HOUSTON – (July 16, 2014) – Being a part of a business group and participating in capital markets can have a significant positive impact on an Indian company's performance in the stock market, according to a new study on Indian entrepreneurship by emerging-economy experts at Rice University, the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India, and the graduate business school INSEAD Singapore. The findings contradict prior research that suggests business groups in developing economies act mainly as substitutes to poorly developed economic institutions in these countries. ...

Does practice really make perfect? It's an age-old question, and a new study from Rice University, Princeton University and Michigan State University finds that while practice won't make you perfect, it will usually make you better at what you're practicing. "This question is the subject of a long-running debate in psychology," said Fred Oswald, professor and chair of psychology at Rice and one of the study's co-authors. "Why do so few people who are involved in sports such as golf, musical instruments such as the violin or careers such as law or medicine ever reach an ...

CHICAGO (July 16, 2014) – Cases of the highly contagious, drug-resistant bacteria, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), have increased fivefold in community hospitals in the Southeastern United States, according to a new study published in the August issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. "This dangerous bacteria is finding its way into healthcare facilities nationwide. Even this marked increase likely underestimates the true scope of the problem given variations in hospital surveillance ...

The repetitive facilitation exercise (RFE) is one of the most common rehabilitation tactics for stroke patients attempting to regain wrist movement. Stroke hemiparesis individuals are not able to move that part of their body because they cannot create a strong enough neural signal that travels from the brain to the wrist. With RFE, however, patients get a mental boost. They are asked to think about moving. At the same time, a practitioner flexes the wrist. The goal is to send a long latency response from the stretch that arrives in the brain at the exact time the thought ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study shows that worse sleep quality predicts lower physical activity in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Results show that PTSD was independently associated with worse sleep quality at baseline, and participants with current PTSD at baseline had lower physical activity one year later. Further analysis found that sleep quality completely mediated the relationship between baseline PTSD status and physical activity at the one-year follow-up, providing preliminary evidence that the association of reduced sleep quality with reduced physical ...

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL July 16, 2014... While the Mediterranean diet may have broad health benefits, its impact on cognitive decline differs among race-specific populations, according to a new study published in the Journal of Gerontology. The team of researchers, including Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU Prof. Danit R. Shahar RD, Ph.D, analyzed an NIH/NIA prospective cohort study [Health ABC] conducted over eight years in the U.S. to measure the effects of adherence to a Mediterranean diet. Prof. Shahar is affiliated with the BGU S. Daniel Abraham International Center ...

Neuropsychological impairment has long been established as a fundamental characteristic of depression, but a specific pattern of impairment that is widely recognized has not been summarized. Professor Jia Hongxiao and his group from the Beijing Anding Hospital, Capital Medical University, explore major depressive disorder (MDD) from the perspective of neuropsychology. They found that the self-serving bias and self-recognition bias were impaired in individuals suffering from MDD compared with a control group. This research lays the groundwork for further study on the etiology ...

People with higher job status may be more willing to compromise privacy for security reasons and also be more determined to carry out those decisions, according to researchers. This preoccupation with security may shape policy and decision-making in areas ranging from terrorism to investing, and perhaps cloud other options, said Jens Grossklags, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, Penn State. "What may get lost in the decision-making process is that one can enhance security without the negative impact on privacy," said Grossklags. "It's more ...

Opioids – strong morphine-based painkillers – are widely prescribed to patients experiencing chronic severe pain. While these drugs are very effective for treating and managing pain, they have one particularly bothersome side effect: constipation. A new drug, called naloxegol, could bring relief. In stage 3 trials reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, KU Leuven and international researchers provide new evidence that the drug relieves constipation without dulling opioids' pain-relieving effects. Up until a decade ago, physicians rarely prescribed opioids, reserving ...

Popping the blisters on the bubble wrap might be the most enjoyable thing about moving. But now, scientists propose a more productive way to reuse the popular packing material — as a sheet of small, test tube-like containers for medical and environmental samples. Their report, which shows that analyses can take place right in the bubbles, appears in the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry. George Whitesides and colleagues explain that although bubble wrap filled with biological samples, like blood or urine, or chemicals would have to be handled carefully, the material offers ...

New Rochelle, NY, July 16, 2014–Experimental drugs proven safe but perhaps not sufficiently effective in initial testing or against a first disease target may sit gathering dust on the shelves of pharmaceutical companies. An NIH-sponsored effort based on a crowdsourcing strategy to establish collaborations between industrial and academic partners to test and develop these therapeutic compounds was met with an overwhelming response and has led to clinical testing of a broad range of pilot projects and a newly announced round of funding opportunities. These findings are described ...

Republicans search the Net for information about the weather, climate change and global warming during extremely hot or cold spells. Democrats Google these terms when they experience changes in the average temperatures. These are some of the surprising findings from a study by Corey Lang of the University of Rhode Island in the US, published in Springer's journal Climatic Change. He tracked how the temperature fluctuations and rainfall that Americans experience daily in their own cities make them scour the Internet in search of information about climate change and global ...

If you've ever tried to watch a video on a tablet on a sunny day, you know you have to tilt it at just the right angle to get rid of glare or invest in a special filter. But now scientists are reporting in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces that they've developed a novel glass surface that reduces both glare and reflection, which continue to plague even the best mobile displays today. Valerio Pruneri and colleagues note that much effort has been poured into anti-reflective and anti-glare technology. In the highly competitive digital age, any bonus feature ...

