New Rochelle, NY, May 21, 2014—The workplace can provide an ideal environment to implement support, well-being, and testing interventions aimed at reducing risky alcohol use among men. By targeting male-dominated industries, in particular, alcohol screening and prevention efforts may be effective in reducing alcohol use, according to a Review article in Journal of Men's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Journal of Men's Health website. A team of Australian researchers led by Nicole Lee, ...

NEW HYDE PARK, NY – A recent study by investigators from LIJ Medical Center demonstrated that using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in men with an elevated prostate specific antigen (PSA) resulted in a prostate cancer detection rate that was twice as high as data reported in the March 1999 Prostate journal that analyzed men undergoing the standard 12-core biopsy with an elevated PSA. Physicians in the recent trial used a targeted approach to evaluate prostate cancer that combines MR imaging and transrectal ultrasound fusion guided prostate biopsy. Given the limitations ...

PITTSBURGH—Web services companies, such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft, all make promises about how they will use personal information they gather. But ensuring that millions of lines of code in their systems operate in ways consistent with privacy promises is labor-intensive and difficult. A team from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research, however, has shown these compliance checks can be automated. The researchers developed a prototype automated system that is now running on the data analytics pipeline of Bing, Microsoft's search engine. According to ...

According to the Alaskan Division of Forestry the Funny River fire was very active overnight (May 20) because of low humidity. Currently the fire is estimated to be near 7,000 acres and has reached Tustumena Lake. It is spreading east and west along the shore, is 10 miles long, and is about a mile wide with broadening at the lake shore. There have been no evacuations or reports of any structures lost. Early this morning (May 21), flame lengths of 125 feet with erratic fire behavior were reported. Winds for today are forecasted to remain out of the north keeping the fire ...

Radioactivity is usually associated with nuclear fallout or comic-book spider bites, but in very small amounts it can be a useful tool for diagnosing diseases. Small molecules containing a radioactive isotope of fluorine called "18F radiotracers" are used to detect and track certain diseases in patients. Once injected into the body, these molecules accumulate in specific targets, such as tumors, and can be visualized by their radioactive tag on a positron emission tomography (PET) scan. The 18F tags quickly decay so no radioactivity remains after about a day. But there ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (May 21, 2014)—Having premenstrual syndrome (PMS) before menopause does not mean women will be troubled by hot flashes afterward. But they may face more menopause complaints other than hot flashes, such as trouble with memory and concentration, finds a new study published online in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). The research team at the Helsinki University Central Hospital and Folkhälsan Research Institute in Helsinki, Finland, are the first to show a link between PMS and a worse quality of life after menopause. They ...

National Museum of Natural History scientist Bert Van Bocxlaer and an international team of researchers revealed that anthropogenic changes in Africa's Lake Malaŵi are a driving force behind the increase of urogenital schistosomiasis, a debilitating tropical disease caused by parasitic flatworms. Scientists estimate that 250 million people are affected by schistosomiasis worldwide, and 600 million more are at risk of contracting it. In some villages along the shorelines of Lake Malaŵi, 73 percent of the people and up to 94 percent of the schoolchildren are infected ...

Field and laboratory work by Omar Torres-Carvajal from Museo de Zoología QCAZ, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, and his former undergraduate student Simón Lobos has resulted in the discovery of a gem-looking new species of shade lizard from the cloudforests in northwestern Ecuador. This region is part of the 274,597 km2 Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena hotspot that lies west of the Andes. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys. Shade lizards (genus Alopoglossus) are widely distributed across tropical South America. They differ from most other lizards ...

A tiny Mediterranean island visited by the likes of Madonna, Sting, Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone is now the focus of a ground-breaking study by University of Leicester geologists. Pantelleria, a little-known island between Sicily and Tunisia, is a volcano with a remarkable past: 45 thousand years ago, the entire island was covered in a searing-hot layer of green glass. Volcanologists Drs Mike Branney, Rebecca Williams and colleagues at the University of Leicester Department of Geology have been uncovering previously unknown facts about the island's physical history. And ...

Patients receiving chemical treatment for cancer often suffer fatigue and body weight loss, two of the most worrying effects of this therapy linked to the alteration of their circadian rhythms. The circadian system, better known as our biological clock, is responsible for coordinating all the processes that take place in our organism. If it does not function correctly, what is known as a circadian disruption or chronodisruption, has for years been linked to an increased incidence of cancer, obesity, diabetes, depression, cognitive problems or cardiovascular diseases. "Also, ...

A new way of measuring sea level using satellite navigation system signals, for instance GPS, has been implemented by scientists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Sea level and its variation can easily be monitored using existing coastal GPS stations, the scientists have shown. Measuring sea level is an increasingly important part of climate research, and a rising mean sea level is one of the most tangible consequences of climate change. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have studied new ways of measuring sea level that could become important ...

Research from North Carolina State University finds that dam removal improves spawning grounds for American shad and seems likely to improve survival rates for adult fish, juveniles and eggs – but for different reasons. The researchers focused on a small tributary in North Carolina called the Little River, where three dams were removed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. American shad (Alosa sapidissima) spend the bulk of their adult lives in saltwater, but return to freshwater rivers like this one to spawn. While in these freshwater environments, the adult shad do not ...

