A clinical trial of patients with post-acute coronary syndrome (ACS, heart disease) depression finds that a centralized, patient-preference program decreased depressive symptoms and may be cost-neutral over time, according to a report published Online First by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. The study is being released early to coincide with its presentation at the American College of Cardiology's annual Scientific Sessions. About 1.2 million Americans survive an ACS event every year and many of them have clinically significant and persistent depression. ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Farmers can make a profit selling their produce directly to local businesses, but they must not let possible new costs weaken their commitment to the new venture, according to an international team of researchers. "We found that the farmers who really made a conscious decision to sell local and who made more of a commitment tended to do better than those who are just testing the waters with local direct selling," said Amit Sharma, associate professor of hospitality management, Penn State. Sharma added that farmers who were only testing the idea ...

HERSHEY, Pa. -- Only about one in five central Pennsylvania women who have experienced intimate partner violence is asked or counseled by a health care provider about abuse, according to Penn State medicine and public health science researchers. Overall, approximately only one in nine women has received preventive counseling about violence and safety. "Our research shows that we (as a healthcare community) haven't been doing a good job of identifying and counseling about intimate partner violence," said Jennifer S. McCall-Hosenfeld, primary care physician and assistant ...

Two types of environmental conditions—cold-dry and humid-rainy—are associated with seasonal influenza epidemics, according to an epidemiological study led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health's Fogarty International Center. The paper, published in PLOS Pathogens, presents a simple climate-based model that maps influenza activity globally and accounts for the diverse range of seasonal patterns observed across temperate, subtropical and tropical regions. The findings could be used to improve existing current influenza transmission models, and could help ...

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have established a high-efficiency cell-cell fusion system, providing a new model to study how fusion works. The scientists showed that fusion between two cells is not equal and mutual as some assumed, but, rather, is initiated and driven by one of the fusion partners. The discovery, they say, could lead to improved treatments for muscular dystrophy, since muscle regeneration relies on cell fusion to make muscle fibers that contain hundreds or even thousands of nuclei. The study reveals two critical components that have to be present for cell ...

This press release is available in German. Geneva, Switzerland (07 March, 2013) – A new survey reveals that 44 per cent of German women did not play competitive sport or spend any time on intensive workouts such as running or cycling, in a given week. German women remain reluctant to devote any time to competitive sport, despite being more physically active than their European counterparts in Britain, Denmark, Sweden and France, according to a new multi-national survey on sport and exercise habits. With Germany favourites to be crowned champions at this summer's UEFA ...

TEMPE, Ariz. – Conversion of large swaths of Brazilian land for sugar plantations will help the country meet its needs for producing cane-derived ethanol but it also could lead to important regional climate effects, according to a team of researchers from Arizona State University, Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science. The team found that anticipated conversion to sugarcane plantations could lead to a 1°C decrease in temperature during the growing season, to be followed by a 1°C increase after harvest. "When averaged over the entire year, there ...

Canada's Arctic Archipelago glaciers will melt faster than ever in the next few centuries. Research by European funded scientists has shown that 20 per cent of the Canadian Arctic glaciers may have disappeared by the end of this century which would amount to an additional sea level rise of 3.5cm The results of the research, part of the EU funded ice2sea programme, will be published in Geophysical Research Letters this week, and the paper is now available online. The researchers developed a climate model for the island group of the north of Canada in which they simulated ...

ITHACA, N.Y. — From athletes to individuals suffering from osteoporosis, bone fractures are usually the result of tiny cracks accumulating over time -- invisible rivulets of damage that, when coalesced, lead to that painful break. Using cutting-edge X-ray techniques, Cornell University researchers have uncovered cellular-level detail of what happens when bone bears repetitive stress over time, visualizing damage at smaller scales than previously observed. Their work could offer clues into how bone fractures could be prevented. Marjolein van der Meulen, professor of ...

Looking at the transformation of a fly larva into a pupa may help researchers to understand the molecular mechanisms that trigger puberty. A study conducted on the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, by scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) led by ICREA research professor Marco Milán, identifies an miRNA as key to the relationship between hormones that control growth and sexual maturity. According to Milán, "accelerated growth or obesity can provoke premature puberty in humans, harming their development – and this is a growing problem in ...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Weight loss study participants who received financial incentives were more likely to stick with a weight loss program and lost more weight than study participants who received no incentives, according to Mayo Clinic research that will be presented Saturday, March 9 at the American College of Cardiology's 62nd Annual Scientific Session. Previous studies have shown that financial incentives help people lose weight, but this study examined a larger group of participants (100) over a longer period (one year), says lead author Steven Driver, M.D., an internal ...

People may more likely be exposed to the flu through airborne virus than previously thought, according to new research from the University of Maryland School of Public Health. The study also found that when flu patients wear a surgical mask, the release of virus in even the smallest airborne droplets can be significantly reduced. "People are generally surprised to learn that scientists don't know for sure how flu spreads," says Donald Milton, M.D., Dr.P.H., who directs the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health and led the study of influenza virus aerosols ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- A large randomized controlled study is among the first to rigorously demonstrate that health information technology can improve compliance with patient care guidelines by clinicians in resource-limited countries. The study was led by Regenstrief Institute investigator Martin Chieng Were, M.D., M.S., assistant professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, and Regenstrief Institute affiliated scientist Rachel Vreeman, M.D., M.S, assistant professor of pediatrics at the IU School of Medicine. The impact of this improved compliance is ...

