This news release is available in French. Montreal, November 11, 2014 -- Regardless of whether a business has been in the family for one year or one thousand, the person in charge typically hopes that handing the reins to a close relative will ensure security for future generations. But that's easier said than done, given that 30 per cent of firms make it to the second generation of family ownership, and only 12 per cent make it to the third. Concordia University management professor Peter Jaskiewicz believes there's hope for business owners who stay current by focusing ...

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have designed a simple, yet highly accurate traffic prediction model for roadway transportation networks. They have recently published their work in the journal Nature Communications. "Transportation networks and in particular the highway transportation network are like the body's circulatory system for the nation," says Zoltán Toroczkai, professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, who co-authored the study with physics graduate student Yihui Ren and national and international collaborators. The team's model ...

CORAL GABLES, Fla. (November 11, 2014) -- Researchers at the University of Miami (UM) have developed a family-focused, culturally-informed treatment for schizophrenia (CIT-S). The program is one of the first to incorporate elements of the patient's cultural background as part of therapy. The findings are published online ahead of print, in the Journal of Family Psychology. The novel treatment aimed to reduce patients' symptoms and improve patient and caregiver emotional well-being, explains Amy Weisman de Mamani, Associate Professor of Psychology in the College of Arts ...

As baby boomers reach their sunset years, shifting nationwide demographics with them, the financial burden of Alzheimer's disease on the United States will skyrocket from $307 billion annually to $1.5 trillion, USC researchers announced today. Health policy researchers at the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics used models that incorporate trends in health, health care costs, education and demographics to explore the future impact of one of humanity's costliest diseases on the nation's population. Other key findings include: From 2010 to ...

A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published online this week in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics reports anti-cancer activity in 10 out of 11 patient tumor samples grown in mice and treated with the experimental drug TAK-733, a small molecule inhibitor of MEK1/2. While the drug is conceived as a second-generation inhibitor in patients harboring the BRAF mutation, the study shows drug activity in melanoma models regardless of BRAF mutation status. Treated tumors shrunk up to 100 percent. "The importance of this molecule is that it's a next-generation ...

A University of Texas at Arlington physics team is using their expertise in the field of optics and photonics to advance new methods in areas such as mapping the neural circuitry of the brain and guiding neurons to potentially repair damage in the body. Samarendra Mohanty, an assistant professor of physics, leads the Biophysics and Physiology Lab in the UT Arlington College of Science. He is co-author on two papers published this month. In one published by the online journal PLOS ONE Nov. 10, researchers in Mohanty's lab described using a method called "two-photon optogenetic ...

Making a paper airplane in school used to mean trouble. Today it signals a promising discovery in materials science research that could help next-generation technology -like wearable energy storage devices- get off the ground. Researchers at Drexel University and Dalian University of Technology in China have chemically engineered a new, electrically conductive nanomaterial that is flexible enough to fold, but strong enough to support many times its own weight. They believe it can be used to improve electrical energy storage, water filtration and radiofrequency shielding ...

November 11, 2014 - Several lines of research have opened exciting new frontiers in scientific understanding and clinical management of bipolar disorder. Recent advances in bipolar disease research are described in this month's special issue of Harvard Review of Psychiatry. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. Bipolar disease is a "prevalent, complex, and hard-to-treat illness [leading] to extreme and erratic shifts of mood, thinking, and behavior, with a very high risk of suicide as well as increased risks of dying ...

In multiple sclerosis, the immune system goes rogue, improperly attacking the body's own central nervous system. Mobility problems and cognitive impairments may arise as the nerve cells become damaged. In a new study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and co-investigators have identified a key protein that is able to reduce the severity of a disease equivalent to MS in mice. This molecule, Del-1, is the same regulatory protein that has been found to prevent inflammation and bone loss in a mouse model of gum disease. "We see that two completely different ...

DALLAS - November 11, 2014 - UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have determined the specific type of cell that gives rise to large, disfiguring tumors called plexiform neurofibromas, a finding that could lead to new therapies for preventing growth of these tumors. "This advance provides new insight into the steps that lead to tumor development and suggests ways to develop therapies to prevent neurofibroma formation where none exist today," said Dr. Lu Le, Assistant Professor of Dermatology at UT Southwestern and senior author of the study, published online and ...

As scientists probe the molecular underpinnings of why some people are prone to obesity and some to leanness, they are discovering that weight maintenance is more complicated than the old "calories in, calories out" adage. A team of researchers led by the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine's Kendra K. Bence have now drawn connections between known regulators of body mass, pointing to possible treatments for obesity and metabolic disorders. Their work also presents intriguing clues that these same molecular pathways may play a role in learning ...

Salivary mucins, key components of mucus, actively protect the teeth from the cariogenic bacterium, Streptococcus mutans, according to research published ahead of print in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The research suggests that bolstering native defenses might be a better way to fight dental caries than relying on exogenous materials, such as sealants and fluoride treatment, says first author Erica Shapiro Frenkel, of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. S. mutans attaches to teeth using sticky polymers that it produces, eventually forming a biofilm, a protected ...

