Beaumont research findings published in the February online issue of Spine shows that patients who have a low back surgery called minimally invasive transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion, end up better off in many ways than patients who have more invasive surgery to alleviate debilitating pain. "About 90 percent of adults experience low back pain in their lifetime, which can be caused by spinal instability, stenosis, spondylolisthesis, and symptomatic degenerative disc disease," says Mick Perez-Cruet, M.D., neuro-spine surgeon at Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak and professor, ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Excessive weight gain during pregnancy increases the risk of suffering illnesses such as hypertension and gestational diabetes, or of having a premature birth or a birth by Caesarean; furthermore, it also has negative effects on the newly-born and increases the risk of infants being overweight by 30%. Aware of the importance of preventing gestational weight gain, both in mother and child, researchers from the University of Granada, Madrid Polytechnic University and the European University carried out a study on the benefits ...

Bottom Line: Most people who use opioid painkillers without a physician's prescription initially get them from friends or relatives for free, but as the number of days of use increase sources for the medications expand to include prescriptions from physicians and purchases from friends, relatives, drug dealers or strangers. Author: Christopher M. Jones, Pharm.D., M.P.H., who was with the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, at the time of research but is now with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ...

Bottom Line: A blood test accurately screened for infection with the agent responsible for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a fatal neurological disease. Author: Graham S. Jackson, Ph.D., of the University College of London (UCL) Institute of Neurology, and colleagues. Background: vCJD is a fatal degenerative brain disorder thought to be caused by a misfolded protein (prion) in the brain and contracted most commonly through eating infected beef. Up to 3 million cattle in the United Kingdom may have been infected with BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), ...

NASA's Terra satellite passed over Tropical Cyclone Kofi in the Southwestern Pacific Ocean and captured an infrared image of the storm revealing powerful thunderstorms around center of circulation. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured an infrared image on March 3 at 09:55 UTC/4:55 a.m. EST. Cloud top temperatures were near -80C/-112F indicating very strong thunderstorms around the center. At 0900 UTC/4 a.m. EST Tropical Storm Kofi had maximum sustained winds near 45 knots51.7 mph/83.3 ...

New York, NY, March 3, 2014 – Men who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer need to assimilate information rapidly in order to weigh the treatment options and make informed decisions. Although patients consult a variety of information sources, outcome information that is specific to the treating physician leads to greater patient satisfaction following treatment, according to a new study published in The Journal of Urology®. The benefits of patient information are broad. For many people confronted with a cancer diagnosis, information translates to greater involvement ...

The reintroduction of mountain lions across the mid-western United States has made species management an urgent area of research for conservationists. A report in the Wildlife Society Bulletin explores the fatal cost of human interaction with cougars and asks what state agencies can do to protect both species. Cougars (Puma concolor) are slowly recolonizing their historic habitats, including the Black Hills of South Dakota, but since they've been away, the land has become crossed with roads and home to many human communities. "The cougar population in the Black Hills ...

The open air plays of the Ancient Greeks may offer us a valuable insight into the Mediterranean climate of the time, reports new research in Weather. Using historical observations from artwork and plays, scientists identified 'halcyon days', of theatre friendly weather in mid-winter. "We explored the weather conditions which enabled the Athenians of the classical era to watch theatre performances in open theatres during the midwinter weather conditions," said Christina Chronopoulou, from the National and Kapodestrian University of Athens. "We aimed to do so by gathering ...

Politicians know that turning on the tears can be a vote winner, but how does the political manipulation of our emotions actually work? Research in Political Psychology explores how emotions such as anxiety, even if their cause has nothing to do with politics, can result in a hardening of our views. "There's been a lot of focus in recent years on emotions and political attitudes, but the ways we, as political scientists, have studied this phenomena have made it hard to draw firm conclusions," said Dr. Jonathan Renshon, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "We bypassed ...

Medical diagnoses and DNA sequencing can be made cheaper, faster and more reliable using a new miniaturized technique for gel electrophoresis based on conducting polymer materials, according to researchers at Linköping University in Sweden. Gel electrophoresis is a process through which different proteins or DNA fragments are separated so that they can be identified and studied. Today, most separations require considerable manual work and are carried-out on large gels which require several hours to complete. The industry needs miniaturized systems capable of automatically ...

Facebook has become a global phenomenon and an active space for social comparison. With the increase in technology use, there is a positive correlation with decreased body image in young women. In a study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, 960 female college students were evaluated on the time they spend on social media sites, how important "likes" are, and whether or not they untag photos of themselves. "Over 95% of college women in our study use Facebook, and those with Facebook accounts described typically spending 20 minutes on the site during ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 3, 2014—What do some high-end golf clubs and your living room window have in common? The answer is glass, but in the golf clubs' case it's a specialized glass product, called metallic glass, with the ability to be bent considerably and spring back into its original form. Your windows, as you know, aren't quite as forgiving of a sudden impact, and they shatter – they are brittle, as opposed to ductile, or more flexible products. For the golf clubs, however, a new generation of flexible metallic glass puts more bounce back into a golf ball, from the ...

Rotary-wing aircraft, such as Apache and Chinook helicopters, play vital combat and logistical roles across the U.S. military services, but new research in the Wildlife Society Bulletin reveals how vulnerable these aircraft are to wildlife strikes. Many types of aircraft are vulnerable to strikes, estimated to cost the aviation industry $1.2 billion worldwide per year; however, to date no assessment of strikes to military rotary-wing aircraft has been conducted. A research team led by Dr. Brian Washburn from the Wildlife Research Center used records from the Army, Navy, ...

Researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center have found that blocking the action of a key signaling molecule in the immune system known as Netrin-1 stalls chronic inflammation and insulin resistance tied to obesity and often derived from fatty diets. Reporting in this week's issue of Nature Medicine, the NYU Langone team showed in experiments in mice and human tissue that Netrin-1 signaling is propelled by fat tissue growth. The team previously discovered that Netrin-1 was secreted by the immune system clean-up cells, or macrophages, whose buildup leads to inflammation. ...

PITTSBURGH, March 4, 2014 – Eating fish in amounts comparable to those of people living in Japan seems to impart a protective factor that wards off heart disease, according to an international study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and led by the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Middle-aged Japanese men living in Japan had lower incidence of coronary artery calcification, a predictor of heart disease, than middle-aged white men living in the United States, likely due to the significantly higher consumption of omega-3 fatty acids ...

Research at UCLA on a technique for detecting the earliest spread of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, has confirmed that the procedure significantly prolongs patients' survival rates compared with traditional "watch and wait" techniques. The technique, which combines lymphatic mapping and sentinel-node biopsy, allows doctors to quickly determine whether the disease has spread, or metastasized, to the lymph nodes, which occurs in approximately 20 percent of patients. Patients with cancer in their lymph nodes may benefit from having their other nearby lymph ...

A UCLA-led team of researchers has found evidence that photosensitizing a virus's membrane covering can inhibit its ability to enter cells and potentially lead to the development of stronger, cheaper medications to fight a host of tough viruses. The UCLA AIDS Institute study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Virology, is part of ongoing research on a compound called LJ001, a "broad-spectrum" antiviral that can attack a wide range of microbes. The current paper advances the science by showing that the process of photosensitization — heightening a ...

A team of researchers from National University of Singapore (NUS) have created the first two-photon, small molecule fluorogenic probe that can serve as a useful tool for the rapid assessment of an individual's potential risk for Parkinson's disease. The highly sensitive fluorescence probe can detect with high precision the activity of Monoamine Oxidase B (MAO-B), an enzyme that is found in elevated levels in patients with Parkinson's disease. This innovation paves the way for the development of less costly non-invasive technologies and devices to help monitor the risk and ...

BOSTON – A drug that unleashes the immune system to attack cancer can produce lasting remissions and hold the disease in check – for more than two years, in some cases – in many patients with advanced melanoma, according to a new study by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and allied institutions. The study, published online today, March 3, by the Journal of Clinical Oncology, provides the longest-term look so far at how melanoma patients have fared since receiving the drug, nivolumab, in a phase I clinical trial. The ...

Artificial photosynthesis, in which we emulate the process used by nature to capture energy from the sun and convert it into electrochemical energy, is expected to be a major asset in any sustainable energy portfolio for the future. Artificial photosynthesis offers the promise of producing liquid fuels that are renewable and can be used without exacerbating global climate change. A key to realizing commercial-scale artificial photosynthesis technology is the development of electrocatalysts that can efficiently and economically carry out water oxidation reaction that is ...

New York, NY— Bacteria in the gut are essential for the development of intestinal tumors in mice, according to research led by investigators from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Removing the bacteria may play a critical role in reducing cancer risk, the researchers write, in the March issue of the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Sergio A. Lira, MD, PhD, Director of the Immunology Institute, and Professor of Immunology and Medicine, and his laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, used a transgenic mouse model to test the hypothesis that ...

Voters who cast their ballots via smartphones made fewer errors than they did when voting via traditional methods in a mock election, according to new research from psychologists at Rice University. In a first-of-its-kind study, co-author Rice Professor of Psychology Michael Byrne examined how smartphone-based voting systems can be incorporated into the current large-scale voting process. The study, "Toward More Usable Electronic Voting: Testing the Usability of a Smartphone Voting System," found that while there are no consistent differences in efficiency and perceived ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — New evidence establishes for the first time that Cahokia, a sprawling, pre-Columbian city situated at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, hosted a sizable population of immigrants. Cahokia was an early experiment in urban life, said Thomas Emerson, who led the new analysis. Emerson is Illinois state archaeologist and the director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey at the University of Illinois. Researchers have traditionally thought of Cahokia as a relatively homogeneous and stable population drawn from the immediate area, ...

Researchers at New Zealand's University of Otago are helping to clear up an enduring mystery regarding the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. They have discovered the microbial soil processes that help ensure that the explosive gas hydrogen remains at trace levels. In recent decades it was found that around four-fifths of all hydrogen released into the air is rapidly removed through soil activity, but exactly what is recycling it, and how, has remained unclear. Now, Otago scientists have shown that the soil bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis uses two special enzymes ...

Increasing the intake of fatty fish increases the number of large HDL particles, according to a recent study completed at the University of Eastern Finland. People who increased their intake of fish to a minimum of 3–4 weekly meals had more large HDL particles in their blood than people who are less frequent eaters of fish. Large HDL particles are believed to protect against cardiovascular diseases. The results were published in PLOS ONE. The consumption of fish has long been know to be beneficial for health; however, the mechanisms by which fats and other useful nutrients ...