Irvine, Calif., May 26, 2015 - The Millennium Drought in southeastern Australia forced Greater Melbourne, a city of 4.3 million people, to successfully implement innovations that hold critical lessons for water-stressed regions around the world, according to findings by UC Irvine and Australian researchers. It wasn't a new pipeline over the mountains, special rate hikes or a $6 billion desalination plant that kept faucets running. Rather, integrated outreach by utilities and agencies required to work together led to a culture shift among ordinary water users, according ...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (MAY 26, 2015). A surgical skills laboratory and corresponding dissection curricula were established in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Cleveland Clinic in the 2011-2012 academic year. The authors describe how this came about and what it has meant for neurosurgical resident training and assessment of residents' surgical skills in the following paper: "Establishing a surgical skills laboratory and dissection curriculum for neurosurgical residency training" by James K. C. Liu, MD, and colleagues, published today online, ahead of print in the Journal ...

A new study has shed light on how cancer patients' attitudes and beliefs drive the use of complementary and alternative medicine. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the findings may help hospitals develop more effective and accessible integrative oncology services for patients. Although many cancer patients use complementary and alternative medicine, what drives this usage is unclear. To investigate, a team led by Jun Mao, MD and Joshua Bauml, MD, of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman ...

This news release is available in French. Hormone therapy (HT) is prescribed to alleviate some of the symptoms of menopause in women. Menopausal women are more likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease but not other forms of dementia, and HT has been prescribed to treat cognitive decline in post-menopausal women with variable degrees of effectiveness. New research by Dr. Liisa Galea, at the University of British Columbia, suggests the form of estrogens used in HT and previous motherhood could be critical to explain why HT has variable effects. Research in ...

Being very overweight in your teens may double the risk of developing bowel cancer by the time you are middle aged, suggests research published online in the journal Gut. And a high level of an indicator of systemic inflammation--erythrocyte sedimentation rate, or ESR for short--at this age is also linked to heightened risk of the disease in later life, the study shows. Adult obesity and inflammation have been associated with an increased risk of bowel cancer, which is the third most common form of cancer among men, worldwide. However, less is known about how obesity ...

Road traffic noise is linked to a heightened risk of developing a mid-riff bulge, indicates research published online in Occupational & Environmental Medicine. Exposure to a combination of road traffic, rail, and aircraft noise may pose the greatest risk of acquiring a spare tyre--otherwise known as central obesity, and thought to be one of the most harmful types of fat deposition around the body--the findings suggest. The researchers assessed how much road traffic, rail, and aircraft noise 5075 people living in five suburban and rural areas around Stockholm, Sweden, ...

Patients aged 80 and above are significantly less likely to be investigated or aggressively treated after surgery than their younger counterparts, reveals a national audit of hospital deaths, published in the online journal BMJ Open. This is despite the fact that the oldest old have higher rates of trauma and multiple underlying conditions on admission, say the Australian researchers. Care in the oldest old may be less aggressive, or scaled down because the outcome is expected to be poor or treatment considered futile, they say. Perceived future quality of life issues ...

1. Appropriate duration of dual antiplatelet therapy still unclear Free abstract: http://www.annals.org/article.aspx?doi=10.7326/M15-0083 URL goes live when embargo lifts A systematic review of published evidence does little to clarify the appropriate duration of dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT) following drug eluting stent placement. The evidence suggests that longer duration therapy decreases the risk for myocardial infarction, but increases the risk for major bleeding events, and may provide a slight increase in mortality. The results are published in Annals of Internal ...

Ovarian cancer is notoriously difficult to diagnose and treat, making it an especially fatal disease. Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center have now identified six mRNA isoforms (bits of genetic material) produced by ovarian cancer cells but not normal cells, opening up the possibility that they could be used to diagnose early-stage ovarian cancer. What's more, several of the mRNA isoforms code for unique proteins that could be targeted with new therapeutics. The study is published the week of May 25 by the Proceedings ...

Frailer older patients are at higher risk of readmission to hospital or death within 30 days after discharge from a general internal medicine ward, but health care professionals can assess who is at risk using the Clinical Frailty Scale, according to a study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) Readmission within 30 days after hospital discharge is common and also costly for the health care system. Identifying at-risk patients and addressing the factors contributing to readmission can help reduce recurrences. However, current tools are not able to predict accurately ...

This news release is available in French. Scientists measuring brain activity have found that in many regions, such as the sensory or motor cortex, activity sometimes oscillates at different frequencies, forming wave-like patterns. Despite the fact that such oscillations are frequently observed, and present in many brain regions, their functional role remains unclear. Research done by Dr. Christopher Pack, from McGill University, who looked at such waves occurring in a region of the visual cortex of the brain, suggests these oscillations could have a role in resetting ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY -- A team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has identified a set of genes that control stem cell production in tomato. Mutations in these genes explain the origin of mammoth beefsteak tomatoes. More important, the research suggests how breeders can fine-tune fruit size in potentially any fruit-bearing crop. The research appears online today in Nature Genetics. In its original, wild form the tomato plant produces tiny, berry-sized fruits. Yet among the first tomatoes brought to Europe from Mexico by conquistador Hernan Cortez in ...

UPTON, NY -- Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have just taken a big step toward the goal of engineering dynamic nanomaterials whose structure and associated properties can be switched on demand. In a paper appearing in Nature Materials, they describe a way to selectively rearrange the nanoparticles in three-dimensional arrays to produce different configurations, or phases, from the same nano-components. "One of the goals in nanoparticle self-assembly has been to create structures by design," said Oleg Gang, who led the work ...

