There is a rapidly growing momentum driving the development of mobile payment systems. New research has shown systems, such as the Bristol Pound, can have a positive effect on the local community by encouraging consumers to support and value their local businesses. The paper, which will be presented at this month's ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (ACM CSCW 2015) [14-18 March], looks at user interactions and practices around mobile payment systems. The research, led by Dr Mark Perry at Brunel University London and visiting ...

Tourists are familiar with the Lodoicea maldivica palm, also called coco de mer, mainly because of their bizarrely shaped fruits. Scientists, however, are fascinated by the huge plants - which are abundant on the Seychelles islands of Praslin and Curieuse - for entirely different reasons. The coco de mer palm engages in a lot of effort for reproduction, producing large amounts of pollen and huge fruits that cannot be spread around, but rather fall to the ground at the base. "This is nan enormous commitment of energy in very nutrient-poor soil - it does not really make ...

The central dogma of molecular biology describes the flow of genetic information. It was first described by Francis Crick in 1956 as one-way traffic: as: "DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein." A recent paper published in Mutation Research - Fundamental and Molecular Mechanisms of Mutagenesis, however suggests that, rather than being a one-way street, DNA-directed RNA transcription may have profound adaptability. The authors of the paper showed a conceptually novel relationship between the genotype (DNA) and the phenotype (the products of the transcription of DNA). The ...

This news release is available in German. A momentary lapse of concentration is all it takes for a finger to become trapped or sprain an ankle - and it hurts. Pain is the body's protective mechanism and a complex neurological phenomenon. Moreover, ongoing pain in the sense of chronic pain can be a disease. Scientists from Technische Universität München (TUM) have now demonstrated that already during a few minutes of ongoing pain, the underlying brain activity changes by shifting from sensory to emotional processes. In their experiments, Prof. Markus Ploner, ...

Until now there have been few molecular epidemiological studies regarding the effects of weight changes on metabolism in the general population. In a recent study conducted and funded within the framework of the Competence Network Obesity, researchers at the Institute of Epidemiology II at Helmholtz Zentrum München (HMGU) evaluated molecular data of the KORA study*. "Techniques such as metabolomics and transcriptomics allow the simultaneous determination of a variety of low molecular weight metabolites or gene activities (transcripts of genes) using high-throughput ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- New research debunks the assumption that a woman's religion predicts her views on policies affecting reproductive health care such as insurance coverage for birth control. Even when it comes to policies that have sometimes been characterized as going against Christian views - such as the Affordable Care Act mandate for employer-provided contraception coverage- religious women's opinions are mixed, finds the nationally-representative study by the University of Michigan . Protestants and Catholics were most likely to agree that employer health plans ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. - A promising new natural treatment for Alzheimer's disease is moving toward clinical trials. This will be a major step forward as there is nothing on the market that slows the progression of Alzheimer's. Muraleedharan Nair, Michigan State University natural products chemist, has patented a botanical compound, withanamides. His spinoff company, Natural Therapeutics, will begin the trials as soon as funding is in place. To date, none of the major pharmaceutical companies - Merck, Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb - have been able to produce an effective ...

Very old persons often have chronic problems, such as physical immobility, unsteady gait, and mental impairments. In such patients, these risks have to be considered and their treatments adapted accordingly. Deutsches Ärzteblatt International in its current issue introduces two original articles on the subject of geriatric medicine. The study reported by Wolfgang von Renteln-Kruse et al. (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2015; 112: 103) investigated the clinical treatment of geriatric patients with cognitive impairment, who require an appropriate environment and appropriate care. ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- A Duke University study proposes a strategy to better use limited public health care dollars for protecting more people from a sexually transmitted infection called human papillomavirus (HPV) and the cancers it can cause. Public health programs that devote a portion of their funding to encourage more boys to be vaccinated against HPV -- rather than merely attempting to raise coverage among girls -- may ultimately protect more people for the same price, the study suggests. The findings appear online in the journal Epidemics. Whether vaccinating boys against ...

A novel therapeutic approach for an existing drug reverses a condition in elderly patients who are at high risk for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found. The drug, commonly used to treat epilepsy, calms hyperactivity in the brain of patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), a clinically recognized condition in which memory impairment is greater than expected for a person's age and which greatly increases risk for Alzheimer's dementia, according to the study published this week in NeuroImage: Clinical. The ...

WASHINGTON - Both physicians and patients overestimate the risk of heart attack or death for possible acute coronary syndrome (ACS) as well as the potential benefit of hospital admission for possible ACS. A survey of patient and physician communication and risk assessment, along with an editorial, were published online last week in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Quantifying Patient-Physician Communication and Perceptions of Risk During Admissions for Possible Acute Coronary Syndromes" and "Lost in Translation: Physician Understanding and Communication of Risk to Patients ...

LSU Professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy Ward Plummer and Jiandi Zhang, in collaboration with their colleagues from the Institute of Physics, Beijing, China, have published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Vol. 112, pg. 2367) titled "Classification of Charge Density Waves based on their Nature." This work is a result of a collaboration funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Charge Density Waves, or CDWs, are observed in many solids, especially in low-dimensional systems. The existence of CDWs was first predicted in the ...

