When a rhythm stalls, the effect can be fatal - in a power grid it can mean a blackout, and in the human heart even death. An international team of scientists has now developed a new approach for revoking these undesired quenching states. They use an advanced mathematical methodology, building on complex networks analysis, and demonstrate it in experiments with chemical reactions. This could one day help to stabilize the flow of electricity in power grids challenged by the variable input from renewable energy sources. Future research could apply it to other complex networks, ...

Millimetre-sized crystals of high-quality graphene can be made in minutes instead of hours using a new scalable technique, Oxford University researchers have demonstrated. In just 15 minutes the method can produce large graphene crystals around 2-3 millimetres in size that it would take up to 19 hours to produce using current chemical vapour deposition (CVD) techniques in which carbon in gas reacts with, for example, copper to form graphene. Graphene promises to be a 'wonder material' for building new technologies because of its combination of strength, flexibility, ...

Updated guidelines on the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) have been released by an international group of leading respiratory societies, The new guidelines, issued by the American Thoracic Society, the European Respiratory Society, the Japanese Respiratory Society, and the Latin American Thoracic Association, were published in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. "In these updated guidelines, we analyzed new evidence reported since our 2011 guideline was issued and updated our treatment recommendations ...

Main Finding(s): Among women with a family history of breast cancer, those diagnosed with breast cancer gained weight at a greater rate compared with cancer-free women of the same age and menopausal status. Journal in Which the Study was Published: Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research Author: Kala Visvanathan, MD, MHS, associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of the Clinical Cancer Genetics and Prevention Service at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive ...

Cincinnati, OH, July 15, 2015 -- Although it is well documented that child and adolescent overweight and obesity have been increasing, little is known about actual fitness levels in these age groups. FITNESSGRAM is a comprehensive youth fitness educational, reporting, and promotional tool developed for use in schools. In a new study scheduled for publication in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers used FITNESSGRAM to study the fitness levels of a nationwide sample of 1st through 12th graders. The NFL PLAY 60 FITNESSGRAM Partnership Project, which is funded by the ...

Breast cancer survivors with a family history of the disease, including those who carry BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations, gained more weight over the course of four years than cancer-free women -- especially if they were treated with chemotherapy, according to a prospective study by Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers. Data from earlier studies suggest that breast cancer survivors who gain weight may have a higher risk of having their cancer return, the researchers say, noting that gains of 11 pounds or more are also associated with a higher risk of developing ...

TORONTO, ON - If it seems like you're pulling more bass than trout out of Ontario's lakes this summer, you probably are. Blame it on the ripple effect of climate change and warming temperatures. Birds migrate earlier, flowers bloom faster, and fish move to newly warmed waters putting local species at risk. To mitigate the trend and support conservation efforts, scientists at the University of Toronto (U of T) are sharing a way to predict which plants or animals may be vulnerable to the arrival of a new species. The researchers looked specifically at the impact of ...

Taking a combination of antidepressants and common painkillers is associated with an increased risk of bleeding soon after starting treatment, finds a study published in The BMJ this week. The researchers say their results may have been affected by other unmeasured or unknown factors and should be interpreted with caution. However, they suggest special attention is needed when patients use both these classes of drugs together. Depression produces the greatest decrement in health of all common chronic conditions and depression in older people is an important public ...

Women should be able to treat cystitis themselves with antibiotics without a prescription, says a general practitioner in The BMJ this week. Dr Kyle Knox says this would save three million scarce GP appointments a year. Acute uncomplicated urinary tract infections (AUUTIs) such as cystitis are the most common bacterial infections in women. Cystitis affects around half of women at least once in their lifetime and is coded as the reason for 1% of the 300 million GP consultations held annually in the UK. Management of cystitis is straightforward - a short course of ...

Should doctors recommend homeopathy? Two experts debate the issue in The BMJ this week. Peter Fisher, Director of Research at the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine, says that of all the major forms of complementary medicine, homeopathy is the most misunderstood. He questions the methods used to review the evidence for homeopathy. For example, in a recent report by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council which stated that "there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective." "The fact that ...

Standardised mortality ratios (SMRs) for hospitals do not provide an accurate picture of how many deaths could have been avoided, according to a new study by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London published in the BMJ. The authors say the widely used hospital-wide standardised mortality ratios, such as HSMR (Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio) and SHMI (Summary Hospital level Mortality Indicator), should not be used to benchmark hospitals' quality of care. Hospital-wide SMRs compare the number of deaths in a hospital ...

The first comprehensive genome analyses of 7 melon varieties was completed by a research team led by Josep Casacuberta, Jordi Garcia-Mas and Sebastian Ramos-Onsins, providing breeders new knowledge important for understanding phenotypic variability and helping increasing plant quality yields by selective breeding. The findings were published in the advanced online edition of Molecular Biology and Evolution. The researchers sought to bridge the gap between expanding the genetic knowledge of melons and understanding important traits such as flavor, size and water use. The ...

