WASHINGTON — Large cities in the U.S. are significantly safer than their rural counterparts, with the risk of injury death more than 20 percent higher in the country. A study to be published online tomorrow in Annals of Emergency Medicine upends a common perception that urban areas are more dangerous than small towns ("Safety in Numbers: Are Major Cities the Safest Places in the U.S.?"). "Cars, guns and drugs are the unholy trinity causing the majority of injury deaths in the U.S.," said lead study author Sage Myers, MD, MSCE, of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, ...

PerFluoroAlkyl Substances (PFASs) and precursor compounds have been used in a wide variety of commercial and industrial products over the past six decades. Applications include water and oil repellent coatings, e.g. for textiles, paper products, carpets and food packaging, pharmaceuticals and surfactants in cleaning products and fire-fighting foams. PFASs are highly resistant to chemical, thermal and biological degradation. PFASs and their precursor compounds have shown a dramatic increase and dispersal around the world over the past four decades. An increasing amount ...

Expert ballet dancers seem to glide effortlessly across the stage, but learning the steps is both physically and mentally demanding. New research suggests that dance marking — loosely practicing a routine by "going through the motions" — may improve the quality of dance performance by reducing the mental strain needed to perfect the movements. The new findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that marking may alleviate the conflict between the cognitive and physical aspects of dance practice, allowing ...

Detrusor overactivity is common after stroke, and is characterized by frequent micturition and urinary incontinence. However, the optimal treatment for post-stroke detrusor overactivity remains unclear. According to a study reported in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 18, 2013), patients with post-stroke detrusor overactivity from the Department of Neurology, Fourth Hospital of Harbin Medical University, China, received electroacupuncture at points Baliao [including bilateral Shangliao (BL31), bilateral Ciliao (BL32), bilateral Zhongliao (BL33), and bilateral ...

Chinese herbal medicine, which has been used for thousands of years in China, has long been considered an effective treatment for vascular dementia. There are already meta-analyses of the effects of herbal extracts (ginkgo biloba and huperzine A) on vascular dementia. However, there has been no systematic review of the efficacy and safety of Chinese herbal medicines for vascular dementia, despite its wide use in clinical practice. A recent study published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 18, 2013) evaluated the efficacy and safety of Chinese herbal medicines ...

A recent study published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 17, 2013) injected recombinant lentivirus carrying enhanced green fluorescent protein and the target gene Atoh1 into the cochlea of normal rats using a postauricular approach via the round window membrane. After 30 days, recombinant lentivirus was shown to have no impact on the hair cell numbers and auditory functions, infect hair and supporting cells, and promote supporting cells to transdifferentiate into hair cells. Researchers believed that it may be a new approach for gene therapy in the treatment ...

Considerable improvement in device performance of polymer-based optoelectronic devices is reported today by researchers from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), South Korea. The new plasmonic material, can be applied to both polymer light-emitting diodes (PLEDs) and polymer solar cells (PSCs), with world-record high performance, through a simple and cheap process. The contrary demands of these devices mean that there are few metal nanoparticles that can enhance performance in PLEDs and PSCs at the same time. Most semiconducting optoelectronic ...

Climate change could drive the Iberian lynx ‒ the world's most threatened cat – to extinction within 50 years, despite substantial ongoing conservation efforts, a new international study has found. Published today in Nature Climate Change, the research team says the impact of climate change must be incorporated in strategies to reintroduce the Iberian lynx to new habitats if the species is to be saved. "We show that climate change could lead to a rapid and severe decrease in lynx abundance in coming decades, and probably lead to its extinction in the wild within ...

Concussions, the most common traumatic brain injury, can have serious long-term health effects; therefore, diagnosis and management of these injuries are important. A primer published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) provides physicians with current approaches to diagnosing and managing concussions in patients. "The importance of accurate and timely recognition and management stems from the consequences of misdiagnosis or faulty management that can lead to major disability or death, in both the short and long term," writes Dr. Charles Tator, Division of ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – An animal model of the human norovirus created at the University of Michigan Health System lays the groundwork for understanding the biology of the pesky virus and developing antiviral drug treatment. Well-known as the virus that impacts cruise ship vacations, norovirus leads to misery on land too. The virus spreads quickly from person to person in any closed-in space, such as schools, nursing homes, or day-care centers. "The first virus in this group was discovered in 1972 following a disease outbreak at a school in Norwalk, Ohio in 1968. Since then ...

Researchers from Aalto University and Paris Tech have placed water droplets containing magnetic nanoparticles on strong water repellent surfaces and have made them align in various static and dynamic structures using periodically oscillating magnetic fields. This is the first time researchers have demonstrated reversible switching between static and dynamic self-assembly. 'We are conducting this line of research because it opens up a way to create new responsive and intelligent systems and materials,' said Dr. Robin Ras of Aalto University, Finland. Self-assembly is ...

A new finding provides fresh hope for the millions of women worldwide with oestrogen receptor positive breast cancer. Australian scientists have shown that a specific change, which occurs when tumours become resistant to anti-oestrogen therapy, might make the cancers susceptible to treatment with chemotherapy drugs. Seventy percent of breast cancer patients have oestrogen receptor positive cancer, and most patients respond well to anti-oestrogen therapies, for a few years at least. Within 15 years, however, 50% will relapse and eventually die from the disease. Dr Andrew ...

