Ads can communicate their main message in as little as a tenth of a second, helped by color, according to a new study published in Marketing Science, a publication of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The Buffer Effect: The Role of Color When Advertising Exposures Are Brief and Blurred is by Michel Wedel, Pepsico Chaired Professor of Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business of the University of Maryland and Rik Pieters, Professor of Marketing at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management of the University of Tilburg ...

A sex-changing fish called California sheephead (Semicossyphus pulcher) plays a vital role in the food web of kelp forests along the Pacific coast. Commonly found in the waters from Baja California to Point Conception -- although they can sometimes be found as far north as Monterey Bay -- sheephead feed on sea urchins, whose grazing habits can wreak havoc on community composition in kelp forests. A new study by UC Santa Barbara research biologist Jenn Caselle uses data from three decades of research to document differential exploitation and recovery of sheephead populations ...

Recent research from the University of Alberta reveals that contrary to current scientific knowledge, there's no atmospheric lead pollution in the province's oil sands region. William Shotyk, a soil and water scientist who specializes in heavy metal pollution, examined sphagnum moss from 21 separate peat bogs in three locations around the oil sands area, near open pit mines and processing facilities. After measuring the heavy metal content in the moss samples in his ultra-clean lab at the University of Alberta, Shotyk, based in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life and ...

A University of Colorado Cancer Center study being presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium shows that triple negative breast cancer cells process tryptophan to promote survival while traveling through the body in order to seed new tumor sites. "I'm not saying that people with metastatic breast cancer shouldn't eat turkey during the holidays, but triple-negative breast cancer appears to have found a way to process tryptophan more quickly, equipping cancer cells to survive while in circulation, which allows them to metastasize," says Thomas Rogers, the paper's ...

DALLAS - Dec. 10, 2014 - UT Southwestern Medical Center microbiologists have identified key bacteria in the gut whose resources are hijacked to spread harmful foodborne E. coli infections and other intestinal illnesses. Though many E. coli bacteria are harmless and critical to gut health, some E. coli species are harmful and can be spread through contaminated food and water, causing diarrhea and other intestinal illnesses. Among them is enterohemorrhagic E. coli or EHEC, one of the most common foodborne pathogens linked with outbreaks featured in the news, including ...

An anomaly spotted at the Large Hadron Collider has prompted scientists to reconsider a mathematical description of the underlying physics. By considering two forces that are distinct in everyday life but unified under extreme conditions like those within the collider and just after the birth of the universe, they have simplified one description of the interactions of elementary particles. Their new version makes specific predictions about events that future experiments at the LHC and other colliders should observe and could help to reveal "new physics," particles or processes ...

BERKELEY -- Future fitness trackers could soon add blood-oxygen levels to the list of vital signs measured with new technology developed by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley. "There are various pulse oximeters already on the market that measure pulse rate and blood-oxygen saturation levels, but those devices use rigid conventional electronics, and they are usually fixed to the fingers or earlobe," said Ana Arias, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and head of the UC Berkeley team that is developing a new organic optoelectronic ...

New Haven, Conn. - A new combination of cancer drugs delayed disease progression for patients with hormone-receptor-positive metastatic breast cancer, according to a multi-center phase II trial. The findings of the randomized study (S6-03) were presented at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held Dec. 6-9, by Kerin Adelson, M.D., assistant professor of medical oncology at Yale Cancer Center and chief quality officer at Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven. The trial enrolled 118 post-menopausal women with metastatic hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer ...

PHILADELPHIA--Two-thirds of women treated for early-stage breast cancer in the U.S. receive longer radiation therapy than necessary, according to a new study published in JAMA this week from Penn Medicine researchers Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, and Justin E. Bekelman, MD. Their findings reveal that the vast majority of women after breast conserving surgery receive six to seven weeks of radiation therapy, despite multiple randomized trials and professional society guidelines showing that three weeks of radiation - called hypofractionated whole breast radiation - is just ...

Although the use of a type of radiation treatment that is shorter in duration and less costly has increased among women with early-stage breast cancer who had breast conserving surgery, most patients who meet guidelines to receive this treatment do not, according to a study appearing in JAMA. The study is being released to coincide with the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. Breast cancer accounts for the largest portion of national expenditures on cancer care, estimated to reach $158 billion in 2020. Breast conservation therapy is the most common treatment for early-stage ...

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have uncovered the mechanism that enables the enzyme Lecithin: retinol acyltransferase (LRAT) to store vitamin A--a process that is indispensable for vision. "Without this information, our knowledge was inadequate to understand the molecular mechanisms of blindness caused by mutations in the enzyme," said Marcin Golczak, assistant professor of pharmacology at Case Western Reserve and an author of the study. The researchers hope the new information will be used to design small molecule therapies for degenerative ...

New research reports that liver transplant recipients with less understanding of treatment information and improper use of medications may be more likely to have trouble following the prescribed regimen. According to the study published in Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the International Liver Transplantation Society, the patients' non-adherence is linked to adverse clinical outcomes, such as organ rejection or graft loss. During the past 30 years, improvements in surgical techniques and advances in immunosuppressive ...

