Patients who take a triple combination of blood pressure drugs and common painkillers are at an increased risk of serious kidney problems, especially at the start of treatment, finds a study published on bmj.com today. Although the absolute risk for individuals is low, it is still something doctors and patients should be aware of, say the researchers. Acute kidney injury (also known as kidney failure) is a major public health concern. It occurs in more than 20% of hospital inpatients and is associated with around half of all potentially preventable deaths in hospital. ...

Breast and colorectal cancer screening should be targeted towards patients with a life expectancy greater than 10 years: for any shorter life expectancy the harms are likely to outweigh the benefits, concludes a study published on bmj.com today. The authors stress that their results "should not be used to deny screening for patients with limited life expectancy" but "should inform decision making which aims to account for patient preferences and values while maximising benefits and minimising risks." Guidelines recommend screening healthy older patients because complications ...

A special report published by the BMJ today finds that thousands of melanoma patients around the world are undergoing an expensive and invasive procedure called sentinel node biopsy, despite a lack of clear evidence and concerns that it may do more harm than good. Although not recommended for routine use in England, it has become the standard care for melanoma patients in several countries including the United States, where it was estimated to cost over $686m in 2012. Melanoma is the fifth most common cancer in the UK, affecting one in 60 people. In the US it affects ...

Male deaths from all-causes, but particularly cardiovascular and respiratory disease, could be significantly reduced with a decrease in biomass smoke (smoke produced by domestic cooking and heating and woodland fires), a paper published today on bmj.com suggests. The researchers say this could have significant impact on further interventions to reduce pollution from this source. Although a large amount of research has been carried out on the adverse health effects of air pollution, no studies have reported reductions in deaths associated with interventions to reduce ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – An experimental oral drug given to mice after a spinal cord injury was effective at improving limb movement after the injury, a new study shows. The compound efficiently crossed the blood-brain barrier, did not increase pain and showed no toxic effects to the animals. "This is a first to have a drug that can be taken orally to produce functional improvement with no toxicity in a rodent model," said Sung Ok Yoon, associate professor of molecular & cellular biochemistry at Ohio State University and lead author of the study. "So far, in the spinal cord ...

A synthetic "poop" developed at the University of Guelph can cure nasty gastrointestinal infections caused by Clostridium difficile, a toxin-producing bacterium. A study on the artificial stool was published today in the inaugural issue of Microbiome, a new peer-reviewed science journal. The stool – a "super-probiotic" called RePOOPulate – was created by Guelph microbiologist Emma Allen-Vercoe to replace human fecal matter used in stool transplants, a known treatment for C. difficile. She made the super-probiotic from purified intestinal bacterial cultures grown ...

An analysis of the first three years of data from NASA's Kepler mission, which already has discovered thousands of potential exoplanets, contains good news for those searching for habitable worlds outside our solar system. It shows that 17 percent of all sun-like stars have planets one to two times the diameter of Earth orbiting close to their host stars, according to a team of astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. This estimate includes only planets that circle their stars within a distance of about one-quarter ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- The hand-held scanners, or tricorders, of the Star Trek movies and television series are one step closer to reality now that a University of Missouri engineering team has invented a compact source of X-rays and other forms of radiation. The radiation source, which is the size of a stick of gum, could be used to create inexpensive and portable X-ray scanners for use by doctors, as well as to fight terrorism and aid exploration on this planet and others. "Currently, X-ray machines are huge and require tremendous amounts of electricity," said Scott Kovaleski, ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– For decades, consensus among psychologists has held that a group of five personality traits –– or slight variations of these five –– are a universal feature of human psychology. However, a study by anthropologists at UC Santa Barbara raises doubt about the veracity of that five-factor model (FFM) of personality structure as it relates to indigenous populations. Their findings appear in the current issue of the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Studying the Tsimane, an isolated indigenous group ...

Cambridge, Mass. - January 8, 2013 - At a time when communication networks are scrambling for ways to transmit more data over limited bandwidth, a type of twisted light wave is gaining new attention. Called an optical vortex or vortex beam, this complex beam resembles a corkscrew, with waves that rotate as they travel. Now, applied physicists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created a new device that enables a conventional optical detector (which would normally only measure the light's intensity) to pick up on that rotation. The ...

Testing medicines to prevent lung cancer requires treating many thousands of high-risk individuals and then waiting 5, 10 or 15 years to discover which of them develop cancer and which, if any, experience survival benefit from the treatment. A University of Colorado Cancer Center study recently published in the journal Cancer Prevention Research proposes a possible waypoint on the way to benefit, which if validated, could dramatically reduce the number of patients needed and time required to test drugs for lung cancer prevention. "Chemoprevention is an important approach ...

ROSEMONT, Ill.—Female athletes are three times more likely to suffer from anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) ruptures, one of the most common knee injuries, compared to male athletes. The ACL is one of the four main ligaments within the knee that connect the femur (upper leg bone) to the tibia (lower leg bone). Recent research highlights the unique anatomical differences in the female knee that may contribute to higher injury rates, and should be taken into consideration during reconstructive surgery and sports training, according to a review article in the January 2013 issue ...

LA JOLLA, CA – January 8, 2013 - Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found an easier way to perform one of the most fundamental tasks in molecular biology. Their new method allows scientists to add a marker to certain cells, so that these cells may be easily located and/or selected out from a larger cell population. The technique, which is described in a recent issue of the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, makes use of the tight binding of two proteins that are cheaply obtainable but are not found in human or other mammalian ...

