PHILADELPHIA – A simple vision test performed on the sidelines may help determine whether athletes have suffered a concussion, according to a study released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 66th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, April 26 to May 3, 2014. The study provides more evidence that the King-Devick test, a one-minute test where athletes read single-digit numbers on index cards, can be used in addition to other tests to increase the accuracy in diagnosing concussion. For the study, 217 members of the University of Florida men's ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- An Indiana University study in collaboration with medical researchers from Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has found that advancing paternal age at childbearing can lead to higher rates of psychiatric and academic problems in offspring than previously estimated. Examining an immense data set -- everyone born in Sweden from 1973 until 2001 -- the researchers documented a compelling association between advancing paternal age at childbearing and numerous psychiatric disorders and educational problems in their children, including autism, ADHD, bipolar ...

Bethesda, MD — Pay-for-performance—reimbursing health care providers based on the results they achieved with their patients as a way to improve quality and efficiency—has become a major component of health reforms in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other affluent countries. Although the approach has also become popular in the developing world, there has been little evaluation of its impact. A new study, being released today as a Web First by Health Affairs, examines the effects of pay-for-performance, combined with capitation, in China's largely rural Ningxia ...

Stars, diamonds, circles. Rather than your average bowl of Lucky Charms, these are three-dimensional cell cultures generated by an exciting new digital microfluidics platform, the results of which have been published in Nature Communications this week by researchers at the University of Toronto. The tool, which can be used to study cells in cost-efficient, three-dimensional microgels, may hold the key to personalized medicine applications in the future. "We already know that the microenvironment can greatly influence cell fate," says Irwin A. Eydelnant, recent doctoral ...

Helsinki/Jülich/Leipzig. Scientists made an important step in order to better understand the relationships between vegetation and climate. So-called extremely low-volatility organic compounds, which are produced by plants, could be detected for the first time during field and laboratory experiments in Finland and Germany. These organic species contribute to the formation of aerosol that can affect climate and air quality, they report in this week's issue of the journal Nature. The results may help to explain discrepancies between observations and theories about how volatile ...

Low-molecular-weight heparin is commonly used in surgeries to prevent dangerous blood clots. But when patients experience the other extreme – uncontrolled bleeding – in response to low-molecular-weight heparin, there is no antidote. Now researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created a synthetic form of low-molecular-weight heparin that can be reversed if things go wrong and would be safer for patients with poor kidney function. "When doctors talk to me about the kind of heparin they want to use during ...

In the span of a decade, Canada has gone from ecstasy importer to global supplier of the illegal party drug. At the same time, even newer designer highs—sometimes just a mouse-click away—are flooding the drug market faster than legislation can keep pace. It's a worrying problem that University of Alberta researchers say requires more education to help Canadians understand the very real, deadly risks of designer drug use. "The chemists who are making these drugs are coming up with about 10 new drugs per year; the legislation cannot keep up with the market," said Alan ...

Loads of studies over the years have shown that children who were breastfed score higher on IQ tests and perform better in school, but the reason why remained unclear. Is it the mother-baby bonding time, something in the milk itself or some unseen attribute of mothers who breastfeed their babies? Now a new study by sociologists at Brigham Young University pinpoints two parenting skills as the real source of this cognitive boost: Responding to children's emotional cues and reading to children starting at 9 months of age. Breastfeeding mothers tend to do both of those ...

HONOLULU – Twenty-five years after the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, beaches on the Alaska Peninsula hundreds of kilometers from the incident still harbor small hidden pockets of surprisingly unchanged oil, according to new research being presented here today. The focus of the study is to learn how oil persists long after a spill. Researchers presenting the work caution that the amount of oil being studied is a trace of what was originally spilled and that results from these sites cannot be simply extrapolated to the entire spill area. The ...

In the cells of humans and other organisms, only a subset of genes are active at any given time, depending largely on the stage of life and the particular duties of the cell. Cells use different molecular mechanisms to orchestrate the activation and deactivation of genes as needed. One central mechanism is an intricate DNA packaging system that either shields genes from activation or exposes them for use. In this system, the DNA strand, with its genes, is coiled around molecules known as histones, which themselves are assembled into larger entities called nucleosomes. ...

South Africa has been financing domestic rainwater harvesting tanks in informal low-income settlements and rural areas in five of that nation's nine provinces. But pathogens inhabit such harvested rainwater, potentially posing a public health hazard, especially for children and immunocompromised individuals, according to a team from the University of Stellenbosch. The research was published ahead of print in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. International studies had indicated that harvested rainwater frequently harbors pathogens, and that, in light of the financing ...

Extremely hot temperatures over land have dramatically and unequivocally increased in number and area despite claims that the rise in global average temperatures has slowed over the past 10 to 20 years. Scientists from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science and international colleagues made the finding when they focused their research on the rise of temperatures at the extreme end of the spectrum where impacts are felt the most. "It quickly became clear, the so-called "hiatus" in global average temperatures did not stop the rise in the number, intensity ...

Activation of beta-catenin, the primary mediator of the ubiquitous Wnt signaling pathway, alters the immune system in lasting and harmful ways, a team of Chicago-based researchers demonstrate in the February 26, 2014, issue of Science Translational Medicine. An increase in beta-catenin in certain types of T cells—a class of white blood cells—causes chronic inflammation in the intestine and colon, eventually leading to cancer. The same mechanism is used by colon cancer to propagate itself. The researchers combine data from patients suffering from colitis or colon cancer ...

