Boston, MA -- In the wake of the horrific school shootings in Newtown, Conn. in December, three Harvard experts say the best way to curb gun violence in the U.S. is to take a broad public health approach, drawing on proven, evidence-based strategies that have successfully reduced other public health threats like smoking, car crashes, and accidental poisonings. The authors make the case for a comprehensive public health approach to gun violence in a viewpoint article published online January 7, 2013 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). For instance, ...

Working with fruit flies, Johns Hopkins scientists have decoded the activity of protein signals that let certain nerve cells know when and where to branch so that they reach and connect to their correct muscle targets. The proteins' mammalian counterparts are known to have signaling roles in immunity, nervous system and heart development, and tumor progression, suggesting broad implications for human disease research. A report of the research was published online Nov. 21 in the journal Neuron. To control muscle movements, fruit flies, like other animals, have a set of ...

University of Iowa biologist Daniel Eberl and his colleagues have shown that one of the mechanisms involved in hearing is similar to the battery in your car. And if that isn't interesting enough, the UI scientists advanced their knowledge of human hearing by studying a similar auditory system in fruit flies—and by making use of the fruit fly "love song." To see how the mechanism of hearing resembles a battery, you need to know that the auditory system of the fruit fly contains a protein that functions as a sodium/potassium pump, often called the sodium pump for short, ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (January 7, 2013) - Athletes with concussions must be held out of practice or play until all symptoms have resolved, to avoid the risk of further injury during the vulnerable period before the brain has recovered. That's among the key recommendations in the new American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM) position statement on concussions in sport, which appears in the January issue of Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. At a time of increased concern ...

PHILADELPHIA — Directed assembly is a growing field of research in nanotechnology in which scientists and engineers aim to manufacture structures on the smallest scales without having to individually manipulate each component. Rather, they set out precisely defined starting conditions and let the physics and chemistry that govern those components do the rest. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania has shown a new way to direct the assembly of liquid crystals, generating small features that spontaneously arrange in arrays based on ...

New York, NY—January 7, 2013—Columbia Engineering's Computer Science PhD candidate Ang Cui and Computer Science Professor Salvatore Stolfo have found serious vulnerabilities in Cisco VoIP (voice over internet protocol) telephones, devices used around the world by a broad range of networked organizations from governments to banks to major corporations, and beyond. In particular, they have discovered troubling security breaches with Cisco's VoIP phone technology. At a recent conference on the security of connected devices, Cui demonstrated how they can easily insert malicious ...

PHILADELPHIA – Roughly half of all black and Hispanic patients who enter publicly funded alcohol treatment programs do not complete treatment, compared to 62 percent of white patients, according to a new study from a team of researchers including the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Comparable disparities were also identified for drug treatment program completion rates. The study, published in the latest issue of Health Affairs, shows that completion disparities among racial groups are likely related to differences in socioeconomic status and, ...

CHICAGO --- Women who are obese at the start of their pregnancy may be passing on insufficient levels of vitamin D to their babies, according to a new Northwestern Medicine® study. The study found that babies born to lean mothers had a third higher amount of vitamin D compared to babies born to obese moms. Vitamin D is fat-soluble, and previous studies have found that people who are obese tend to have lower levels of the vitamin in their blood. In this study, both obese and lean mothers had very similar levels of vitamin D at the end of their pregnancies, yet obese ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (January 7, 2013) – Surveys suggest that while most US physicians are willing to play a role in responding to natural and manmade disasters, most do not feel adequately prepared to fulfill that role. Toward helping physicians and health care systems understand and fulfill their obligation to provide medical care in disasters, the January Southern Medical Journal is a special issue on disaster medicine and physician preparedness. The official journal of the Southern Medical Association, the SMJ is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters ...

AURORA, Colo. (Jan. 7, 2013) A new study out by researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, found large differences in the criteria that states use to determine eligibility for Part C early intervention services for infants and toddlers who have developmental delays. A developmental delay is any significant lag in a child's development as compared with typical child development. Current eligibility criteria for Part C services vary from state to state. With their colleagues, Steven Rosenberg, PhD, associate professor, University of Colorado Department ...

The quest for a twin Earth is heating up. Using NASA's Kepler spacecraft, astronomers are beginning to find Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars. A new analysis of Kepler data shows that about 17 percent of stars have an Earth-sized planet in an orbit closer than Mercury. Since the Milky Way has about 100 billion stars, there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized worlds out there. Francois Fressin, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), presented the analysis today in a press conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, ...

Comets trailing wispy tails across the night sky are a beautiful byproduct of our solar system's formation, icy leftovers from 4.6 billion years ago when the planets coalesced from rocky rubble. The discovery by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Clarion University in Pennsylvania of six likely comets around distant stars suggests that comets – dubbed "exocomets" – are just as common in other stellar systems with planets. Though only one of the 10 stars now thought to harbor comets is known to harbor planets, the fact that all these stars have ...

TORONTO, Jan. 7, 2013—A new study has found that adults with diabetes in Ontario are getting significantly fewer government-funded eye exams than they were a decade ago, a key component of high-quality diabetes care essential to preventing diabetes-related eye complications. The decrease is an unintended consequence of the provincial government's decision in 2004 to delist routine eye exams from the Ontario Health Insurance Plan for healthy adults under age 65, said lead researcher Dr. Tara Kiran. Routine eye exams continue to be funded for adults with diabetes and other ...