July 22, 2013, Shenzhen, China - The largest genomic institute of the world, BGI Shenzhen, China (hereinafter BGI), together with Reproductive & Genetic Hospital CITIC-XIANGYA (hereinafter CITIC-XIANGYA) announced today that they have successfully applied Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) to detect in vitro fertilized (IVF) embryos with genetic abnormalities. The successful application of preimplantation sequencing (the most advanced form of preimplantation genetic screening, PGS) opens a new chapter in the field of human assisted reproduction, providing new hopes for IVF ...

This news release is available in German. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), the central, self-governing research funding organisation in Germany, presented a position paper on the future of the German research system at its annual press conference in Berlin on 4 July 2013. Drawn up by the DFG's Executive Committee and Executive Board, the paper was the subject of intense discussion among representatives from all areas of science and the humanities and the federal and state government funding bodies at the DFG's Annual Meeting, which ...

Thiols are sulfur-containing molecules found in most proteins of the human body. Characterized by their 'garlicky' smell, they also give coffee, sweat and the spray of skunks their unique odor. Because they are so widespread in biology, medicine and materials science, thiols are ideal targets for connecting molecules like drugs or polymers together, except that they must first be fitted with a chemical group that acts like an adaptor to other molecules. One of the most potentially useful of these 'adaptors' are the alkynes, which can be extremely powerful in bioconjugation. ...

Do migrants from Eastern European countries become happier once they have settled in Western Europe? A University of Leicester sociologist has investigated this question -- and the answer might make potential migrants think twice before packing their bags. Most migrants were no happier after migration -- and migrants from Poland were significantly less happy. In a paper published in 'Migration Studies', Dr. David Bartram analyses data from the European Social Survey of more than 42,000 people to try and determine whether happiness can be gained by moving to another ...

The UK New Labour Government's ideological preoccupations included tackling deprivation, addressing anti-social behaviour and persuading young people to engage in 'positive activities'. In 2007, the report 'Aiming High for Young People' outlined policies intended to contribute to the achievement of associated goals. The Youth Sector Development Fund (YSDF) provided Civil Sector Organisations (CSOs) with the means to put the policies into practice and also aimed to build organisational capacity. Using data gathered for the evaluation of one organisation's YSDF-financed programme ...

Young female cancer patients are unhappy about the way fertility preservation options are discussed with them by doctors before starting cancer treatment, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Sheffield and The Children's Hospital, Sheffield. The pioneering study discovered that only 40 per cent of young female cancer patients were happy with the way their doctors discussed the options they had to preserve fertility, before undergoing chemotherapy or radiotherapy which can have a harmful effect on a patient's fertility. Researchers conducted ...

Global efforts to adapt staple foods like rice, wheat and potato to climate change have been given a major boost today as new research shows the whereabouts of their wild cousins –which could hold beneficial qualities to help improve crops and make them more productive and resilient. The analysis assesses 29* of the world's most important food crops and reveals severe threats to just over half of their wild relatives as they are not adequately saved in genebanks and not available to researchers and plant breeders for crop improvement. Climate change is predicted to cause ...

"A wave is a deformation in the surface of a liquid that moves at a speed that is independent of that liquid," the researchers explain. For example: in the waves that are formed when a rock is thrown into a pond, the water remains still while the waves move away from the center at their own speed. "In our case, what occurs is actually the opposite: the water moves very rapidly (at several meters per second), but the wave moves at a speed of zero. That is, it remains still, "frozen" in time for any observer who sees it from outside of the water," explains one of the authors ...

ANN ARBOR—Mass extinctions, like lotteries, result in a multitude of losers and a few lucky winners. This is the story of one of the winners, a small, shell-crushing predatory fish called Fouldenia, which first appears in the fossil record a mere 11 million years after an extinction that wiped out more than 90 percent of the planet's vertebrate species. The extinction that ended the Devonian Era 359 million years ago created opportunities quickly exploited by a formerly rare and unremarkable group of fish that went on to become—in terms of the sheer number of species—the ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Young harp seals off the eastern coast of Canada are at much higher risk of getting stranded than adult seals because of shrinking sea ice cover caused by recent warming in the North Atlantic, according to a Duke University study. "Stranding rates for the region's adult seals have generally not gone up as sea ice cover has declined; it's the young-of-the-year animals who are stranding (those less than one year old)," said David Johnston, a research scientist at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. "And it's not just the weakest pups -- those ...

High levels of arsenic in rice have been shown to be associated with elevated genetic damage in humans, a new study has found. Over the last few years, researchers have reported high concentrations of arsenic in several rice-growing regions around the world. Now, University of Manchester scientists, working in collaboration with scientists at CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in Kolkata, have proven a link between rice containing high levels of arsenic and chromosomal damage, as measured by micronuclei* in urothelial cells, in humans consuming rice as a staple. The ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- A new poll shows 82 percent of adults support banning smoking in cars when children under 13 are riding in the vehicle. According to the latest University of Michigan Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health, support is strong for prohibiting drivers and passengers from smoking when kids are in the car. However, only seven states nationwide have laws banning the practice. Also in this month's poll, 87 percent of adults said they'd support a ban on smoking in businesses where children are allowed. Seventy-five percent expressed ...

This news release is available in French. Type 2 diabetes accounts for 90 % of cases of diabetes around the world, afflicting 2.5 million Canadians and costing over 15 billion dollars a year in Canada. It is a severe health condition which makes body cells incapable of taking up and using sugar. Dr. Alexey Pshezhetsky of the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center, affiliated with the University of Montreal, has discovered that the resistance to insulin seen in type 2 diabetics is caused partly by the lack of a protein that has not previously been associated ...