September 15, 2014 – An educational program for nurses can help address knowledge gaps related to advance health care directives (AHCDs)—thus helping to ensure that patients' wishes for care at the end of life are known and respected, reports a paper in the October/December Journal of Christian Nursing, official journal of the Nurses Christian Fellowship. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. Maureen Kroning, EdD, RN, of Nyack (N.Y.) College and Good Samaritan Hospital presents her hospital's experience with developing ...

Soldiers deployed to tropical and sunny climates are coming home with increased risk factors for a threat far from the battlefield: skin cancer. In a retrospective study of about 200 veterans seen at the post-deployment clinic of the Tennessee Valley Healthcare System of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Tennessee Valley Healthcare System found that 62 percent of military personnel reported getting sunburned while deployed abroad, including cases of skin blistering. In addition, 29 percent noted a change ...

At nearly 100 feet long and weighing as much as 170 tons, the blue whale is the largest creature on the planet, and by far the heaviest living thing ever seen on Earth. So there's no way it could have anything in common with the tiniest fish larvae, which measure millimeters in length and tip the scales at a fraction of a gram, right? Not so fast, says L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics. Using simple hydrodynamics, a team of researchers led by Mahadevan was able to show ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 15, 2014 – Schizophrenia is generally considered to be a disorder of brain development and it shares many risk factors, both genetic and environmental, with other neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and intellectual disability. The normal path for brain development is determined by the combined effects of a complex network of genes and a wide range of environmental factors. However, longitudinal brain imaging studies in both healthy and patient populations are required in order to map the disturbances in brain structures as they emerge, ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) —In what may be the largest study of sleep problems among individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS), researchers at UC Davis have found that widely undiagnosed sleep disorders may be at the root of the most common and disabling symptom of the disease: fatigue. Conducted in over 2,300 individuals in Northern California with multiple sclerosis, the large, population-based study found that, overall, more than 70 percent of participants screened positive for one or more sleep disorders. The research highlights the importance of diagnosing the root causes ...

The age of the Anthropocene--the scientific name given to our current geologic age--is dominated by human impacts on our environment. A warming climate. Increased resistance of pathogens and pests. A swelling population. Coping with these modern global challenges requires application of what one might call a more-ancient principle: evolution. That's the recommendation of a diverse group of researchers, in a paper published today in the online version of the journal Science. A majority of the nine authors on the paper have received funding from the National Science Foundation ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. – A microbe developed to clean up nuclear waste and patented by a Michigan State University researcher has just been improved. In earlier research, Gemma Reguera, MSU microbiologist, identified that Geobacter bacteria's tiny conductive hair-like appendages, or pili, did the yeoman's share of remediation. By increasing the strength of the pili nanowires, she improved their ability to clean up uranium and other toxic wastes. In new research, published in the current issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Reguera has added an additional layer ...

Two fires are seen burning in this satellite image taken by the Aqua satellite on September 11, 2014. The Selway complex of fires had been previously reported located 30 miles west of Darby, MT. It appears a new fire may have started again in this complex. Currently the size of the complex is 1,659 fires. The fire is mostly contained and there will be no additional reporting on this fire unless activity increases. It is, for the most part, contained. The Johnson Bar fire started with a lightning strike on August 03, 2014. To date, 8,867 acres have been affected. ...

Glaucoma, a leading cause of irreversible blindness, is associated with elevated pressure in the eye. This elevated pressure essentially is due to a plumbing problem. Fluid builds up in the eye, increasing pressure and eventually damaging the optic nerve. For nearly 150 years, researchers have been trying to understand what causes the blockage that prevents the eye from draining properly. In a unique study of human ocular cells, a multi-institution research team led by a biomedical engineer at Northwestern University has found a new culprit. Glaucoma appears to be a consequence ...

Here's your northern Vermont forecast for the rest of this century: annual precipitation will increase by between a third and half an inch per decade, while average temperatures will rise some five degrees Fahrenheit by midcentury. By late in the century, average temperatures will have spiked more than eight degrees. In July, by 2100, the City of Burlington will have at least ten additional days above ninety degrees. The growing season picks up 43 more days. Looking at ski conditions, expect annual snowfall at six major ski resorts to decline about fifty percent by century's ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Sept. 12, 2014 — The liver transplant team at Mayo Clinic in Florida has found, based on 12 years of experience, that more than half of patients receiving a new liver can be "fast-tracked" to return to a surgical ward room following their transplant, bypassing a one- or two-day stay in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). In the September issue of the American Journal of Transplantation, the physicians and researchers have turned their knowledge of who can be safely fast-tracked into a scoring system that other transplant centers can also use — thus sparing ...

This news release is available in German. In future, some diseases might be diagnosed earlier and treated more effectively. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen have developed an optical method that makes individual proteins, such as the proteins characteristic of some cancers, visible. Other methods that achieve this only work if the target biomolecules have first been labelled with fluorescent tags; In general, however, that approach is difficult or even impossible. By contrast, with their method, coined iSCAT, the researchers ...

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) report says the 2013 unemployment rate for individuals with research doctoral degrees in science, engineering and health (SEH) fields was one-third the rate for the general population aged 25 and older--2.1 percent versus 6.3 percent. According to the report, an estimated 837,900 individuals in the United States held SEH research doctoral degrees in 2013, and nearly 735,900 of them were in the labor force; this includes those employed full time or part time and unemployed individuals actively seeking work. Statistics show that ...

