SAN ANTONIO (July 28, 2014) -- Researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, the Texas Liver Institute and other institutions have identified a combination of pills that cures 9 of 10 hepatitis C patients. The combination of the drugs sofosbuvir and simeprevir, with or without ribavirin, cured 93 percent of patients in 12 weeks, and was well tolerated by patients, according to the study published today in The Lancet. National study conducted in the U.S. Eric Lawitz, M.D., clinical professor in the School of Medicine at the UT Health ...

Set goal, work to achieve goal, attain goal and react accordingly — that's the script we write when we set our sights on an achievement. But what happens when the script isn't followed, and you learn too soon that you will accomplish what you set out to do? New research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business finds that the positive reaction one would have when succeeding is lessened if it doesn't follow the expected course. In "Feeling Good at the Right Time: Why People Value Predictability in Goal Attainment," Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral ...

There is no cure for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, but the research community is one step closer to finding treatment. University of Washington bioengineers have a designed a peptide structure that can stop the harmful changes of the body's normal proteins into a state that's linked to widespread diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and Lou Gehrig's disease. The synthetic molecule blocks these proteins as they shift from their normal state into an abnormally folded form by targeting a toxic intermediate phase. The ...

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL, July 28, 2014...Mothers who live near green spaces deliver babies with significantly higher birth weights, according to a new study, "Green Spaces and Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes" published in the journal, Occupational and Environmental Medicine. A team of researchers from Israel and Spain, including Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), evaluated nearly 40,000 single live births from a registry birth cohort in Tel Aviv, Israel to determine the impact of green surroundings during pregnancy and birth outcomes. "We found that that overall, an increase ...

PORTLAND, Ore. – The findings of a new study suggest two ways to effectively address the problem that birth control pills may not work as well in obese women, compared to women of a normal body mass index. Birth control pills are a one-size-fits-all method, researchers say, but as the population has increased in weight, concern has grown about how well the pill works for obese women. Studies have consistently found that obesity has a negative impact on drug levels in the body, which may in turn affect how well the pill prevents pregnancy. "Birth control pills have ...

A powerful new tool that can help advance the genetic engineering of "fuel" crops for clean, green and renewable bioenergy, has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a multi-institutional partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The JBEI researchers have developed an assay that enables scientists to identify and characterize the function of nucleotide sugar transporters, critical components in the biosynthesis of plant cell walls. "Our unique assay enabled us to analyze ...

A new strategy which enables molecules to be disconnected essentially anywhere, even remote from functionality, is described by researchers from the University of Bristol in Nature Chemistry today. The method is now being developed to explore the possibility of creating a tuberculosis (TB) vaccine. The organic synthesis strategy, developed by Professor Varinder Aggarwal and Dr Ramesh Rasappan in the School of Chemistry, involves a new method for combining smaller fragments together in which there is no obvious history in the product of their genesis. The paper describes ...

CHICAGO – A new study, published in the July, 2014, issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute by Northwestern Medicine® researchers, sheds new light on the risks associated with the growing popularity of endoscopic resection in the treatment of localized, early-stage esophageal cancer. Researchers found that the more traditional surgical resection, while more invasive, provided significantly better outcomes with an 87.6 percent five-year survival rate for patients than endoscopic resection, which had a 76 percent five-year survival rate. The study, "Treatment ...

Tropical Storm Genevieve may be a remnant low pressure area but there's still a chance it could make a comeback. Meanwhile, GOES-West satellite imagery showed there are two developing low pressure areas "chasing" Genevieve to the east. NOAA's Central Pacific Hurricane Center has suddenly become very busy tracking these three areas. NASA/NOAA's GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland provided an infrared image of the Central and Eastern Pacific on July 28 that showed Genevieve southeast of Hawaii, and two other low pressure areas behind ...

Dallas (SMU) — Smart phones and mobile devices are on the cusp of revolutionizing health care, armed with mobile health ("mHealth") apps capable of providing everything from cardiac measurements to sonograms. While tremendous potential exists to broaden access to medical treatment and control costs, several health law experts say in a just-published New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) report that more oversight is needed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure consumer confidence and safety. Out of some 100,000 mHealth apps on the market, only about ...

Fairfax, Va., July 28, 2014—A two-step decision tree analysis, incorporating Donabedian's model, is a feasible process to evaluate and distill the many available quality standards, guidelines, recommendations and indicators in order to update national and international quality standards for radiation therapy, according to a study published in the July-August 2014 issue of Practical Radiation Oncology (PRO), the official clinical practice journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). Guidelines, recommendations and indicators may be utilized to develop ...

(Boston)-- Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) report variants in a new gene, PLXNA4, which may increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). The discovery of this novel genetic association may lead to new drug treatment options that target PLXNA4 specifically. These findings appear in the Annals of Neurology. AD is the most frequent age-related dementia affecting 5.4 million Americans including 13 percent of people age 65 and older, and more than 40 percent of people age 85 and older. Genetic factors account for much of the risk for ...

MANHATTAN, Kansas — He calls himself the bug hunter, but the target of his work consists of viruses that can only be found and identified with special methods and instruments. Benjamin Hause, an assistant research professor at the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Kansas State University, recently published an article about one of his discoveries, porcine enterovirus G, which is an important find in the United States. "We had isolated a virus in cells, but didn't know what it was," Hause said. "We used next-generation sequencing to identify it, and it turned ...