New research conducted in a rural community in Pakistan highlights the crucial role that essential fatty acids play in human brain growth and function. A team co-led by the University of Exeter, working with experts in Singapore, has published findings in Nature Genetics which show that mutations in the protein Mfsd2a cause impaired brain development in humans. Mfsd2a is the transporter in the brain for a special type of fat called lysophosphatidylcholines (LPCs) -- which are composed of essential fatty acids like omega-3. This shows the crucial role of these fats in ...

Having a healthy gut may well depend on maintaining a complex signaling dance between immune cells and the stem cells that line the intestine. Scientists at the Buck Institute are now reporting significant new insight into how these complex interactions control intestinal regeneration after a bacterial infection. It's a dance that ensures repair after a challenge, but that also goes awry in aging fruit flies -- the work thus offers important new clues into the potential causes of age-related human maladies, such as irritable bowel syndrome, leaky gut and colorectal cancer. "We've ...

May 26, 2015, Shenzhen, China - Researchers from BGI reported the most complete haploid-resolved diploid genome (HDG) sequence based on de novo assembly with NGS technology and the pipeline developed lays the foundation for de novo assembly of genomes with high levels of heterozygosity. The latest study was published online today in Nature Biotechnology. The human genome is diploid, and knowledge of the variants on each chromosome is important for the interpretation of genomic information. In this study, researchers presented the assembly of a haplotype-resolved diploid ...

A gene essential to the production of pain-sensing neurons in humans has been identified by an international team of researchers co-led by the University of Cambridge. The discovery, reported today in the journal Nature Genetics, could have implications for the development of new methods of pain relief. Pain perception is an evolutionarily-conserved warning mechanism that alerts us to dangers in the environment and to potential tissue damage. However, rare individuals - around one in a million people in the UK - are born unable to feel pain. These people accumulate numerous ...

Scientists at the University of York's Centre for Quantum Technology have made an important step in establishing scalable and secure high rate quantum networks. Working with colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of Toronto, they have developed a protocol to achieve key-rates at metropolitan distances at three orders-of-magnitude higher than previously. Standard protocols of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) exploit random sequences of quantum bits (qubits) to distribute secret keys in a completely ...

TORONTO, May 25, 2015 - A new, Ontario-wide study shows that rates of hospital readmission following a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are greater than other chronic diseases and injuries and are higher than previously reported. The study, led by Dr. Angela Colantonio, senior scientist, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, UHN, examined nearly 30,000 TBI patients discharged from Ontario hospitals over the span of eight years. Published in the May edition of Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, the study found that about 36 per cent of patients with TBI had been ...

Madagascar is home to extraordinary biodiversity, but in the past few decades, the island's forests and associated biodiversity have been under greater attack than ever. Rapid deforestation is affecting the biotopes of hundreds of species, including the panther chameleon, a species with spectacular intra-specific colour variation. A new study by Michel Milinkovitch, professor of genetics, evolution, and biophysics at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), led in close collaboration with colleagues in Madagascar, reveals that this charismatic reptilian species, which is only ...

This news release is available in French. Certain blind individuals have the ability to use echoes from tongue or finger clicks to recognize objects in the distance, and some use echolocation as a replacement for vision. Research done by Dr. Mel Goodale, from the University of Western Ontario, in Canada, and colleagues around the world, is showing that echolocation in blind individuals is a full form of sensory substitution, and that blind echolocation experts recruit regions of the brain normally associated with visual perception when making echo-based assessments ...

Seville, Spain - 24 May 2015: Cognitive impairment predicts worse outcome in elderly heart failure patients, reveals research presented today at Heart Failure 2015 by Hiroshi Saito, a physiotherapist at Kameda Medical Centre in Kamogawa, Japan. Patients with cognitive impairment had a 7.5 times greater risk of call cause death and heart failure readmission. Heart failure patients with cognitive impairment may get progressively worse at adhering to medications, leading to poorer prognosis. Heart Failure 2015 is the main annual meeting of the Heart Failure Association ...

SAN DIEGO - Results from a new nationwide survey announced today indicate a steady increase in the number of pediatric patients who are being treated with proton radiation therapy for cancerous and non-cancerous tumors. The research, led by Andrew L. Chang, M.D., medical director of pediatrics with the Scripps Proton Therapy Center, was presented during the 54th annual Particle Therapy Co-Operative Group (PTCOG) Conference in San Diego, which runs through May 23. Based on a survey of all proton therapy centers in the United States, the number of pediatric patients treated ...

Seville, Spain - 23 May 2015: Moderate to severe depression is associated with a 5-fold increased risk of all cause mortality in patients with heart failure, according to research presented today at Heart Failure 2015. The results from OPERA-HF show that risk was independent of comorbidities and severity of heart failure. Patients who were not depressed had an 80% lower mortality risk. Heart Failure 2015 is the main annual meeting of the Heart Failure Association (HFA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and takes place 23 to 26 May in Seville, Spain. The scientific ...

Many animals feed on seeds, acorns or nuts. The common feature of these are that they have shells and there is no direct way to know what's inside. How do the animals know how much and what quality of food is hidden inside? A simple solution would be to break the shells, which often takes time and effort -- it would be a big disappointment to know that it's rotten or bad after the hard effort of opening the nuts! Can animals evaluate the food hidden inside the nuts? This is especially important for some animals who cache the food items for later use without opening and ...