There are three common drugs for advanced ovarian cancer: paclitaxel, cyclophosphamide, and topotecan. Like a shell game, if you pick the right drug a patient is likely to respond. And, unfortunately, picking the wrong drug can lead to treatment failure. As reported in this month's issue of the journal PLoS ONE, a University of Colorado Cancer Center and University of Virginia study used a sophisticated model of ovarian cancer genetics to match the right tumor with the right drug. Patients who were matched in this way lived an average 21 months longer than patients who ...

RICHLAND, Wash. – Scientists have created a microbattery that packs twice the energy compared to current microbatteries used to monitor the movements of salmon through rivers in the Pacific Northwest and around the world. The battery, a cylinder just slightly larger than a long grain of rice, is certainly not the world's smallest battery, as engineers have created batteries far tinier than the width of a human hair. But those smaller batteries don't hold enough energy to power acoustic fish tags. The new battery is small enough to be injected into an organism and holds ...

Coral Gables, Fla. (Feb. 17, 2014) -- There is a big effort in industry to produce electrical devices with more and faster memory and logic. Magnetic memory elements, such as in a hard drive, and in the future in what is called MRAM (magnetic random access memory), use electrical currents to encode information. However, the heat which is generated is a significant problem, since it limits the density of devices and hence the performance of computer chips. Scientists are now proposing a novel approach to achieve greater memory density while producing less heat: by using ...

In May 2011, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used explosives to breach a levee south of Cairo, Ill., diverting the rising waters of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to prevent flooding in the town, about 130,000 acres of Missouri farmland were inundated. It was the largest flood of the lower Mississippi ever recorded, and researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign took advantage of this "once-in-a-scientific-lifetime" occurrence to study the damage, funded by a National Science Foundation Rapid Response Grant. Their results, published this week ...

Spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and then stopping it could exacerbate the problem of climate change, according to new research by atmospheric scientists at the University of Washington. Carrying out geoengineering for several decades and then stopping would cause warming at a rate that will greatly exceed that expected due to global warming, according to a study published Feb. 18 in Environmental Research Letters. "The absolute temperature ends up being roughly the same as what it would have been, but the rate of change is so drastic, ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Programs that aim to curb teen prescription drug abuse have vastly differing effectiveness, ranging from big drops in drug abuse to no measurable effect, according to a new study of 11,000 teenagers by researchers at Duke and Pennsylvania State universities. The best results came from pairing a school-based program with a home-based intervention, resulting in a 10 percent decrease in abuse rates. By contrast, most school-based programs were ineffective when used by themselves, with just one exception. The six-year study is among the first to measure ...

Led by biomedical engineer Justin Zook of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a team of scientists from Harvard University and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute of Virginia Tech has presented new methods to integrate data from different sequencing platforms, thus producing a reliable set of genotypes to benchmark human genome sequencing. "Understanding the human genome is an immensely complex task and we need great methods to guide this research," Zook says. "By establishing reference materials and gold standard data sets, scientists are one step closer ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. –Women between the ages of 18 and 24 are at the highest risk for dating violence, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, these women are less likely than older adults to seek formal safety resources and instead look to peers or technology for help and advice. In an effort to connect more young women with safety information, University of Missouri researchers collaborated with Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and the One Love Foundation to develop the "One Love My Plan" smartphone application, an interactive tool that ...

With the introduction of curved smartphones, flexible electronic goods are gradually moving to the center stages of various markets. Flexible display technology is the culmination of the latest, cutting-edge electric cell device technology. Developing such products, however, requires not only a curved display, but also operational precision of other parts, including the memory, in a flexible state. Dr. Tae-Wook Kim at KIST announced their successful development of a 64-bit memory array using flexible and twistable carbon nano material and organo-polymer compound, which ...

Nursing homes are widely used by Medicare beneficiaries who require rehabilitation after hospital stays. But according to a recent study led by a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing, a high percentage of Medicare patients who are discharged from nursing homes will return to the hospital or the emergency room within 30 days. "Nearly two million older adults use this benefit every year," said assistant professor Mark Toles, the first author of the study. "Before this study, we didn't recognize the large number of older adults ...

AUDIO: Falon Tilley and Michael W. Beets discuss the successful implementation of the Healthy Lunchbox Challenge, an innovative theory and incentive-based program, at four large-scale, community-based summer day camps. They observed... Click here for more information. PHILADELPHIA, PA, February 18, 2014 – During the school year, 21 million children receive free or reduced-price lunches, yet less than 10% of those children participate in the Department of Agriculture's Summer ...

Jena (Germany) A trousers button, a coin or a watch can be dangerous for people with a nickel allergy. Approximately 1 in 10 Germans is allergic to the metal. "This raises the question of the safety of medical implants containing nickel," explains Professor Dr. Markus Rettenmayr of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany). Nickel-titanium alloys are increasingly used as material for cardiovascular implants in minimal invasive surgery. Once implanted, nickel-titanium alloys can release small amounts of nickel due to corrosion phenomena, the holder of the Chair of ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Corporations with board directors who have investment banking experience are more likely to acquire other businesses – and make better acquisitions when they do – according to a new study from the University at Buffalo School of Management. Forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Economics, the study found that directors with investment banking experience help their firms to select better businesses to acquire, more accurately determine the value of the target business and either reduce reliance on mergers and acquisition consultants or negotiate lower ...

