Law enforcement authorities need to better understand trafficking patterns of cocaine in the United States to address one of the world's largest illegal drug markets, according to a Michigan State University researcher whose new methodology might help. Siddharth Chandra, an economist, studied wholesale powdered cocaine prices in 112 cities to identify city-to-city links for the transit of the drug. He used data published by the National Drug Intelligence Center of the U.S. Department of Justice from 2002 to 2011, which field intelligence officers and local, regional and ...

A man with almost no hair on his body has grown a full head of it after a novel treatment by doctors at Yale University. There is currently no cure or long-term treatment for alopecia universalis, the disease that left the 25-year-old patient bare of hair. This is the first reported case of a successful targeted treatment for the rare, highly visible disease. The patient has also grown eyebrows and eyelashes, as well as facial, armpit, and other hair, which he lacked at the time he sought help. "The results are exactly what we hoped for," said Brett A. King, M.D., ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (June 19, 2014) – Researchers in Taiwan have found that peripheral blood stem cells can be "mobilized" by injection of a special preparation of granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) into rats that modeled osteoarthritis (OA). The bone marrow was stimulated to produce stem cells, leading to the inhibition of OA progression. The finding, they said, may lead to a more effective therapy for OA, a common joint disease that affects 10 percent of Americans over the age of 60. The study will be published in a future issue of Cell Transplantation and ...

New Rochelle, NY, June 19, 2014—An innovative system using automated 3D printing technology and advanced digital tools to create customized, prefabricated ceramic building blocks, called PolyBricks, is enabling the construction of mortar-less brick building assemblies at much greater scales than was previously possible. The new techniques that use 3D printers to produce modular ceramic bricks from a single material that then interlock and assemble easily into larger units for architectural applications are described in an article in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing ...

PHILADELPHIA (June 19, 2014) – We already know haters are predisposed to be that way. Now we see they also spend a lot of time at fewer activities than their non-hater counterparts. But in a twist of irony, that grumpy person at work may actually be pretty good at their job since they spend so much time on fewer activities, thereby giving them the opportunity to hone their skills in specific tasks. It's all covered in a new study published in the journal Social Psychology. It seems that a person's "dispositional attitude" – whether the person is a "hater" or a "liker" ...

A mathematical tool used by the Metropolitan Police and FBI has been adapted by researchers at Queen Mary University of London to help control outbreaks of malaria, and has the potential to target other infectious diseases. In cases of serial crime such as murder or rape, police typically have too many suspects to consider, for example, the Yorkshire Ripper investigation in the UK generated a total of 268,000 names. To help prioritise these investigations, police forces around the world use a technique called geographic profiling, which uses the spatial locations of ...

For thousands of years, Mother Nature has taken the blame for tremendous human suffering caused by massive flooding along the Yellow River, long known in China as the "River of Sorrow" and "Scourge of the Sons of Han." Now, new research from Washington University in St. Louis links the river's increasingly deadly floods to a widespread pattern of human-caused environmental degradation and related flood-mitigation efforts that began changing the river's natural flow nearly 3,000 years ago. "Human intervention in the Chinese environment is relatively massive, remarkably ...

A new proposed scheme, by Wen-Xing Yang, from the Department of Physics, Southeast University, China, and colleagues, analyzed in detail the optical steady behavior in GaAs quantum well structure driven by an elliptically polarized field (EPF) in a unidirectional ring cavity. They show that the controllable optical steady behavior including multi-stability (OM) and optical bistability (OB) can be obtained via nonradiation coherence, and the frequency detuning, cooperation parameter and the amplitude of the EPF. Most interestingly, the conversion between OB and OM can ...

Houghton, Mich., June 19, 2014: Over the next 100 years, Minnesota's iconic boreal forest and deep snow may change into a deciduous forest with winters warm enough for some precipitation to fall as rain, according to a new U.S. Forest Service assessment of the vulnerability of Minnesota forests to climate change. "Minnesota Forest Ecosystem Vulnerability Assessment and Synthesis" was published by the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Station and is available online at: http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/45939 The assessment describes effects of climate change that ...

Jena (Germany) In a chemistry lab at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany): Prof. Dr. Alexander Schiller works at a rectangular plastic board with 384 small wells. The chemist carefully pipets some drops of sugar solution into a row of the tiny reaction vessels. As soon as the fluid has mixed with the contents of the vessels, fluorescence starts in some of the wells. What the Junior Professor for Photonic Materials does here – with his own hands – could also be called in a very simplified way, the 'sweetest computer in the world'. The reason: the sugar molecules ...

Researchers from the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group, co-ordinated through the editorial base in LSTM, conducted an independent review of the effects of treating cholera with antimicrobial drugs, published in The Cochrane Library today. Cholera is an acute watery diarrhoea caused by infection with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which can cause rapid dehydration and death. Effective treatment requires early diagnosis and rehydration using oral rehydration salts or intravenous fluids. This review looked at the effects of adding antimicrobial drugs to this treatment. Thirty-nine ...

Researchers of the group of cellular and molecular neurobiology of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the University of Barcelona, led by researcher Artur Llobet, have shown that synaptic levels of the protein clathrin are a determinant factor for synaptic plasticity of neurons. Chemical synapses and synaptic vesicular transmission cycle Neurons transmit information in a specialized contact points called synapses. These structures consist of two elements: the presynaptic one, information donor, and postsynaptic, which receives the information. In ...