DETROIT — Researchers at Wayne State University have made a fundamental discovery and, in subsequent collaboration with scientists at La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology (LIAI), are one step closer to the goal of developing the world's first T-cell peptide-based vaccine for heart disease — the number one killer in the nation. Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory disease of the arterial walls, which thicken due to accumulation of fatty materials such as cholesterols and triglycerides. Blocking of arteries supplying blood to the heart is the underlying cause ...

Scientists have discovered a new pathway the dengue virus takes to suppress the human immune system. This new knowledge deepens our understanding of the virus and could contribute to the development of more effective therapeutics. For years, the conventional approach to target the dengue virus was through vector control, which was regarded to be the most effective method. This is because the mechanics of the virus have been elusive, which in turn hampered the development of effective treatments and vaccines. Fortunately a new study, published in the prestigious journal ...

A new protein biomarker test platform developed by researchers at the University of Michigan and Indiana University promises to improve diagnostic testing. The test can accurately and simultaneously measure multiple proteins that indicate the presence of diseases like graft-versus-host disease (bone marrow transplant rejection) in only two hours, no washing steps, and using only a minute volume of blood plasma. A report on this new technology can be found online in the journal TECHNOLOGY. The protein test uses a micropatterning method developed in Shuichi Takayama's Micro/Nano/Molecular ...

As sea ice begins to melt back toward its late September minimum, it is being watched as never before. Scientists have put sensors on and under ice in the Beaufort Sea for an unprecedented campaign to monitor the summer melt. The international effort hopes to figure out the physics of the ice edge in order to better understand and predict open water in Arctic seas. "This has never been done at this level, over such a large area and for such a long period of time," said principal investigator Craig Lee, an oceanographer at the University of Washington's Applied Physics ...

On 16 July 2014 the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) published the results of a literature search for evidence-based clinical practice guidelines on the treatment of people with breast cancer. The aim of the report is to identify those recommendations from current guidelines of high methodological quality that may be relevant for the planned revision of the disease management programme (DMP). According to the results of the report, there is no compelling need for revision of any part of the DMP. However, IQWiG identified some aspects that ...

Scientists have designed a new self-assembling nanoparticle that targets tumours, to help doctors diagnose cancer earlier. The new nanoparticle, developed by researchers at Imperial College London, boosts the effectiveness of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanning by specifically seeking out receptors that are found in cancerous cells. The nanoparticle is coated with a special protein, which looks for specific signals given off by tumours, and when it finds a tumour it begins to interact with the cancerous cells. This interaction strips off the protein coating, ...

Scientists now have a better understanding of how short DNA strands decompose in microseconds. A European team found new fragmentation pathways that occur universally when DNA strands are exposed to metal ions from a family of alkaline and alkaline earth elements. These ions tend to replace protons in the DNA backbone and at the same time induce a reactive conformation leading more readily to fragmentation. These findings by Andreas Piekarczyk, from the University of Iceland, and colleagues have been published in a study in EPJ D. They could contribute to optimising cancerous ...

University of Leicester researchers have released evidence substantiating an unexpected dual role of an important component of the immune system. Findings by researchers at the University's Department of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation – including three PhD graduates – are published in a paper for the journal 'Medical Microbiology and Immunology'. The paper presents significant new findings about the protein properdin – an important part of the immune system. It is a positive regulator in the alternative pathway of complement activation – which means it plays a ...

Stem cells can substitute the lost cells after central nervous system injury, decrease nervous tissue damage and promote neurofunctional recovery. Many brain injury models, including middle cerebral artery occlusion and traumatic brain injury models, have confirmed that neural stem cells (NSCs) can migrate from subventricular zone to injured cerebral cortex. But the mechanism underlying activation of endogenous NSCs in the ischemic brain remains unclear. Dr. Hyung-Seok Kim, Chonnam National University Medical School, Korea and his team revealed that NSCs were activated ...

Ventricular enlargement has been suggested as a structural biomarker for normal aging and progression of some illnesses, such as Alzheimer's disease. However, the question of how this structural change in the brain in normal elderly affects change of white matters remains a topic of interest and concern. Dr. Sang Seok Yeo, College of Medicine, Yeungnam University, Republic of Korea, and his team performed a diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) study to investigate the question. They detected four regions of interest in the periventricular white matter of 60 normal subjected aged ...

The brain has a low renewable capacity for self-repair and generation of new functional neurons in the treatment of trauma, inflammation and cerebral diseases. Cytotherapy is one option to regenerate central nervous system that aim at replacing the functional depleted cells due to traumatic brain injury (TBI). Bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) are also considered a candidate for cytotherapy because they can differentiate into neurons/nerve cells, pass across blood-brain barrier, migrate into the injured region, secrete neurotrophic factor, and provide microenvironment ...

This news release is available in Spanish. The new research paper, which reports on one of the first experimental studies in the world to analyze how cooperative attitudes evolve in different age ranges, was written by the professors from the OpenSystems research group of the Department Fundamental Physics at the Universidad de Barcelona (UB), Josep Perelló and Mario Gutiérrez-Roig, Anxo Sánchez, of the Complex Systems Interdisciplinary Group (Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos - GISC) of the Mathematics Department at the Universidad Carlos III de ...