Unlike salamanders, mammals can't regenerate lost limbs, but they can repair large sections of their ribs. In a new study in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research, a team directed by USC Stem Cell researcher Francesca Mariani takes a closer look at rib regeneration in both humans and mice. The first author of the paper, USC medical student Marissa K. Srour, was a USC undergraduate when she started the project, which earned a 2011 USC Discovery Scholar Prize. Each year, 10 graduating seniors win these coveted prizes, which recognize exceptional new scholarship. Using ...

PHILADELPHIA — Using a zebrafish model of a human genetic disease called neurofibromatosis (NF1), a team from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has found that the learning and memory components of the disorder are distinct features that will likely need different treatment approaches. They published their results this month in Cell Reports. NF1 is one of the most common inherited neurological disorders, affecting about one in 3,000 people. It is characterized by tumors, attention deficits, and learning problems. Most people with NF1 have ...

September 12, 2014 -- Humanitarian crises are becoming increasingly complex and a growing threat to the health and safety of populations. An improved evidence-base to guide interventions in the countries most vulnerable to these conditions is more critical than ever. A paper by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health published online in the journal Science, looks at the challenges of doing research in such settings and the strategies that must be adopted for scientific advance. "The circumstances of humanitarian crises present many barriers ...

VIDEO: Here are movies of dynamic behavior of a sugar chain on the basis of NMR-validated simulations. This chain has a particular sugar (green circle). Click here for more information. We often experience difficulties in identifying the accurate shape of dynamic and fluctuating objects. This is especially the case in the nanoscale world of biomolecules. The research group lead by Professor Koichi Kato of the Institute for Molecular Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences ...

65 million people around the world today suffer from epilepsy, a condition of the brain that may trigger an uncontrollable seizure at any time, often for no known reason. A seizure is a disruption of the electrical communication between neurons, and someone is said to have epilepsy if they experience two or more unprovoked seizures separated by at least 24 hours. Epilepsy is the most common chronic disease in pediatric neurology, with about 0.5𔂿% of children developing epilepsy during their lifetime. A further 30󈞔% of epileptic children develop refractory ...

Walking or cycling to work is better for people's mental health than driving to work, according to new research by health economists at the University of East Anglia and the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR). A report published today reveals that people who stopped driving and started walking or cycling to work benefited from improved wellbeing. In particular, active commuters felt better able to concentrate and were less under strain than if they travelled by car. These benefits come on top of the physical health benefits of walking and cycling that are ...

When active, the protein called Ral can drive tumor growth and metastasis in several human cancers including pancreatic, prostate, lung, colon and bladder. Unfortunately, drugs that block its activity are not available. A study published today in the journal Nature uses a novel approach to target the activation of these Ral proteins: "When you want to keep an alligator from biting you, you can tie its mouth shut. We took another approach – we put a stick in its mouth to hold it open," says Dan Theodorescu, MD, PhD, professor of Urology and Pharmacology, director of the ...

Things can go downhill fast when a patient has sepsis, a life-threatening condition in which bacteria or fungi multiply in a patient's blood -- often too fast for antibiotics to help. A new device inspired by the human spleen and developed by a team at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering may radically transform the way doctors treat sepsis. "Even with the best current treatments, sepsis patients are dying in intensive care units at least 30 percent of the time," said Mike Super, Ph.D., Senior Staff Scientist at the Wyss Institute. "We need ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---A potential way to treat muscular dystrophy directly targets muscle repair instead of the underlying genetic defect that usually leads to the disease. Muscular dystrophies are a group of muscle diseases characterized by skeletal muscle wasting and weakness. Mutations in certain proteins, most commonly the protein dystrophin, cause muscular dystrophy in humans and also in mice. A University of Michigan team led by cell biologist Haoxing Xu, discovered that mice missing a critical calcium channel inside the cell, called TRPML1, showed similar muscle ...

BOULDER, Colo – Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada have directly entangled three photons in the most technologically useful state for the first time, thanks in part to superfast, super-efficient single-photon detectors developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Entanglement is a special feature of the quantum world in which certain properties of individual particles become linked such that knowledge of the quantum state of any one particle dictates that of the others. Entanglement plays a critical role in quantum information ...

Treating advanced small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) with thoracic (or chest) radiation therapy in addition to standard treatment significantly prolongs long-term survival and reduces cancer recurrence in the chest by almost 50%, according to new research published in The Lancet and being presented simultaneously at ASTRO's 2014 Annual Meeting in San Francisco. The authors say that as the thoracic radiotherapy is well tolerated, it should to be routinely offered to all SCLC patients with extensive disease whose cancer responds to chemotherapy. SCLC is an aggressive cancer ...

Berkeley — The human brain is capable of a neural workaround that compensates for the buildup of beta-amyloid, a destructive protein associated with Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The findings, to be published Sunday, Sept. 14, in the journal Nature Neuroscience, could help explain how some older adults with beta-amyloid deposits in their brain retain normal cognitive function while others develop dementia. "This study provides evidence that there is plasticity or compensation ability in ...