Responding to an urgent need for better antibacterial coatings on surgical sutures, scientists are reporting the discovery of a new coating that is almost 1,000 times more effective than the most widely used commercial coating. Their report appears in ACS' journal Langmuir. Professor Gregory Tew, who is from UMass-Amherst, and colleagues explain that infection at the site of surgical incisions is one of the most common post-surgical complications that keep patients hospitalized longer and boost hospital bills. The most common antibiotic coating contains triclosan, but ...

A potentially powerful new approach for limiting health care costs — which account for almost $1 out of every $5 spent in the U.S. each year — is the topic of the feature story in this week's edition of Chemical & Enginering News (C&EN), the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society. C&EN Senior Correspondent Marc S. Reisch explains that one until-now neglected way to reign in health care spending involves providing patients and doctors with better diagnostic tests. Such tests could save money by providing greater ...

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. – August 29, 2012 -- Estimates of the total mass of all life on Earth should be reduced by about one third, based on the results of a study by a team of scientists at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography and colleagues in Germany. The research was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. According to previous estimates, about one thousand billion tons of carbon is stored in living organisms, of which 30 percent is in single-cell microbes in the ocean floor and 55 percent reside in land ...

The use of newer drugs, a greater number of effective drugs, and a longer treatment regimen may be associated with improved survival of patients with multidrug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TR), according to a large study by a team of international researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine. Global efforts to control tuberculosis are being challenged by the emergence of strains that are resistant to several antibiotics including isoniazid and rifampicin, the two most powerful, first-line (standard) anti-tuberculosis drugs—so-called multidrug resistant tuberculosis ...

Increasingly humanitarian organizations will find themselves responding to health emergencies provoked by the adverse effects of mining and other extractive industries, setting up a potential clash to do with the core principles and values at the heart of humanitarian medicine, writes Philippe Calain from the humanitarian medical organization, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), in this week's PLOS Medicine. "A pragmatic approach of engagement with the corporate sector for the delivery of aid, or an implicit support to mainstream development agendas could compromise the ...

In their August editorial, the PLOS Medicine Editors reflect on a recent Policy Forum article by Jason Corburn and Alison Cohen*, which describes the need for urban health equity indicators to guide public health policy in cities and urban areas. The Editors focus on the need for better air quality data for the world's cities because many cities with the worst airborne particulate levels are in low- and middle-income countries and often have limited data. Worryingly, the World Health Organization estimates that 1.34 million premature deaths were at attributable to outdoor ...

Child mortality is a key indicator not only of child health and nutrition but also of the implementation of child survival interventions and, more broadly, of social and economic development. Millennium Development Goal 4 calls for a two thirds reduction in the under-five mortality rate between 1990 and 2015. With the renewed focus on child survival, tracking of progress in the reduction of child mortality is increasingly important. A sponsored collection of new articles on the methodology for estimation of child mortality was published today in the open-access journal ...

Researchers at the University of Hawaii – Manoa (UHM) School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) made a discovery that challenges a major theory in the field of coral reef ecology. The general assumption has been that the more flexible corals are, regarding which species of single celled algae (Symbiodinium) they host in coral tissues, the greater ability corals will have to survive environmental stress. In their paper published August 29, 2012, however, scientists at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) at SOEST and colleagues documented that the ...

Scientists have taken a step closer to solving one of life's mysteries – why family size generally falls as societies become richer. Evolutionary biologists have long puzzled over this because natural selection is expected to have selected for organisms that try to maximise their reproduction. But in industrialised societies around the world, increasing wealth coincides with people deliberately limiting their family size – the so-called 'demographic transition'. In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, researchers from the London ...

Astronomers at the International Astronomical Union meeting announced the discovery of the first transiting circumbinary multi-planet system: two planets orbiting around a pair of stars. The discovery shows that planetary systems can form and survive even in the chaotic environment around a binary star. And such planets can exist in the habitable zone of their stars. "Each planet transits over the primary star, giving unambiguous evidence that the planets are real," said Jerome Orosz, Associate Professor of Astronomy at San Diego State University and lead author of the ...

Fort Davis, Texas — NASA's Kepler mission has found the first multi-planet solar system orbiting a binary star, characterized in large part by University of Texas at Austin astronomers using two telescopes at the university's McDonald Observatory in West Texas. The finding, which proves that whole planetary systems can form in a disk around a binary star, is published in the August 28 issue of the journal Science. "It's Tatooine, right?" said McDonald Observatory astronomer Michael Endl. "But this was not shown in Star Wars," he said, referring to the periodic changes ...

There are more than 400,000 species of beetles and only two species of the tuatara, a reptile cousin of snakes and lizards that lives in New Zealand. Crocodiles and alligators, while nearly 250 million years old, have diversified into only 23 species. Why evolution has produced "winners" — including mammals and many species of birds and fish — and "losers" is a major question in evolutionary biology. Scientists have often posited that because some animal and plant lineages are much older than others, they have had more time to produce new species (the dearth of crocodiles ...

Gravitational waves, much like the recently discovered Higgs boson, are notoriously difficult to observe. Scientists first detected these ripples in the fabric of space-time indirectly, using radio signals from a pulsar-neutron star binary system. The find, which required exquisitely accurate timing of the radio signals, garnered its discoverers a Nobel Prize. Now a team of astronomers has detected the same effect at optical wavelengths, in light from a pair of eclipsing white dwarf stars. "This result marks one of the cleanest and strongest detections of the effect of ...

