The chance of infection in some hospital wards varies dramatically according to whether the nurses leave the windows open. A University of Leeds-led team studied airflow in a "Nightingale" ward—a classic hospital ward design that traditionally accommodates two rows of up to 30 beds—by using tracer gases to simulate how airborne infections spread. They found ventilation in the ward was generally good when windows were left open, keeping the danger of airborne infection low. But risks increased fourfold when the windows were closed. Lead investigator Dr Cath Noakes, ...

A new process for growing forests of manganese dioxide nanorods may lead to the next generation of high-performance capacitors. As an energy-storage material for batteries and capacitors, manganese dioxide has a lot going for it: it's cheap, environmentally friendly and abundant. However, chemical capacitors made with manganese dioxide have lacked the power of the typical carbon-based physical capacitor. Michigan Technological University scientist Dennis Desheng Meng theorized that the situation could be improved if the manganese dioxide were made into nanorods, which ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., – April 16, 2013 – Many people survive their cancers, but end up dying of cardiovascular disease (CVD). New research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center finds that CVD risk factors may be overlooked during survivorship care. Kathryn E. Weaver, Ph.D., assistant professor of social sciences and health policy at Wake Forest Baptist, and colleagues surveyed survivors of breast, prostate, colorectal and gynecologic cancers in search of answers. "Increasingly, we are concerned about cardiovascular health in long-term cancer survivors, and we believe ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- William M. Tierney, M.D. focuses on the potential of electronic medical systems and computer-based decision support to control healthcare costs in "Controlling costs with computer-based decision support: a hammer, a scalpel or an illusion?" published online in JAMA Internal Medicine on April 15. Dr. Tierney is president and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute, associate dean for clinical effectiveness research at the Indiana University School of Medicine, chief of medicine for Wishard-Eskenazi Health, and a practicing physician. Drawing upon his lengthy ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — An international team of researchers, including an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, has an explanation for why we see so many hybrid moths in nature. The team closely examined the behavior and the olfactory circuitry of male moths and found an answer in female-produced pheromones — chemicals generally consisting of a blend of two to several derivatives of fatty acids. Male moths use pheromones to find females. To avoid mating with the wrong moth species, the pheromone blends are specific for each moth species, with only males ...

Achieving widespread reductions in preventable hospital readmissions among Medicare beneficiaries may take longer than many health care professionals originally anticipated, according to researchers at Penn State, the Weill Cornell Medical College and the University of Pennsylvania. "Studies show that one in five Medicare beneficiaries returns to the hospital within 30 days of discharge at an annual cost of $18 billion to the program, and many of these readmissions are thought to be preventable with better care," said Jessica Mittler, assistant professor of health policy ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. – Researchers may have found a way to block kidney-destroying inflammation and help damaged kidney cells recover. In a related study, they report progress on a non-invasive method to assess how much kidney function has survived a serious bout of inflammation or a chronic problem like high blood pressure. The diagnostic tool could help physicians make hard choices about whether a patient has enough kidney function left to benefit from treatment or whether dialysis or a transplant is in their future, said Dr. Michael P. Madaio, nephrologist and Chairman of ...

CHICAGO --- A study published today in the European Heart Journal found no evidence that digoxin increases mortality in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF), the opposite of results just published by another group in the same journal analyzing the same data. Older patients with AF also often have heart failure, and digoxin is approved to treat both conditions. AF is the most common kind of cardiac arrhythmia, an electrical malfunction that throws off the heart's rhythm and pumping rate. It may cause no symptoms or cause some patients to faint, but is seldom fatal. Heart ...

The latest national survey of 100% biodiesel (B100) "blend stock" samples by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that 95% of the samples from 2011-12 met ASTM International fuel quality specifications. The ASTM standards serve as guidelines for industry and are designed to ensure quality at the pump for consumers – along with reliable operation of the nation's vehicles powered by biodiesel blends. "The survey showed a major improvement over results from previous years," NREL Senior Chemist Teresa Alleman said. "In our 2007 ...

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and UC Berkeley and have discovered new materials to capture methane, the second highest concentration greenhouse gas emitted into the atmosphere. Methane is a substantial driver of global climate change, contributing 30 percent of current net climate warming. Concern over methane is mounting, due to leaks associated with rapidly expanding unconventional oil and gas extraction, and the potential for large-scale release of methane from the Arctic as ice cover continues to melt and decayed material releases methane ...

It may be possible soon to charge cell phones, change the tint on windows, or power small toys with peel-and-stick versions of solar cells, thanks to a partnership between Stanford University and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). A scientific paper, "Peel and Stick: Fabricating Thin Film Solar Cells on Universal Substrates," appears in the online version of Scientific Reports, a subsidiary of the British scientific journal Nature. Peel-and-stick, or water-assisted transfer printing (WTP), technologies were developed by the ...

VIDEO: Moshmi Bhattacharya, Ph.D., and graduate student Donna Cvetkovic describe new findings about kisspeptins. while they usually prevent the spread of cancer, kisspeptins actally make some breast cancers worse, with... Click here for more information. KISS 1 is a metastasis-suppressor gene which helps to prevent the spread of cancers, including melanoma, pancreatic and ovarian cancers to name a few. But new research from Western University's Schulich School of Medicine & ...

