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Medicine4 Aug 2015

Intervention to screen women for partner violence does not improve health outcomes

Screening women for partner violence and providing a resource list did not influence the number of hospitalizations, emergency department, or outpatient care visits compared with women only receiving a resource list or receiving no intervention over 3 years, according to a study in the August 4 issue of JAMA, a violence/human rights theme issue. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends women of reproductive age be screened for partner violence. However, others, such as the World Health Organization conclude there is insufficient evidence for this recommendation. ...

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Science4 Aug 2015

One-fourth of female sex workers in northern Mexican cities enter sex trade as minors

More than 1 in 4 female sex workers in the northern Mexico cities of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez reported entering the sex trade as minors, and entering the sex trade as an adolescent vs as an adult was associated with a greater risk for HIV infection, according to a study in the August 4 issue of JAMA, a violence/human rights theme issue. Adolescents migrating from Central America and Mexico to the United States are at risk for being trafficked into the sex industry in Mexico's northern border cities. Research from other regions indicates that those entering the sex trade ...

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Medicine4 Aug 2015

High rates of violence, HIV infection for adolescents in sex trade on US-Mexico border

Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that more than one in four female sex workers in two Mexican cities on the U.S. border entered the sex trade younger than age 18; one in eight before their 16th birthday. These women were more than three times more likely to become infected with HIV than those who started sex work as adults. They were also three times more likely to be violently coerced to engage in sex with male clients and seven times less likely to use a condom during their first month in the sex trade. The study is published ...

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Science4 Aug 2015

Scientists solve mystery behind earthworm digestion

Scientists have discovered how earthworms can digest plant material, such as fallen leaves, that would defeat most other herbivores. Earthworms are responsible for returning the carbon locked inside dead plant material back into the ground. They drag fallen leaves and other plant material down from the surface and eat them, enriching the soil, and they do this in spite of toxic chemicals produced by plants to deter herbivores. The scientists, led by Dr Jake Bundy and Dr Manuel Liebeke from Imperial College London, have identified molecules in the earthworm gut that ...

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Energy4 Aug 2015

New device converts DC electric field to terahertz radiation

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 4, 2015 -- Terahertz radiation, the no-man's land of the electromagnetic spectrum, has long stymied researchers. Optical technologies can finagle light in the shorter-wavelength visible and infrared range, while electromagnetic techniques can manipulate longer-wavelength radiation like microwaves and radio waves. Terahertz radiation, on the other hand, lies in the gap between microwaves and infrared, whether neither traditional way to manipulate waves works effectively. As a result, creating coherent artificial sources of terahertz radiation in ...

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Science4 Aug 2015

A droplet's pancake bounce

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 4, 2015 -- Studies of the impact a droplet makes on solid surfaces hark back more than a century. And until now, it was generally believed that a droplet's impact on a solid surface could always be separated into two phases: spreading and retracting. But it's much more complex than that, as a team of researchers from City University of Hong Kong, Ariel University in Israel, and Dalian University of Technology in China report in the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing. "During the spreading phase, the droplet undergoes an inertia-dominant ...

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Medicine4 Aug 2015

New weapon in the fight against malnutrition

UBC scientists have opened the doors to new research into malnutrition by creating an animal model that replicates the imbalance of gut bacteria associated with the difficult-to-treat disease. Malnutrition affects millions of people worldwide and is responsible for one-fifth of deaths in children under the age of five. Children can also experience impaired cognitive development and stunted growth. The problem arises when people don't have enough food to eat and their diet lacks proper nutrients. The disease also has a lot to do with environmental factors and it has ...

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Medicine4 Aug 2015

In vitro cellular response to osteopathic manipulative therapy provides proof of concept

In vitro studies of the cellular effects of modeled osteopathic manipulative therapy (OMT) provide proof of concept for the manual techniques practiced by doctors of osteopathic medicine (DOs), according to researchers from the University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix. The study, published in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, focused on modeling two common OMT techniques, myofascial release and counterstrain. Researchers subjected fibroblast matrices to various strains and employed a scratch wound strain model to test the ability of OMT ...

