A study conducted at the University of Strathclyde investigating the presence of Legionella in compost, has found that the bacteria exist in a significant number of commercial products. The research, the first substantial analysis of Legionella in UK composts, suggests that the bacteria are a common part of the microflora found within the composts tested. It is widely recognised that Legionella bacteria are commonly present in the environment and the researchers have found that compost could be a potential source of infection. Dr Tara K. Beattie, of the University ...

Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have taken a step toward developing a new treatment to aid the recovery of limb function after strokes. In a study published online in the journal Neurobiology of Disease, researchers report the full recovery of forelimb strength in animals receiving vagus nerve stimulation. "Stroke is a leading cause of disability worldwide," said Dr. Navid Khodaparast, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and lead author of the study. "Every 40 seconds, someone in the U.S. has a stroke. Our results ...

All of the absences from work for depression, certified by doctors, were recorded as well as many questionnaires measuring depressive moods. The results, which will be published in The American Journal of Epidemiology, do not indicate any significant association between a person experiencing the symptoms of depression during their lifetime and their subsequently contracting cancer. The continuing increase in incidences of cancer in France is a subject that concerns healthcare professionals, patients and their families. Although research has not yet solved all of the enigmas ...

A new American Chemical Society (ACS) video focuses on the world's most sensitive explosive detector to date. Known as FIDO, the handheld detector has been used to detect roadside bombs in Iraq, as well as in homeland security operations and airport security. The video, the latest episode in ACS' Prized Science series, is available at http://www.acs.org/PrizedScience and on DVD. "Dogs are the gold standard [for explosive detection]… but they have some limitations," explains Tim Swager, Ph.D., winner of the 2013 ACS Award for Creative Invention for his work on the device. ...

Early treatment of heart attack patients with an inexpensive beta-blocker drug called metoprolol, while in transit to the hospital, can significantly reduce damage to the heart during a myocardial infarction, according to clinical trial study results published Oct. 1 in the journal Circulation. The study was a collaboration between Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III (CNIC) in Spain and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. The study, involving emergency ambulances and seven hospitals across Spain, shows this simple, low-cost ...

For most women, childbirth is an intense experience, culminating in the joy of delivering a newborn, swaddled and sweet, resting in the mother's arms within hours. Yet for those who deliver their babies prematurely, the experience is bereft of such bonding, laden with anxiety, confusion, and doubt. "Having a prematurely born baby is like a nightmare for the mother," explains Lisa Segre, assistant professor in the University of Iowa College of Nursing. "You're expecting to have a healthy baby, and suddenly you're left wondering whether he or she is going to live." These ...

Washington, DC, October 1, 2013 – Administration of antibiotics may have caused successive outbreaks of vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) in a Greek neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), according to a study in the October issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). A team of physicians at the Aristotle University School of Medicine in Greece responded to two occurrences of VRE in their 44-bed NICU with a bundled intervention of active surveillance, ...

Montreal, October 1, 2013 – October is Canada's Healthy Workplace Month, but how does one stay mentally fit after the 40-hour workweek is traded in for the gold watch? The more you want to use your brain — and the more you enjoy doing it — the more likely you are to stay sharp as you age. This is according to findings recently published in the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences by a team of Concordia University researchers. The new study has three major findings that can help forecast cognitive ability in one's golden years: The more one seeks out ...

What does the assistive robot of the future look like? It depends. A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology finds that older and younger people have varying preferences about what they would want a personal robot to look like. And they change their minds based on what the robot is supposed to do. Participants were shown a series of photos portraying either robotic, human or mixed human-robot faces and were asked to select the one that they would prefer for their robot's appearance. Most college-aged adults in the study preferred a robotic appearance, although ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (October 1, 2013) – A new study released today shows that among patients undergoing surgery for chronic wounds related to diabetes, the risk of wound-related complications is affected by how well the patient's blood sugar levels are controlled before surgery. These findings appear in the October issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). The risk of serious wound complications is more than three times higher for patients who have high blood glucose before and after surgery, ...

Controversy about the risks of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines has been rumbling in the United States for years -- and now it's Israel's turn. After finding traces of the polio virus in sewage, Israel's Ministry of Health launched a national vaccination campaign that reached more than half a million children. Surprisingly, dissenting voices flooded social media and the mainstream news, calling for a halt to the campaign. Endorsements by public figures, like Israel's president Shimon Peres, did little to calm the storm. Now a study led by researchers at Tel Aviv University ...

As they destroy bacteria very efficiently, plasmas constitute an alternative to chemical disinfectants and potentially to antibiotics, as well. How they achieve this effect has been investigated by biologists, plasma physicists and chemists at the Ruhr-Universität (RUB). Cold atmospheric-pressure plasmas attack the prokaryote's cell envelope, proteins and DNA. "This is too great a challenge for the repair mechanisms and the stress response systems of bacteria," says Junior Professor Dr Julia Bandow, Head of the Junior Research Group Microbial Antibiotic Research at the ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (October 1, 2013) – Body contouring surgery to remove excess skin improves long-term weight control in patients after gastric bypass surgery, reports a study in the October issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). "We demonstrated that patients with body contouring present better long-term weight control after gastric bypass," according to the study by Dr. Ali Modarressi and colleagues of University of Geneva, Switzerland. Since maintaining weight loss to reduce long-term ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (October 1, 2013) – A telestroke service increases the rate of effective tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) therapy for patients with acute ischemic stroke treated at community hospitals, according to a report in the October issue of Neurosurgery, official journal of the Congress of Neurological SurgeonsCongress of Neurological Surgeons. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. Other studies in the October Neurosurgery find that known gene variants don't affect the size of brain aneurysms and that surgery ...