Reductions in government healthcare spending in the European Union (EU) are associated with increased maternal mortality rates, suggests a new paper published today (10 December) in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (BJOG). However, if skilled birth attendants are in place, the association disappears, highlighting the potential importance of maternal care, finds the research. The study looks at the association between reductions in government healthcare spending (GHS) and maternal mortality across the European Union (EU) over a 30 year period ...

WASHINGTON - The correlation between Internet searches on a regional medical website and next-day visits to regional emergency departments was "significant," suggesting that Internet data may be used in the future to predict the level of demand at emergency departments. The first study to use Internet data to predict emergency department visits in either a region or a single hospital was published online Friday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Forecasting Emergency Department Visits Using Internet Data") . "Website visits may be used to predict ER visits for a geographic ...

Hair loss can be devastating for the millions of men and women who experience it. Now scientists are reporting that a substance from honeybee hives might contain clues for developing a potential new therapy. They found that the material, called propolis, encouraged hair growth in mice. The study appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Ken Kobayashi and colleagues note that propolis is a resin-like material that honeybees use to seal small gaps in their hives. Not only does it work as a physical barrier, but it also contains active compounds that fight ...

Cigarette smoking generates as much as $170 billion in annual health care spending in the United States, according to a new study co-authored by researchers at Georgia State University's School of Public Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and RTI International. Dr. Terry F. Pechacek, a professor of health management and policy at Georgia State, was the senior author of the study, "Annual Healthcare Spending Attributable to Cigarette Smoking (An Update)," which was published Wednesday by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study ...

Touch can be a subtle sense, but it communicates quickly whether something in our hands is slipping, for example, so we can tighten our grip. For the first time, scientists report the development of a stretchable "electronic skin" closely modeled after our own that can detect not just pressure, but also what direction it's coming from. The study on the advance, which could have applications for prosthetics and robotics, appears in the journal ACS Nano. Hyunhyub Ko and colleagues explain that electronic skins are flexible, film-like devices designed to detect pressure, ...

Fatigue and pain, along with other symptoms, prevent many people with multiple sclerosis (MS) from exercising. But a new how-to guide for a home-based exercise program, tested by researchers at Case Western Reserve University's nursing school and the Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, offers a way for people with MS to stay more physically active. The researchers developed a 24-week exercise program based on a series of pamphlets with varying levels of difficulty. The program helps inactive individuals start at a lower, shorter level of activity and gradually ...

Windows allow brilliant natural light to stream into homes and buildings. Along with light comes heat that, in warm weather, we often counter with energy-consuming air conditioning. Now scientists are developing a new kind of "smart window" that can block out heat when the outside temperatures rise. The advance, reported in ACS' journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, could one day help consumers better conserve energy on hot days and reduce electric bills. Xuhong Guo, Kaimin Chen, Yanfeng Gao and colleagues explain that researchers are pursuing smart windows ...

HOUSTON - (Dec. 10, 2014) - Like a baseball player sliding into third, a hot monomer skids in a straight line along a cold surface until it's safely among its fellow molecules. This is not what usually happens when scientists assemble monomers to make thin films for next-generation electronics, but the details remained a puzzle until a team led by Rice University got involved. Monomers are organic molecules that, in this application, form clusters and eventually complete layers. Researchers at Rice and the University of Maryland led by Rice theoretical physicist ...

A Danish Research Team identified a molecular mechanism that ensures that when cells divide, the genomic material passes correctly to the resulting daughter cells: "The process, known as chromosome segregation, is vitally important because incorrect passage of the genomic material makes cells prone to develop into cancer cells," says Jakob Nilsson, associate professor at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research. The new discovery depends on a protein called BubR1 which if mutated can cause cancer. The results have just been published in the scientific ...

The Ebola virus travels from person to person through direct contact with infected body fluids. But how long can the virus survive on glass surfaces or countertops? How long can it live in wastewater when liquid wastes from a patient end up in the sewage system? In an article published Dec. 9 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, Kyle Bibby of the University of Pittsburgh reviews the latest research to find answers to these questions. He and his co-investigators didn't find many answers. "The World Health Organization has been saying you can put ...

A team of researchers from the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and environmental testing firm URS reports that a small subset of natural gas wells are responsible for the majority of methane emissions from two major sources -- liquid unloadings and pneumatic controller equipment -- at natural gas production sites. With natural gas production in the United States expected to continue to increase during the next few decades, there is a need for a better understanding of methane emissions during natural gas production. The study team ...

A happy worker is a productive worker. That adage may be true, according to a new study from The University of Texas at Dallas. Two UT Dallas public affairs researchers found that family-friendly policies are beneficial for increasing productivity of employees in public organizations, and the authors said the finding likely lends itself to job satisfaction and commitment. The study, published in the Public Personnel Management, investigated the effects of family-friendly human resources policies in public organizations. Using the Korea Workplace Panel Survey data from ...

New school and office workspace designs created by a group of Penn State engineering students are intended to allow users to share space and materials while maintaining their own work areas -- a dual purpose the researchers say has been neglected. The research began in 2010 as a class project, according to Joseph M. Mahoney, former Penn State graduate student, now assistant professor of mechanical engineering, Penn State, Berks. "There's a lot of interest from an ergonomics perspective and workplace efficiency perspective of designing workstations for single users," Mahoney ...