NEW YORK (Jan. 7, 2013) -- The relationship between a physician practice's adoption of electronic health records (EHR) and quality improvements in patient care remains unclear. However, a new study published in the January issue of Health Affairs by Weill Cornell Medical College and the Primary Care Information Project (PCIP) of the New York City Health Department shows evidence that EHR implementation can improve patient care in small physician practices in New York City when combined with sustained high-intensity technical assistance. To evaluate the effects EHRs have ...

The center of our Milky Way galaxy is a wondrous place full of huge star clusters, dust clouds, magnetic filaments and a supermassive black hole. But it can be a confusing place, too, posing challenges to astronomers trying to image these exotic features and learn more about where they are located in the galaxy. Northwestern University's Farhad Zadeh has discovered a new tool for detecting dusty clouds and stars: simply take a picture using radio waves. He is the first to identify what he calls radio dark clouds and stars. Stars in the early and late phases of their ...

Chemists at the University of California, Davis, have engineered blue-green algae to grow chemical precursors for fuels and plastics -- the first step in replacing fossil fuels as raw materials for the chemical industry. "Most chemical feedstocks come from petroleum and natural gas, and we need other sources," said Shota Atsumi, assistant professor of chemistry at UC Davis and lead author on the study published Jan. 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The U.S. Department of Energy has set a goal of obtaining a quarter of industrial chemicals from ...

WASHINGTON — Teachers across the United States report alarmingly high rates of personally experiencing student violence and harassment while at school, according to an article published by the American Psychological Association that presents comprehensive recommendations to make schools safer for school personnel as well as students. "Understanding and Preventing Violence Directed Against Teachers: Recommendations for a National Research, Practice, and Policy Agenda," was published online Jan. 7 in the APA's flagship journal, American Psychologist. "Violence directed ...

In 2011, a months-long blast of energy launched by an enormous black hole almost 11 billion years ago swept past Earth. Using a combination of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the world's largest radio telescope, astronomers have zeroed in on the source of this ancient outburst. Theorists expect gamma-ray outbursts occur only in close proximity to a galaxy's central black hole, the powerhouse ultimately responsible for the activity. A few rare observations suggested this is not the ...

Once a cyclone, now a tropical depression, Sonamu is being battered by moderate wind shear and an intrusion of dry air is it has practically stalled in the South China Sea. On Sunday, Jan. 6, Tropical Storm Sonamu's maximum sustained winds were near 40 knots (46 mph/74 kph). Sonamu's center was located about 255 nautical miles (258.9 miles/416.7 km) southeast of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, near 7.2 north and 108.9 east and continued to move west. At that time, the ragged low level center became exposed to outer winds. Satellite data showed that the strongest convection ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Chemicals used as flame retardants are present as environmental pollutants at locations around the globe, including remote sites in Indonesia, Nepal and Tasmania, according to a study by researchers from the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs. The study, published this month in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, makes use of a novel but highly effective sampling technique: measuring concentrations of the chemicals in the bark of trees, which absorbs compounds in both vapor and particle phases. "These findings ...

Improving Commercial Vehicle Safety on the Road All across Indiana, passenger vehicles must share the road with large trucks and other commercial vehicles. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Association is a non-profit organization, which focuses on safety issues for these large vehicles and their interactions with others on the road. Accident Statistics According to CVSA statistics, accidents where at least one large truck or bus was involved claimed 13,337 lives from 2007 though 2009. Injuries totaled 260,028 during the same time period. In more than seven out of ...

The holidays in Los Angeles signifies an annual pilgrimage for thousands of fans, players, coaches and scouts from across the nation that flock to the ABA Basketball Games which is now being broadcast by UBC Sports on the UBC-TV Network . The nationally-renowned ABA League was founded in 1967 competing with the well-established National Basketball Association, until the ABA-NBA merger in 1976. The original ABA featured Julius "Dr. J" Erving, George Gervin, Spencer Haywood, Moses Malone and other legends. Four ABA teams were absorbed from the merger: the Brooklyn ...

Retensa, a leader in Employee Retention Strategies and Research, publishes its thought provoking eighth annual "Biggest Quits" list. Each year, Retensa compiles a list of the top 10 most noteworthy resignations across all US industries, sports, and government. Three key trends in the 2012 resignations: long term tenure ends quickly, sex scandals, and culture matters. Trend 1: Life-long careers end abruptly. The most successful NCAA basketball coach has one thing in common with two retail executives from Best Buy, and a tech giant's introduction of Windows ...

Thyroid patients worldwide gave their Facebook profiles the blue ribbon treatment this week to showcase that January is Thyroid Awareness month, a project initiated by the thyroid patient advocacy group, ThyroidChange. May 2011, the group launched a petition as an international protest against the current endocrinology recommendations for the treatment of thyroid disease. The petition has united more than 7500 patients worldwide, to date, as proof that current treatment guidelines are not only ineffective, but also cost our healthcare systems billions of dollars treating ...

The USA VA team is constantly involved in many aspects of marketing, whether online or offline, we have been researching and tracking the trends! We have compiled some interesting information about what is coming for the 2013 year! So, take a little glimpse into the future of marketing! 2012 has been quite an interesting year in marketing trends. The changes in the popularity of some of the widest-known social marketing platforms have made a drastic change in the idea of online marketing as a whole. People aren't focusing as much on paying for advertising through traditional ...