From this week's Eos: Scientists Engage With the Public During Lava Flow Threat On 27 June, lava from Kīlauea, an active volcano on the island of Hawai`i, began flowing to the northeast, threatening the residents in Pāhoa, a community in the District of Puna, as well as the only highway accessible to this area. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) and the Hawai`i County Civil Defense have been monitoring the volcano's lava flow and communicating with affected residents through public meetings since 24 August. Eos recently ...

The majority of people - including healthcare professionals - are unable to visually identify whether a person is a healthy weight, overweight or obese according to research by psychologists at the University of Liverpool. Researchers from the University's Institute of Psychology, Health and Society asked participants to look at photographs of male models and categorise whether they were a healthy weight, overweight or obese according to World Health Organisation (WHO) Body Mass Index (BMI) guidelines. They found that the majority of participants were unable to correctly ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Tiny, thin microtubes could provide a scaffold for neuron cultures to grow so that researchers can study neural networks, their growth and repair, yielding insights into treatment for degenerative neurological conditions or restoring nerve connections after injury. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Wisconsin-Madison created the microtube platform to study neuron growth. They posit that the microtubes could one day be implanted like stents to promote neuron regrowth at injury sites or to treat disease. "This ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Crop producers and scientists hold deeply different views on climate change and its possible causes, a study by Purdue and Iowa State universities shows. Associate professor of natural resource social science Linda Prokopy and fellow researchers surveyed 6,795 people in the agricultural sector in 2011-2012 to determine their beliefs about climate change and whether variation in the climate is triggered by human activities, natural causes or an equal combination of both. More than 90 percent of the scientists and climatologists surveyed said they ...

Located hundreds of miles inland from the nearest ocean, the Midwest is unaffected by North Atlantic hurricanes. Or is it? With the Nov. 30 end of the 2014 hurricane season just weeks away, a University of Iowa researcher and his colleagues have found that North Atlantic tropical cyclones in fact have a significant effect on the Midwest. Their research appears in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Gabriele Villarini, UI assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, studied the discharge records collected at 3,090 U.S. Geological Survey ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Glycogen storage disorders, which affect the body's ability to process sugar and store energy, are rare metabolic conditions that frequently manifest in the first years of life. Often accompanied by liver and muscle disease, this inability to process and store glucose can have many different causes, and can be difficult to diagnose. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri who have studied enzymes involved in metabolism of bacteria and other organisms have catalogued the effects of abnormal enzymes responsible for one type of this disorder in humans. ...

What if you researched your family's genealogy, and a mysterious stranger turned out to be an ancestor? That's the surprising feeling had by a team of scientists who peered back into Europe's murky prehistoric past thousands of years ago. With sophisticated genetic tools, supercomputing simulations and modeling, they traced the origins of modern Europeans to three distinct populations. The international research team published their September 2014 results in the journal Nature. XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, provided the computational ...

Reston, Va. (November 11, 2014) - A novel study demonstrates the potential of a novel molecular imaging drug to detect and visualize early prostate cancer in soft tissue, lymph nodes and bone. The research, published in the November issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, compares the biodistribution and tumor uptake kinetics of two Tc-99m labeled ligands, MIP-1404 and MIP-1405, used with SPECT and planar imaging. Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed non-skin cancer in the United States, and it is second only to lung cancer as the leading cause of cancer ...

If you're a native of rural Mozambique who contracts HIV and becomes symptomatic, before seeking clinical testing and treatment, you'll likely consult a traditional healer. Your healer may well conclude that your complaints are caused by a curse, perhaps placed upon you by a neighbor or by the spirit of an ancestor. To help you battle your predicament, the healer will likely cut your skin with a razor blade and rub medicinal herbs into the cut. A recent survey of symptomatic HIV-positive people in rural Mozambique, led by Carolyn Audet, Ph.D., M.A., assistant professor ...

New research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests that HIV-infected adults are at a higher risk for developing heart attacks, kidney failure and cancer. But, contrary to what many had believed, the researchers say these illnesses are occurring at similar ages as adults who are not infected with HIV. The findings appeared online last month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Researchers say these findings can help reassure HIV-infected patients and their health care providers. "We did not find conclusive evidence to suggest that ...

New Haven, Conn.--The phrase "tears of joy" never made much sense to Yale psychologist Oriana Aragon. But after conducting a series of studies of such seemingly incongruous expressions, she now understands better why people cry when they are happy. "People may be restoring emotional equilibrium with these expressions," said Aragon, lead author of work to be published in the journal Psychological Science. "They seem to take place when people are overwhelmed with strong positive emotions, and people who do this seem to recover better from those strong emotions." There ...

With both wolf proposals shot down by Michigan voters on election day, the debate over managing and hunting wolves is far from over. A Michigan State University study, appearing in a recent issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management, identifies the themes shaping the issue and offers some potential solutions as the debate moves forward. The research explored how different sides of the debate view power imbalances among different groups and the role that scientific knowledge plays in making decisions about hunting wolves. These two dimensions of wildlife management ...

PHILADELPHIA (Nov. 11, 2014) - Federal laws explicitly addressing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have overwhelmingly focused on the needs of military personnel and veterans, according to a new analysis published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress. The study, authored by Jonathan Purtle, DrPH, an assistant professor at the Drexel University School of Public Health, is the first to examine how public policy has been used to address psychological trauma and PTSD in the U.S., providing a glimpse of how lawmakers think about these issues. Purtle found that in federal ...