WASHINGTON, Oct. 6, 2014— Melanoma is the fifth most common cancer type in the United States, and it's also the deadliest form of skin cancer, causing more than 75 percent of skin-cancer deaths. If caught early enough though, it is almost always curable. Now a camera, capable of taking snapshots of the entire human body and rendering high-resolution images of a patient's skin may help doctors spot cancer early and save lives. Developed by a team of researchers at Duke University in North Carolina, USA, the "gigapixel whole-body photographic camera" is essentially three ...

Many US patients with liver cancer—even those with early stage disease that can often be cured—do not receive treatment for their disease, according to an analysis of studies published between 1989 and 2013. Less than one fourth of patients undergo curative treatment, and nearly 50% do not receive any treatment. Elderly, non-Caucasians and patients of low socioeconomic status had lower treatment rates than their counterparts. "We found the low treatment rates among patients with early stage tumors particularly concerning. Many of these patients currently fail to receive ...

Vitamin D deficiency is linked with advanced stages of liver cancer and may be an indicator of a poor prognosis, according to a study of 200 patients with the disease who were followed for an average of 46 weeks. Blood levels of vitamin D negatively correlated with stages of the disease, and patients with severe vitamin D deficiency had more than a 2-fold increased risk of dying during the study, according to Dr. Oliver Waidmann, senior author of the Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics study. INFORMATION: ...

A new phase 1 safety trial has demonstrated that idarubicin-loaded beads are well tolerated by patients but are toxic to liver cancer cells. Idarubicin is an anthracycline that is currently used to treat leukemias. Two months into the 21-patient trial, the tumors of 28% of patients had complete responses to the drug, and the tumors of 24% of patients had a partial response. The findings are published in Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics. INFORMATION: ...

Eating lots of white meat (such as poultry) or fish may reduce the risk of developing liver cancer by 31% and 22%, respectively, according to a recent analysis of studies published between 1956 and 2013. Consuming red meat, processed meat, or total meat was not associated with liver cancer risk. The Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics findings suggest that dietary interventions may be a promising approach for preventing liver cancer. INFORMATION: ...

While all prescription opioids can be abused, oxycodone may be more potent in its ability to promote changes in the brain relevant to addiction. A new study in the European Journal of Neuroscience revealed greater increases of dopamine in the brain following the delivery of oxycodone compared with morphine. The release of dopamine, a chemical messenger between neurons, is consistently tied with reward and motivation. The study's investigators say that it is essential to understand how drugs differentially alter brain chemistry if we hope to understand addiction and ...

Efforts to reduce China's carbon dioxide emissions are being offset by the country's rampant economic growth, according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA). Research published today in Nature Climate Change reveals how carbon efficiency has improved in nearly all Chinese provinces. But the country's economic boom has simultaneously led to a growth in CO2-emitting activities such as mining, metal smelting and coal-fired electricity generation – negating any gains. According to the study, China, the world's largest producer of CO2 emissions, increased ...

This issue was supported by the Qatar Foundation and World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH), Hamad Medical Corporation, Imperial College London, and The Commonwealth Fund. How is accountable care taking shape internationally? Mark McClellan of the Brookings Institution and coauthors seek to offer a global description of an accountable care system and a mechanism to assess related reforms. They suggest five components for a framework applicable internationally: population, outcomes, metrics and learning, payments and incentives, and coordinated delivery. They also ...

A new and potentially more revealing way of studying how animal evolution is affected by the geography of climate has been designed by researchers at The University of Nottingham and Harvard University. The research, published in the prestigious journal, The American Naturalist, uses a new approach to investigate how animals across (interspecific) and within (intraspecific) species change in size along temperature gradients, shedding light on a 150-year-old evolutionary puzzle. Bergmann's rule — the tendency for warm-blooded animal body size to increase in colder environments ...

Life on the Antarctic sea floor is under threat from crabs that could invade the area thanks to favorable conditions as a result of global warming, researchers warn. In a Journal of Biogeography editorial, experts say invasive species degrade marine ecosystems by preying on or outcompeting local species. Early signs of biological invasion are already apparent. "Biological invasion is a major worry in the Arctic," said lead author Dr. Richard Aronson, "but we should be just as concerned about the Antarctic." Assessing the extent of the problem requires long-term monitoring ...

LIVERMORE, California -- Using satellite observations and a large suite of climate models, Lawrence Livermore scientists have found that long-term ocean warming in the upper 700 meters has likely been underestimated. "This underestimation is a result of poor sampling prior to the last decade and limitations of the analysis methods that conservatively estimated temperature changes in data-sparse regions," said LLNL oceanographer Paul Durack, lead author of a paper appearing in the October 5th issue of the journal Nature Climate Change. Ocean heat storage is important ...

Among couples with marriage-like commitments, same-sex couples have a similar break-up rate as heterosexual couples, according to a recent study. The study also found that same-sex couples with a marriage-like commitment have stable unions regardless of government recognition. The findings come from a nationally representative survey of 3,009 couples (471 same-sex) who were followed between 2009 and 2013. "The marriage commitment is associated with a strong benefit in couple stability for both heterosexual couples and same-sex couples," said Dr. Michael J. Rosenfeld, ...

