People with higher job status may be more willing to compromise privacy for security reasons and also be more determined to carry out those decisions, according to researchers. This preoccupation with security may shape policy and decision-making in areas ranging from terrorism to investing, and perhaps cloud other options, said Jens Grossklags, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, Penn State. "What may get lost in the decision-making process is that one can enhance security without the negative impact on privacy," said Grossklags. "It's more ...

Opioids – strong morphine-based painkillers – are widely prescribed to patients experiencing chronic severe pain. While these drugs are very effective for treating and managing pain, they have one particularly bothersome side effect: constipation. A new drug, called naloxegol, could bring relief. In stage 3 trials reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, KU Leuven and international researchers provide new evidence that the drug relieves constipation without dulling opioids' pain-relieving effects. Up until a decade ago, physicians rarely prescribed opioids, reserving ...

Popping the blisters on the bubble wrap might be the most enjoyable thing about moving. But now, scientists propose a more productive way to reuse the popular packing material — as a sheet of small, test tube-like containers for medical and environmental samples. Their report, which shows that analyses can take place right in the bubbles, appears in the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry. George Whitesides and colleagues explain that although bubble wrap filled with biological samples, like blood or urine, or chemicals would have to be handled carefully, the material offers ...

New Rochelle, NY, July 16, 2014–Experimental drugs proven safe but perhaps not sufficiently effective in initial testing or against a first disease target may sit gathering dust on the shelves of pharmaceutical companies. An NIH-sponsored effort based on a crowdsourcing strategy to establish collaborations between industrial and academic partners to test and develop these therapeutic compounds was met with an overwhelming response and has led to clinical testing of a broad range of pilot projects and a newly announced round of funding opportunities. These findings are described ...

Republicans search the Net for information about the weather, climate change and global warming during extremely hot or cold spells. Democrats Google these terms when they experience changes in the average temperatures. These are some of the surprising findings from a study by Corey Lang of the University of Rhode Island in the US, published in Springer's journal Climatic Change. He tracked how the temperature fluctuations and rainfall that Americans experience daily in their own cities make them scour the Internet in search of information about climate change and global ...

If you've ever tried to watch a video on a tablet on a sunny day, you know you have to tilt it at just the right angle to get rid of glare or invest in a special filter. But now scientists are reporting in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces that they've developed a novel glass surface that reduces both glare and reflection, which continue to plague even the best mobile displays today. Valerio Pruneri and colleagues note that much effort has been poured into anti-reflective and anti-glare technology. In the highly competitive digital age, any bonus feature ...

DETROIT — Researchers at Wayne State University have made a fundamental discovery and, in subsequent collaboration with scientists at La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology (LIAI), are one step closer to the goal of developing the world's first T-cell peptide-based vaccine for heart disease — the number one killer in the nation. Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory disease of the arterial walls, which thicken due to accumulation of fatty materials such as cholesterols and triglycerides. Blocking of arteries supplying blood to the heart is the underlying cause ...

Scientists have discovered a new pathway the dengue virus takes to suppress the human immune system. This new knowledge deepens our understanding of the virus and could contribute to the development of more effective therapeutics. For years, the conventional approach to target the dengue virus was through vector control, which was regarded to be the most effective method. This is because the mechanics of the virus have been elusive, which in turn hampered the development of effective treatments and vaccines. Fortunately a new study, published in the prestigious journal ...

A new protein biomarker test platform developed by researchers at the University of Michigan and Indiana University promises to improve diagnostic testing. The test can accurately and simultaneously measure multiple proteins that indicate the presence of diseases like graft-versus-host disease (bone marrow transplant rejection) in only two hours, no washing steps, and using only a minute volume of blood plasma. A report on this new technology can be found online in the journal TECHNOLOGY. The protein test uses a micropatterning method developed in Shuichi Takayama's Micro/Nano/Molecular ...

As sea ice begins to melt back toward its late September minimum, it is being watched as never before. Scientists have put sensors on and under ice in the Beaufort Sea for an unprecedented campaign to monitor the summer melt. The international effort hopes to figure out the physics of the ice edge in order to better understand and predict open water in Arctic seas. "This has never been done at this level, over such a large area and for such a long period of time," said principal investigator Craig Lee, an oceanographer at the University of Washington's Applied Physics ...

On 16 July 2014 the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) published the results of a literature search for evidence-based clinical practice guidelines on the treatment of people with breast cancer. The aim of the report is to identify those recommendations from current guidelines of high methodological quality that may be relevant for the planned revision of the disease management programme (DMP). According to the results of the report, there is no compelling need for revision of any part of the DMP. However, IQWiG identified some aspects that ...

Scientists have designed a new self-assembling nanoparticle that targets tumours, to help doctors diagnose cancer earlier. The new nanoparticle, developed by researchers at Imperial College London, boosts the effectiveness of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanning by specifically seeking out receptors that are found in cancerous cells. The nanoparticle is coated with a special protein, which looks for specific signals given off by tumours, and when it finds a tumour it begins to interact with the cancerous cells. This interaction strips off the protein coating, ...

Scientists now have a better understanding of how short DNA strands decompose in microseconds. A European team found new fragmentation pathways that occur universally when DNA strands are exposed to metal ions from a family of alkaline and alkaline earth elements. These ions tend to replace protons in the DNA backbone and at the same time induce a reactive conformation leading more readily to fragmentation. These findings by Andreas Piekarczyk, from the University of Iceland, and colleagues have been published in a study in EPJ D. They could contribute to optimising cancerous ...

