STANFORD, Calif. — Dermatologists with access to free drug samples are more likely than those without access to samples to write prescriptions for drugs that are more expensive, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Although studies have shown that most physicians do not believe that the availability of free samples affects their behavior or recommendations for patients, the researchers found that the average retail cost of the prescriptions written by dermatologists with access to samples are about twice the cost of prescriptions ...

The availability of free medication samples in dermatology offices appears to change prescribing practices for acne, a common condition for which free samples are often available. Free drug samples provided by pharmaceutical companies are widely available in dermatology practices. The authors investigated prescribing practices for acne vulgaris and rosacea. Data for the study were obtained from a nationally representative sample of dermatologists in the National Disease and Therapeutic Index (NDTI), a survey of office-based U.S. physicians, and from an academic medical ...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in adolescents appears to be associated with atypical connectivity in the brain involving the systems that help people infer what others are thinking and understand the meaning of others' actions and emotions. The ability to navigate and thrive in complex social systems is commonly impaired in ASD, a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting as many as 1 in 88 children. The authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate connectivity in two brain networks involved in social processing: theory of mind (ToM, otherwise known ...

From far away, the top of a leaf looks like one seamless surface; however, up close, that smooth exterior is actually made up of a patchwork of cells in a variety of shapes and sizes. Interested in how these cells individually take on their own unique forms, Caltech biologist Elliot Meyerowitz, postdoctoral scholar Arun Sampathkumar, and colleagues sought to pinpoint the shape-controlling factors in pavement cells, which are puzzle-piece-shaped epithelial cells found on the leaves of flowering plants. They found that these unusual shapes were the cell's response to mechanical ...

Imagine you cannot move your eyes up, and you cannot lift your upper eyelid. You walk through life with your head tilted upward so that your eyes look straight when they are rolled down in the eye socket. Obviously, such a condition should be corrected to allow people a normal position of their head. In order to correct this condition, one would need to understand why this happens. In a paper published in the April 16 print issue of the journal Neuron, University of Iowa researchers Bernd Fritzsch and Jeremy Duncan and their colleagues at Harvard Medical School, along ...

The article "Collapse of superconductivity in a hybrid tin–grapheme Josephson junction array'" (authors: Zheng Han, Adrien Allain, Hadi Arjmandi-Tash,Konstantin Tikhonov, Mikhail Feigelman, Benjamin Sacépé,Vincent Bouchiat, published in Nature Physics on March 30, 2014, DOI:10.1038/NPHYS2929) presents the results of the first experimental study of the graphene-based quantum phase transition of the "superconductor-to-metal" type, i.e. transformation of the system's ground state from superconducting to metallic, upon changing the electron concentration in graphene sheet. The ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Consider the marvel of the embryo. It begins as a glob of identical cells that change shape and function as they multiply to become the cells of our lungs, muscles, nerves and all the other specialized tissues of the body. Now, in a feat of reverse tissue engineering, Stanford University researchers have begun to unravel the complex genetic coding that allows embryonic cells to proliferate and transform into all of the specialized cells that perform myriad biological tasks. A team of interdisciplinary researchers took lung cells from the embryos of ...

Monday night's lunar eclipse proved just as delightful as expected to those able to view it. On the East Coast, cloudy skies may have gotten in the way, but at the National Science Foundation's National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) near Tucson, Ariz., the skies offered impressive viewing, as seen from the pictures provided here. Nicknamed a "blood moon," this lunar eclipse's color was similar to the majority of lunar eclipses. This has to do with the Earth's atmosphere's propensity for longer-wavelength light (e.g., the reds, oranges and yellows seen in sunrises ...

Inexpensive computers, cell phones and other systems that substitute flexible plastic for silicon chips may be one step closer to reality, thanks to research published on April 16 in the journal Nature Communications. The paper describes a new proposal by University of Iowa researchers and their colleagues at New York University for overcoming a major obstacle to the development of such plastic devices—the large amount of energy required to read stored information. Although it is relatively cheap and easy to encode information in light for fiber optic transmission, ...

Lying forgotten in museum collections two new species of yellow-shouldered bats have been unearthed by scientists at the American Museum of New York and The Field Museum of Natural History and described in the open access journal ZooKeys. These two new additions to the genus Sturnira are part of a recent discovery of three bats hidden away in collections around the world, the third one still waiting to be officially announced. Up until recently the genus Sturnira was believed to contain only 14 species. In the last years closer morphological and molecular analysis have ...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Florida State University researchers have identified a new syndrome called "osteosarcopenic obesity" that links the deterioration of bone density and muscle mass with obesity. "It used to be the thinking that the heavier you were the better your bones would be because the bones were supporting more weight," said Jasminka Ilich-Ernst, the Hazel Stiebeling Professor of Nutrition at Florida State. "But, that's only true to a certain extent." The syndrome, outlined in the May issue of Ageing Research Reviews, explains how many obese individuals experience ...

A novel antiviral drug may protect people infected with the measles from getting sick and prevent them from spreading the virus to others, an international team of researchers says. Scientists from the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University, the Emory Institute for Drug Development and the Paul-Ehrlich Institute in Germany developed the drug and tested it in animals infected with a virus closely related to one that causes the measles. As reported in the current issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine, virus levels were significantly ...

