this has yet to be seen in practice. As the authors point out, carbon regulation imposes costs ...

This news release is available in Japanese. Patients with metastatic melanoma who have benefited from a new type of cancer immunotherapy don't appear to share the same tumor-produced antigens, according to a new report by Eliezer Van Allen and colleagues. If the molecular targets for the immunotherapy differ from patient to patient, as this study suggests, it may be difficult to predict which patients will respond to the treatment. The drug, called ipilimumab, is part of a relatively new class of cancer treatments called immune checkpoint inhibitors. The inhibitors ...

This news release is available in Japanese. The Southern Ocean has increased its uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide again, after showing signs of slowing uptake in the 1990s, according to a new report from Peter Landschützer and colleagues. The Southern Ocean is a huge player in carbon sequestration, accounting for up to 40% of oceanic uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide. When earlier studies showed the Southern Ocean's carbon sink weakening, the findings raised concerns that the planet might lose a powerful way to remove the growing amounts ...

Breathe in, breathe out, in, out... Like a giant lung, the Southern Ocean seasonally absorbs vast amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and releases it back later in the year. But on an annual average the seas surrounding Antarctica absorb significantly more CO2 than they release. Most importantly, these seas remove a large part of the CO2 that human activities emit into the atmosphere, thereby slowing down the growth of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, lessening the rate of climate change. Although the Southern Ocean represents no more than a quarter ...

Berkeley -- To speed up progress in tackling climate change, policymakers need to build political support by investing in clean-energy industries rather than first penalizing polluters, according to a new policy paper by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. In the paper, to be published Thursday, Sept. 10, in the journal Science, a multidisciplinary team of environmental, political and legal experts finds that instead of emphasizing cap-and-trade schemes and penalties on greenhouse gas emissions - strategies considered to be most efficient by many economists ...

MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Some of the inner workings of Earth's subduction zones and their "megathrust" faults are revealed in a paper published today in the journal Science. U.S. Geological Survey scientist Jeanne Hardebeck calculated the frictional strength of subduction zone faults worldwide, and the stresses they are under. Stresses in subduction zones are found to be low, although the smaller amount of stress can still lead to a great earthquake. Subduction zone megathrust faults produce most of the world's largest earthquakes. The stresses are the forces acting on ...

Researchers from the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology (MRC CDN) at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King's College London, have discovered a new molecular 'switch' that controls the properties of neurons in response to changes in the activity of their neural network. The findings, published in Science, suggest that the 'hardware' in our brain is tuneable and could have implications that go far beyond basic neuroscience - from informing education policy to developing new therapies for neurological disorders such as epilepsy. Computers ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Since 2002, the Southern Ocean has been removing more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to two new studies. These studies make use of millions of ship-based observations and a variety of data analysis techniques to conclude that that the Southern Ocean has increasingly taken up more carbon dioxide during the last 13 years. That follows a decade from the early 1990s to 2000s, where evidence suggested the Southern Ocean carbon dioxide sink was weakening. The new studies appear today in the American Geophysical Union ...

A prospective longitudinal study of U.S. Marines suggests that reduced heart rate variability - the changing time interval between heartbeats - may be a contributing risk factor for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The findings are reported in the September 9 online issue of JAMA Psychiatry by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System. Even at rest, the normal rhythm of the heart fluctuates, reflecting influences and changes in other parts of the body. Generally speaking, the greater ...

Imagine the scientific discoveries that would result from a searchable online database containing millions of plant, algae, and fungi specimen records. Thanks to a new set of workflow modules to digitize specimen collections currently preserved in herbaria, something like that might be within reach. The modules are provided by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), which is facilitating a collective effort to unify digitization projects across the nation. "North America's herbaria curate approximately 74 million specimens ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Would a color by any other name be thought of in the same way, regardless of the language used to describe it? According to new research, the answer is yes. A new study examines how a culture of nomadic hunter-gatherers names colors, and shows that they group colors into categories that align with patterns of color grouping evident in 110 other world languages. This study population - the Hadza people of Tanzania - has relatively few commonly shared color words in its language. During the study, the most common response by Hadza participants to a ...

Seasonal flare-ups in patients with multiple sclerosis are caused by plummeting levels of melatonin in the spring and summer, according to research published September 10 in Cell. The study reveals that relapses in patients with this autoimmune disorder are much less frequent in the fall and winter, when levels of the so-called darkness hormone are at their highest, but the reverse is true in the spring and summer seasons. Moreover, treatment with melatonin improved clinical symptoms in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis by restoring a healthy balance of immune cells ...

The blame for some of chemotherapy's awful side effects may lie with our gut microbes, early evidence suggests. As chemotherapy drugs are eliminated from the body, bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract can latch onto them and transform them into toxic species that cause severe diarrhea. In a Chemistry & Biology article published online on September 10, researchers present ways to shut down the ability of GI microbes to convert chemotherapy drugs to a toxic species in mice as a first step to helping cancer patients. "The GI microbiota are the great crowd-sourcers of chemistry, ...

Have you ever touched someone else and wondered why his or her skin felt so incredibly soft? Well, now researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on September 10 present evidence that this experience may often be an illusion. In a series of studies led by Aikaterini Fotopoulou of the University College London, participants consistently rated the skin of another person as being softer than their own, whether or not it really was softer. The researchers suggest that this phenomenon may exist to ensure that humans are motivated to build social bonds ...

Those of you who spend hours at the gym with the aim of burning as many calories as possible may be disappointed to learn that all the while your nervous system is subconsciously working against you. Researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on September 10 have found that our nervous systems are remarkably adept in changing the way we move so as to expend the least amount of energy possible. In other words, humans are wired for laziness. The findings, which were made by studying the energetic costs of walking, likely apply to most of our movements, ...

For patients and clinicians alike, it's long been a mystery: why do symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS) seem to get better in the winter and worse in the summer? A group led by Francisco Quintana, PhD, at the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and collaborators have found an explanation that could lead to a deeper understanding of the disease and more targeted treatment options for patients. By first looking broadly at possible environmental factors and then deeply at preclinical models of MS, the research team found that melatonin ...