A new disinfectant, Akwaton, that works at extremely low concentrations could be used in healthcare settings to help control persistent hospital-acquired infections such as Clostridium difficile. The study is reported online in the Journal of Medical Microbiology. Researchers from the Université de Saint-Boniface in Winnipeg, Canada tested the new compound, Akwaton, against bacterial spores that attach to surfaces and are difficult to destroy. Previous work by the group has shown Akwaton is also effective at low concentrations against strains of Meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus ...

They say the real crisis stems from current incentives that reward companies for developing large numbers of new drugs with few clinical advantages over existing ones. Since the early 2000s, numerous articles and reports have claimed that the pipeline for new drugs will soon run dry, write Donald Light from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and Joel Lexchin from York University in Toronto. Yet data indicate that the number of new drugs licensed remains at the long term average range of 15-25 a year. The authors argue that telling "innovation crisis" ...

It has recently been suggested that patients should be kept alive using elective ventilation to facilitate the harvesting of organs for donation. But David Shaw, Honorary Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen believes there is a much simpler way to increase the number of donated organs – by ensuring that doctors respect the wishes of the deceased and over-rule any veto. Veto by the family is the main impediment to an increase in organ donation, with at least 10% of families refusing to donate. Yet Shaw points out that families have no legal grounds for over-riding the ...

Balance and strength training is known to reduce falls in older adults. However, less than 10% of older people routinely engage in strength training and it is likely that this is much lower for activities that challenge balance. It has been suggested that integrating exercise into everyday activities may help people stick to it, but this approach has never been investigated in frail older people at risk of falls. So a team of researchers at the University of Sydney designed and tested the Lifestyle integrated Functional Exercise (LiFE) programme, which involves embedding ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A survey of teachers from the United States and Canada found that one out of four educators who used live animals as part of their science curriculum released the organisms into the wild after they were done using them in the classroom. Yet only 10 percent of those teachers participated in a planned release program, increasing the likelihood that the well-intentioned practice of using live organisms as a teaching tool may be contributing to invasive species problems. The study was presented today (Aug. 7) in Portland at the national meeting of the ...

New research published online in the scientific journal Addiction shows that plain packaging (requiring cigarettes to be packaged in standard packages without attractive designs and imagery) may help to draw the attention of some adolescent smokers to the health warnings on the package. If so, this may in turn deter young smokers from continuing to smoke. Researchers asked eighty-seven teenage secondary school (high school) students from the city of Bristol, UK, to look at twenty images of cigarette packs on a computer screen for ten seconds each while a device tracked ...

CHICAGO --- American adults of a normal weight with new-onset diabetes die at a higher rate than overweight/obese adults with the same disease, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study. The study, to be published in the Aug. 7 issue of JAMA, found that normal-weight participants experienced both significantly higher total and non-cardiovascular mortality than overweight/obese participants. Normal-weight adults with type 2 diabetes have been understudied because those who typically develop the disease are overweight or obese. In this study about 10 percent of those ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – August 6, 2012 – When a stroke patient is discharged from the hospital, they often must cope with a new disability or lack of function, so changes in their medications or a new dosing prescription can be particularly confusing. This can lead the patient to overmedicate, take the wrong medication or skip medications entirely and can result in being readmitted to the hospital. But a pilot study that is looking at a new discharge strategy and being led by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, indicates that phone calls and conversations ...

As the medical community continues to make positive strides in personalized cancer therapy, scientists know some dead ends are unavoidable. Drugs that target specific genes in cancerous cells are effective, but not all proteins are targetable. In fact, it has been estimated that as few as 10 to 15 percent of human proteins are potentially targetable by drugs. For this reason, Georgia Tech researchers are focusing on ways to fight cancer by attacking defective genes before they are able to make proteins. Professor John McDonald is studying micro RNAs (miRNAs), a class ...

What a University of Central Florida student thought was a failed experiment has led to a serendipitous discovery hailed by some scientists as a potential game changer for the mass production of nanoparticles. Soroush Shabahang, a graduate student in CREOL (The College of Optics & Photonics), made the finding that could ultimately change the way pharmaceuticals are produced and delivered. The discovery was based on using heat to break up long, thin fibers into tiny, proportionally sized seeds, which have the capability to hold multiple types of materials locked in ...

A study published in the online journal Hepatology reports a potential new NADPH oxidase (NOX) inhibitor therapy for liver fibrosis, a scarring process associated with chronic liver disease that can lead to loss of liver function. "While numerous studies have now demonstrated that advanced liver fibrosis in patients and in experimental rodent models is reversible, there is currently no effective therapy for patients," said principal investigator David A. Brenner, MD, vice chancellor for Health Sciences and dean of the School of Medicine at the University of California, ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In a touch-screen display or a solar panel, any conductive overlay had better be clear. Engineers employ transparent thin films of indium tin oxide (ITO) for the job, but a high-tech material's properties are only half its resume. They must also be as cheap and easy to manufacture as possible. In a new study, researchers from Brown University and ATMI Inc. report the best-ever transparency and conductivity performance for an ITO made using a chemical solution, which is potentially the facile, low-cost method manufacturers want. "Our ...