A study of 8 European countries presented at this year's European Congress on Obesity (ECO)in Sofia, Bulgaria, shows that children consuming a diet more in line with the rules of the Mediterranean one are 15% less likely to be overweight or obese than those children who do not. The research is by Dr Gianluca Tognon, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden, and colleagues across the 8 countries: Sweden, Germany, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Belgium, Estonia and Hungary. The researchers used data from the IDEFICS study (Identification and Prevention of Dietary – and lifestyle ...

The World Cup in Brazil may be attracting a global armchair audience of millions, but new research has shown that playing football could help lower blood pressure in women aged 35-50. Women within this age group with mild high blood pressure achieve a significant reduction in blood pressure and body fat percentage through playing recreational football for 15 weeks. This is the finding of a new study conducted in a collaboration between researchers across four countries, including Professor Peter Krustrup of the University of Exeter. The acclaimed Scandinavian Journal ...

New research by the Brigham and Women's Hospital, in partnership with Howard University College of Medicine, explores the effect of healthcare reform in Massachusetts on coronary intervention and mortality in adults by race/ethnicity, gender and the level of education in the neighborhood where the patient resides. Published in the June 17, 2014, issue of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, these findings indicate that healthcare reform in Massachusetts has not yet impacted the likelihood of receiving coronary interventions by gender, race/ethnicity ...

SAN ANTONIO, June 19, 2014 – Research conducted at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Pigment Cell and Melanoma, has established unequivocally in a natural animal model that the incidence of malignant melanoma in adulthood can be dramatically reduced by the consistent use of sunscreen in infancy and childhood. According to senior author John L. VandeBerg, Ph.D., the research was driven by the fact that, despite the increasing use of sunscreen in recent decades, the incidence of malignant melanoma, the most ...

Men with prostate cancer aged 43‒74 achieve bigger and stronger muscles, improve functional capacity, gain positive social experiences and the desire to remain active through playing football for 12 weeks. These are the findings of the "FC Prostate" trial, jointly conducted by the University Hospitals Centre for Health Care Research at The Copenhagen University Hospital, Rigshospitalet and the Copenhagen Centre for Team Sport and Health at the University of Copenhagen. Some of the participants in the FC Prostate Cancer research project after a training session. ...

TORONTO – The question of how neurons and their axons establish spatial polarity and direction in tissues and organs is a fundamental question of any organism or biological system. Our cells and axons precisely orient themselves in response to external cues, but what are the core pathways and how are they integrated? Lead author Dr. Naomi Levy-Strumpf and principal investigator Dr. Joseph Culotti developed a novel conceptual framework, published on-line in PLoS GENETICS, June 5 2014. They investigated netrin and Wnt, signaling pathways that are implicated in cancer ...

TORONTO – A series of simple telephone calls can make a profound difference in helping women to meet their treatment goals for breast cancer, according to a randomized trial of women who are also obese, published online today in Journal of Clinical Oncology by Dr. Pamela Goodwin of Mount Sinai Hospital and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute. Women who received advice about weight loss from a trained lifestyle coach by telephone achieved weight loss that was still evident after two years, lowering their risk of breast cancer recurrence. It's already known that ...

Chance events may profoundly shape history. What if Franz Ferdinand's driver had not taken a wrong turn, bringing the Duke face to face with his assassin? Would World War I still have been fought? Would Hitler have risen to power decades later? Historians can only speculate on what might have been, but a team of evolutionary biologists studying ancient proteins has turned speculation into experiment. They resurrected an ancient ancestor of an important human protein as it existed hundreds of millions of years ago and then used biochemical methods to generate and characterize ...

They may only be little, but they pack a star-forming punch: new observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope show that starbursts in dwarf galaxies played a bigger role than expected in the early history of the Universe. Although galaxies across the Universe are still forming new stars, the majority of the stars were formed between two and six billion years after the Big Bang. Studying this early epoch of the Universe's history is key in order to fully understand how these stars formed, and how galaxies have grown and evolved since. A new study using data ...

(THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. – June 19, 2014) The citizen-designed redistricting plan for the Ventura County supervisorial districts has brought fairer representation, according to a study by a California Lutheran University professor published June 19 by SAGE Open, an open-access journal by SAGE. Gregory Freeland, chairman of the Department of Political Science, compared Ventura County supervisors' decisions to their constituents' votes on state propositions and local measures and interviewed politicians and community activists to draw conclusions that could have implications ...

PHILADELPHIA – Autoimmune disease occurs when the body's own natural defense system rebels against itself. One example is pemphigus vulgaris (PV), a blistering skin disease in which autoantibodies attack desmoglein 3 (Dsg3), the protein that binds together skin cells. Left untreated, PV can be fatal, as skin layers slough off and leave the body vulnerable to dehydration and infection. Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania recently found a shared genetic link in the autoimmune response among PV patients that provides important ...

WASHINGTON, DC and NEW YORK (June 19, 2014)— A special federal fund to support community health centers expires after September 2015, creating a funding cliff for primary care clinics located in medically underserved areas. If this funding is not restored, and if more states do not expand Medicaid, the number of patients cared for by safety-net health centers could fall more than 25 percent – or 7 million patients - by 2020. The loss of care for 7 million patients is equivalent to the population of the state of Arizona or the combined populations of Los Angeles and Houston. These ...

Cincinnati, OH, June 19, 2014 -- Physical fitness in childhood and adolescence is beneficial for both physical and mental health throughout life. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that it may also play a key role in brain health and academic performance. In a new study scheduled for publication in the Journal of Pediatrics, researchers studied the independent and combined influence of components of physical fitness on academic performance. Cardiorespiratory capacity, muscular strength, and motor ability are components of physical fitness that have documented ...