In the first national survey of enrollment policies at hospices, researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Yale University have found that the vast majority of hospices in the United States have at least one enrollment policy that could restrict access for terminally ill Medicare patients with high-cost medical needs. The study, which is published in the December issue of Health Affairs (http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/31/12/2690.abstract), calls for reform of Medicare reimbursement rates and hospice eligibility requirements. Led by Melissa Aldridge ...

A surprising discovery about the physical properties of cancer cells could help improve a new diagnostic approach – a liquid biopsy – that detects, measures, and evaluates cancer cells in blood. Cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream can form metastases – new tumors. Detecting these rare circulating cancer cells in a blood sample is much less invasive than a standard tumor biopsy, and could prove useful for monitoring cancer progression and detecting recurrence. While studying what happens to cancer cells when they are subjected to powerful fluid forces, like ...

Phoenix, AZ Dec. 2, 2012) -- A team of brain cancer researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center has effectively treated brain tumor cells using a unique combination of diet and radiation therapy. The study, "The Ketogenic Diet Is an Effective Adjuvant to Radiation Therapy for the Treatment of Malignant Glioma," was published in PLOS ONE. Led by Adrienne C. Scheck, PhD, Principal Investigator in Neuro-Oncology and Neurosurgery Research at Barrow, the groundbreaking research studied the effects of the ketogenic diet in conjunction ...

Rain in Southern Arizona is scarce and precious to begin with, but the afternoon shower that soaked the soil 25 miles north of Tucson on Nov. 29 was unusual in several ways. Spouting from a network of pipes, thousands of gallons of water drizzled down onto the world's only and largest manmade experimental watershed, recently completed at the University of Arizona's Biosphere 2. Six-hundred tons of ground-up volcanic rocks blanket a giant steel tub resting at an incline to form an artificial hillslope. Three identical such hillslopes, each measuring 100 feet long ...

In a well-known fairy tale, Rumpelstiltskin used magic to weave straw into gold. Today, scientists are reversing that formula — using gold to turn straw (and other forms of biomass) into today's global currency: energy. The magic involves a special nanocatalyst, in which minute particles of gold dot the surface of titanium-oxide. The forces that emerge from the combination of these two materials are strong enough to breaks the O-O bond of oxygen molecules and the C-O bond of acetic acid, a byproduct of biomass conversion that, when combined with hydrogen, forms ethanol, ...

LA JOLLA, CA---- A new method for generating stem cells from mature cells promises to boost stem cell production in the laboratory, helping to remove a barrier to regenerative medicine therapies that would replace damaged or unhealthy body tissues. The technique, developed by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, allows for the unlimited production of stem cells and their derivatives as well as reduces production time by more than half, from nearly two months to two weeks. "One of the barriers that needs to be overcome before stem cell therapies ...

Sydney, Australia - Using a super-resolution fluorescent microscope, Australian medical scientists are a step closer to understanding why and how human immune cells decide to activate or not, thus enabling or preventing disease taking hold in the body. Professor Katharina Gaus and her team at the Centre for Vascular Research based at UNSW's Lowy Cancer Research Centre used some of the most advanced super-resolution optical microscope technology available anywhere in the world to see changes in individual proteins in T-cells – the workhorse of our immune system. "Every ...

BETHESDA, MD – DECEMBER 4, 2012 -- It's common knowledge that excessive UV exposure from sunlight raises your chances for skin cancer, but predicting whether someone will actually develop skin cancer remains difficult. In a new research report, scientists from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison show that the risk for skin cancer involves numerous genetic factors including family history, ethnicity, and genetic variations specific to each individual. Using these factors, the researchers developed a more precise model for ...

Bethesda, MD—December 4, 2012 – Listed below are the selected highlights for the December 2012 issue of the Genetics Society of America's journal, Genetics. The December issue is available online at www.genetics.org/content/current. Please credit Genetics, Vol. 192, December 2012, Copyright © 2012. Please feel free to forward to colleagues who may be interested in these articles. ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS Genetic variation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae: Circuit diversification in a signal transduction network, pp. 1523-1532 Brian L. Chin, Owen Ryan, Fran Lewitter, Charles ...

When we eat too much, obesity may develop as a result of chronically high insulin levels, not the other way around. That's according to new evidence in mice reported in the December 4th Cell Metabolism, a Cell Press publication, which challenges the widespread view that rising insulin is a secondary consequence of obesity and insulin resistance. The new study helps to solve this chicken-or-the-egg dilemma by showing that animals with persistently lower insulin stay trim even as they indulge themselves on a high-fat, all-you-can-eat buffet. The findings come as some of ...

Emory researchers announced results of a new study that has proven successful in the prevention of depression in people diagnosed with epilepsy. Depression is one of the most common psychiatric disorders in people with epilepsy. It affects between 32 and 48 percent of people with the disease. Depression is known to have more of an impact on quality of life than frequent seizures. A team of researchers at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University led a study that applied a revised version of a web- and phone-based method focused on preventing, rather ...

Arthrobotrys oligospora doesn't live a charmed life; it survives on a diet of roundworm. But a discovery by a team led by Mingjun Zhang, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, could give the fungus's life more purpose—as a cancer fighter. Zhang and his team have discovered that nanoparticles produced by A. oligospora hold promise for stimulating the immune system and killing tumors. The findings are published in this month's edition of Advanced Functional Materials. Zhang commonly looks to nature for solutions ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The more states spend on home-delivered meals under the Older Americans Act, the more likely they are to help people who don't need nursing home care to stay in their homes, according to a newly published Brown University statistical analysis of a decade of spending and nursing home resident data. "Despite efforts to rebalance long-term care, there are still many nursing home residents who have the functional capacity to live in a less restrictive environment," wrote gerontology researchers Kali Thomas and Vincent Mor in the article ...