Diseased trees in forests may be a significant new source of methane that causes climate change, according to researchers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies in Geophysical Research Letters. Sixty trees sampled at Yale Myers Forest in northeastern Connecticut contained concentrations of methane that were as high as 80,000 times ambient levels. Normal air concentrations are less than 2 parts per million, but the Yale researchers found average levels of 15,000 parts per million inside trees. "These are flammable concentrations," said Kristofer Covey, ...

ST. LOUIS, MO, August 7, 2012— An international research collaboration recently demonstrated progress in protecting cassava against cassava brown streak disease (CBSD), a serious virus disease, in a confined field trial in Uganda using an RNA interference technology. The field trial was planted in November 2010 following approval by the National Biosafety Committee of Uganda. The plants were harvested in November 2011 and results were published in the August 1, 2012 issue of the journal Molecular Plant Pathology . These results point researchers in the right direction ...

New Rochelle, NY, August 7, 2012—The global market value of Alzheimer's disease therapeutics could soar to the $8 billion range once therapeutics are approved that actually change the course of the disease, reports Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN). The current therapeutic market is valued at $3 to $4 billion, shared among drugs that temporarily delay disease progression or address the symptoms but do not alter the underlying disease, according to a recent issue of GEN. "Despite all the research on amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles there is still ...

If you're looking for information on the evolution and function of jaws, University of Notre Dame researcher Matt Ravosa is your man. His integrative research program investigates major adaptive and morphological transformations in the mammalian musculoskeletal system during development and across higher-level groups. In mammals, the greater diversification and increasingly central role of the chewing complex in food procurement and processing has drawn considerable attention to the biomechanics and evolution of this system. Being among the most highly mineralized, and ...

The 14 years of wildlife studies in and around Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park by Sarah Karpanty, associate professor of wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech's College of Natural Resources and Environment, and her students are summarily part of a paper on biodiversity published July 25 by Nature's Advanced Online Publication and coming out soon in print. As human activities put increasing pressures on natural systems and wildlife to survive, 200 scientists around the world carved up pieces of the puzzle to present a clearer picture of reality and find ways to mitigate ...

LA JOLLA, CA----It was long thought that methylation, a crucial part of normal organism development, was a static modification of DNA that could not be altered by environmental conditions. New findings by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, however, suggest that the DNA of organisms exposed to stress undergo changes in DNA methylation patterns that alter how genes are regulated. The scientists found that exposure to a pathogenic bacteria caused widespread changes in a plant's epigenetic code, an extra layer of biochemical instructions in DNA that ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. — Significantly more children get health insurance coverage after increases in federal matching funds to states for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), according to new research from the University of Michigan. The research, published Monday in the journal Health Affairs, showed that a 10-percentage-point increase in the federal match for Medicaid and CHIP, similar to the increase that occurred with the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, is associated with an increase of 1.9 percent in the number of children enrolled in ...

Infrared satellite imagery from shows how cold cloud top temperatures are in a tropical cyclone, and recent imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite shows the cloud-top temperatures have been warming in Tropical Storm 13W. Warming cloud top temperatures indicate less strength, and Tropical Storm 13W is weakening. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm 13W on August 7 at 0253 UTC. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies onboard Aqua captured an infrared image of the storm's cloud temperatures that showed very limited strong thunderstorms make ...

Tropical Storm Haikui is headed for landfall in southeastern China, and NASA's Aqua satellite caught a stunning image of its size and its ragged, but wide eye when it was a typhoon earlier today, August 7. As a result of interaction with land, Haikui has weakened to a tropical storm. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Typhoon Haikui on August 6, 2012 at 12:35 a.m. EDT the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument onboard captured an image of the storm as it was approaching China. The MODIS image clearly showed Haikui's ragged and elongated eye ...

Satellite data helps forecasters see where the strongest part of a tropical cyclone is located, and NASA's Aqua satellite noticed Ernesto's strongest storms were on the eastern side yesterday. Today, strong storms surround Ernesto's center. A visible image of Tropical Storm Ernesto approaching Central America was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies onboard NASA's Aqua satellite. In an image captured on August 6, 2012 at 1840 UTC (2:40 p.m. EDT), the strongest thunderstorms appeared to be on the northern and eastern ...

Conflict-of-interest statements made by physicians and scientists in their medical journal articles after they had been allegedly paid by pharmaceutical manufacturers as part of off-label marketing programs are often inadequate, highlighting the deficiencies in relying on author candidness and the weaknesses in some journal practices in ensuring proper disclosure, according to a study by international researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine. Off-label marketing is the promotion by a manufacturer of a drug for use in a condition or age group, or in a dose or form ...

NJIT Distinguished Research Professor and former Bell Labs scientist Louis J. Lanzerotti, will see his 50-year quest to better understand space weather and Earth's Van Allen Radiation Belts rocket, once again, into space on Aug. 23, 2012. This is when NASA's twin Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) begin their mission to study the extremes of space weather. Lanzerotti, today one of the most respected and valued scientists behind space exploration, was the principal investigator to build one of five instruments aboard each of the two spacecraft that comprise the RBSP mission. ...

A research article by Katharina Kranzer from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and colleagues describe the feasibility and costs of an active tuberculosis case finding project in Cape Town, South Africa. The study describes the integration of tuberculosis testing into a mobile HIV testing service for HIV-negative individuals with symptoms suggestive of tuberculosis and all HIV-positive individuals. The mobile testing clinic, named the Tutu Tester after Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, visits underserviced areas in greater Cape Town and provides testing ...