If we're to meet a goal set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Renewable Fuels Standard to use 36 billion gallons per year of biofuels—mostly ethanol—the nation must expand its infrastructure for transporting and storing ethanol. Currently, ethanol is transported via trucks, trains, and barges. For the large volumes required in the future, transportation by pipeline is considered to be the most efficient method to get it to customers. The integrity and safety of pipelines and storage tanks is crucial, because ethanol is both flammable and, at certain concentrations, ...

A pair of breakthroughs in the field of silicon photonics by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Micron Technology Inc. could allow for the trajectory of exponential improvement in microprocessors that began nearly half a century ago—known as Moore's Law—to continue well into the future, allowing for increasingly faster electronics, from supercomputers to laptops to smartphones. The research team, led by CU-Boulder researcher Milos Popovic, an assistant professor of electrical, computer and energy engineering, ...

Agricultural extension educators should take a flexible approach in teaching farmers about the changing landscape of food safety regulations, according to Penn State researchers. "We should try to focus on creating programs for growers so that they can do what they need to do economically to stay viable as they face new regulations and standards that can be complex and intimidating," said Daniel Tobin, doctoral candidate in agricultural economics, sociology and education. The researchers said that farmers who attended an extension workshop on food safety standards ...

Of all the amazing technologies humans have developed, none has matched the complexity of the fundamental building block of nature: the living cell. And none of the cell's activities would be possible without thin lipid membranes, or bilayers,that separate its parts and regulate their functions. Understanding and controlling bilayers' properties is vital for advances in biology and biotechnology. Now an interdisciplinary team of Northwestern University researchers has determined how to control bilayers' crystallization by altering the acidity of their surroundings. The ...

Northern Canada's permafrost and semi-permafrost environment is a huge challenge for designing and engineering underground pipelines, and a critical aspect of protecting both the pipeline and this sensitive environment involves the design of an effective corrosion protection system. One of the most common methods to protect buried infrastructure—such as oil and gas transmission pipelines —from corrosion is the application of an external coating. "Although great advances have been made within the past 30 years in terms of coatings reliability and longevity, it's still ...

The Energy Department's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently issued a new report, "Non-Hardware ('Soft') Cost-Reduction Roadmap for Residential and Small Commercial Solar Photovoltaics, 2013,"PDF funded by DOE's SunShot Initiative and written by NREL and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). The report builds off NREL's ongoing soft-cost benchmarking analysis and charts a path to achieve SunShot soft-cost targets of $0.65/W for residential systems and $0.44/W for commercial systems by 2020. Non-hardware costs — also referred to as soft, balance of system, ...

As food security becomes an increasingly important global issue, scientists are looking for the best way to maintain the organic matter in soils using different methods of fertilization and crop rotation. Increasing the organic matter in soils is key to growing crops for numerous reasons, including increased water-holding capacity and improved tilth. Scientists have recently used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) to evaluate the effects of various sources of supplemental nitrogen fertilizer on the chemical composition of soil organic matter. Results of their experiments ...

Johns Hopkins researchers, working with mice, say they have identified a chemical compound that reduces the risk of dangerous, potentially stroke-causing blood vessel spasms that often occur after the rupture of a bulging vessel in the brain. They say their findings offer clues about the biological mechanisms that cause vasospasm, or constriction of blood vessels that reduces oxygen flow to the brain, as well as potential means of treating the serious condition in humans. When an aneurysm — essentially a blister-like bulge in the wall of a blood vessel — bursts, blood ...

JUPITER, FL – October 1, 2013 – The membranes surrounding and inside cells are involved in every aspect of biological function. They separate the cell's various metabolic functions, compartmentalize the genetic material, and drive evolution by separating a cell's biochemical activities. They are also the largest and most complex structures that cells synthesize. Understanding the myriad biochemical roles of membranes requires the ability to prepare synthetic versions of these complex multi-layered structures, which has been a long-standing challenge. In a study published ...

Around 10 per cent of the UK is left handed — and that percentage remains consistent in many populations around the world. But why exactly someone is left or right handed remains unclear. New research from The University of Nottingham's Professor John Armour and Dr Angus Davison, in collaboration with UCL's Professor Chris McManus, has ruled out a 'strong genetic determinant' in influencing handedness. The researchers conducted a twin study examining the whole genome — which contains hereditary information — of nearly 4,000 subjects from the London Twin Research Unit ...

Knocking on wood is the most common superstition in Western culture used to reverse bad fortune or undo a "jinx." Other cultures maintain similar practices, like spitting or throwing salt, after someone has tempted fate. Even people who aren't particularly superstitious often participate in these practices. A new study from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business finds that these superstitions actually do "reverse" perceived bad fortune. People believe that negative outcomes are especially likely after a jinx. If someone says, "No one I know will ever get ...