ANN ARBOR--Each year, millions of people lose billions of dollars in NCAA March Madness basketball pools. Still, most return the following year for another pummeling. But flipping a coin yields better results than carefully selecting brackets, says Dae Hee Kwak, assistant professor of sport management at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology. "I completed my own (informal) bracket alongside our study by literally flipping a coin 63 times," Kwak said. "I wanted to see if this outperformed the hard thought-out selections made by the study participants in ...

The sugar industry used several tactics to influence the setting of research priorities for the 1971 US National Caries Program (NCP), according to a study published by Cristin Kearns, Stanton Glantz and Laura Schmidt from the University of California San Francisco, US, in this week's PLOS Medicine. The researchers analyzed an archive of 319 internal sugar industry documents from 1959 to 1971 (the "Roger Adams papers") and US National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR) documents to explore how the sugar industry sought to influence the setting of research priorities ...

A newly discovered cache of industry documents reveals that the sugar industry worked closely with the National Institutes of Health in the 1960s and '70s to develop a federal research program focused on approaches other than sugar reduction to prevent tooth decay in American children. An analysis of those papers by researchers at UC San Francisco appears March 10, 2015 in the open-source scientific journal, PLOS Medicine. The archive of 319 industry documents, which were uncovered in a public collection at the University of Illinois, revealed that a sugar industry ...

A new technique for creating artificial DNA that is faster, more accurate and more flexible than existing methods has been developed by scientists at Imperial College London. The new system - called BASIC - is a major advance for the field of synthetic biology, which designs and builds organisms able to make useful products such as medicines, energy, food, materials and chemicals. To engineer new organisms, scientists build artificial genes from individual molecules and then put these together to create larger genetic constructs which, when inserted into a cell, will ...

Most military battlefield casualties die before reaching a surgical hospital. Of those soldiers who might potentially survive, most die from uncontrolled bleeding. In some cases, there's not much medics can do -- a tourniquet won't stop bleeding from a chest wound, and clotting treatments that require refrigerated or frozen blood products aren't always available in the field. That's why University of Washington researchers have developed a new injectable polymer that strengthens blood clots, called PolySTAT. Administered in a simple shot, the polymer finds any unseen ...

How much does health care really cost? UCLA researchers have for the first time described cost across an entire care process for a common condition called benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) using time-driven activity-based costing. They found a 400 percent discrepancy between the least and most expensive ways to treat the condition. The finding takes on even further importance as there isn't any proven difference in outcomes between the lower and higher cost treatments, said study first author Dr. Alan Kaplan, a resident physician in the UCLA Department of Urology. "The ...

Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris have identified a method for manufacturing longer-lasting and stronger forms of glass. The research could lead to more durable display screens, fiber optic cables, windows and other materials, including cement. Glasses are liquids that are cooled in the manufacturing process to reach a stable "frozen liquid" state. However, as glass ages and is exposed to temperature variations, it continues to flow or "relax," causing it to change shape. This ...

The sun emitted two mid-level solar flares on March 9, 2015: The first peaked at 7:54 pm EDT and the second at 11:24 pm EDT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured images of the flares, which were classified as an M5.8-class and an M5.1-class, respectively. These were the second and third flares from the same active region -- numbered Active Region 12297 -- after it rotated over the left side of the sun on March 7. INFORMATION: ...

An in-car alarm that sounds when sensors on the vehicle detect an imminent crash could cut crash rates from 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 for drivers over the of 60 suffering tiredness on long journeys, according to a study published in the International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics. Psychologist Carryl Baldwin of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA, and colleagues there and at the Sentara Norfolk General Sleep Center, emphasize how fatigue poses a persistent threat to transportation safety. Alarms that sound when a vehicle senses an imminent collision or ...

NASA's Terra satellite provided an outside look at Tropical Cyclone Pam while the RapidScat instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station provided an inside look at the surface winds generated by the storm. The GPM core satellite provided another inside look at Pam and provided data on where the heavy rainfall was occurring within the storm. On March 9 and 10, Tropical Cyclone Pam strengthened to hurricane-force as it neared Vanuatu in the Southern Pacific Ocean. On March 10 (11 p.m. local time), the Vanuatu Meteorology and Geo-Hazards Department (VMGD) ...

In an analysis of about 2,600 hospitalizations for severe sepsis, readmissions within 90 days were common, and approximately 40 percent occurred for diagnoses that could potentially be prevented or treated early to avoid hospitalization, according to a study in the March 10 issue of JAMA. Patients are frequently rehospitalized within 90 days after having severe sepsis. Little is known, however, about the reasons for readmission and whether they can be reduced. Hallie C. Prescott, M.D., M.Sc., of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and colleagues examined the most ...

The prevalence of type 2 diabetes among 25,000 patients with familial hypercholesterolemia (a genetic disorder characterized by high low-density lipoprotein [LDL] cholesterol levels) was significantly lower than among unaffected relatives, with the prevalence varying by the type of gene mutation, according to a study in the March 10 issue of JAMA. Statins have been associated with increased risk for diabetes, but the cause for this is not clear. One theory is that statins increase expression of LDL receptors and increase cholesterol uptake into cells including the pancreas, ...

