The use of cement in partial hip replacement surgery may be linked to a risk of death - often occurring within minutes - finds research published in the online journal BMJ Open. The risk is relatively rare. But the alarm was first sounded in 2009, and most of the cases that have come to light have occurred since that date, say the authors, who include the former chief medical officer for England. This suggests that measures to reduce the risks are not being acted on widely enough, they say. They base their findings on an analysis of cases submitted between 2005 and ...

The first cases of Mad Cow disease in humans (properly called variant Creutzfeld Jakob Disease, or vCJD) occurred in the late 1990s and are thought to be the consequence of eating contaminated beef products. Since then, several cases of secondary infections caused by transfusions with blood from donors who subsequently developed vCJD have been reported, raising concerns about the safety of blood and blood products. A paper published in PLOS Pathogens on June 12th now describes an assay that can detect prions in blood samples from humans with vCJD and in animals at early ...

Washington, DC (June 12, 2014) — Among young adult dialysis patients living in poor neighborhoods, blacks have a significantly higher risk of dying while young compared with whites. The findings, which come from a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN), suggest that more work is needed to understand social factors that could worsen outcomes among young black adults with kidney failure. Among young dialysis patients aged 18 to 30 years, blacks are nearly twice as likely as whites to die while still young. The reasons ...

A new study published in PLOS Computational Biology shows that genes associated with hereditary diseases occur throughout the human body. The study, by Esti Yeger-Lotem et al., used network biology to model the interactions between proteins associated with diseases such as Parkinson's in different tissues. Using these networks, they show that proteins carrying the disease are found throughout the body. In tissues vulnerable to hereditary diseases, the networked proteins had unique interactions relevant for the mechanism of the disease. Disease causing genes tend to ...

Men who eat moderate amounts of processed red meat may have an increased risk of incidence and death from heart failure, according to a study in Circulation: Heart Failure, an American Heart Association journal. Processed meats are preserved by smoking, curing, salting or adding preservatives. Examples include cold cuts (ham, salami), sausage, bacon and hot dogs. "Processed red meat commonly contains sodium, nitrates, phosphates and other food additives, and smoked and grilled meats also contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, all of which may contribute to the increased ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have found that persons with lower blood levels of vitamin D were twice as likely to die prematurely as people with higher blood levels of vitamin D. The finding, published in the June 12 issue of American Journal of Public Health, was based on a systematic review of 32 previous studies that included analyses of vitamin D, blood levels and human mortality rates. The specific variant of vitamin D assessed was 25-hydroxyvitamin D, the primary form found in blood. "Three years ago, the Institute ...

Lincoln, Neb. — Younger generations are closing the social class gap between evangelical Protestants and mainline denominations, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist of religion has found. And in what appears to be an important shift in the U.S. religious landscape, a growing number of younger-generation working-class Americans are not affiliated with any particular religious denomination. "When lower-class Americans aren't choosing to be evangelical, they're increasingly choosing to be nothing," said Philip Schwadel, associate professor ...

In today's digitally driven world, access to information appears limitless. But when you have something specific in mind that you don't know, like the name of that niche kitchen tool you saw at a friend's house, it can be surprisingly hard to sift through the volume of information online and know how to search for it. Or, the opposite problem can occur – we can look up anything on the Internet, but how can we be sure we are finding everything about the topic without spending hours in front of the computer? Computer scientists from the University of Washington and the ...

Selecting graduate students in the fields of science and engineering based on an assessment of their character instead of relying almost entirely on their scores on a standardized test would significantly improve the quality of the students that are admitted and, at the same time, boost the participation of women and minorities in these key disciplines. That is the argument made in the essay "A test that fails" published in the June 12 issue of the journal Nature. The authors are Associate Professor of Physics Casey Miller of the University of South Florida and Keivan ...

DALLAS – June 12, 2014 – UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have generated fresh insights that could aid in the development of rapid-acting antidepressants for treatment-resistant depression. The researchers found that by blocking NMDA receptors with the drug ketamine, they could elicit rapid antidepressant effects in patients with treatment-resistant depression. Ketamine was developed as an anesthetic, but is better known publicly for its abuse as the party drug Special K. Researchers are now seeking alternatives because ketamine can produce side effects that ...

Researchers from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have discovered that populating the gastrointestinal (GI) tracts of mice with Bacteroides species producing a specific enzyme helps protect the good commensal bacteria from the harmful effects of antibiotics. Their research is published ahead of print in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. Antibiotics are powerful weapons against pathogens, but most are relatively indiscriminate, killing the good bacteria, along with the bad. Thus, they may render patients vulnerable to invasion, particularly by virulent, ...

For some cigarette smokers, strategies to aid quitting work well, while for many others no method seems to work. Researchers have now identified an aspect of brain activity that helps to predict the effectiveness of a reward-based strategy as motivation to quit smoking. The researchers observed the brains of nicotine-deprived smokers with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and found that those who exhibited the weakest response to rewards were also the least willing to refrain from smoking, even when offered money to do so. "We believe that our findings may ...

