A study which will be published in the May 2014 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine was aimed at determining whether an EGFR-targeted therapy combined with chemo-radiotherapy can improve local tumor control effectively, compared to cytotoxic agents or irradiation alone. Dr. Haizhu Song and co-workers from Jinling Hospital and the Medical School of Nanjing University in China demonstrated that nimotuzumab could enhance chemo-radiosensitivity by promoting autophagic cell death in esophageal squamous carcinoma (ESCC) cells. Nimotuzumab is a humanized anti-EGFR monoclonal ...

Eyewitness accuracy declines steadily and quite measuredly as the distance increases. Additionally, a good deal of guess work or so-called "false alarms" also comes into play as the distance increases. These findings have implications for the trustworthiness of eyewitness accounts that are used to solve criminal cases. Research led by James Lampinen of the University of Arkansas in the US and published in Springer's journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review sheds light on the matter. Eyewitness identification plays a crucial role in approximately 80,000 criminal cases per ...

New findings published by researchers at the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering are helping to unravel the complex interplay between alcohol and social behavior and may lead to new therapies for mitigating the negative impacts of alcohol use and abuse. Their experiments, published in the current issue of Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research, center not on patrons at a local happy hour, but on far simpler creatures: zebrafish. A team led by Maurizio Porfiri, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the school's ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – The human body is full of proteins called enzymes that help nearly every function in the body. Scientists have been studying enzymes for decades in order to learn how they work and how to create better drugs and medical treatments for many ailments. Now, University of Missouri researchers have completed a 3-D map of an enzyme called Proline utilization A (PutA). PutA facilitates metabolism by adding oxygen to molecules. John Tanner, a professor in the MU Department of Biochemistry, says mapping this enzyme will give researchers a better understanding of ...

HANOVER, NH – Providing patient-centered care consistently in clinical practice requires practitioners who are able to recognize that different clinical situations require different approaches and are skilled enough to adapt. Across the range of health-care problems, patient-centered care has been found to be associated with improved patient outcomes, including improved self-management, patient satisfaction, and medication adherence, and some studies have found evidence for improved clinical outcomes. Data from surveys and research indicate that clinicians often do not ...

A shortened version of a questionnaire used by psychologists to assess risk factors for obsessive-compulsive disorder also may help determine the risk of depression and anxiety, according to a Baylor University study. The revision may be a good fit for assessing the risk of mental health issues stemming from certain beliefs — such as seeing threats as greater than they are and feeling that things are not right unless they are perfect. Such dysfunctional beliefs are central to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), said researcher Thomas Fergus, Ph.D., assistant professor ...

ALLENDALE, Mich. — New research shows that nations with greater women's empowerment win more medals and send more athletes to the Summer Olympics. The effect of women's empowerment held for both men and women, although it was stronger for female athletes, according to a study by Grand Valley State University researchers. The findings were published in April 2014 in the Journal of Sports Economics. The research, led by Aaron Lowen, associate professor of economics at Grand Valley State, provides evidence for the popular but previously untested hypothesis that women's empowerment ...

Fifty-million-year-old fossil beetles that fed only on palm seeds are giving Simon Fraser University biologists Bruce Archibald and Rolf Mathewes new information about ancient climates. According to their research, published online this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these fossil beetles indicate that during a period of global warming in the geological past, there were mild, frost-free winters extended even in the uplands of ancient western North America. Working with co-authors Geoffrey Morse of the University of San Diego, California, ...

Forgiving ourselves for hurting another is easier if we first make amends — thus giving our inner selves a "moral OK," according to Baylor University psychology researchers. The research, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, is significant because previous studies show that the inability to self-forgive can be a factor in depression, anxiety and a weakened immune system, researchers said. "One of the barriers people face in forgiving themselves appears to be that people feel morally obligated to hang on to those feelings. They feel they deserve to feel bad. ...

Researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Tokyo have created electronic devices that become soft when implanted inside the body and can deploy to grip 3-D objects, such as large tissues, nerves and blood vessels. These biologically adaptive, flexible transistors might one day help doctors learn more about what is happening inside the body, and stimulate the body for treatments. The research, available online and in an upcoming print issue of Advanced Materials, is one of the first demonstrations of transistors that can change shape and ...

Astrophysicists at UC San Diego have measured the minute gravitational distortions in polarized radiation from the early universe and discovered that these ancient microwaves can provide an important cosmological test of Einstein's theory of general relativity. These measurements have the potential to narrow down the estimates for the mass of ghostly subatomic particles known as neutrinos. The radiation could even provide physicists with clues to another outstanding problem about our universe: how the invisible "dark matter" and "dark energy," which has been undetectable ...

Over a million American students misuse prescription drugs or take illegal stimulants to increase their attention span, memory, and capacity to stay awake. Such "smart drugs" become more and more popular due to peer pressure, stricter academic requirements, and the tight job market. But young people who misuse them risk long-term impairments to brain function, warn Kimberly Urban at the University of Delaware and Wen-Jun Gao at Drexel University College of Medicine, USA, in a NIH-funded review published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. The ...