Salmon are beginning to swim up the Elwha River for the first time in more than a century. But University of Washington marine geologists are watching what's beginning to flow downstream – sediments from the largest dam-removal project ever undertaken. The 108-foot Elwha Dam was built in 1910, and after decades of debate it was finally dismantled last year. Roughly a third of the 210-foot Glines Canyon Dam still stands, holding back a mountain of silt, sand and gravel. Removal of the upper dam was halted in January while crews repair a water-treatment plant near Port ...

UAlberta medical researchers and their American colleagues have discovered that the "gateway" known to control the movement of molecules in and out of a cell's nucleus appears to play another critically important role – one no one had noticed until now. These "gateways" have a second key job in a cell – the ability to control the structure of chromosomes and the DNA linked to those chromosomes. This impacts what genes produce or express. The discovery gives scientists a new way to investigate the triggers for various kinds of disease, says Richard Wozniak, the principal ...

Sniffing, a common behavior in dogs, cats and other animals, has been observed to also serve as a method for rats to communicate—a fundamental discovery that may help scientists identify brain regions critical for interpreting communications cues and what brain malfunctions may cause some complex social disorders. Researchers have long observed how animals vigorously sniff when they interact, a habit usually passed off as simply smelling each other. But Daniel W. Wesson, PhD, of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, whose research is published in Current ...

What makes us happy? Family? Money? Love? How about a peptide? The neurochemical changes underlying human emotions and social behavior are largely unknown. Now though, for the first time in humans, scientists at UCLA have measured the release of a specific peptide, a neurotransmitter called hypocretin, that greatly increased when subjects were happy but decreased when they were sad. The finding suggests that boosting hypocretin could elevate both mood and alertness in humans, thus laying the foundation for possible future treatments of psychiatric disorders like ...

TORONTO, ON – March 7, 2013: A new technique developed by U of T Engineering Professor Ted Sargent and his research group could lead to significantly more efficient solar cells, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nano Letters. The paper, "Jointly-tuned plasmonic-excitonic photovoltaics using nanoshells," describes a new technique to improve efficiency in colloidal quantum dot photovoltaics, a technology which already promises inexpensive, more efficient solar cell technology. Quantum dot photovoltaics offers the potential for low-cost, large-area solar ...

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Married couples who have attained higher levels of education are less likely to divorce than less-educated couples, but a new study conducted at Rutgers School of Social Work points to significant racial differences. "African-American women don't seem to enjoy the same degree of protection that education confers on marriage," said Jeounghee Kim, assistant professor at the school. "For white Americans, higher education is related to a lower chance of divorce, and this protective effect of education on marriage increased consistently among the recent ...

FROSTBURG, MD (March 7, 2013)—Prairie dogs pull up stakes and look for a new place to live when all their close kin have disappeared from their home territory--a striking pattern of dispersal that has not been observed for any other species. This is according to a new study published in Science by behavioral ecologist John Hoogland, Professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science's Appalachian Laboratory. He has been studying the ecology and social behavior of prairie dogs in national parks in Arizona, South Dakota, and Utah for the last 40 years. For ...

University of British Columbia researchers have successfully normalized the production of blood vessels in the brain of mice with Alzheimer's disease (AD) by immunizing them with amyloid beta, a protein widely associated with the disease. While AD is typically characterized by a build-up of plaques in the brain, recent research by the UBC team showed a near doubling of blood vessels in the brain of mice and humans with AD. The new study, published online last week in Scientific Reports, a Nature journal, shows a reduction of brain capillaries in mice immunized with ...

Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and Google have developed a novel approach that allows the massive infrastructure powering cloud computing as much as 15 to 20 percent more efficiently. This novel model has already been applied at Google. Researchers presented their findings at the IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture conference Feb. 23 to 27 in China. Computer scientists looked at a range of Google web services, including Gmail and search. They used a unique approach to develop their model. Their first ...

Recently Science Magazine invited JQI fellow Chris Monroe and Duke Professor Jungsang Kim to speculate on ion trap technology as a scalable option for quantum information processing. The article is highlighted on the cover of this week's issue, which is dedicated to quantum information. The cover portrays a photograph of a surface trap that was fabricated by Sandia National Labs and used to trap ions at JQI and Duke, among other laboratories. Trapped atomic ions are a promising architecture that satisfies many of the critical requirements for constructing a quantum computer. ...

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite noticed areas of heavy rainfall in low pressure System 92P hours before it became the nineteenth tropical cyclone of the Southern Pacific Ocean. NASA's TRMM satellite captured a look at the rainfall rates within low pressure System 92P on March 7 at 0023 UTC (March 6 at 7:23 p.m. EST), just hours before it became Tropical Cyclone 19P (TC 19P). TRMM data indicated that heavy rain was falling at a rate of 2 inches/50 mm per hour around the center of circulation, and that some of the thunderstorms were powerful as they ...

This press release is available in French. Montreal, March 7, 2013 – Just hours after the tragic shooting of 27 victims at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Twitter was overloaded with messages slamming reporters for interviewing children involved in the tragedy. While some of the journalists probably knew better but wanted the story at all costs, others were rookie reporters facing ethical decisions for the first time and unaware of the impact these interviews might have on the young survivors. Past studies have documented that new journalists can cause a number of ...