A large-scale field experiment conducted during the December 2011 parliamentary elections in Russia suggests that fraud had a significant impact on the results. The research marks an advance in efforts to quantify vote fraud. The researchers, including a visiting research scholar at Princeton University, estimate that fraud accounted for at least 11 percentage points of the vote recorded for the ruling United Russia party in Moscow. They estimated that the party received at least 635,000 votes in the city as a result of fraud in the election, which resulted in United ...

Territorial song sparrows use increasingly threatening signals to ward off trespassing rivals. First an early warning that matches the intruder's song, then wing waving – a bird's version of "flipping the bird" – as the dispute heats up, and finally, if all other signals have failed, attack. This hierarchical warning scheme, discovered by researchers at the University of Washington, adds nuance to a communication system that has been long-used as a model to study how people use and learn language "This is one of the most complicated communication systems outside of ...

An analysis of policy documents from Medicaid programs, suggests that current policies to manage conflicts of interest (COIs) of members of Medicaid drug selection committees are not transparent and vary widely, according to a report published Online First by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. It is important to manage COI for formulary drug selections or reimbursement to ensure that products are selected based on evidence and with minimal bias and to protect against pharmaceutical industry influence, according to the study background. In an analysis, ...

Stage at diagnosis only partly explains the wide variation in lung cancer survival rates among different developed countries, indicates a large study of nearly 60,000 patients, published online in Thorax. Other factors, such as treatment, are also likely to have a key role, say the authors. Stage at diagnosis has often been suggested as one of the primary reasons why lung cancer survival is low in certain countries, such the UK, on the grounds that patients go to see their doctors too late for treatment to be effective. The authors collected information on more ...

The number of children admitted to hospital as emergencies has steadily increased every year since 2003, with the largest rises seen among the under 5s, indicates research published online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. Common infections account for much of this rise, say the authors, who suggest this indicates a "systematic failure in the NHS" to assess children with acute illness that could be better managed by family doctors, out of hours services, and the telephone advice service NHS Direct rather than hospitals. The authors base their findings on hospital ...

During the 1930s, dedicated sanitaria and invasive surgery were commonly prescribed for those with the infection - usually caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which the editors describe as "the most successful human pathogen of all time." TB often lies dormant with no symptoms, but in a proportion of cases, becomes active, predominantly attacking the lungs. But it can also affect the bones and nervous system, and if left untreated can be fatal. The infection is developing increasing resistance around the world to the powerful drugs currently used to treat it. "Whatever ...

University of British Columbia and Berkeley researchers have used a sophisticated new computer system to quickly reconstruct protolanguages – the rudimentary ancient tongues from which modern languages evolved. The results, which are 85 per cent accurate when compared to the painstaking manual reconstructions performed by linguists, will be published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We're hopeful our tool will revolutionize historical linguistics much the same way that statistical analysis and computer power revolutionized the study ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — The increasing production and use of antibiotics, about half of which is used in animal production, is mirrored by the growing number of antibiotic resistance genes, or ARGs, effectively reducing antibiotics' ability to fend off diseases – in animals and humans. A study in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that China – the world's largest producer and consumer of antibiotics – and many other countries don't monitor the powerful medicine's usage or impact on the environment. On Chinese commercial pig ...

A new type of prophylactic treatment for brain injury following prolonged epileptic seizures has been developed by Emory University School of Medicine investigators. Status epilepticus, a persistent seizure lasting longer than 30 minutes [check this, some people say FIVE], is potentially life-threatening and leads to around 55,000 deaths each year in the United States. It can be caused by stroke, brain tumor or infection as well as inadequate control of epilepsy. Physicians or paramedics now treat status epilepticus by administering an anticonvulsant or general anesthesia, ...

MADISON – For decades, archaeologists have debated how farming spread to Stone Age Europe, setting the stage for the rise of Western civilization. Now, new data gleaned from the teeth of prehistoric farmers and the hunter-gatherers with whom they briefly overlapped shows that agriculture was introduced to Central Europe from the Near East by colonizers who brought farming technology with them. "One of the big questions in European archaeology has been whether farming was brought or borrowed from the Near East," says T. Douglas Price, a University of Wisconsin-Madison ...

ANN ARBOR — Ancient carbon trapped in Arctic permafrost is extremely sensitive to sunlight and, if exposed to the surface when long-frozen soils melt and collapse, can release climate-warming carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere much faster than previously thought. University of Michigan ecologist and aquatic biogeochemist George Kling and his colleagues studied places in Arctic Alaska where permafrost is melting and is causing the overlying land surface to collapse, forming erosional holes and landslides and exposing long-buried soils to sunlight. They found that ...

Volcanoes are well known for cooling the climate. But just how much and when has been a bone of contention among historians, glaciologists and archeologists. Now a team of atmosphere chemists, from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Copenhagen, has come up with a way to say for sure which historic episodes of global cooling were caused by volcanic eruptions. The answer lies in patterns of isotopes found in ancient volcanic sulfur trapped in ice core, patterns due to stratospheric photochemistry. Their mechanism is published in the highly recognized ...

