A group of leading brain injury specialists look back on 40 years of the Glasgow Coma Scale and outline the continuing role of the scale in research and clinical practice, in a new Personal View published in The Lancet Neurology. The Personal View is published on the 40th anniversary of the Glasgow Coma Scale's introduction in a 1974 Lancet article*. Since this seminal publication, the Glasgow Coma Scale has provided a practical method for bedside assessment of impairment of conscious level, the clinical hallmark of acute brain injury. The scale was designed to be ...

To arrange for an interview with a researcher, please contact the Communications staff member identified at the end of each tip. For more information on ORNL and its research and development activities, please refer to one of our media contacts. If you have a general media-related question or comment, you can send it to news@ornl.gov. MATERIALS – Rare earth substitute … An alloy discovered at Oak Ridge National Laboratory holds great promise for permanent magnets as the material retains its magnetic properties at higher temperatures yet contains no rare-earth elements. ...

Buying keywords of a popular competitors' brand names on search engines such as Google and Bing can backfire according to a new study in the Articles in Advance section of Marketing Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Firms buy specific keywords, including competitors' brand names, on search engines to reach consumers searching for those words. Online advertisements employing such keywords are called search ads. Sometimes a brand such as Nissan Altima will buy search ads to reach customers who conduct a ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – New research suggests that use of antibiotics is still prevalent among terminal patients who have chosen hospice care as an end-of-life option, despite little evidence that the medications improve symptoms or quality of life, and sometimes may cause unwanted side effects. The use of antibiotics is so engrained in contemporary medicine that 21 percent of patients being discharged from hospitals directly to a hospice program leave with a prescription for antibiotics, even though more than one fourth of them don't have a documented infection during their ...

This news release is available in German. Many animals exhibit segmental patterns that manifest themselves during development. One classical example is the sequential and rhythmic formation the segmental precursors of the backbone, a process that has been linked to the ticking of an oscillator in the embryo – the "segmentation clock". Until now, this patterning process was thought to be determined simply by the time scale of genetic oscillations that periodically trigger new segment formation. However, this week in the journal Science, Max Planck researchers suggest ...

WASHINGTON, July 14, 2014 — Chances are those dollars in your pocket have a trace of cocaine on them. Don't worry — most bank notes in the U.S. do. Your cash also contains invisible ink and has likely been through a washing machine before it came out of the ATM. For more, watch this week's Reactions episode, which features a stack of chemistry facts about the almighty dollar. The video is available at http://youtu.be/bAIwFaPycaU. Subscribe to the series at Reactions YouTube, and follow us on Twitter @ACSreactions to be the first to see our latest videos. The American ...

Together with the company Tissuegnostics, the pathologist Lukas Kenner and his colleagues have developed a software that is able to identify cancer cells in tissue sections and demonstrate the presence of specific biomarkers on cells. The overall information provides a precise picture of the disease and leads to the most suitable treatment. According to the results of the study, "Two independent pathologists concur with each other only in regard of every third diagnosis." "The recently developed software offers, for the first time, the option of eliminating the so-called ...

The public perception that No Child Left Behind has increased burnout and lowered job satisfaction among teachers is unfounded, according to a recent study co-authored by UT Dallas researcher Dr. James R. Harrington. The study, which was published online in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association, found that, overall, the accountability pressures of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) did not have much of an impact on teachers' job satisfaction or commitment to the profession. NCLB is the latest version ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (July 14, 2014)—In the 2,500+ years that have passed since acupuncture was first used by the ancient Chinese, it has been used to treat a number of physical, mental and emotional conditions including nausea and vomiting, stroke rehabilitation, headaches, menstrual cramps, asthma, carpal tunnel, fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis, to name just a few. Now, a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials which is being published this month in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS), indicates that acupuncture can affect the severity ...

In the movie "Terminator 2," the shape-shifting T-1000 robot morphs into a liquid state to squeeze through tight spaces or to repair itself when harmed. Now a phase-changing material built from wax and foam, and capable of switching between hard and soft states, could allow even low-cost robots to perform the same feat. The material — developed by Anette Hosoi, a professor of mechanical engineering and applied mathematics at MIT, and her former graduate student Nadia Cheng, alongside researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and Stony ...

A research team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed a novel, tunable nanoantenna that paves the way for new kinds of plasmonic-based optomechanical systems, whereby plasmonic field enhancement can actuate mechanical motion. "Recently, there has been a lot of interest in fabricating metal-based nanotextured surfaces that are pre-programmed to alter the properties of light in a specific way after incoming light interacts with it," explained Kimani Toussaint, an associate professor of mechanical science and engineering who led the research. ...

Prof. Rivka Inzelberg of Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Sagol Neuroscience Center at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, documented the exceptional creativity of Parkinson's patients two years ago in a review for Behavioral Neuroscience. Since then, she has conducted the first empirical study to verify a link between Parkinson's disease and artistic inclination. That empirical study, now published in the Annals of Neurology, definitively demonstrates that Parkinson's patients are more creative than their healthy peers, and that those patients ...

Antibiotic resistance is depleting our arsenal against deadly diseases and infections, such as tuberculosis and Staph infections, but recent research shows promise to speed up the drug discovery process. In a study reported in ACS Chemical Biology, University of Illinois researchers developed a new technique to quickly uncover novel, medically relevant products produced by bacteria. Past techniques involved screening more than 10,000 samples to find a novel product, said principal investigator Doug Mitchell, assistant professor of chemistry and Institute for Genomic ...