VIDEO: An animation of satellite observations from August 26-28, 2012 shows Tropical Storm Isaac moving past the Florida Keys and into the Gulf of Mexico, nearing landfall in the U.S. Gulf... Click here for more information. NASA satellites have been providing valuable data to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center watching the development and progression of powerful Tropical Storm Isaac as it heads for landfall. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ...

Eyewitness identification evidence is often persuasive in the courtroom and yet current eyewitness identification tests often fail to pick the culprit. Even worse, these tests sometimes result in wrongfully accusing innocent suspects. Now psychological scientists are proposing a radical alternative to the traditional police lineup that focuses on eyewitnesses' confidence judgments. In a new article forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Neil Brewer of Flinders University and colleagues report a new type of lineup ...

Tampa, FL (Aug. 28, 2012) -- A new study has found a gene that appears to make women happy, but it doesn't work for men. The finding may help explain why women are often happier than men, the research team said. Scientists at the University of South Florida (USF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute reported that the low activity form of the gene monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) is associated with higher self-reported happiness in women. No such association was found in men. The findings appear online ...

A popular marketing ploy with junk foods and other indulgent table fare can be an equally effective tool for promoting healthier eating in school cafeterias. "Nutritionists and school lunch planners can turn the tables on children's poor eating habits by adopting the same 'branding' tactic used by junk food marketers," said Brian Wansink, an expert on the subtle cues that affect people's eating habits and professor of marketing at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. Food marketers have associated particular foods with mascots, ...

URBANA, Ill. — Like a melody that keeps playing in your head even after the music stops, researchers at the University of Illinois's Beckman Institute have shown that the beat goes on when it comes to the human visual system. In an experiment designed to test their theory about a brain mechanism involved in visual processing, the researchers used periodic visual stimuli and electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings and found, one, that they could precisely time the brain's natural oscillations to future repetitions of the event, and, two, that the effect occurred even after ...

Break apart a couple worm-like chromosomes and they may reconnect with mismatched tips and tails – such is the case of the EML4-ALK fusion gene that creates 2-7 percent of lung cancers. Almost exactly a year ago, the FDA approved the drug crizotinib to treat these ALK+ lung cancer patients, who were likely never smokers. Informed doctors use the test called a FISH assay to check for the EML4-ALK fusion gene, and then if the test is positive, ALK+ patients benefit greatly from crizotinib. A recent University of Colorado Cancer Center case study published in the Journal ...

CHAMPAIGN, lll. — The rhythm of life is driven by the cycles of day and night, and most organisms carry in their cells a common, (roughly) 24-hour beat. In animals, this rhythm emerges from a tiny brain structure called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the hypothalamus. Take it out of the brain and keep it alive in a lab dish and this "brain clock" will keep on ticking, ramping up or gearing down production of certain proteins at specific times of the day, day after day. A new study reveals that the brain clock itself is driven, in part, by metabolism, the production ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Numerous studies have shown the powerful effect that exercise can have on cancer care and recovery. For patients who have gone through breast or colon cancer treatment, regular exercise has been found to reduce recurrence of the disease by up to 50 percent. But many cancer patients are reluctant to exercise, and few discuss it with their oncologists, according to a Mayo Clinic study published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management. "As doctors, we often tell patients that exercise is important, but to this point, nobody had studied what patients ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---What if every U.S. worker got an automatic 10 percent pay raise at age 55? According to a new University of Michigan study, most people would work quite a bit longer to enjoy the extra income before they retired. By eliminating social security payroll taxes starting when workers are 55-years old, the study shows that take-home pay would jump by 10.6 percent and they would work 1.5 years longer on average, paying more income taxes and helping to reduce the Federal deficit. "People are living longer, healthier lives, and so far have opted to take most ...

CORAL GABLES, FL (August 28, 2012) -- As Hurricane Isaac nears the Gulf Coast, one may wonder what the impact of natural disasters are on children. Who is most at risk for persistent stress reactions? How can such youth be identified and assisted in the aftermath of a destructive storm? Dr. Annette M. La Greca, a professor of psychology and pediatrics at the University of Miami, and her colleagues, have been studying children's disaster reactions following Hurricanes Andrew (1992), Charley (2004) and Ike (2008). Recent findings from Hurricane Ike shed light on these questions ...

CORAL GABLES, FL (August 28, 2012)—Parents of young children hope for a successful kindergarten experience that will set their youngsters on the right path of their educational journey. Some worry about their kids not adapting to the school environment, particularly when the children are talkative and overactive. Yet, a new study by the University of Miami (UM) shows that overly shy preschool children are at greater academic risk than their chatty and boisterous peers. The study is one of the first to follow the social and academic progress of children throughout the preschool ...

Pretend play can be fun for preschool children, but a new University of Virginia study, published in a recent online edition of the journal Psychological Bulletin, finds that it is not as crucial to a child's development as currently believed. Pretend play is any play a child engages in, alone, with playmates, or with adults, that involves uses of the imagination to create a fantasy world or situation, such as making toy cars go "vrrooooom" or making dolls talk. Based on a number of key studies over four decades, pretend play is widely considered by psychologists – and ...