The new generation of bio-based plastic packaging is not only eco-friendly but also has several superior qualities compared to traditional plastic packaging. The plastic packaging industry is moving towards completely bio-based products. The volume of oil used every year in the production of plastics equates to approximately five per cent of the world's total oil consumption. Approximately 40 per cent of all plastics are used in packaging, which puts special pressure on the packaging industry to reduce dependence on oil. The use of renewable natural resources in industrial ...

Scientists have taken inspiration from one of the oldest natural materials to exploit the extraordinary qualities of graphene, a material set to revolutionise fields from computers and batteries to composite materials. Published today in Nature Communications, a Monash University study led by Professor Dan Li has established, for the first time, an effective way of forming graphene, which normally exists in very thin layers, into useful three-dimensional forms by mirroring the structure of cork. Graphene is formed when graphite is broken down into layers one atom thick. ...

"There is a critical need for scientists to address basic questions that have hindered the development of emerging energy resources, including geothermal, wind, solar and natural gas, from underground shale formations," said Mark Zoback, a professor of geophysics at Stanford University. "In this talk we present, from a university perspective, a few examples of fundamental research needs related to improved energy and resource recovery." Zoback, an authority on shale gas development and hydraulic fracturing, served on the U.S. Secretary of Energy's Committee on Shale Gas ...

A new analysis of topographic and gravity data from Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons, indicates that Titan's icy outer crust is twice as thick as has generally been thought. Scientists have long suspected that a vast ocean of liquid water lies under the crust. The new study suggests that the internally generated heat that keeps that ocean from freezing solid depends far more on Titan's interactions with Saturn and its other moons than had been suspected. Howard Zebker, a professor of geophysics and of electrical engineering at Stanford University, will present the ...

Stanford geophysicists are well represented at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union this week in San Francisco. Included among the many presentations will be several studies that relate to predicting ­– and preparing for – major earthquakes in the Himalaya Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. The AGU Fall Meeting is the largest worldwide conference in the geophysical sciences, attracting more than 20,000 Earth and space scientists, educators, students, and other leaders. This 45th annual fall meeting is taking place through Dec. 7 at the Moscone Convention Center ...

A software tool called PredictAD developed by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland promises to enable earlier diagnosis of the disease on the basis of patient measurements and large databases. Alzheimer's disease currently takes on average 20 months to diagnose in Europe. VTT has shown that the new method could allow as many as half of patients to get a diagnosis approximately a year earlier. VTT has been studying whether patients suffering from memory problems could be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease at an earlier stage in the light of their measurement values. ...

Fertility tests frequently reveal that males have problems with the quality of their sperm. The problems often relate to sperm senescence, which is a reduction in quality with age. Sperm senescence can arise either before or after the DNA in the sperm cells is produced by a process known as meiosis. So-called "pre-meiotic" senescence results from accumulated damage in the germline cells with increasing age and results in older males having sperm of lower quality. Post-meiotic senescence occurs after the sperm cells have been produced, either during storage of sperm ...

Tornado-like vortexes can be produced in bizarre fluids which are controlled by quantum mechanics, completely unlike normal liquids. New research published today in the journal Nature Communications demonstrates how massed ranks of these quantum twisters line up in rows, and paves the way for engineering quantum circuits and chips measuring motion ultra-precisely. The destructive power of rampaging tornadoes defeats the human ability to control them. A Cambridge team has managed to create and control hundreds of tiny twisters on a semiconductor chip. By controlling where ...

Drinking three to four cups of coffee per day may help to prevent type 2 diabetes according to research highlighted in a session report published by the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC), a not-for-profit organisation devoted to the study and disclosure of science related to coffee and health. Recent scientific evidence has consistently linked regular, moderate coffee consumption with a possible reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes. An update of this research and key findings presented during a session at the 2012 World Congress on Prevention ...

Using DNA detection techniques developed at the University, the team mapped the presence of foxes in Tasmania, predicted their spread and developed a model of their likely distribution as a blueprint for fox eradication, but swift and decisive action is needed. University of Canberra professor in wildlife genetics and leader of the team, Stephen Sarre, found foxes are widespread in northern and eastern Tasmania and the model developed by his team forecasts they will spread even further with likely devastating consequences for the island's wildlife. "There's nothing ...

After years of basic research, scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) are increasingly able to understand the mechanisms underlying the human Usher syndrome and are coming ever closer to finding a successful treatment approach. The scientists in the Usher research group of Professor Dr. Uwe Wolfrum are evaluating two different strategies. These involve either the repair of mutated genes or the deactivation of the genetic defects using agents. Based on results obtained to date, both options seem promising. Usher syndrome is a congenital disorder that causes ...

New research from the University of Southampton has shown that copper can prevent horizontal transmission of genes, which has contributed to the increasing number of antibiotic-resistant infections worldwide. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in bacteria is largely responsible for the development of antibiotic-resistance, which has led to an increasing number of difficult-to-treat healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs). The newly-published paper, which appears in the journal mBio, shows that while HGT can take place in the environment, on frequently-touched surfaces, ...