WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – June 11, 2014 – Hospital readmission, an important measure of quality care, costs the United States an estimated $17 billion each year. And according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), about half of those readmissions could be avoided. Therefore, there is significant interest in identifying factors that influence readmission rates, especially those that can be identified prior to discharge. To pinpoint which stroke patients are most at risk, researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center undertook a retrospective case-control ...

Adolescents tend to be more powerful in influencing their friends to start smoking than in helping them to quit, according to sociologists. In a study of adolescent friendship networks and smoking use over time, the researchers found that friends exert influence on their peers to both start and quit smoking, but the influence to start is stronger. "What we found is that social influence matters, it leads nonsmoking friends into smoking and nonsmoking friends can turn smoking friends into nonsmokers," said Steven Haas, associate professor of sociology and demography, ...

On June 11, 2014, the sun erupted with its third X-class flare in two days. The flare was classified as an X1.0 and it peaked at 5:06 a.m. EDT. Images of the flare were captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. All three flares originated from an active region on the sun that recently rotated into view over the left limb of the sun. To see how this event may affect Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings. To see a video ...

New Rochelle, NY, June 11, 2014—Men who have sex with men (MSM) account for more than 60% of HIV infections in the U.S. and 78% of new infections in men. Antiretroviral therapy can control HIV infection and suppress viral load, but mental health and substance abuse problems common among MSM can interfere with medication adherence. How conditions such as depression and alcohol and drug abuse can affect anti-HIV therapy and the success of various interventions are explored in an article published in LGBT Health, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. ...

EVANSTON, Ill. - New research is shedding light on what kind of sentences are best at facilitating the growth of toddlers' vocabularies.  A new study conducted at Northwestern University provides evidence that toddlers can learn verbs after hearing them only twice. Sandra R. Waxman, Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and Sudha Arunachalam, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern, note that previous studies have shown that children as young as two years of age can successfully learn novel verbs after they've heard the verb many times ...

There is no "one size fits all" image of how men view their role as fathers within the context of the workplace. However, fatherhood is becoming a more serious and time consuming role for men to fulfill. Therefore employers must acknowledge that many fathers want to be more than just traditional "organization men" who dedicate their life to their work. These insights come from Beth Humberd of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, in the US, one of the authors of a study about how professional men experience fatherhood in the context of their workplace. The article appears ...

New York, New York — Hispanic women are significantly more likely to have a baby with a neural tube birth defect, and nearly a quarter of all preterm births in the United States are Hispanic, according to a new report from the March of Dimes. The report is available in English and Spanish and can be view at: http://www.marchofdimes.com/Peristats/pdflib/991/MOD_2014HispanicReport.pdf http://www.marchofdimes.com/Peristats/pdflib/991/MOD_2014HispanicReport_Spanish.pdf Thalia, a global ambassador for the March of Dimes, and Latin Grammy Award-winning artist and mother ...

China, from 2015 the world's biggest economy, is its worst polluter already now. It has not yet, but will be most probably climbing the top position also with regards the aggregate contribution to climate change (historical emission residues included), called the climate debt. At the same time, it is the largest victim of environmental change, and the leading country in cleaning-up the environmental mess - the government has taken bold steps towards improvement. Could the largest polluter become the world's last best hope for establishing a global ecological civilisation? ...

Before Tropical Storm Cristina intensified into a hurricane, NASA's TRMM satellite passed overhead and gathered data that showed areas of heavy rainfall were occurring within. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) upgraded the third tropical depression of the Eastern Pacific Ocean to tropical storm status and named it Cristina on June 10 at 0300 UTC (8 p.m. PDT). Earlier that morning at 1238 UTC (5:38 a.m. PDT), the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite flew over the depression and gathered rainfall data that hinted that the storm was intensifying. At NASA's ...

Space is not empty. A wind of charged particles blows outwards from the Sun, carrying a magnetic field with it. Sometimes this solar wind can break through the Earth's magnetic field. Researchers at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) in Uppsala now have an answer to one of the questions about how this actually occurs. When two areas with plasma (electrically charged gas) and magnetic fields with different orientations collide, the magnetic fields can be "clipped off" and "reconnected" so that the topology of the magnetic field is changed. This magnetic reconnection ...

Your memory for that last bite of a steak or chocolate cake may be more influential than memory for the first bite in determining when you want to eat it again, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Our memories for foods are often vivid, especially when we experience foods that are terrifyingly bad or delightfully good. The findings from this research shed light on how memories for food are formed and how they guide our decisions about how soon we're willing to eat a food again. "Research has ...

A new study from Uppsala University demonstrates that elderly humans carrying a common variant of the fat mass and obesity gene FTO also have a shifted endocrine balance. Low blood concentrations of the satiety hormone leptin and high blood concentrations of the hunger promoting hormone ghrelin makes carriers of the FTO gene put on weight. The findings are published in the journal Diabetes. In the Prospective Investigation of the Vasculature in Uppsala Seniors, researchers from Uppsala University and the University of Umeå used data from 985 elderly participants (50% ...

Nearly half a million people with diabetes end up in emergency rooms around the U.S. every year due to the seizures and other consequences of dropping or spiking blood-sugar levels associated with the disease. To help prevent serious complications, scientists have now developed a new glucose-sensing protein that could one day be part of an implantable, 24-7 monitoring device. They describe the protein in the journal ACS Chemical Biology. Sylvia Daunert and colleagues note that scientists have been working on new ways to track glucose levels. Most patients with diabetes ...