In an analysis of outcomes of about 12,000 patients who underwent transcatheter aortic valve replacement, death rate after one year was nearly one in four; of those alive at 12 months, almost half had not been rehospitalized and approximately 25 percent had only one hospitalization, according to a study in the March 10 issue of JAMA. Following U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in 2011, transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) has been used with increasing frequency for the treatment of severe aortic stenosis in patients who have high risks with conventional ...

Among patients with a displaced fracture in the upper arm near the shoulder (proximal humeral), there was no significant difference between surgical treatment and nonsurgical treatment in patient-reported outcomes over two years following the fracture, results that do not support the trend of increased surgery for patients with this type of fracture, according to a study in the March 10 issue of JAMA. Proximal humeral fractures account for 5 percent to 6 percent of all adult fractures; an estimated 706,000 occurred worldwide in 2000. The majority occur in people older ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Study results of one-year data for more than 12,000 patients who had transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) in the United States show an overall one-year death rate of 23.7 percent and a stroke rate of 4.1 percent, according to a study published in the March 10 issue of JAMA. "Transcatheter aortic valve replacement has become transformational for patients who need a new valve and are at high-risk for surgery or inoperable. But we have been lacking long-term data for this group of patients who are considering this procedure," says study lead ...

MADISON, Wis. -- In a study published March 9 in Nature Chemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison chemistry Professor Kyoung-Shin Choi presents a new approach to combine solar energy conversion and biomass conversion, two important research areas for renewable energy. For decades, scientists have been working to harness the energy from sunlight to drive chemical reactions to form fuels such as hydrogen, which provide a way to store solar energy for future use. Toward this end, many researchers have been working to develop functional, efficient and economical methods ...

From AGU's blogs: More urban heat; less summer fog, on California coast The summer fog that shrouds coastal southern California - what locals call the June Gloom - is being driven up into the sky by urban sprawl, according to scientists who have studied 67 years of cloud heights and urban growth in the region. Less fog may, at first, seem like a good thing. But less fog is bad news for native plants in the coastal hills and mountains, which depend on the cool fog as their only source of water during the rainless summer months. So less fog means warmer, drier, less healthy ...

Red lead is most familiar to us in orange-red rustproof paint. Artists have treasured the brilliant color of this pigment for their paintings since ancient times. However, various ageing processes cause discoloration of the saturated hue over time. Thanks to a combination of X-ray diffraction mapping and tomography experiments at DESY´s synchrotron light source PETRA III, Belgian scientists have now explained an additional step in the light-induced degradation of lead red. The key to their discovery was the identification of the very rare lead carbonate mineral plumbonacrite ...

A team of scientists led by Johns Hopkins cardiologist and biomedical engineer Hiroshi Ashikaga, M.D., Ph.D., has developed a mathematical model to measure and digitally map the beat-sustaining electrical flow between heart cells. The work, the scientists say, could form a blueprint for vastly more precise imaging tests that capture cell-to-cell communication and pinpoint the tiny clusters of cells at the epicenter of complex, life-threatening arrhythmias. Such imaging approaches, they add, would enable precision-targeted, minimally invasive treatments that eliminate ...

Infectious disease should be a key consideration in wildlife conservation, suggests a study focused on primates in Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park, published by PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The study investigated the parasite Cryptosporidium and cross-species transmission risks among humans, wild primates and domesticated animals within the greater Gombe ecosystem. "We found that people are likely exposing the endangered chimpanzees of Gombe to a particular species of Cryptosporidium, which may be contributing to their decline," says Michelle Parsons, a PhD ...

Computers that function like the human brain could soon become a reality thanks to new research using optical fibres made of speciality glass. The research, published in Advanced Optical Materials, has the potential to allow faster and smarter optical computers capable of learning and evolving. Researchers from the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the University of Southampton, UK, and Centre for Disruptive Photonic Technologies (CDPT) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, have demonstrated how neural networks and synapses in the brain ...

Scientists on two continents have independently discovered a set of celestial objects that seem to belong to the rare category of dwarf satellite galaxies orbiting our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Dwarf galaxies are the smallest known galaxies, and they could hold the key to understanding dark matter, and the process by which larger galaxies form. A team of researchers with the Dark Energy Survey, headquartered at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and an independent group from the University of Cambridge jointly announced their findings ...

People who lose their jobs are less willing to trust others for up to a decade after being laid-off, according to new research from The University of Manchester. Being made redundant or forced into unemployment can scar trust to such an extent that even after finding new work this distrust persists, according to the new findings of social scientist Dr James Laurence. This means that the large-scale job losses of the recent recession could lead to a worrying level of long-term distrust among the British public and risks having a detrimental effect on the fabric of society. Dr ...

DARIEN, IL - A new study finds that obstructive sleep apnea is associated with a significantly increased risk of motor vehicle accidents, and this risk is reduced when sleep apnea is treated effectively using continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy. Results show that patients with sleep apnea were nearly 2.5 times more likely to be the driver in a motor vehicle accident, compared with a control group of other drivers in the general population. Further risk analysis found that severe excessive daytime sleepiness, a short sleep duration of 5 hours or less, and ...

Many mammals -- and some birds -- escape the winter by hibernating for three to nine months. This period of dormancy permits species which would otherwise perish from the cold and scarce food to survive to see another spring. The Middle East, with temperate winters, was until recently considered an unlikely host for hibernating mammals. New research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London by Tel Aviv University researchers is set to not only correct this fallacy but also change the very concept of hibernation. Prof. Noga Kronfeld-Schor, Chair of the Department ...