Foreign invaders such as pythons and lionfish are not the only threats to Florida's natural habitat. The native Carolina Willow is also starting to strangle portions of the St. Johns River. Biologists at the University of Central Florida recently completed a study that shows this slender tree once used by Native Americans for medicinal purposes, may be thriving because of water-management projects initiated in the 1950s. Canals were built to control runoff and provide water for agriculture. The unintended consequence -- stable water levels -- allowed Carolina Willow ...

New York children participating in a federal nutrition program had healthier eating behaviors and lower rates of obesity two years after improvements to the program were undertaken, according to a study published online today in Obesity, the official journal of the Obesity Society. In 2009 all 50 states rolled out sweeping changes to the menu of foods available through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, which reaches nearly half of all infants born in the United States. New York was the first state in the nation to roll ...

A new American Chemical Society (ACS) video provides a behind-the-scenes-look at the DayGlo Color Corp. factory, producer of the fluorescent paints that light up traffic cones, black light posters, hula-hoops and other products. The video, the latest episode of the award-winning Bytesize Science series from the world's largest scientific society, is at www.BytesizeScience.com. Inside DayGlo opens with a brief history of the company, which has been designated as an ACS National Historic Chemical Landmark, and continues with an in-depth look inside its main production ...

With the first explosions of atomic bombs, the world became witness to one of the most important and consequential principles in physics: Energy and mass, fundamentally speaking, are the same thing and can, in fact, be converted into each other. This was first demonstrated by Albert Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity and famously expressed in his iconic equation, E=mc2, where E stands for energy, m for mass and c for the speed of light (squared). Although physicists have since validated Einstein's equation in countless experiments and calculations, and many technologies ...

VIDEO: This is a computer simulation of one octant of a core collapse supernova, using SNSPH. Click here for more information. Two University of Texas at Arlington researchers want to bridge the gap between what is known about exploding stars and the remnants left behind thousands of years later. So they're trying something new – using SNSPH, a complex computer code developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. On Tuesday, Carola I. Ellinger, a post-doctoral researcher at ...

By taking a "bottom-up" approach, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have observed for the first time that "size does matter" in regards "pyroelectricity"—the current/voltage developed in response to temperature fluctuations that enables technologies such as infrared sensors, night-vision, and energy conversion units, to name a few. "Controlling and manipulating heat for applications such as waste heat energy harvesting, integrated cooling technologies, electron emission, and related functions is an exciting field of study today," explained ...

HERSHEY, Pa. -- While the number of overweight and obese Americans has increased, the amount of weight counseling offered by primary care physicians has decreased -- especially for patients with high blood pressure and diabetes -- according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. More than 145 million adult Americans are overweight or obese. Researchers analyzed data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey for the years 1995-1996 and 2007-2008. This national survey collects information about the provision and use of outpatient medical care services in ...

Our Milky Way is a spiral galaxy - a pinwheel-shaped collection of stars, gas and dust. It has a central bar and two major spiral arms that wrap around its disk. Since we view the Milky Way from the inside, its exact structure is difficult to determine. Astronomers have identified a new structure in the Milky Way: a long tendril of dust and gas that they are calling a "bone." "This is the first time we've seen such a delicate piece of the galactic skeleton," says lead author Alyssa Goodman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Goodman presented the ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- A combination of the drugs pazopanib and paclitaxel shows promise in slowing anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC), according to a Mayo Clinic-led study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The two drugs together resulted in greater anti-cancer activity in ATC than either drug alone, says lead researcher Keith Bible, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic oncologist. Anaplastic thyroid cancer is a rare but devastating form of thyroid cancer that typically strikes men and women in their 60s and 70s. It is very aggressive, with a median survival ...

The sun ejects a continuous flow of electrically charged particles and magnetic fields in the form of the solar wind -- and this wind is hotter than it should be. A new study of data obtained by European Space Agency's Cluster spacecraft may help explain the mystery. The solar wind is made of an electrically-charged gas called plasma. One theory about the wind's puzzling high temperatures is that irregularities in the flow of charged particles and magnetic fields in the plasma create turbulence, which, in turn, dissipates and adds heat to its surroundings. Using two separate ...

The eighth tropical cyclone to form during the Southern Indian Ocean cyclone season formed from low pressure System 98S and became Tropical Cyclone Narelle. NASA's TRMM satellite passed over System 98S and saw the hallmark "hot towers" that indicated the storm would soon likely intensify into Tropical Storm Narelle. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite passed over System 98S on Jan. 7 at 0901 UTC (4:01 a.m. EST/U.S.) hours before it intensified into Tropical Storm Narelle. TRMM's Precipitation Radar instrument captured estimates of rainfall occurring ...

Tropical Depression Sonamu has been consistently slow moving over the last couple of days, and that has not changed. NASA's Aqua satellite captured an infrared image of the stubborn storm lingering in the South China Sea, and it still contained some strong thunderstorms. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Depression Sonamu on Jan. 8 at 0641 UTC (1:41 a.m. EST/U.S.), the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument aboard took an infrared look at the storm. AIRS data showed that Sonamu still contained some very cold cloud top temperatures of -63F (-52C) ...