11 June 2014 – Sodium intake around the world continues to be of concern1 and public health authorities hypothesise that it may be linked with cardiovascular disease risk2. In an effort to identify ways to reduce the amount of sodium consumed and provided in the food supply, the American Heart Association brought together over 100 key stakeholders and thought leaders at a special conference in June 2013. Proceedings from the conference were published in the May 2014 edition of Circulation3. Among the top priorities identified by the group were increasing consumer understanding ...

The war on drugs could get a boost with a new method that analyzes sewage to track levels of illicit drug use in local communities in real time. The new study, a first-of-its-kind in the U.S., was published in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology and could help law enforcement identify new drug hot spots and monitor whether anti-drug measures are working. Kurunthachalam Kannan and Bikram Subedi note that to date, most methods to estimate drug use in the U.S. are based on surveys, crime statistics and drug seizures by law enforcement. But much illegal drug ...

One of the important tasks for quantum physics researchers and engineers is designing more sensitive instruments to study the tiny fields and forces that govern the world we live in. The most precise measuring instruments devised to date, such as atomic clocks or gravitational wave detectors, are interferometric in nature and operate according to the laws of quantum mechanics. As with all quantum objects, photons – the basic building blocks of light - display a "wave-particle" duality. Interferometers exploit the wave-like behaviour of photons to measure a signal, known ...

Traumatic brain injuries from sports, recreational activities, falls or car accidents are the leading cause of death and disability in children and adolescents. While previously it was believed that the window for brain recovery was at most one year after injury, new research from the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas published online today in the open-access journal Frontiers in Neurology shows cognitive performance can be improved to significant degrees months, and even years, after injury, given targeted brain training. "The after-effects ...

The potential value of turning the nation's freeways into "smart transportation systems" is enormous. Equipping the nation's concrete arteries with a nervous system of computers and sensors that directly control on-ramp signals to keep traffic moving smoothly can substantially reduce travel times, fuel consumption and air pollution, not to mention improve road safety. In California alone the economic penalty of traffic congestion has been estimated at $400 million in extra costs and $3.5 million in lost wages every day. The tightly integrated computing and networking ...

A team of European scientists has now extended a previous biophysical model to investigate elongated growth within biological tissues by describing the evolution over time of the shape of a fruit fly's wing. They found the aspect ratio of the typical biological shapes may exhibit a maximum at finite time and then decrease. For sufficiently large tissues, the shape is expected to approach that of a disk or sphere. These findings have been reported by Carles Blanch-Mercader from the University of Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues, in a paper published in EPJ E. They provide ...

This news release is available in German. Large shell structures made of concrete or stone are hardly ever built any more. The reason is that their construction requires large, expensive supporting structures. At the Vienna University of Technology, a completely new construction method has been developed, which does not require any timber structures at all: a flat concrete slab hardens on the ground, and then an air cushion below the plate is inflated, bending the concrete and quickly forming a sustainable shell. Even large event halls could be built this way. In ...

How neurons are created and integrate with each other is one of biology's greatest riddles. Researcher Dietmar Schmucker from VIB-KU Leuven unravels a part of the mystery in Science magazine. He describes a mechanism that explains novel aspects of how the wiring of highly branched neurons in the brain works. These new insights into how complex neural networks are formed are very important for understanding and treating neurological diseases. Neurons, or nerve cells It is estimated that a person has 100 billion neurons, or nerve cells. These neurons have thin, elongated, ...

The Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) assessed current study results on the benefit of a test for human papillomavirus (HPV) and examined whether its first assessment from January 2012 is still valid. The rapid report published by the Institute on 11 June 2014 answers this question with "yes". IQWiG still sees indications that precursors of cervical cancer can be detected and treated earlier and consequently tumours occur less often in women who underwent this testing. HPV testing is not reimbursed by SHI funds In screening for cervical cancer, ...

Neiker-Tecnalia, in collaboration with the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country, has in recent years been studying the high water stress tolerance of hybrids of the Radiata Pine (Pinus radiata X Pinus attenuata). These trees appear to be a very interesting alternative for the forestry sector in view of the modifications ecosystems are undergoing and will be undergoing as a result of climate change. To obtain new specimens of these trees in a rapid, productive way, the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development, Neiker-Tecnalia, and SCION –the New Zealand ...

On the island of Java, in Indonesia, the silvery gibbon, an endangered primate, lives in the rainforests. In a behavior that's unusual for a primate, the silvery gibbon sings: It can vocalize long, complicated songs, using 14 different note types, that signal territory and send messages to potential mates and family. Far from being a mere curiosity, the silvery gibbon may hold clues to the development of language in humans. In a newly published paper, two MIT professors assert that by re-examining contemporary human language, we can see indications of how human communication ...

Philadelphia, PA, June 11, 2014 – There are currently only two FDA-approved medications for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the United States. Both of these medications are serotonin uptake inhibitors. Despite the availability of these medications, many people diagnosed with PTSD remain symptomatic, highlighting the need for new medications for PTSD treatment. The renin-angiotensin system has long been of interest to psychiatry. Some of the first drugs targeting this system were the angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin ...