Anaheim, Calif., June 4, 2014 – For every 15 healthcare providers who receive the influenza vaccination, one fewer person in the community will contract an influenza-like illness, according to a study using California public health data from 2009 – 2012. In an abstract that will be presented on June 7 at the 41st Annual Conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), a researcher analyzed archival data from the California Department of Public Health to determine the relationship between vaccinating healthcare personnel against ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – One of the biggest challenges for medical researchers studying the effectiveness of stem cell therapies is that transplants or grafts of cells are often rejected by the hosts. This rejection can render experiments useless, making research into potentially life-saving treatments a long and difficult process. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have shown that a new line of genetically modified pigs will host transplanted cells without the risk of rejection. "The rejection of transplants and grafts by host bodies is a huge hurdle for medical researchers," ...

Boston, MA (June 4, 2014) ─ Limiting saturated fat could help people whose genetic make-up increases their chance of being obese. In a new study, researchers from the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University identified 63 gene variants related to obesity and used them to calculate a genetic risk score for obesity for more than 2,800 white, American men and women enrolled in two large studies on heart disease prevention. People with a higher genetic risk score, who also consumed more of their calories as saturated fat, ...

Changes in coldness, creaminess or texture that we experience in the mouth while we are eating an ice cream can be visualised on a screen using coloured curves. Graphs help manufacturers improve product quality, as proven by researchers at the Institute of Agrochemistry and Food Technology in Valencia, Spain. In the last five years a technique known as 'Temporal Dominance of Sensations' (TDS) has become popular, used to analyse how consumer impressions evolve from the moment they taste a product. Researchers at the Institute of Agrochemistry and Food Technology (CSIC) ...

Weight loss surgery might have more value than simply helping morbidly obese people to shed unhealthy extra pounds. It reduces their risk of cancer to rates almost similar to those of people of normal weight. This is the conclusion of the first comprehensive review article taking into account relevant studies about obesity, cancer rates and a weight loss procedure called bariatric surgery. Published in Springer's journal Obesity Surgery, the review was led by Daniela Casagrande of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. With bariatric surgery, a part ...

Intense light from the enormous explosion of a star more than 12 billion years ago — shortly after the Big Bang — recently reached Earth and was visible in the sky. Known as a gamma-ray burst, light from the rare, high-energy explosion traveled for 12.1 billion years before it was detected and observed by a telescope owned by Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Gamma-ray bursts are believed to be the catastrophic collapse of a star at the end of its life. SMU physicists report that their telescope was the first on the ground to observe the burst and to capture an ...

When people work in socially homogeneous groups, they overestimate their own contributions to the group's success, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT scholar. In fact, in some cases such "self-serving bias" occurs to a degree about five times as great in homogeneous groups as in ethnically diverse groups. Such results raise a larger point, suggests Evan Apfelbaum, the W. Maurice Young Assistant Professor of Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the lead author of the new study: Researchers have often used homogeneous social groups ...

WASHINGTON – Arguing for a continuation of the nation's human space exploration program, a new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council concludes that the expense of human spaceflight and the dangers to the astronauts involved can be justified only by the goal of putting humans on other worlds. The report recommends that the nation pursue a disciplined "pathway" approach that encompasses executing a specific sequence of intermediate accomplishments and destinations leading to the "horizon goal" of putting humans on Mars. The success of this approach ...

Los Angeles, London (June 04, 2014). Growing up in a multilingual home has many advantages, but many parents worry that exposure to multiple languages might delay language acquisition. New research could now lay some of these multilingual myths to rest, thanks to a revealing study that shows both monolingual and bilingual infants learn a new word best from someone with a language background that matches their own. While 1.5 year old babies are powerful word learners, they can have difficulty learning similar-sounding words (e.g., "coat" and "goat"). A string of previous ...

This news release is available in German. Sometimes quantum particles behave like waves. This phenomenon is often used for high precision measurements, for instance in atomic clocks. Usually, only the wave properties of single particles play a role, but now researchers at the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology, Vienna University of Technology have succeeded in quantum mechanically controlling hundreds of Rubidium atoms of an ultracold Bose-Einstein-condensate by shaking it in just the right way. Now, not only internal states of atoms can be used for ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- A new brief, 5-question screening tool can help clinicians identify which veterans may be at greater risk of violence, according to a new study led by a UNC researcher. The study, published online by the American Journal of Psychiatry, is based on a national survey sample of veterans combined with a smaller, in-depth assessment sample. The screening tool, called the Violence Screening and Assessment of Needs (VIO-SCAN), asked veterans about financial stability, combat experience, alcohol misuse, history of violence or arrests, and probable posttraumatic ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Researchers at Mayo Clinic have demonstrated in a mouse model that their recently developed synthetic peptide carrier is a potential delivery vehicle for brain cancer chemotherapy drugs and other neurological medications. The findings appear in PLOS ONE. "Not only have we shown that we can transport eight different molecules, we think this method will be less disruptive or invasive because it mimics a normal physiological process," says Mayo Clinic neuroscientist Gobinda Sarkar, Ph.D., the corresponding author of the study. The researchers are able ...

Long-lost paintings have been discovered on the walls of Cambodia's ancient Angkor Wat temple, thanks to the keen observations of an Australian National University (ANU) researcher. The ancient paintings date back almost 500 years and depict deities, animals, boats and the temple itself, giving historians a new understanding of life in a relatively unknown period of Cambodia's history. Rock art researcher Noel Hidalgo Tan discovered the hidden images while working as a volunteer at an archaeological excavation in Angkor Wat during a university break in 2010. "I was ...

SALT LAKE CITY— Four new genes have been added to the growing list of those known to cause increased breast cancer risk when mutated through the efforts of researchers at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah, who lead an international consortium working to find more gene mutations that cause inherited breast cancer susceptibilities. "BRCA1 and BRCA2 aren't the whole story when it comes to inherited breast cancer risk. We've known for a long time that more genes had to be responsible and several have since been discovered, by us and by others," according ...

Essential oils have boomed in popularity as more people seek out alternatives to replace their synthetic cleaning products, anti-mosquito sprays and medicines. Now scientists are tapping them as candidates to preserve food in a more consumer-friendly way. A study from ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry reports the development of new edible films containing oils from clove and oregano that preserve bread longer than commercial additives. Nilda de F. F. Soares and colleagues note that the search for new ways to keep packaged food from spoiling has led some ...

Quantum criticality, the strange electronic state that may be intimately related to high-temperature superconductivity, is notoriously difficult to study. But a new discovery of "quantum critical points" could allow physicists to develop a classification scheme for quantum criticality -- the first step toward a broader explanation. Quantum criticality occurs in only a few composite crystalline materials and happens at absolute zero -- the lowest possible temperature in the universe. The paucity of experimental observations of quantum criticality has left theorists wanting ...

Mussels might be a welcome addition to a hearty seafood stew, but their notorious ability to attach themselves to ships' hulls, as well as to piers and moorings, makes them an unwelcome sight and smell for boaters and swimmers. Now, researchers report in ACS' journal Langmuir a clearer understanding of how mussels stick to surfaces, which could lead to new classes of adhesives that will work underwater and even inside the body. Shabeer Ahmad Mian and colleagues note that mussels have a remarkable knack for clinging onto solid surfaces underwater. That can make them a ...

E-cigarettes are a potential smoking cessation aid and they may also be able to lower the risk of nicotine dependency in high-risk groups. The available scientific evidence, however, remains insufficient. This is the conclusion reached by Dennis Nowak et al. from Munich in this issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2014; 111: 349–55). The authors performed a systematic literature search for data on e-cigarettes' mechanism of action, their emissions, how they are seen by groups of potential users, their efficacy in smoking cessation, and their addiction ...

A group of New Zealand health policy researchers from the University of Otago's Dunedin and Christchurch campuses has called on the leading medical journal BMJ to be much more even handed in scrutinizing the transparency of what it publishes. Professor Robin Gauld, the Director of the Centre for Health Systems, has co-written a letter that has appeared in the BMJ on 31 May, expressing concern about a journal editorial reviewing a report into the performance of the Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) prepared by the King's Fund in England. The report, released in ...

Scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) and the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO) have succeeded in reproducing, in human cells, the chromosomal translocations that cause two types of cancer: acute myeloid leukemia and Ewing's sarcoma. The findings, published today in Nature Communications, open the way to the development of new therapeutic targets for the treatment of these cancers. The study was led by Juan Carlos Ramírez and Raúl Torres, of the CNIC Viral Vectors Unit, and Sandra Rodríguez-Perales, of the Molecular ...

Australia's koalas cope with extreme heat by resting against cooler tree trunks, new research has revealed. Thermal imaging uncovered the koalas' cool plan, confirming that they choose to hug trees that can be more than 5°C cooler than the air during hot weather. Researchers observed the behaviour of 30 koalas during hot weather at French Island, Victoria. Co-author Andrew Krockenberger from James Cook University in Cairns, in far north-east Australia, says heat wave events can hit koala populations hard. "We know that about a quarter of the koalas in one population ...

The nation's sewer system is a topic most people would prefer to avoid, but its aging infrastructure is wearing out, and broken pipes leaking raw sewage into streets and living rooms are forcing the issue. To better predict which pipes need to be fixed, scientists report in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology that certain conditions in the pipes can clue utilities in to which ones need repair — before it's too late. Mark T. Hernandez and colleagues note that the maintenance of U.S. wastewater collection systems costs an estimated $4.5 billion every year, ...

Research Triangle Park (RTP) might not have the international renown that Silicon Valley has developed, but the North Carolina region has become a tech powerhouse in its own right – in crop science. A recent growth spurt promises intense new research with the potential to transform how — and how well — the world is fed, says an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society. Melody M. Bomgardner, a senior editor at C&EN, notes that the park, which is nestled between the higher education triad Raleigh, Durham and ...

LOS ANGELES — Soda consumers may be getting a much higher dose of the harmful sugar fructose than they have been led to believe, according to a new study by the Childhood Obesity Research Center (CORC) at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC), part of Keck Medicine of USC. In the study, published online June 3, 2014 in the journal Nutrition, Keck School of Medicine researchers analyzed the chemical composition of 34 popular beverages, finding that beverages and juices made with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, ...

Multiple sclerosis manifests itself in many different ways and different courses. A recent effort to fine-tune descriptions – or phenotypes -- of MS was undertaken by an international team of leaders in MS research and clinical care. The results of this effort by the International Advisory Committee on Clinical Trials in MS, including recommendations for more research, has just been published (Neurology 2014;83:1). The volunteer Committee is jointly supported by the National MS Society and the European Committee for Treatment and Research in MS (ECTRIMS). "Having better ...