An international research team reports results of a three-year study of sediment samples collected offshore from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in a new paper published August 18, 2015, in the American Chemical Society's journal, Environmental Science and Technology. The research aids in understanding what happens to Fukushima contaminants after they are buried on the seafloor off coastal Japan. Led by Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist and marine chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the team found that a small fraction of contaminated ...

Only 1 in 10 heart failure patients is referred to a cardiac rehabilitation program after being hospitalized, despite strong evidence that such exercise programs improve quality of life and reduce the likelihood of future hospitalizations. The findings, from a UCLA-led study, appear in the August 25 Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Researchers drew the data from a national database of more than 100,000 people with heart failure who were discharged from hospitals between 2005 and 2014 and were eligible for cardiac rehabilitation programs. "Although we expected ...

A new class of fascinating technologies -- including optics in computing, telecommunications links and switches, and virtually any other optical component -- could be created simply by configuring a mesh of light-controlling devices known as interferometers. This is similar to the way electronic semiconductors can fashion the wide array of digital technologies we have at our disposal today. Optical technologies have the potential to greatly reduce the power consumption of computers, speed telecommunications, and enhance the sensitivity of chemical and biological sensors. ...

A national survey of more than 750 emergency medical services providers conducted by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University identified airway management skills, personal anxiety and limited pediatric care proficiency among key factors that may contribute to pediatric safety events for children in out-of-hospital emergent care situations. The study, published online today in The Journal of Pediatrics, supports the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation for pediatric physician involvement in EMS training, medical oversight and policy development. "Pediatric ...

Violent conflicts in Neolithic Europe were held more brutally than has been known so far. This emerges from a recent anthropological analysis of the roughly 7000-year-old mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten by researcher of the Universities of Basel and Mainz. The findings, published in the journal PNAS, show that victims were murdered and deliberately mutilated. It was during the time when Europeans first began to farm. To what degree conflicts and wars featured in the early Neolithic (5600 to 4900 B.C.), and especially in the so-called Linear Pottery culture ...

A study of catsharks reveals how alterations in the expression and function of certain genes in limb buds underlie the evolution of fish fins to limbs. The findings are reported by researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG, Barcelona) and their collaborators in the journal eLife and give new insight into how fish evolved to live on land in the form of early tetrapods. The first four-legged, land-living creatures - known as early tetrapods - evolved from fish, following the transformation of fins into limbs. This ...

Patient satisfaction is a very poor proxy for quality of care comparisons in elective cranial neurosurgery. Because deaths are rare events in elective cranial neurosurgery, reporting of surgeon or even department-specific mortality figures cannot differentiate a high or low level of the quality of care. The current focus on patient safety in health care has led to public quality-of-care comparisons between health care facilities and even between individual health care professionals. In the United States, a new reimbursement method based on patient satisfaction ratings ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - New research findings contradict a fundamental assumption about the functioning of "organic" solar cells made of low-cost plastics, suggesting a new strategy for creating inexpensive solar technology. Commercialization of organic solar cells has been hindered by inefficiencies, but the findings point toward a potential path to create a new class of solar technology able to compete with standard silicon cells. "These solar cells could provide a huge cost advantage over silicon," said Muhammad Ashraful Alam, Purdue University's Jai N. Gupta Professor ...

A new international study is the first to use a high-resolution, large-scale computer model to estimate how much ice the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could lose over the next couple of centuries, and how much that could add to sea-level rise. The results paint a clearer picture of West Antarctica's future than was previously possible. The study is published today (18 August) in The Cryosphere, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). "The IPCC's [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] 4th and 5th Assessment Reports both note that the acceleration ...

A group of clinicians and geochemists are working to develop a test for the most common form of primary liver cancer, HCC (Hepatocellular Carcinoma). HCC kills over 600,000 people worldwide every year. It usually develops from chronic liver disease such as hepatitis or cirrhosis, but there is no good biochemical test to indicate when the cancer develops, meaning that even for patients most at risk, it is nearly impossible to know when a cancer may develop until symptoms appear. Now a multi-national group of scientists are developing a new test for HCC, based on methods ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Employees with a racially diverse group of friends outside of work may actually perform better at their jobs, a new study suggests. Researchers found that workers who had more different-race friends in their personal lives than their co-workers also tended to have a more racially diverse network of friends on the job. This broader network was linked to employees who did more tasks beyond their job responsibilities and who, under certain circumstances, had more trust in their supervisors. "Your friends outside of work actually have this connection to ...

This news release is available in French. This news release is available in French. New research shows that teaching young adolescents practical cooking skills leads to positive changes for the entire family. In an article published today in Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, an NRC Research Press journal (a division of Canadian Science Publishing), researchers evaluated the Kinect-Ed presentation and found an increase in the frequency of family dinners after participation. Kinect-Ed, a 90-minute motivational nutrition education presentation, was ...

BOSTON, Aug. 18, 2015 -- Cranberries are often touted as a way to protect against urinary tract infections, but that may be just the beginning. Researchers fed cranberry extracts to mice with colon cancer and found that the tumors diminished in size and number. Identifying the therapeutic molecules in the tart fruit could lead to a better understanding of its anti-cancer potential, they say. The team will describe their approach in one of more than 9,000 presentations at the 250th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest ...