Disruptions in a key brain region can explain the varied outcomes after a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in children and adolescents, according to research published July 15 in The Journal of Neuroscience. Post-injury outcomes vary widely, and injury severity can only explain some of this variance. Combining data from brain imaging and recording, researchers at the University of Southern California and UCLA found that disruptions in the structure and function of a brain region called the corpus callosum could explain the variance in cognitive outcomes. TBI is the leading ...

Why do some youngsters bounce back quickly from a traumatic brain injury, while others suffer devastating side effects for years? New UCLA/USC research suggests that damage to the fatty sheaths around the brain's nerve fibers--not injury severity-- may explain the difference. Published in the July 15 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience, the finding identifies possible biomarkers that physicians could use to predict higher-risk patients who require closer monitoring. The study is the first to combine imaging scans with recording of the brain's electrical activity ...

WASHINGTON, DC, July 14, 2015 -- When a sound wave hits an obstacle and is scattered, the signal may be lost or degraded. But what if you could guide the signal around that obstacle, as if the interfering barrier didn't even exist? Recently, researchers at Nanjing University in China created a material from polyethylene membranes that does exactly that. Their final product, described this week in the Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing, was an acoustical "metamaterial" with an effective density near zero (DNZ). This work could help to endow a transmission ...

A quick biological test may be able to identify children who have literacy challenges or learning disabilities long before they learn to read, according to new research from Northwestern University. The study, publishing in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology on July 14th, centers on the child's ability to decipher speech -- specifically consonants -- in a chaotic, noisy environment. Preliterate children whose brains inefficiently process speech against a background of noise are more likely than their peers to have trouble with reading and language development when ...

A yearlong study of more than 300 patients found that the investigational drug patiromer can reduce elevated blood-potassium levels--a common side effect of drugs essential in the treatment of chronic diabetic kidney disease. The drug, given in this trial at one of four doses based on disease severity, returned blood potassium levels to normal when measured at four weeks and kept them under control for one year, the length of the trial. By quickly bringing potassium levels back to normal and keeping them there, patiromer can prevent life-threatening adverse events. The ...

The new guidelines for determining whether patients should begin taking statins to prevent cardiovascular disease issued in 2013 by the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA) are more accurate and more efficient than an earlier set of guidelines in assigning treatment to adults at increased risk for cardiovascular events - including heart attacks and strokes - and identifying those whose low risk rules out the need to take statins. In their paper appearing in the July 15 issue of JAMA, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) ...

An examination of the 2013 guidelines for determining statin eligibility, compared to guidelines from 2004, indicates that they are associated with greater accuracy and efficiency in identifying increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) events and presence of subclinical coronary artery disease, particularly in individuals at intermediate risk, according to a study in the July 14 issue of JAMA. The 2013 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) guidelines for the management of blood cholesterol represent a shift in the treatment approach ...

A microsimulation model-based analyses suggests that the health benefits associated with the 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk threshold of 7.5 percent or higher used in the 2013 ACC-AHA cholesterol guidelines are worth the additional costs required to achieve these health gains, and that a more lenient threshold might also be cost-effective, according to a study in the July 14 issue of JAMA. In November 2013 the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) released new recommendations to guide statin treatment initiation ...

Among patients with diabetic kidney disease and hyperkalemia (elevated potassium levels in the blood), a potentially life-threatening condition, those who received the new drug patiromer, twice daily for four weeks, had significant decreases in potassium levels which lasted through one year, according to a study in the July 14 issue of JAMA. Patients at the highest risk for hyperkalemia are those taking renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS) inhibitors with stage 3 or greater chronic kidney disease (CKD) who also have diabetes mellitus, heart failure, or both. Because ...

An examination of state vaccination requirements for adolescents finds that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is currently required in only two states, many fewer than another vaccine associated with sexual transmission (hepatitis B) and another primarily recommended for adolescents (meningococcal conjugate), according to a study in the July 14 issue of JAMA. Eight years after HPV vaccines were first recommended in the United States, vaccination coverage is substantially below the Healthy People 2020 target of 80 percent. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control ...

Berkeley -- Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with scientists at the Gladstone Institutes, have developed a template for growing beating cardiac tissue from stem cells, creating a system that could serve as a model for early heart development and a drug-screening tool to make pregnancies safer. In experiments to be published Tuesday, July 14, in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers used biochemical and biophysical cues to prompt stem cells to differentiate and self-organize into micron-scale cardiac tissue, including ...

Boston, MA - A new study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers has found that it would be cost-effective to treat 48-67% of all adults aged 40-75 in the U.S. with cholesterol-lowering statins. By expanding the current recommended treatment guidelines and boosting the percentage of adults taking statins, an additional 161,560 cardiovascular-related events could be averted, according to the researchers. "The new cholesterol treatment guidelines have been controversial, so our goal for this study was to use the best available evidence to quantify the ...

WASHINGTON, DC --July 14, 2015--Multiple species of bacteria working together in healthy guts are responsible for keeping out nasty bacterial invader, Clostridium difficile, a hospital-acquired culprit responsible for 15,000 deaths each year. The study, published this week in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, could lead to tests to predict which hospital patients are at highest risk of infection and better management of infections. "Hospital-acquired C. difficile infections have bloomed as a problem in the last 10-15 years, ...