Is cancer an inevitable consequence of aging? Although it is widely thought that cancer is an inevitable consequence of aging, the risk of developing several common cancers decreases with age. Researchers have long been puzzled by the apparent decrease with age in the risk of developing certain adult cancers. A possible solution to this puzzle was presented in a recent paper published in Biophysical Reviews and Letters by Professor James P. Brody of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. "Most cancers have a characteristic ...

For the Spanish Royal Academy, senescent is he who "begins to age". But laboratory biology results are contradicting the dictionary: not only is senescence not a synonym of ageing, it is also not intrinsically negative for the organism. Cellular senescence is such a badly named physiological process that those who do research in this area think it needs another name. That is the case of Manuel Serrano, from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), one of the world's leading experts on senescence, who has just published a review on this topic. Without actually ...

Washington D.C., July 14, 2014 – A recent study published in the July 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry confirms the validity of the DSM-5 change to the age of onset criterion for diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In DSM-5, age of onset criterion for ADHD, previously set at 7 in DSM-IV, has been raised to 12. As explained in DSM-5, age of onset is now set at 12, rather than an earlier age, to reflect the importance of clinical presentation during childhood for accurate diagnosis, while also ...

Philadelphia, PA, July 14, 2014 – The inability to ignore irrelevant stimuli underlies the impaired working memory and cognition often experienced by individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, reports a new study in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry. Our brains are usually good at focusing on the information that we are trying to learn and filtering out the "noise" or thoughts that aren't relevant. However, memory impairment in schizophrenia may be related in part to a problem with this filtering process, which Dr. Teal Eich at Columbia University and her colleagues ...

Superconductors are futuristic materials that will hopefully have a broad range of technological applications at some time in the future (medical imaging, transport…). Today's use is limited by the extremely low temperatures (close to absolute zero) required for superconductivity to manifest. However, some families of these materials work at "relatively" high temperatures (about - 200° C), and it's on these that scientists are focusing their attention. Among them are copper-based superconductors, which have very unique characteristics. A study conducted by researchers of ...

A new theory of how cancer works could lead to the next generation of treatments of the disease. The theory suggests that cancer forms when recently evolved genes are damaged, and cells have to revert to using older, inappropriate genetic pathways. Astrobiologists Dr Charley Lineweaver from The Australian National University and Professor Paul Davies from Arizona State University teamed up with oncologist Dr Mark Vincent from the University of Western Ontario to develop the new model. "The rapid proliferation of cancer cells is an ancient, default capability that ...

The creators of a unique kit containing anatomical body parts produced by 3D printing say it will revolutionise medical education and training, especially in countries where cadaver use is problematical. The '3D Printed Anatomy Series', developed by experts from Monash University, is thought to be the first commercially available resource of its kind. The kit contains no human tissue, yet it provides all the major parts of the body required to teach anatomy of the limbs, chest, abdomen, head and neck. Professor Paul McMenamin, Director of the University's Centre for ...

ATLANTA – July 14, 2014 –Physical fitness may buffer some of the adverse health effects of too much sitting, according to a new study by researchers from the American Cancer Society, The Cooper Institute, and the University of Texas. The study appears in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, and finds the association between prolonged sedentary time and obesity and blood markers associated with cardiovascular disease is markedly less pronounced when taking fitness into account. Sedentary behavior has been linked to an increase risk of obesity, metabolic syndrome, type ...

More than 140 years ago, Charles Darwin noticed something peculiar about domesticated mammals. Compared to their wild ancestors, domestic species are more tame, and they also tend to display a suite of other characteristic features, including floppier ears, patches of white fur, and more juvenile faces with smaller jaws. Since Darwin's observations, the explanation for this pattern has proved elusive, but now, in a Perspectives article published in the journal GENETICS, a new hypothesis has been proposed that could explain why breeding for tameness causes changes in such ...

Scientists at the University of East Anglia have shown how the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis could reduce tumor growth in cancer patients. Research published today reveals the existence of previously unknown signaling platforms which are responsible for the drug's success in shrinking tumours. It is hoped that the findings could help develop a synthetic equivalent with anti-cancer properties. The research was co-led with the Universidad Complutense de Madridin, Spain. The team used samples of human breast cancer cells to induce tumours in mice. They ...

Weizmann Institute scientists have demonstrated for the first time a photonic router – a quantum device based on a single atom that enables routing of single photons by single photons. This achievement, as reported in Science magazine, is another step toward overcoming the difficulties in building quantum computers. At the core of the device is an atom that can switch between two states. The state is set just by sending a single particle of light – or photon – from the right or the left via an optical fiber. The atom, in response, then reflects or transmits the next incoming ...

Serendipity leads University of Kansas scientists to the discovery and description of Rhipidocyrtus muiri - a 107 year old, lost in collections specimen, which turned out to represent a new genus and species. The long and tortuous history of the enigmatic ripidiine wedge beetle from Borneo is discussed in a recent paper published in the open access journal ZooKeys. The holotype male, and only known specimen of Rhipidocyrtus muiri, was collected 107 years ago in Borneo but subsequent to this it was transferred among several researchers in the early 1900s. The specimen ...