For the first time in the world, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) were able to enroll patients at other hospitals into an acute stroke clinical trial. The research was published in a recent issue of the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, a publication of the American Neurological Association. "One of the main drawbacks of conducting clinical trials for stroke is that we traditionally are limited to patients who arrive at large stroke centers that have the expertise to treat stroke quickly to minimize damage ...

Women are more attracted to war heroes than regular soldiers or men who display heroic traits in other fields, such as in sports or natural disaster work, according to new research from the University of Southampton and partners in Europe. The findings also suggest that men did not find heroism to be a sexually attractive trait in women. In the study, published online in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour, 92 women studying in the UK were presented with hypothetical profiles of the opposite sex, representing varying levels of heroism in different contexts such ...

Women who give birth in a public hospital are more confident parents compared to women who have babies privately, a new Australian study has found. A joint study by Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland, surveyed more than 6400 mums in Queensland, and found women who birth in the public sector were more likely to receive after-hospital health care, in turn boosting their confidence as a new parent, than women in the private system. Associate Professor Yvette Miller from QUT's Faculty of Health and one of the authors of the study published ...

At the centre of the image is the open star cluster NGC 6193, containing around thirty bright stars and forming the heart of the Ara OB1 association. The two brightest stars are very hot giant stars. Together, they provide the main source of illumination for the nearby emission nebula, the Rim Nebula, or NGC 6188, which is visible to the right of the cluster. A stellar association is a large grouping of loosely bound stars that have not yet completely drifted away from their initial formation site. OB associations consist largely of very young blue-white stars, which ...

New York University researchers have devised a computer model to explain how a neural circuit learns to classify sensory stimuli into discrete categories, such as "car vs. motorcycle." Their findings, which appear in the journal Nature Communications, shed new light on the brain processes underpinning judgments we make on a daily basis. "Categorization is vital for survival, such as distinguishing food from inedible things, as well as for formation of concepts, for instance 'dog vs. cat,' and relationship between concepts, such as hierarchical classification of animals," ...

Chestnut Hill, MA (March 9th, 2015): Feedback - the objective response, opinion, or input - is something most of us experience either at work or amongst friends to bodies of work or projects that are complete. But in the world of creative processes - where no one knows what the finished product should look like - feedback is inherently different, and more constructive, according to new research by a Boston College professor who says the findings should be utilized in the corporate world. "Traditionally when we think about feedback, we think about the manager who knows ...

In an era of $1,000-a-pill medications, a new approach may be needed to finance an emerging breed of highly expensive pharmaceuticals and vaccines, according to a new RAND Corporation analysis. In other industries, it is common for suppliers to encourage investment through approaches such as equipment leases or supplier-financed credit. Health care could learn from such approaches, according to Dr. Soeren Mattke, lead author of the analysis and a senior scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. Instead of paying upfront for the cost of a treatment -- $20 ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- The anti-inflammatory class of drugs NSAIDs have shown great promise in preventing cancers including colon, esophagus and skin. However, they can increase the risks of heart attacks, ulcers and rare but potentially life-threatening bleeds. A new study suggests there may be ways to reduce these dangerous side effects. Collaborators from the University of Michigan, the National Cancer Institute and the University of Alabama looked at naproxen, which is known to have a lower cardiovascular risk than other NSAIDs. Naproxen, like most NSAIDs and aspirin, ...

An Antarctic octopus that lives in ice-cold water uses an unique strategy to transport oxygen in its blood, according to research published in Frontiers in Zoology. The study suggests that the octopus's specialized blood pigments could help to make it more resilient to climate change than Antarctic fish and other species of octopus. The Antarctic Ocean hosts rich and diverse fauna despite inhospitable temperatures close to freezing. While it can be hard to deliver oxygen to tissues in the cold due to lower oxygen diffusion and increased blood viscosity, ice-cold waters ...

Studying the intricate fractal patterns on the surface of cells could give researchers a new insight into the physical nature of cancer, and provide new ways of preventing the disease from developing. This is according to scientists in the US who have, for the first time, shown how physical fractal patterns emerge on the surface of human cancer cells at a specific point of progression towards cancer. Publishing their results today, 11 March, in the Institute of Physics and Germany Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, they found that the distinctive repeating fractal ...

Voices in people's heads are far more varied and complex than previously thought, according to new research by Durham and Stanford universities, published in The Lancet Psychiatry today. One of the largest and most detailed studies to date on the experience of auditory hallucinations, commonly referred to as voice hearing, found that the majority of voice-hearers hear multiple voices with distinct character-like qualities, with many also experiencing physical effects on their bodies. The study also confirmed that both people with and without psychiatric diagnoses hear ...

During pregnancy, the mother supplies the fetus with nutrients and oxygen via the placenta. If placental development is impaired, this may lead to growth disorders of the embryo or to life-threatening diseases of the mother such as preeclampsia, a serious condition involving high blood pressure and increased urinary protein excretion. Now, Dr. Katharina Walentin and Professor Kai Schmidt-Ott of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch have discovered a new molecular signaling pathway which regulates the development of the placenta. Perturbations ...

In a study published in The Lancet on March 10, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) report that patients with a genetic sensitivity to warfarin - the most widely used anticoagulant for preventing blood clots - have higher rates of bleeding during the first several months of treatment and benefited from treatment with a different anticoagulant drug. The analyses from the TIMI Study Group, suggest that using genetics to identify patients who are most at risk of bleeding, and tailoring treatment accordingly, could offer important safety benefits, particularly ...