The guiding philosophy for educating children with disabilities has been to integrate them as much as possible into a normal classroom environment, with the hope that peers' skills will help bring them up to speed. A new study provides empirical evidence that peers really can have an impact on a child's language abilities, for better or worse. While peers with strong language skills can help boost their classmates' abilities, being surrounded by peers with weak skills may hinder kids' language development. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal ...

A St. Jude Children's Research Hospital study found that 73 percent of adult survivors of childhood cancer more than doubled their risk of developing metabolic syndrome and related health problems by failing to follow a heart-healthy lifestyle. The results appear in the current issue of the journal Cancer. Almost 32 percent of the 1,598 adult survivors of childhood cancer in the study had metabolic syndrome, an umbrella term for health risk factors like high blood pressure, abdominal obesity, elevated triglyceride and other abnormalities that often occur together. The ...

HOUSTON – (July 28, 2014) – Rice University researchers are using magnetic beads and DNA "springs" to create chains of varying flexibility that can be used as microscale models for polymer macromolecules. The experiment is visual proof that "bead-spring" polymers, introduced as theory in the 1950s, can be made as stiff or as flexible as required and should be of interest to materials scientists who study the basic physics of polymers The work led by Rice chemical and biomolecular engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal and graduate student Julie Byrom was published this month in ...

Some 15% of adults suffer from fertility problems, many of these due to genetic factors. This is something of a paradox: We might expect such genes, which reduce an individual's ability to reproduce, to disappear from the population. Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science that recently appeared in Nature Communications may now have solved this riddle. Not only can it explain the high rates of male fertility problems, it may open new avenues in understanding the causes of genetic diseases and their treatment. Various theories explain the survival of harmful mutations: ...

Imagine trying to measure a tennis ball that bounces wildly, every time to a distance a million times its own size. The bouncing obviously creates enormous "background noise" that interferes with the measurement. But if you attach the ball directly to a measuring device, so they bounce together, you can eliminate the noise problem. As reported recently in Nature, physicists at the Weizmann Institute of Science used a similar trick to measure the interaction between the smallest possible magnets – two single electrons – after neutralizing magnetic noise that was a million ...

Researchers using statistical tools to map social connections in prairie dogs have uncovered relationships that escaped traditional observational techniques, shedding light on prairie dog communities that may help limit the spread of bubonic plague and guide future conservation efforts. The work was done by researchers from North Carolina State University and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). "Prairie dogs are increasingly rare and are subject to bubonic plague," says Dr. Jennifer Verdolin, lead author of a paper on the work and an animal behavior ...

A psychology researcher at North Carolina State University is proposing a new theory to explain why older adults show declining cognitive ability with age, but don't necessarily show declines in the workplace or daily life. One key appears to be how motivated older adults are to maintain focus on cognitive tasks. "My research team and I wanted to explain the difference we see in cognitive performance in different settings," says Dr. Tom Hess, a professor of psychology at NC State and author of a paper describing the theory. "For example, laboratory tests almost universally ...

WASHINGTON, July 28, 2014—A group of researchers in Taiwan has developed a new optical technology that may be able to detect an early complication of diabetes sooner, when it is more easily treated. If the device proves safe and effective in clinical trials, it may pave the way for the early detection and more effective treatment of this complication, called diabetic autonomic neuropathy, which is common among people with both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. The condition progressively affects the autonomic nerves controlling vital organs like the heart and gastrointestinal ...

Researchers from the University of Bradford, UK, have devised a simple blood test that can be used to diagnose whether people have cancer or not. The test will enable doctors to rule out cancer in patients presenting with certain symptoms, saving time and preventing costly and unnecessary invasive procedures such as colonoscopies and biopsies being carried out. Alternatively, it could be a useful aid for investigating patients who are suspected of having a cancer that is currently hard to diagnose. Early results have shown the method gives a high degree of accuracy ...

A new study of the European project SOPHIE has evaluated the relationship between the type of family policies and gender inequalities in health in Europe. The results show that countries with traditional family policies (central and southern Europe) and countries with contradictory policies (Eastern Europe), present higher inequalities in self-perceived health, i.e. women reported poorer health than men. Health inequalities are especially remarkable in Southern Europe countries, where women present a 27% higher risk of having poor health compared to men. The authors of ...

Ultrafast real-time optical imaging is an effective and important tool for studying dynamical events, such as shock waves, neural activity, laser surgery and chemical dynamics in living cells. Limited by the frame rate, conventional imaging system such as charge-coupled device (CCD) and complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) imaging device can not image fast dynamic processes. Last few years, serial time-encoded amplified microscopy (STEAM) technique based on space-frequency mapping combined with frequency-time mapping has been demonstrated as a completely new optical ...

New research has identified areas of the Earth that are high priorities for conservation in the face of climate change. Europe is particularly vulnerable, as it has the lowest fraction of its land area, only four per cent, of any continent in 'refugia' – areas of biological diversity that support many species where natural environmental conditions remain relatively constant during times of great environmental change. The refugia that do exist in Europe are mostly in Scandinavia and Scotland. The biggest refugia are in the Amazon, the Congo basin, the boreal forests ...