MINNEAPOLIS – New research suggests that fainting may be genetic and, in some families, only one gene may be responsible. However, a predisposition to certain triggers, such as emotional distress or the sight of blood, may not be inherited. The study is published in the April 16, 2013, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Fainting, also called vasovagal syncope, is a brief loss of consciousness when your body reacts to certain triggers. It affects at least one out of four people. "Our study strengthens the evidence that ...

Researchers have discovered a biomarker that may help prevent a devastating intestinal disease that occurs in one of every 10 early preterm infants. The Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center study may help prevent necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), a condition primarily seen in preemies in which bowel tissue dies. The death rate approaches 30 percent. Survivors are at risk for short-bowel syndrome (caused by surgical removal of the small intestine) and neurodevelopmental disability. The study is published in the journal Microbiome. The research, led by Ardythe ...

A cup of beetroot juice a day may help reduce your blood pressure, according to a small study in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension. People with high blood pressure who drank about 8 ounces of beetroot juice experienced a decrease in blood pressure of about 10 mm Hg. But the preliminary findings don't yet suggest that supplementing your diet with beetroot juice benefits your health, researchers said. "Our hope is that increasing one's intake of vegetables with a high dietary nitrate content, such as green leafy vegetables or beetroot, might be a lifestyle ...

Patients' health outcomes improve when physicians individualize care and take their patients' life circumstances into account, according to a new study by the University of Illinois at Chicago and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The study is the largest ever to be conducted using real patients to collect data about their doctors' behavior using concealed audio recorders. It appears in the April 16 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine and was funded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. "What our study really tells us is that the information that patients ...

Research at Johns Hopkins suggests that if hospitals would show physicians the price of some diagnostic laboratory tests at the time the tests are ordered, doctors would order substantially fewer of them or search for lower-priced alternatives. In a study of up-front price transparency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, the researchers found that the practice of offering price information decreased overall use of tests by roughly 9 percent. Currently, hospitals typically keep both patients and providers essentially blind to the cost of medical services, a system that wastefully ...

Contrary to conventional wisdom, short-term hearing loss after sustained exposure to loud noise does not reflect damage to our hearing: instead, it is the body's way to cope. The landmark finding could lead to improved protection against noise-induced hearing loss in future. The research, led by University of New South Wales Professor Gary Housley, has found that "reversible hearing loss" is a physiological adaptation mechanism, allowing the cochlea (the auditory portion of the inner ear) to perform normally when exposed to noise stress. "This explains why we lose ...

An eight gene 'signature' can predict length of relapse-free survival after chemotherapy, finds new research in Biomed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine. Researchers from Academia Sinica and the National Taiwan University College of Medicine first identified genes that were involved in cellular invasion, a property of many cancer cells, using the National Cancer Institute's 60 human cancer cell line panel (NCI-60). Comparing the pattern of activation of each of these genes in different cell lines with how these cell lines responded to 99 different anti-cancer ...

ATP is the main energy currency of cells and one might expect that not only contracting muscle, but also uncontrollably dividing cancer cells would have a high demand for ATP. However, for some reason cancer cells have re-programmed their metabolic engines to produce less ATP. The phenomenon, known as Warburg effect, is typical for cancer cells and the mechanism behind is believed to benefit cancer cells by switching biochemical engines from energy manufacturing reactions to anabolic reactions, which primarily support growth of the cell size and proliferation. The triggers ...

Abnormal gut bacteria in premature babies can be found days before the onset of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) finds new research in BioMed Central's open access journal Microbiome. Babies who later went on to develop NEC had a lower diversity of gut bacteria 4-9 days after birth, increased level of Firmicutes or Enterobacteriaceae, and lacked the Propionibacterium found in healthy babies. NEC is a common but devastating problem of premature babies - affecting about 10% of infants born at under 29 weeks, about a third will die. To find out what the difference is between ...

New research results from Uppsala University, Sweden, instil hope of efficient hydrogen production with green algae being possible in the future, despite the prevailing scepticism based on previous research. The study, which is published today in the esteemed journal PNAS, changes the view on the ability of green algae – which is good news. The world must find a way of producing fuel from renewable energy sources to replace the fossil fuels. Hydrogen is today considered one of the most promising fuels for the future and if hydrogen can be produced directly from sunlight ...

For the first time, researchers have linked autism in a mouse model of the disease with abnormalities in specific regions of the animals' chromosomes. The regions contain genes associated with aberrant brain development and activity. "These discoveries in mice may eventually pave the way towards understanding autism in human patients and devising new treatments," said co-senior author, Elliott H. Sherr, MD, PhD, a pediatric neurologist at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital and professor of neurology at UC San Francisco (UCSF). The findings are reported in a study published ...

This adds up to around 1900 fewer such admissions every year, the authors calculate, and confirms the value of public health interventions, such as smoking bans, they say. They base their findings on the number of emergency admissions for asthma among adults aged 16 and over in England between April 1997 and December 2010. Smoking in all public places was banned in July 2007 in England, where the prevalence of asthma is one of the highest in the world, affecting almost 6% of the population. During the study period, 502,000 adults with asthma were admitted as emergencies. ...

A resting heart rate - the number of heart beats per minute - is determined by an individual's level of physical fitness, circulating hormones, and the autonomic nervous system. A rate at rest of between 60 and 100 beats per minute is considered normal. People who are very physically active tend to have a low heart rate at rest, but the authors wanted to find out if heart rate had any bearing on an individual's risk of death, irrespective of their level of cardiorespiratory fitness. They therefore tracked the health of just under 3000 men for 16 years, all of whom ...