G-spot, vaginal, or clitoral orgasms are all incorrect terms, experts say. In a recent Clinical Anatomy review, they argue that like 'male orgasm', 'female orgasm' is the correct term. The authors note that the majority of women worldwide do not have orgasms during intercourse: as a matter of fact, female sexual dysfunctions are popular because they are based on something that does not exist, i.e. the vaginal orgasm. The key to female orgasm is the female penis—the clitoris, vestibular bulbs and pars intermedia, labia minora, and corpus spongiosum of the female urethra. ...

Familiar voices can improve spoken language processing among school-age children, according to a study by NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. However, the advantage of hearing a familiar voice only helps children to process and understand words they already know well, not new words that aren't in their vocabularies. The findings, which were published online in August in the Journal of Child Language, suggest that children store information about a speaker to retrieve and harness at a later time, similar to what has been found for adult ...

In a study of 951 lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth, those experiencing both cyber and school bullying were most likely to engage in aggressive and suicidal behaviors. However, bullied youth who felt connected to an adult at school were not more likely to report such behaviors. "In recent years, clubs such as Gay-Straight Alliances have played an integral role in creating safer environments in schools. These efforts are often student-led with the guidance of only a handful of adult advisors; however, our study highlights just how important adults are in buffering sexual ...

In a study of 574 low-income adults, many felt stigmatized when receiving medical care. This stigma was most often the result of interactions with clinicians that felt demeaning, rather than an internalized sense of shame related to receiving public insurance or charity care. Experiencing stigma was associated with unmet health needs, poorer perceptions of quality of care, and worse self-reported health. "Feeling judged by providers was associated with higher reports of unmet physical and mental health needs and declining health, even though people who reported stigma ...

When the supersonic solar wind hits the Earth's magnetic field, a powerful electrical connection occurs with Earth's field, generating millions of amperes of current that drive the dazzling auroras. These so-called Birkeland currents connect the ionosphere to the magnetosphere and channel solar wind energy to Earth's uppermost atmosphere. Solar storms release torrential blasts of solar wind that cause much stronger currents and can overload power grids and disrupt communications and navigation. Now for the first time, scientists are making continuous, global measurements ...

Trying on clothes when a shop is closed could become a reality thanks to new research that uses semi-transparent mirrors in interactive systems and which will be unveiled at an international conference tomorrow [Tuesday 7 October]. The research paper, to be presented at one of the world's most important conferences on human-computer interfaces - ACM UIST 2014 [5-8 October], could change the way people interact and collaborate in public spaces, such as museums and shop windows. The research, led by Professor Sriram Subramanian, Dr Diego Martinez Plasencia and Florent ...

Gender diversity in the workplace helps firms be more productive, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT researcher — but it may also reduce satisfaction among employees. "Having a more diverse set of employees means you have a more diverse set of skills," says Sara Ellison, an MIT economist, which "could result in an office that functions better." At the same time, individual employees may prefer less diverse settings. The study, analyzing a large white-collar U.S. firm, examined how much "social capital" offices build up in the form of things like cooperation, ...

The next generation of aircraft could be thinner and lighter thanks to the development of a new imaging technique that could detect damage previously invisible to acoustic imaging systems. The nonlinear acoustic technique developed by researchers from the University of Bristol's Ultrasonics and Non-destructive Testing (NDT) research group is published in the current issue of Physical Review Letters together with an accompanying article in Physics. It has long been understood that acoustic nonlinearity is sensitive to many physical properties including material microstructure ...

For millennia, bacteria and other microbes have engaged in intense battles of chemical warfare, attempting to edge each other out of comfortable ecological niches. Doctors fight pathogens with an arsenal of weapons—antibiotics—co-opted from these microbial wars, but their efforts are frustrated by the development of drug resistance that outpaces drug discovery. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University have now innovated and demonstrated the value of an algorithm to analyze microbial genomic data and speed discovery of new ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Fuel cells are totally appropriate systems for substituting the batteries of mobile phones, laptop computers and vehicles. They turn the energy resulting from the combining of hydrogen and oxygen into electrical power, with water vapour being the only waste product. In other words, they generate energy in the same way that batteries do, but they do not contaminate. However, if these fuel cells are to produce energy, they need an external supply of hydrogen, and right now storing hydrogen safely poses difficulties. That ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – It is not only prenatal drug exposure, but also conditions related to drug use that can influence negative behavior in children, according to a new study from the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions. In examining the long-term effects of cocaine use during pregnancy in a sample of low-income, cocaine-exposed and non-exposed families, researchers found that a mother's harshness toward her child during mother-child interactions at 2 years of age is one of the strongest predictors of problem behaviors in kindergarten, such as fighting, ...

A new paper from the Wildlife Conservation Society, Montana State University, Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, and the U.S. Geological Survey looks at the feasibility of electrofishing to selectively remove invasive trout species from Montana streams as an alternative to using fish toxicants known as piscicides that effect all gill-breathing organisms. Westslope Cutthroat Trout (WCT) have experienced severe declines throughout much of their historical range. One major reason for this decline is the current competitive advantages enjoyed by non-native Brook ...

Reducing community transmission and changing behaviour in communities is key to containing Ebola outbreaks, according to new research into the first known outbreak of the virus in 1976 by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health. The study authors include Professor Peter Piot and Dr Joel Breman, who travelled to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), to investigate the first outbreak in 1976. The study, published in Epidemics, also found that if the people in the affected ...