Every time we have an infection or a headache and take a pill, we get a lot more drugs than our body actually needs. The reason is that only a fraction of the drugs in a pill reaches the right places in the body; the rest never reaches its destination and may cause unwelcome side effects before they are flushed out of the body again. This kind of major overdosing is especially true when doctors treat brain diseases, because the brain does not easily accept entering drugs. "People with brain diseases are often given huge amounts of unnecessary drugs. During a long life, ...

The headlights – two eyes, the radiator cowling – a smiling mouth: This is how our brain sometimes creates a face out of a car front. The same happens with other objects: in house facades, trees or stones – a "human face" can often be detected as well. Prof. Dr. Gyula Kovács from Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) knows the reason why. "Faces are of tremendous importance for human beings," the neuroscientist explains. That's why in the course of the evolution our visual perception has specialized in the recognition of faces in particular. "This sometimes even ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. --- Cyberbullying isn't just a problem in middle class and affluent areas. Teenagers in poor, high-crime neighborhoods also experience online bullying, finds new research led by a Michigan State University criminologist. The study suggests the "digital divide" – the gap between people with access to online technologies and those without – may be nonexistent, at least when it comes to cyberbullying, said Thomas J. Holt, MSU associate professor of criminal justice. "We found neighborhood conditions that are indicative of poverty and crime are a significant ...

VIDEO: In this TRMM 3-D simulated flyby of System 92B from May 19, tall storms were shown reaching heights of over 14km (about 8.7 miles). Click here for more information. A tropical low pressure area known as System 92B has been organizing in the Northern Indian Ocean's Bay of Bengal and NASA's TRMM satellite has shown strong thunderstorms and heavy rainfall in the developing storm. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite passed over System 92B on May 19 and ...

It's no longer a certainty that American mothers will get custody over their children during a divorce. In fact, if Wisconsin Court Records of the past 20 years are anything to go by, joint custody is becoming the norm. So says Maria Cancian and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US, whose findings are published in Springer's journal Demography. For most of the twentieth century, in both divorce and nonmarital cases, most children ended up living with their mothers after their parents' divorce. This conformed to gender norms that views mothers ...

A new method of generating mature nerve cells from skin cells could greatly enhance understanding of neurodegenerative diseases, and could accelerate the development of new drugs and stem cell-based regenerative medicine. The nerve cells generated by this new method show the same functional characteristics as the mature cells found in the body, making them much better models for the study of age-related diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and for the testing of new drugs. Eventually, the technique could also be used to generate mature nerve cells for transplantation ...

VIDEO: Children identified as intellectually disabled or with low IQ learned to read at a first-grade level after persistent, intensive instruction from a scientifically based curriculum. The findings of the pioneering... Click here for more information. The findings of a pioneering four-year educational study offer hope for thousands of children identified with intellectual disability or low IQ who have very little, if any, reading ability. The study by researchers at Southern ...

Out of the thousands of chemicals used for countless everyday products, about 500 have been assessed for potential health risks by the federal program tasked with this colossal duty. The good news is the Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the program, has improved it, but more remains to be done, according to a report from the National Research Council (NRC). Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society, hits the report's highlights. Cheryl Hogue, senior correspondent for C&EN, explains that the EPA program, called ...

Turning the "hydrogen economy" concept into a reality, even on a small scale, has been a bumpy road, but scientists are developing a novel way to store hydrogen to smooth out the long-awaited transition away from fossil fuels. Their report on a new solid, stable material that can pack in a large amount of hydrogen that can be used as a fuel appears in the ACS journal Chemistry of Materials. Umit B. Demirci and colleagues explain that storing hydrogen in solids is a recent development and a promising step toward building a hydrogen economy. That's the idea originated ...

To the relief of patients diagnosed with hepatitis C, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved two new treatments late last year, and a few more are on the way. Now scientists are solving another side of the disease's problem: identifying the millions more who have the virus but don't know it — and unwittingly pass it on. A report in the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry describes a novel, scrapbook-inspired test that does just that. Xuan Mu, Zhi Zheng and colleagues point out that the hepatitis C virus (HCV), a blood-borne pathogen that can cause liver cirrhosis, ...

For anyone searching for another reason to enjoy a glass of red wine with dinner, here's a good one: A new study has found that red wine, as well as grape seed extract, could potentially help prevent cavities. They say that their report, which appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, could lead to the development of natural products that ward off dental diseases with fewer side effects. M. Victoria Moreno-Arribas and colleagues explain that dental diseases are extremely common throughout the world. Cavities, periodontal disease and tooth loss affect ...

A team led by a University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM) researcher, working as a grantee from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has identified a number of existing drugs that could be "repurposed" to fight outbreaks of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV). Clinicians treating patients suffering from MERS currently have no drugs specifically targeted to the MERS-CoV, a virus first detected in humans in 2012 that has since caused 572 laboratory-confirmed infections, including ...

TORONTO, May 21, 2014 – Homeless clients using services at Toronto's Good Shepherd Ministries are nearly nine times more likely to have a history of problem or pathological gambling than the general population, a new study from St. Michael's Hospital has found. "Intuitively, one might think there's a connection between problem gambling and homelessness but very few studies have explored this in any depth.," said Dr. Flora Matheson, a research scientist with St. Michael's Centre for Research on Inner City Health. "By doing this kind of research, we help community organizations ...