HAMPTON, NJ (April 16, 2014): Celldex Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: CLDX) announced today that final data from its Phase 1 study of CDX-1401 in solid tumors, including long-term patient follow-up, have been published in Science Translational Medicine (Vol 6 Issue 232). The data demonstrate robust antibody and T cell responses and evidence of clinical benefit in patients with very advanced cancers and suggest that CDX-1401 may predispose patients to better outcomes on subsequent therapy with checkpoint inhibitors. CDX-1401 is an off-the-shelf vaccine consisting of a fully ...

Geologists who analyzed 40 meteorites that fell to Earth from Mars unlocked secrets of the Martian atmosphere hidden in the chemical signatures of these ancient rocks. Their study, published April 17 in the journal Nature, shows that the atmospheres of Mars and Earth diverged in important ways very early in the 4.6 billion year evolution of our solar system. The results will help guide researchers' next steps in understanding whether life exists, or has ever existed, on Mars and how water—now absent from the Martian surface—flowed there in the past. Heather Franz, ...

Sometimes known as Kennedy's disease, spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy (SBMA) is a rare inherited neuromuscular disorder characterized by slowly progressive muscle weakness and atrophy. Researchers have long considered it to be essentially an affliction of primary motor neurons – the cells in the spinal cord and brainstem that control muscle movement. But in a new study published in the April 16, 2014 online issue of Neuron, a team of scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine say novel mouse studies indicate that mutant protein levels ...

An international team of scientists has discovered new relationships between deep-sea temperature and ice-volume changes to provide crucial new information about how the ice ages came about. Researchers from the University of Southampton, the National Oceanography Centre and the Australian National University developed a new method for determining sea-level and deep-sea temperature variability over the past 5.3 million years. It provides new insight into the climatic relationships that caused the development of major ice-age cycles during the past two million years. The ...

All the particles we know to exist make up only about five per cent of the mass and energy of the universe. The rest – "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" – remains mysterious. A European collaboration lled by researchers from the Vienna University of Technology has now carried out extremely sensitive measurements of gravitational effects at very small distances at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble. These experiments provide limits for possible new particles or fundamental forces, which are a hundred thousand times more restrictive than previous estimations. Undiscovered ...

The skull of a newly discovered 325-million-year-old shark-like species suggests that early cartilaginous and bony fishes have more to tell us about the early evolution of jawed vertebrates—including humans—than do modern sharks, as was previously thought. The new study, led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, shows that living sharks are actually quite advanced in evolutionary terms, despite having retained their basic "sharkiness" over millions of years. The research is published today in the journal Nature. "Sharks are traditionally thought to ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – As scientists catalog the trillions of bacteria found in every nook and cranny of the human body, a new look by the University of Michigan shows wide variation in the types of bacteria found in healthy people. Based on their findings in today's Nature, there is no single healthy microbiome. Rather each person harbors a unique and varied collection of bacteria that's the result of life history as well their interactions with the environment, diet and medication use. "Understanding the diversity of community types and the mechanisms that result ...

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have discovered interacting proteins on the surface of the sperm and the egg essential to begin mammalian life. These proteins, which allow the sperm and egg to recognize one another, offer new paths towards improved fertility treatments and the development of new contraceptives. Fertilisation occurs when an egg and a sperm recognise each other and fuse together to form an embryo. The Izumo protein displayed on the sperm that recognises the egg was identified in 2005 by Japanese researchers who named it Izumo, after a ...

A research team at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel has discovered an protein family that plays a central role in the fight against the bacterial pathogen Salmonella within the cells. The so called interferon-induced GTPases reveal and eliminate the bacterium's camouflage in the cell, enabling the cell to recognize the pathogen and to render it innocuous. The findings are published in the current issue of the science magazine Nature. Bacteria have developed countless strategies to hide themselves in order to evade attack by the immune system. In the body, Salmonella ...

Waves in your brain make smells stick to your memories and inner maps. When I was a child I used to sit in my grandfather's workshop, playing with wood shavings. Freshly shaven wood has a distinct smell of childhood happiness, and whenever I get a whiff of that scent my brain immediately conjures up images of my grandfather at his working bench, the heat from the fireplace and the dog next to it. Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience have recently discovered the process behind this phenomenon. The brain, it turns out, connects smells to memories ...

HOUSTON – (April 16, 2014) – As companies file their annual proxy statements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this spring, a new study by Rice University and Cornell University shows just how S&P 500 companies have tied CEO compensation to performance. The study found large variations in the choice of performance measures, and the researchers said that companies tend to choose measures that are informative of CEO actions. "On average, firms rely mostly on accounting-based performance measures, among which they put heavier weights on income measures, ...

Scientists at Yale have confirmed a 50-year-old, previously untested theoretical prediction in physics and improved the energy storage time of a quantum switch by several orders of magnitude. They report their results in the April 17 issue of the journal Nature. High-quality quantum switches are essential for the development of quantum computers and the quantum internet — innovations that would offer vastly greater information processing power and speed than classical (digital) computers, as well as more secure information transmission. "Fighting dissipation is one ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Maintaining an interest in the goals you pursue can improve your work and reduce burnout, according to research from Duke University. "Our research shows that interest is important in the process of pursuing goals. It allows us to perform at high levels without wearing out," said Paul O'Keefe, who conducted the studies as a doctoral student in Duke University's Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, along with associate professor Lisa Linnenbrink-Garcia. "This suggests that interest matters more than we suspected." The studies, which appear online ...