This is a Hubble Space Telescope composite image of a supernova explosion designated SN 2014J in the galaxy M82. At a distance of approximately 11.5 million light-years from Earth it is the closest supernova of its type discovered in the past few decades. The explosion is categorized as a Type Ia supernova, which is theorized to be triggered in binary systems consisting of a white dwarf and another star — which could be a second white dwarf, a star like our sun, or a giant star. Astronomers using a ground-based telescope discovered the explosion on January 21, 2014. This ...

Brown marmorated stink bugs cause millions of dollars in crop losses across the United States because of the damage their saliva does to plant tissues. Researchers at Penn State have developed methods to extract the insect saliva and identify the major protein components, which could lead to new pest control approaches. "Until now, essentially nothing was known about the composition of stink bug saliva, which is surprising given the importance of these insects as pests and the fact that their saliva is the primary cause of feeding injury to plants and crop losses," said ...

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, released the largest and most comprehensive health and lifestyle analysis of people from a range of Hispanic/Latino origins. The data will enable individuals, communities, and policy makers to tailor better health intervention strategies. "This study lays the foundation for future research on the possible causes of chronic diseases and ways to prevent them, and to help us understand the reasons why Hispanics and Latinos live longer than the general population," said Gregory Talavera, ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A rodent in a maze is a staple — even a stereotype — of experimental psychology research. But the maze in the lab of Rebecca Burwell, professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University, is not your grandfather's apparatus. In a new video article published in the Journal of Visualized Experiments, Burwell's research group demonstrates in full detail how the maze can be used to perform automated visual cognitive research tasks with great efficiency. The article is available here: http://www.jove.com/video/51316/automated-visual-cognitive-tasks-for-recording-neural-activity-using The ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Feb. 26, 2014 — Somali Americans develop twice the antibody response to rubella from the current vaccine compared to Caucasians in a new Mayo Clinic study on individualized aspects of immune response. A non-Somali, African-American cohort ranked next in immune response, still significantly higher than Caucasians, and Hispanic Americans in the study were least responsive to the vaccine. The findings appear in the journal Vaccine. "This is fascinating," says Gregory Poland, M.D., Mayo Clinic vaccinologist and senior author of the study. "We don't know ...

BOULDER, Colo -- JILA physicists used an ultrafast laser and help from German theorists to discover a new semiconductor quasiparticle—a handful of smaller particles that briefly condense into a liquid-like droplet. Quasiparticles are composites of smaller particles that can be created inside solid materials and act together in a predictable way. A simple example is the exciton, a pairing, due to electrostatic forces, of an electron and a so-called "hole," a place in the material's energy structure where an electron could be, but isn't. The new quasiparticle, described ...

Pine forests are especially magical places for atmospheric chemists. Coniferous trees give off pine-scented vapors that form particles, very quickly and seemingly out of nowhere. New research by German, Finnish and U.S. scientists elucidates the process by which gas wafting from coniferous trees creates particles that can reflect sunlight or promote cloud formation, both important climate feedbacks. The study is published Feb. 27 in Nature. "In many forested regions, you can go and observe particles apparently form from thin air. They're not emitted from anything, ...

Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Cologne have created a new model to successfully predict the evolution of the influenza virus from one year to the next. This advance in our understanding of influenza suggests a new, systematic way to select influenza vaccine strains. The findings appear in Nature on Feb. 26. The flu is one of the major infectious diseases in humans. Seasonal strains of the influenza A virus account for about half a million deaths per year. In a concerted effort, WHO and its Collaborating Centers have closely monitored the evolution ...

Melanoma is particularly dangerous because it can form metastases in vital organs such as the lungs, liver or brain. UV radiation is considered to be the most significant triggering factor. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University Hospital and the LIMES Institute of the University of Bonn has now discovered that sunburns contribute to the development of this malignant disease not only through direct alteration of pigment cell genomes but also indirectly through inflammatory processes in the surrounding tissue. The results are now being published online ...

According to their results, these extremely low-volatile organic compounds consist of relatively large molecules which contain an almost equal number of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms. The scientists present a plausible explanation supported by numerous experimental findings of how these vapours are formed almost immediately when plant emissions (e.g. monoterpenes) are released into the air. The vapours can then condense on small aerosol particles (starting from clusters of only a few nanometres in diameter) suspended in the air, causing them to grow to around 100 nanometres ...

New Rochelle, NY, February 26, 2014–Whole body cooling in comatose patients who have suffered a heart attack can limit the damage to brain tissue caused by the restoration of blood flow and oxygen. But new data indicate that in certain patients therapeutic hypothermia is less effective and may even worsen neurological outcomes, as described in an article in Therapeutic Hypothermia and Temperature Management, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Therapeutic Hypothermia and Temperature Management website at ...

(Boston)--Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) researchers have demonstrated the potential of using a virtual computer environment for distance healthcare education for an international audience that often has limited access to conventional teaching and training. In this pilot project led by John Wiecha, MD, corresponding author of the study and associate professor of family medicine at BUSM, a virtual world was created in which participants engaged in a learning activity by creating virtual avatars of themselves to navigate through a three-dimensional computer environment ...