The nature of the machinery responsible for the entry of proteins into cell membranes has been unravelled by scientists, who hope the breakthrough could ultimately be exploited for the design of new anti-bacterial drugs. Groups of researchers from the University of Bristol and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) used new genetic engineering technologies to reconstruct and isolate the cell's protein trafficking machinery. Its analysis has shed new light on a process which had previously been a mystery for molecular biologists. The findings, published today ...

People and spaces, the tragedy of commonsense morality, myths about meaning of life, and remaking love were four themes at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference in Austin. Researchers presented new work, showing how psychology reaches into our everyday lives. Video from four of these talks is now available online. Highlights include: Sam Gosling of the University of Texas-Austin described how the link between our emotions and spaces is is inseparable. As such, our spaces say a lot about us. In new work, Gosling and colleagues identified ...

Sophia Antipolis, 18 February 2014: One-quarter of high risk patients do not receive anticoagulants after ablation of atrial fibrillation (AF), according to the latest survey of European practice. The EORP Atrial Fibrillation Ablation Pilot Study, conducted by the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), reveals that 65% of patients were taking anticoagulants one year after ablation of AF.1 But up to 25% of patients at high risk of stroke (defined as a CHA2DS2-VASc score >1) were not taking any anticoagulant drug. And around ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid have designed a system that speeds up online administrative procedures by automatically verifying and validating printed electronic documents, a process that had been done manually up until now. With the law known as Ley 11/2007, regarding citizens' electronic access to public services, going into effect, electronic documents have gained full legal validity. When a document of this type is printed out, it must be accompanied by its Código Seguro de Verificación (CSV- Secure ...

Couples with young children are as likely to stay together if the mother is the main breadwinner rather than the father, new research shows. A paper published in the journal Sociology today [Tuesday 18 February 2014] says the relationships of parents are in some cases more stable if the mother earns more than the father. Dr Shireen Kanji, of the University of Leicester School of Management, and Dr Pia Schober, of the German Institute for Economic Research, Berlin, examined survey data on 3,944 British couples as their first child aged from eight months to seven years. ...

Emotional eating is something we're all familiar with. Maybe you had had a rough week at work and all you want on Friday night is to plop down and watch a movie with a giant bowl of buttery popcorn. Maybe you're a student stressed about a big exam and you're munching on candy as you study. Or maybe your child's birthday party is coming up and you've bought an ice cream cake to serve a small army to celebrate. Happy or sad, up or down, there's a plethora of media in the world that tells us our moods often dictate the foods we choose to eat. More recent studies, though, ...

Jerusalem, Feb. 18, 2014 – Experimental work pointing to a therapy for alleviating mucositis -- a common, severe side effect of chemotherapy and irradiation of cancer patients or patients prepared for bone marrow transplantation – has been achieved by an international team of researchers from the US and Israel headed by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Mucositis is a strong inflammatory reaction of the mucosal lining of the digestive system, particularly the gut. Mucositis is often a major reason for premature suspension of anti-cancer therapy. As ...

Winter in the Arctic is not only cold and dark, it is also storm season when hurricane-like cyclones traverse the northern waters from Iceland to Alaska. These cyclones are characterized by strong localized drops in sea level pressure, and as Arctic-wide decreases in sea level pressure are one of the expected results of climate change, this could increase extreme Arctic cyclone activity, including powerful storms in the spring and fall. A new study in Geophysical Research Letters uses historical climate model simulations to demonstrate that there has been an Arctic-wide ...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18, 2014 — In what may be the warmest Winter Olympics on record, Sochi looks more like SoCal by the day. With few real snowflakes around to blanket Sochi's slopes, the latest episode of the American Chemical Society's Reactions YouTube series explains how science keeps the Winter Olympics alive with artificial snow. The video is available at http://youtu.be/ftMFMlk6FlA. Producing artificial snow isn't as simple as grinding up big blocks of ice and spraying it on the slopes. Sochi's artificial snow guns — cannons that fire fake snow 20 to 30 feet in ...

Are you active at your job? If you're like most workers, you probably aren't. And the consequences could be deadly. A team of researchers at the University of Iowa measured physical activity in police, whose jobs are presumably predicated on movement. Yet the group found that police officers burn as much energy on the job as someone sitting while holding a baby or washing dishes. "We find that police work is primarily sedentary," explains Sandra Ramey, assistant professor in the UI College of Nursing. "The public view, how the media portray it on shows like 'Hawaii ...

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz uses computer simulations to explore the universe's most violent events, so when the first detailed observations of a star being ripped apart by a black hole were reported in 2012 (Gezari et al., Nature), he was eager to compare the data with his simulations. He was also highly skeptical of one of the published conclusions: that the disrupted star was a rare helium star. "I was sure it was a normal hydrogen star and we were just not understanding what's going on," said Ramirez-Ruiz, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, ...

Primary care doctors are not quick to prescribe antihypertensive medication to young people even after an average of 20 months of high blood pressure. Young adults who are white, male, not on Medicaid and not frequent clinic visitors are especially less likely to receive medication. These are the results of a study¹ by a research team at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in the United States led by Heather Johnson. It appears in the Journal of General Internal Medicine², published by Springer. One in every 10 Americans between the ages of ...