WASHINGTON D.C. May 13, 2014 -- People standing on a beach often feel the water tugging the sand away from under their feet. This is the undertow, the current that pulls water back into the ocean after a wave breaks on the beach. Large storms produce strong undertows that can strip beaches of sand. By predicting how undertows interact with shorelines, researchers can build sand dunes and engineer other soft solutions to create more robust and sustainable beaches. "Formulation of the Undertow Using Linear Wave Theory," a new paper in the journal Physics of Fluids, clears ...

WASHINGTON D.C. May 13, 2014 -- The ability to transfer a gene or DNA sequence from one animal into the genome of another plays a critical role in a wide range of medical research—including cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and diabetes. But the traditional method of transferring genetic material into a new cell, called "microinjection," has a serious downside. It involves using a small glass pipette to pump a solution containing DNA into the nucleus of an egg cell, but the extra fluid can cause the cell to swell and destroy it—resulting in a 25 to 40 percent cell death rate. Now, ...

A new study by The University of Manchester has shed light on why athletes are more likely to have abnormal heart rhythms. Elderly athletes with a lifelong history of training and competing in endurance events like marathons, triathlons and iron man challenges can have heart rhythm disturbances, known as arrhythmias. The Manchester research in rodents, funded by the British Heart Foundation, shows molecular changes in the heart's pacemaker occur in response to exercise training. The finding, reported in Nature Communications, overturns the commonly held belief that ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 13, 2014—New research published online today in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA), a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association, finds weak to nonexistent relationships between state-administered value-added model (VAM) measures of teacher performance and the content or quality of teachers' instruction. Based on their results, the authors question whether VAM data will be useful in evaluating teacher performance and shaping classroom instruction. VIDEO: Co-author Morgan S. Polikoff discusses key findings ...

University of Central Florida physicist Zenghu Chang has done it again. For a third time this year, his research group has published an article in a Nature journal. This time, Chang and his team have developed a new ultrafast light source for observing electron motion in molecules – made up of nuclei and electrons – at the point before the nuclei start to move. By being able to observe what actually happens, scientists can begin to understand how an electron interacts with other electrons, which may help improve the efficiency of solar cells. "The charge migration that ...

Men who have been incarcerated and released are more than twice as likely to die prematurely as those who have not been imprisoned, according to a new study published by Georgia State University criminologist William Alex Pridemore. Former prisoners are more likely to die early from infectious and respiratory diseases, drug overdoses and homicides. Causes of this "mortality penalty" include increased exposure to diseases like TB and HIV, the prolonged stress of the prison environment, the disruption of important social bonds and, upon release, the struggle to reintegrate ...

We're often told to "forgive and forget" the wrongs that we suffer – it turns out that there may be some scientific truth behind the common saying. A study from researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland shows that the details of a transgression are more susceptible to forgetting when that transgression has been forgiven. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "It is well established that learning to forgive others can have positive benefits for an individual's physical and mental health," ...

Firefighters are currently battling the Signal Fire in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. The fire was reported by the Signal Peak Lookout Tower Sunday (May 11) in the afternoon and is located approximately 15 miles north of Silver City. It is currently estimated to be 4,700 acres. The Southwest Area Incident Management Team assumed command of the fire Monday at 6:00 p.m. The cause of the fire is thought to be human either a careless camper or arson, but the investigation is still ongoing. Residents in the vicinity of Signal Peak have evacuated. The firefighters ...

One in three women around the world have experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner. Although domestic violence is associated with a range of adverse health impacts, even after the abuse has ended, it is not easily identified by health care professionals, prompting some countries, notably the United States, to introduce screening programmes in healthcare settings. A new study, published online by the BMJ today [13 May], has found no evidence to support domestic violence screening. Researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Melbourne, La Trobe and Columbia ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Surgery patients covered by Medicaid come into their operations with worse health, do worse afterward, stay in the hospital longer and find themselves back in the hospital more often than those covered by private insurance, a new analysis by University of Michigan Medical School researchers finds. In fact, people with Medicaid coverage were twice as likely as other patients to have certain health risk factors before they had surgery, the researchers report in JAMA Surgery. They also had many more emergency operations, experienced two-thirds more complications ...

Deadly skin cancers in mice shrank in response to a new treatment that may complement other "immunotherapies" developed recently to boost the body's own defenses against disease threats, according to a new study published by UC San Francisco researchers in the May 2014 edition of the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Using a mouse version of a human drug that is popular for treating osteoporosis, the UCSF researchers discovered a way to manipulate the thymus, a gland situated at the base of the neck above the heart, to alter its activity so that some of the specialized ...

A first year Environmental Science student at The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC) has had a literature review of the Southeast Asian monsoon published in the academic journal Geoscience Frontiers. Her research concluded that future climate warming could lead to a 15 day delay in the monsoon onset in Southeast Asia by the start of the next century. Yen Yi Loo investigated how global and regional temperature and rainfall anomalies affect rainfall patterns and the South East Asian Monsoon. She also highlighted how increased rainfall intensity in the last ...

Scientists from The University of Manchester – part of the Manchester Cancer Research Centre - have demonstrated the potential of a drug to improve the effectiveness of radiotherapy in stopping tumour growth. There is increasing interest in using the body's own immune system to attack tumour cells – a strategy that can be very effective without the side effects associated with conventional chemotherapy. Skin cancers have been successfully treated using a topical cream, imiquimod, which recruits immune cells through a molecule known as toll-like receptor 7 (TLR7), a ...