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Environment4 Aug 2015

New strain of yeast to be helpful in toxic waste removal

A new strain of yeast called Yarrowia lipolytica Y-3492 was found to be very active in waste water treatment. The discovery was made by by microbiologists from Kazan Federal University during their research at Western Siberian peat bogs. The strain is said to be effective against nitro compounds which are used in explosives, herbicides, insecticides, polymers, dyes, and some medications. Oil refineries and military equipment plants produce especially high amounts of such waste. The research was conducted with the use of widely known trinitrotoluene (TNT). It is well-known ...

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Medicine4 Aug 2015

Natural cocktail used to prevent, treat disease of wine grapes

COLLEGE STATION -- It's happy hour at a lab in College Station. The cocktail of choice, developed by scientists with Texas A&M AgriLife Research, is one that stops or prevents the deadly Pierce's disease on wine grapes. The discovery could turn a new leaf on the multimillion-dollar U.S. wine industry. Hear, hear. The study, published in the academic journal PLOS ONE, describes the use of four bacteriophages that were identified for their ability to attack the bacteria that causes the devastating disease in grapes and several other plants. A bacteriophage, or phage, ...

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Environment4 Aug 2015

Crop pests outwit climate change predictions en route to new destinations

A paper from the University of Exeter has highlighted the dangers of relying on climate-based projections of future crop pest distributions and suggests that rapid evolution can confound model results. Crop pests and pathogens are destructive organisms which pose a huge threat to food security and land management across the world. Much research has been carried out into why the pests are spreading, where they are likely to establish next, what damage they will do and what can be done to reduce their impact. In a new synthesis, published today in the Annual Review of ...

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Medicine4 Aug 2015

Brain infection study reveals how disease spreads from gut

Diagnosis of deadly brain conditions could be helped by new research that shows how infectious proteins that cause the disease spread. The study reveals how the proteins - called prions - spread from the gut to the brain after a person or animal has eaten contaminated meat. Scientists say their findings could aid the earlier diagnosis of prion diseases - which include variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in people and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cows. In people, the disease remains very rare - 229 people have died from vCJD since it was first identified ...

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Medicine4 Aug 2015

New clinical practice guidelines address temperature management during heart surgery

The Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists, and the American Society of ExtraCorporeal Technology have released a set of clinical practice guidelines to address management of a patient's temperature during open heart surgery. The guidelines appear in the August issue of The Annals of Thoracic Surgery and were published simultaneously in two other journals. Numerous strategies are currently used to optimally manage the practice of cooling the blood, temperature maintenance (control of body temperature during surgery), and rewarming ...

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Science4 Aug 2015

From pluripotency to totipotency

This news release is available in French. While it is already possible to obtain in vitro pluripotent cells (ie, cells capable of generating all tissues of an embryo) from any cell type, researchers from Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla's team have pushed the limits of science even further. They managed to obtain totipotent cells with the same characteristics as those of the earliest embryonic stages and with even more interesting properties. Obtained in collaboration with Juanma Vaquerizas from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine (Münster, Germany), these ...

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Medicine4 Aug 2015

Exercise during teen years linked to lowered risk of cancer death later

Women who exercised during their teen years were less likely to die from cancer and all other causes during middle-age and later in life, according to a new study by investigators at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Shanghai Cancer Institute in China. The study was published online July 31 in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association of Cancer Research. Lead author Sarah Nechuta, Ph.D., MPH, assistant professor of Medicine in the Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center, said understanding the long-term impact of modifiable ...

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Medicine4 Aug 2015

New Medicaid health care program for disabled adults improves aspects of patients' care

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- UF Health researchers have found that care linked to heart attacks and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, among disabled adults covered by Medicaid has improved with the expansion of a new health care program in Texas over the last decade. This approach to health care delivery is growing in popularity across the country, with the number of states implementing similar programs increasing from eight in 2004 to 18 in 2014. These programs have two components: managed care and home- and community-based health services. Managed care is reputed ...

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Earth Science4 Aug 2015

Seagrass thrives surprisingly well in toxic sediments -- but still dies all over the world

Toxic is bad. Or is it? New studies of seagrasses reveal that they are surprisingly good at detoxifying themselves when growing in toxic seabed. But if seagrasses are stressed by their environment, they lose the ability and die. All over the world seagrasses are increasingly stressed and one factor contributing to this can be lack of detoxification. Seagrass meadows grow along most of the world's coasts where they provide important habitats for a wide variety of life forms. However in many places seagrass meadows have been lost or seriously diminished and in several places, ...

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Science4 Aug 2015

Striking a gender balance among speakers at scientific conferences

Increasing the number of female speakers at a scientific conference can be done relatively quickly by calling attention to gender disparities common to such meetings and getting more women involved in the conference planning process, suggests a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researcher. Reporting online Aug. 4 in the journal mBio, Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, professor and chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Bloomberg School, lays out how the American Society of Microbiology General Meeting was able ...

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Science4 Aug 2015

How new moms assess their partners' ability to parent

COLUMBUS, Ohio - New mothers take a close look at their personal relationship with their husband or partner when deciding how much they want him involved in parenting, new research finds. The study found that mothers limited the father's involvement in child-rearing when they perceived their couple relationship to be less stable. Mothers also limited fathers who were less confident in their own ability to raise children. The bottom line is that new mothers are assessing their partners' suitability to be a parent, said Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, co-author of the study and ...

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Social Science4 Aug 2015

Spiders quickly learn eavesdropping to gain ground on the mating competition

When it comes to courting, one common spider species is quick to learn, and that learning process involves eavesdropping on the visual cues of rivals to win their mate. The latest discovery in a research partnership represented by Alma College, The Ohio State University at Newark and the University of Cincinnati is the featured article in the August issue of the international research journal Animal Behaviour. Previous studies by the researchers explored how brush-legged wolf spiders (Schizocosa ocreata) used visual eavesdropping to try to outdo a male rival's leg-tapping ...

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Medicine4 Aug 2015

Modelling the effect of vaccines on cholera transmission

Cholera is a diarrhoeal disease that is caused by an intestinal bacterium, Vibrio cholerae. Recently an outbreak of cholera in Haiti brought public attention to this deadly disease. In this work, the goal of our differential equation model is to find an effective optimal vaccination strategy to minimize the disease related mortality and to reduce the associated costs. The effect of seasonality in pathogen transmission on vaccination strategies was investigated under several types of disease scenarios, including an endemic case and a new outbreak case. This model is an extension ...

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Medicine4 Aug 2015

Teen marijuana use not linked to later depression, lung cancer, other health problems, study finds

WASHINGTON -- Chronic marijuana use by teenage boys does not appear to be linked to later physical or mental health issues such as depression, psychotic symptoms or asthma, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Rutgers University tracked 408 males from adolescence into their mid-30s for the study, which was published in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors. "What we found was a little surprising," said lead researcher Jordan Bechtold, PhD, a psychology research fellow ...

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Medicine4 Aug 2015

HIV grows despite treatment, study finds

HIV can continue to grow in patients who are thought to be responding well to treatment, according to research by the University of Liverpool. During treatment for HIV the virus hides in blood cells that are responsible for the patient's immune response. The virus does this by inserting its own genetic information into the DNA of the blood cells, called CD4 Tlymphocytes. The study by the University's Institute of Infection and Global Health measured the levels of integrated HIV in the CD4 cells of patients undergoing uninterrupted treatment for up to 14 years, and ...

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Space4 Aug 2015

Super star takes on black holes in jet contest

A super-dense star formed in the aftermath of a supernova explosion is shooting out powerful jets of material into space, research suggests. In a study published today, a team of scientists in the Australia and the Netherlands has discovered powerful jets blasting out of a double star system known as PSR J1023+0038. It was previously thought that the only objects in the Universe capable of forming such powerful jets were black holes. PSR J1023+0038 contains an extremely dense type of star astronomers call a neutron star, in a close orbit with another, more normal ...

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Science4 Aug 2015

Riding a horse is far more complex than riding simulators

Flight simulators for the training of air pilots are well known. But what about riding simulators? Although the first horse simulator was used at the French National Equestrian School in Saumur already in the 1980s, riding simulators for dressage, show jumping, polo or racing, have become available only recently. They look like horses and respond to the aids of the rider via sensors which measure the force exerted by the reins and the rider's legs. Via a screen in front of the simulator, the rider immerses himself into a virtual equestrian world. Simulators are aimed ...

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