BOSTON, Aug. 18, 2015 -- The use of solar energy in the U.S. is growing, but panels on rooftops are still a rare sight. They cost thousands of dollars, and homeowners don't recoup costs for years even in the sunniest or best-subsidized locales. But scientists may have a solution. They report today the development of a unique, "green" antenna that could potentially double the efficiencies of certain kinds of solar cells and make them more affordable. The researchers are presenting their work at the 250th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- People being treated for bipolar disorder and other psychiatric illnesses are at greater risk of attempting suicide, but physicians may now have tools to predict which of those individuals will attempt it and intervene early to prevent such tragedies from occurring. Researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine reported Tuesday in the Nature Publishing Group's leading journal in psychiatry, Molecular Psychiatry, that they have developed blood tests and questionnaire instruments that can predict with more than 90 percent accuracy which of those patients ...

An unprecedented potential "molecular tweezer" called CLR01, reported in the journal eLife, not only blocks HIV and other sexually transmitted viruses, but also breaks up proteins in semen that boost infection. Semen is the main vector for sexual HIV transmission. It contains proteins that assemble into very stable polymers called amyloid fibrils, which can enhance HIV infectivity by up to 10,000 times. Scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and Ulm (Germany) now show that a molecule with the shape of a tweezer not only destroys HIV particles but also ...

A new study shown that meteorite impacts on ancient oceans may have created nucleobases and amino acids. Researchers from Tohoku University, National Institute for Materials Science and Hiroshima University discovered this after conducting impact experiments simulating a meteorite hitting an ancient ocean (Fig. 1). With precise analysis of the products recovered after impacts, the team found the formation of nucleobases and amino acids from inorganic compounds. The research is reported this week in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. All the genetic information ...

Children with better academic and behavioral functioning when they start kindergarten often have better educational and societal opportunities as they grow up. For instance, children entering kindergarten with higher reading and math achievement are more likely to go to college, own homes, be married, and live in higher-income neighborhoods as adults. Now a new study points to very early roots of differences in school readiness, with growth in vocabulary playing a particularly important role. The study found that children with larger oral vocabularies by age 2 arrived at ...

Adolescents who have romantic relationships tend to have more problems with psychosocial adjustment. In contrast, young adults who have romantic relationships tend to have fewer problems with psychosocial adjustment. Although the links between having a romantic relationship and psychosocial adjustment change with age, a new longitudinal study has found that it's not just having a relationship that matters, but the quality of the relationship: Higher-quality romantic relationships are associated with fewer psychosocial difficulties across adolescence and young adulthood. The ...

Scientists working at Korea University, Korea, and TU Berlin, Germany have developed a brain-computer control interface for a lower limb exoskeleton by decoding specific signals from within the user's brain. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap, the system allows users to move forwards, turn left and right, sit and stand simply by staring at one of five flickering light emitting diodes (LEDs). The results are published today (Tuesday 18th August) in the Journal of Neural Engineering. Each of the five LEDs flickers at a different frequency, and when the user focusses ...

A new test for offers the possibility of near real time monitoring of bone diseases, such as osteoporosis and multiple myeloma. The functionality of the test, which measures changes in calcium isotope ratios, has been validated on blood samples from NASA space shuttle astronauts. Our bones are largely built of calcium, and the turnover of calcium can indicate the development of bone diseases such as osteoporosis and the cancer multiple myeloma. Geochemists have developed extremely accurate ways of measuring calcium isotope ratios, for example for the study of sea shell ...

For an embargoed PDF, please contact Cara Graeff or 215-351-2513 or Angela Collom or 215-351-2514. 1. Anonymous essay exposes scandalous doctor behavior Free abstract: http://www.annals.org/article.aspx?doi=10.7326/M14-2168 Editorial: http://www.annals.org/article.aspx?doi=10.7326/M15-1144 URLs go live when embargo lifts An anonymous and provocative essay published in Annals of Internal Medicine exposes the dark underbelly of medicine where doctors displayed stomach-churning disrespect for vulnerable patients. The author describes teaching a medical humanities ...

PHILADELPHIA - Websites for national and state health insurance marketplaces show evidence of improved efforts to assist patients in choosing health insurance plans, such as providing decision support tools, experts from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have found. However, in a letter published in the August 18 issue the Annals of Internal Medicine, the Penn team recommends taking more steps to better support consumers in making informed health plan decisions. The marketplaces, also called health exchanges, were established by the Patient ...

Research has shown that a regular dose of aspirin reduces the long-term risk of cancer in those who are overweight in an international study of people with a family history of the disease. The study, conducted by researchers at Newcastle University and the University of Leeds, UK, is published today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. They found that being overweight more than doubles the risk of bowel cancer in people with Lynch Syndrome, an inherited genetic disorder which affects genes responsible for detecting and repairing damage in the DNA. Around half of these ...

Testing for genetic risk factors could improve treatment for myeloma - a cancer of the blood and bone marrow - by helping doctors identify patients at risk of developing more aggressive disease. New research, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology today (Monday), found as few as nine genetic features would need to be tested to identify high-risk patients who might benefit from intensive treatment. The study, led by researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, is the first to link genetic mutations in myeloma cells to the chances of surviving the disease. The ...