Vascular brain injury from conditions such as high blood pressure and stroke are greater risk factors for cognitive impairment among non-demented older people than is the deposition of the amyloid plaques in the brain that long have been implicated in conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, a study by researchers at the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at UC Davis has found. Published online early today in JAMA Neurology (formerly Archives of Neurology), the study found that vascular brain injury had by far the greatest influence across a range of cognitive domains, ...

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. – Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an aggressive blood cancer that is currently incurable in 70% of patients. In a bold effort, CSHL scientists are among those identifying and characterizing the molecular mechanisms responsible for this cancer in order to generate potential new therapeutics. CSHL Assistant Professor Christopher Vakoc, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues, including the group of Professor Robert Roeder Ph.D. at The Rockefeller University, report the characterization of a protein required for AML in a paper published today in the Proceedings ...

A discovery using stem cells from a patient with motor neurone disease could help research into treatments for the condition. The study used a patient's skin cells to create motor neurons - nerve cells that control muscle activity - and the cells that support them called astrocytes. Researchers studied these two types of cells in the laboratory. They found that a protein expressed by abnormalities in a gene linked to motor neurone disease, which is called TDP-43, caused the astrocytes to die. The study, led by the University of Edinburgh and funded by the Motor Neurone ...

While most infection control measures are focused on hospitals, a new study points to the need for more targeted interventions to prevent the spread of drug-resistant bugs in nursing homes as community-associated strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) are on the rise in these facilities. The study is published in the March issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. CA-MRSA is a growing cause of invasive disease, including bloodstream infections, abscesses, and pneumonia. ...

An international research team coordinated at the IRCM in Montréal found a possible alternative treatment for lymphoid leukemia. Led by Dr. Tarik Möröy, the IRCM's President and Scientific Director, the team discovered a molecule that represents the disease's "Achilles' heel" and could be targeted to develop a new approach that would reduce the adverse effects of current treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy. The study's results are being published today in the prestigious scientific journal Cancer Cell. The researchers' results have direct implications ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – New Geosphere articles posted online 11 Jan. and 5 Feb. 2013 include additions to the "Origin and Evolution of the Sierra Nevada and Walker Lane" series, the "Neogene Tectonics and Climate-Tectonic Interactions in the Southern Alaskan Orogen" series, and the "Crevolution 2: Origin and Evolution of the Colorado River System II" series. A new series is also introduced: "Results of IODP Exp313: The History and Impact of Sea-level Change Offshore New Jersey." Papers cover: 1. Fresh water and the New Jersey shelf 2. Adobe Hills, California-Nevada, USA 3. ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Spending a day in someone else's shoes can help us to learn what makes them tick. Now the same approach is being used to develop a better understanding between humans and robots, to enable them to work together as a team. Robots are increasingly being used in the manufacturing industry to perform tasks that bring them into closer contact with humans. But while a great deal of work is being done to ensure robots and humans can operate safely side-by-side, more effort is needed to make robots smart enough to work effectively with people, says Julie Shah, ...

With Valentine's Day looming, many married couples will wish marital bliss for their single friends. At the same time, many singles will pity their coupled friends' loss of freedom. People like to believe that their way of life — whether single or coupled — is the best for everyone, especially if they think their relationship status is unlikely to change, according to a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study suggests that this bias may influence how we treat others, even in situations where relationship ...

Increasingly frequent extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, severe storms, and heat waves have focused the attention of climate scientists on the connections between greenhouse warming and extreme weather. Because of the potential threat to U.S. national security, a new study was conducted to explore the forces driving extreme weather events and their impacts over the next decade, specifically with regard to their implications for national security planning. The report finds that the early ramifications of climate extremes resulting from climate change are already ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Shark attacks in the U.S. reached a decade high in 2012, while worldwide fatalities remained average, according to the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File report released today. The U.S. saw an upturn in attacks with 53, the most since 2000. There were seven fatalities worldwide, which is lower than 2011 but higher than the yearly average of 4.4 from 2001 to 2010. It is the second consecutive year for multiple shark attacks in Western Australia (5) and Reunion Island (3) in the southwest Indian Ocean, which indicates the localities ...

Although the current Supreme Court has been criticized for its lack of diversity on the bench, the Court is actually more diverse overall today than ever in history, according to a new study that borrows statistical methods from ecology to reveal a more precise picture of diversity. The study, which appears in the online edition of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, examines seven categories of diversity for every Supreme Court justice since the Court first convened in 1790 with Justice John Jay, including ethnic/racial origin, religion, professional background, childhood ...

A team of UCLA-led researchers has identified a protein with broad virus-fighting properties that potentially could be used as a weapon against deadly human pathogenic viruses such as HIV, Ebola, Rift Valley Fever, Nipah and others designated "priority pathogens" for national biosecurity purposes by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. In a study published in the January issue of the journal Immunity, the researchers describe the novel antiviral property of the protein, cholesterol-25-hydroxylase (CH25H), an enzyme that converts cholesterol to an ...

DETROIT — A Wayne State University researcher has identified characteristics in benign breast disease associated with future cancer risk in African-American women. Michele Cote, Ph.D., associate professor of oncology in the School of Medicine and the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, recently reviewed data from about 1,400 20- to 84-year-old African-American women who underwent breast biopsies between 1997 and 2000. Researchers identified biopsies that showed benign breast disease (BBD) and also tracked subsequent breast cancers. BBD is an established risk factor ...