DALLAS – June 12, 2014 – Orexin proteins, which are blamed for spontaneous daytime sleepiness, also play a crucial role in bone formation, according to findings by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers. The findings could potentially give rise to new treatments for osteoporosis, the researchers say. Orexins are a type of protein used by nerve cells to communicate with each other. Since their discovery at UT Southwestern more than 15 years ago, they have been found to regulate a number of behaviors, including arousal, appetite, reward, energy expenditure, and wakefulness. ...

This news release is available in German. One of the most remarkable consequences of the rules in quantum mechanics is the capability of a quantum particle to penetrate through a potential barrier even though its energy would not allow for the corresponding classical trajectory. This is known as the quantum tunnel effect and manifests itself in a multitude of well-known phenomena. For example, it explains nuclear radioactive decay, fusion reactions in the interior of stars, and electron transport through quantum dots. Tunneling also is at the heart of many technical ...

The first large-scale, comprehensive analysis of the genomic diversity of Mexico — led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the University of California-San Francisco and the Mexican National Institute of Genomic Medicine — has identified a dazzling mosaic of genotypes and population substructures across the country. Some groups are as genetically different from one another as Europeans are from East Asians. The study, which will be published June 13 in Science, soundly refutes the current practice of lumping together Mexicans or Latinos as ...

Scientists from the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have conducted a first-of-its-kind study that characterizes the cellular diversity within glioblastoma tumors from patients. The study, which looked at the expression of thousands of genes in individual cells from patient tumors, revealed that the cellular makeup of each tumor is more heterogeneous than previously suspected. The findings, which appear online in Science Express, will help guide future investigations into potential treatments for this devastating disease. This is the first time ...

In the most comprehensive genetic study of the Mexican population to date, researchers from UC San Francisco and Stanford University, along with Mexico's National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), have identified tremendous genetic diversity, reflecting thousands of years of separation among local populations and shedding light on a range of confounding aspects of Latino health. The study, which documented nearly 1 million genetic variants among more than 1,000 individuals, unveiled genetic differences as extensive as the variations between some Europeans and Asians, ...

The offspring of chimpanzees inherit 90% of new mutations from their father, and just 10% from their mother, a finding which demonstrates how mutation differs between humans and our closest living relatives, and emphasises the importance of father's age on evolution. Published today in Science, researchers from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics and the Biomedical Primate research Centre in the Netherlands looked at whether, in chimpanzees, there was a heightened risk of fathers passing on mutations to their children compared to humans. In humans, each individual ...

Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico report evidence for potentially oceans worth of water deep beneath the United States. Though not in the familiar liquid form -- the ingredients for water are bound up in rock deep in the Earth's mantle -- the discovery may represent the planet's largest water reservoir. The presence of liquid water on the surface is what makes our "blue planet" habitable, and scientists have long been trying to figure out just how much water may be cycling between Earth's surface and interior reservoirs through ...

VIDEO: This video depicts Restored grasping after immunotherapy and rehabilitative training. Click here for more information. Only if the timing, dosage and kind of rehabilitation are right can motor functions make an almost full recovery after a large stroke. Rats that were paralyzed down one side by a stroke almost managed to regain their motor functions fully if they were given the ideal combination of rehabilitative training and substances that boosted the growth of nerve fibers. ...

A new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows that a part of the nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system, is formed in a way that is different from what researchers previously believed. In this study, which is published in the journal Science, a new phenomenon is investigated within the field of developmental biology, and the findings may lead to new medical treatments for congenital disorders of the nervous system. Almost all of the body's functions are controlled by the autonomous, involuntary nervous system, for example the heart and blood vessels, ...

Scientists have discovered a relationship between climate change and ocean currents over the past six million years after analysing an area of the Atlantic near the Strait of Gibraltar, according to research published today (Friday, 13 June) in the journal Science. An expedition of scientists, jointly led by Dr Javier Hernandez-Molina, from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, examined core samples from the seabed off the coast of Spain and Portugal which provided proof of shifts of climate change over millions of years. The team ...

Proximity to other meadows increases disease resistance in wild meadow plants, according to a study led by Anna-Liisa Laine at the University of Helsinki. The results of the study, analysing the epidemiological dynamics of a fungal pathogen in the archipelago of Finland, will be published in Science on 13 June 2014. The study surveyed more than 4,000 Plantago lanceolata meadows and their infection status by a powdery mildew fungus in the Åland archipelago of Finland. The surveys have continued since 2001, resulting in one of the world's largest databases on disease dynamics ...

This news release is available in German and Spanish. Even computers are error-prone. The slightest disturbances may alter saved information and falsify the results of calculations. To overcome these problems, computers use specific routines to continuously detect and correct errors. This also holds true for a future quantum computer, which will require procedures for error correction as well: "Quantum phenomena are extremely fragile and error-prone. Errors can spread rapidly and severely disturb the computer," says Thomas Monz, member of Rainer Blatt's research group ...

Washington, DC (June 12, 2014) – We know it too well. We are watching a horror film and the antagonist is about to maim a character; we ball up, get ready for the shot and instead of turning away, we lean forward in the chair, then flinch and cover our eyes – Jason strikes again! But what is going on in our body that drives us to this reaction, and why do we engage in it so readily? Recent research published in the Journal of Communication found that people exposed to core disgusts (blood, guts, body products) showed higher levels of attention the more disgusting the content ...