University of Leicester researchers have released evidence substantiating an unexpected dual role of an important component of the immune system. Findings by researchers at the University's Department of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation – including three PhD graduates – are published in a paper for the journal 'Medical Microbiology and Immunology'. The paper presents significant new findings about the protein properdin – an important part of the immune system. It is a positive regulator in the alternative pathway of complement activation – which means it plays a ...

Stem cells can substitute the lost cells after central nervous system injury, decrease nervous tissue damage and promote neurofunctional recovery. Many brain injury models, including middle cerebral artery occlusion and traumatic brain injury models, have confirmed that neural stem cells (NSCs) can migrate from subventricular zone to injured cerebral cortex. But the mechanism underlying activation of endogenous NSCs in the ischemic brain remains unclear. Dr. Hyung-Seok Kim, Chonnam National University Medical School, Korea and his team revealed that NSCs were activated ...

Ventricular enlargement has been suggested as a structural biomarker for normal aging and progression of some illnesses, such as Alzheimer's disease. However, the question of how this structural change in the brain in normal elderly affects change of white matters remains a topic of interest and concern. Dr. Sang Seok Yeo, College of Medicine, Yeungnam University, Republic of Korea, and his team performed a diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) study to investigate the question. They detected four regions of interest in the periventricular white matter of 60 normal subjected aged ...

The brain has a low renewable capacity for self-repair and generation of new functional neurons in the treatment of trauma, inflammation and cerebral diseases. Cytotherapy is one option to regenerate central nervous system that aim at replacing the functional depleted cells due to traumatic brain injury (TBI). Bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) are also considered a candidate for cytotherapy because they can differentiate into neurons/nerve cells, pass across blood-brain barrier, migrate into the injured region, secrete neurotrophic factor, and provide microenvironment ...

This news release is available in Spanish. The new research paper, which reports on one of the first experimental studies in the world to analyze how cooperative attitudes evolve in different age ranges, was written by the professors from the OpenSystems research group of the Department Fundamental Physics at the Universidad de Barcelona (UB), Josep Perelló and Mario Gutiérrez-Roig, Anxo Sánchez, of the Complex Systems Interdisciplinary Group (Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos - GISC) of the Mathematics Department at the Universidad Carlos III de ...

There is an increasing interest in Parkinson's disease (PD) treatment by increasing dopamine content and reducing dopaminergic metabolites in the brain. Xuming Yang, Shanghai Municipal Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, China and his team detected dopamine content and dopaminergic metabolites in the midbrain of PD rats, which were treated by neural stem cell (NSC) transplantation and Zhichan decoction administration, using high-performance liquid chromatography, and determined global optimization of dihydroxyphenylacetic acid and homovanillic acid levels using genetic ...

Previous studies have shown that chrysophanol protects against learning and memory impairments in lead-exposed adult mice. Ji Zhang, Hebei North University, China, proposed a hypothesis that chrysophanol can alleviate learning and memory dysfunction and hippocampal injury in lead-exposed neonatal mice. Results showed that chrysophanol alleviated hippocampal neuronal cytoplasmic edema, promoted mitochondrial crista fusion, significantly improved learning and memory abilities, decreased lead content in blood, brain, heart, spleen, liver and kidney, increased superoxide dismutase ...

People who selflessly step up and donate a kidney can face insurance challenges afterwards, despite the lack of evidence that they have increased health risks. The finding, which comes from a new study published in the American Journal of Transplantation, suggests that actions by insurers may create unnecessary burden and stress for those choosing to donate and could negatively impact the likelihood of live kidney donation. The impact of kidney donation on the ability to change or initiate health or life insurance following donation is unknown. To investigate, Dorry ...

Healthy living kidney donors often face pointless post-donation hurdles when seeking or changing health or life insurance, according to results of a new study by Johns Hopkins researchers. "Living donors are some of the healthiest people in the United States. They're heavily screened before they're approved for donation and should be easily insurable," says study leader Dorry Segev, M.D., Ph.D., M.H.S., an associate professor of surgery and epidemiology at The Johns Hopkins University. Under terms of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), health insurance ...

Research from the University of Copenhagen is shedding new light on the brain's complicated barrier tissue. The blood-brain barrier is an effective barrier which protects the brain, but which at the same time makes it difficult to treat diseases such as Alzheimer's. In an in vitro blood-brain barrier, researchers can recreate the brain's transport processes for the benefit of the development of new pharmaceuticals for the brain. The new research findings are published in the AAPS Journal. Ninety-five per cent of all tested pharmacological agents for treating brain disorders ...

New research from The University of Texas at Dallas demonstrates that drug paraphernalia triggers the reward areas of the brain differently in dependent and non-dependent marijuana users. The study, published July 1 in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, demonstrated that different areas of the brain activated when dependent and non-dependent users were exposed to drug-related cues. The 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in the United States. According to a 2013 survey from the Pew Research Center, 48 percent of ...

The mysterious spotted green pigeon (Caloenas maculata) was a relative of the dodo, according to scientists who have examined its genetic make-up. The authors say their results, published in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, support a theory that both birds are descended from 'island hopping' ancestors. The only known example of the spotted green pigeon is the Liverpool pigeon, which is currently in the World Museum, Liverpool. The only other known specimen has been lost, and there are no records of the bird in the wild. There is no record of where the ...