In a commentary to be published in the Dec. 12 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, two Johns Hopkins faculty members predict an ever-diminishing role for government and drug company funding of basic biomedical research and suggest scientists look to "innovative" kinds of private investment for future resources. Current negotiations in Washington over sequestration and the so-called "fiscal cliff" provide an opportunity to fundamentally rethink the funding of biomedical research, they say. Pointing to a decade of flat government funding for biomedical ...

Antifibrinolytic drugs are frequently used to prevent blood loss during surgery, but sometimes cause convulsive seizures. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Beverly Orser at the University of Toronto investigated the molecular mechanisms that underlie this side effect. By studying antifibrinolytics in mice, Orser and colleagues found that the drugs inhibited the activity of glycine receptors in the brain, leading to seizures. Seizures could be prevented by co-treatment with the general anesthetic isoflurane. This study explains the ...

Obesity is associated with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, both of which can be significantly improved by weight loss. Gastric bypass and adjustable gastric banding are two bariatric surgery techniques that are frequently used to effect weight loss in obese patients, but it is unclear if the two procedures produce different outcomes. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Samuel Klein at the University of Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis compared the effects of 20% weight loss induced by either gastric bypass or adjustable ...

Bariatric surgery procedures have similar therapeutic benefits in obese adults Obesity is associated with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, both of which can be significantly improved by weight loss. Gastric bypass and adjustable gastric banding are two bariatric surgery techniques that are frequently used to effect weight loss in obese patients, but it is unclear if the two procedures produce different outcomes. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Samuel Klein at the University of Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis ...

ANN ARBOR—It's a sad but familiar scene near the grounds of many medical campuses: hospital-gowned patients, some toting rolling IV poles, huddled in clumps under bus shelters or warming areas, smoking cigarettes. Smoking causes 30 percent of all cancer deaths and 87 percent of all lung cancer deaths. Yet, roughly 50 percent to 83 percent of cancer patients keep smoking after a cancer diagnosis, through treatment and beyond, says Sonia Duffy, University of Michigan School of Nursing researcher. For patients who quit on their own, relapse rates (as in the general population) ...

When faced with scandal or wrongdoing, corporations should stick to the facts in their post-crisis messaging, according to a new study from researchers at Rice University, the University of Georgia and the University of Maryland – College Park. The study, "Managing the message: The effects of firm actions and industry spillovers on media coverage following wrongdoing," examined quarterly media coverage of 45 U.S. public toy companies a 10-year period and over 5,500 press releases generated by the companies during that time. Almost half of the companies surveyed conducted ...

Some people live their lives by the motto "no risk - no fun!" and avoid hardly any risks. Others are clearly more cautious and focus primarily on safety when investing and for other business activities. Scientists from the University of Bonn in cooperation with colleagues from the University of Zurich studied the attitudes towards risk in a group of 56 subjects. They found that in people who preferred safety, certain regions of the brain show a higher level of activation when they are confronted with quite unforeseeable situations. In addition, they do not distinguish as ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. – The first evidence of blood vessel dysfunction has been found in a small cohort of generally healthy young people with cystic fibrosis, researchers report. "Even though the lung function in these kids is fine at this point, there is evidence of vascular dysfunction and exercise intolerance," said Dr. Ryan A. Harris, clinical exercise physiologist at the Medical College of Georgia and Institute of Public and Preventive Health at Georgia Health Sciences University. "We think this blood vessel dysfunction could be contributing to their exercise intolerance, ...

It all started with a crab apple tree. Two years ago, a 71-year-old Indiana man impaled his hand on a branch after cutting down a dead tree. The wound caused an infection that led scientists to discover a new bacterium and solve a mystery about how bacteria came to live inside insects. On Oct. 15, 2010, Thomas Fritz, a retired inventor, engineer and volunteer firefighter, cut down a dead, 10-foot-tall crab apple tree outside his home near Evansville, Ind. As he dragged away the debris, he got tangled in it and fell. A small branch impaled his right hand in the fleshy ...

Visualize a dusty place where stream beds are sand and lakes are flats of dried mud. Are we on Mars? In fact, we're on arid parts of Earth, a planet where water covers some 70 percent of the surface. How long will water be readily available to nourish life here? Scientists funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) program are finding new answers. NSF-supported CNH researchers will address water resources management and policy in a changing world at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), ...

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- The key to motivation in physical activity may be feeling inadequate. One Kansas State University researcher found that those who exercised with a teammate whom they perceived to be better increased their workout time and intensity by as much as 200 percent. Brandon Irwin, assistant professor of kinesiology, was the principle investigator in a study that tested whether individuals engage in more intense physical activity when alone, with a virtual partner or competing against a teammate. "People like to exercise with others and make it a social activity," ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The quest to harness a broader spectrum of sunlight's energy to produce electricity has taken a radically new turn, with the proposal of a "solar energy funnel" that takes advantage of materials under elastic strain. "We're trying to use elastic strains to produce unprecedented properties," says Ju Li, an MIT professor and corresponding author of a paper describing the new solar-funnel concept that was published this week in the journal Nature Photonics. In this case, the "funnel" is a metaphor: Electrons and their counterparts, holes — which are ...

An insect growth regulator is one of the latest technologies U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are adding to their arsenal to help fight house flies that spread bacteria to food. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists at the agency's Center for Medical, Agricultural, and Veterinary Entomology in Gainesville, Fla., are using an insect growth regulator called pyriproxyfen to kill house flies that spread bacteria that can cause diarrhea and other illnesses. When pyriproxyfen is applied to larval breeding sites such as manure, it mimics a hormone in ...

New combinations of medical imaging technologies hold promise for improved early disease screening, cancer staging, therapeutic assessment, and other aspects of personalized medicine, according to Ge Wang, director of Virginia Tech's Center for Biomedical Imaging, in a recent paper that appeared in the refereed journal PLOS ONE. The integration of multiple major tomographic scanners into a single framework "is a new way of thinking in the biomedical imaging world" and is evolving into a "grand fusion" of many imaging modalities known as "omni-tomography," explained Wang, ...

Durham, NC – The question of how life began on a molecular level has been a longstanding problem in science. However, recent mathematical research sheds light on a possible mechanism by which life may have gotten a foothold in the chemical soup that existed on the early Earth. Researchers have proposed several competing theories for how life on Earth could have gotten its start, even before the first genes or living cells came to be. Despite differences between various proposed scenarios, one theme they all have in common is a network of molecules that have the ability ...

Like a homeowner prepping for a hurricane, the bacterium Bacillus subtilis uses a long checklist to prepare for survival in hard times. In a new study, scientists at Rice University and the University of Houston uncovered an elaborate mechanism that allows B. subtilis to begin preparing for survival, even as it delays the ultimate decision of whether to "hunker down" and withdraw into a hardened spore. The new study by computational biologists at Rice and experimental biologists at the University of Houston is available online in the Proceedings of the National Academy ...

On Nov. 23, 2012, at 8:54 a.m. EST, the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection or CME. Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and the ESA/NASA mission the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, show that the Nov. 23 CME left the sun at speeds of 375 miles per second, which is a slow to average speed for CMEs. This is the third Earth-directed CME since Nov. 20. Not to be confused with a solar flare, a CME is a solar phenomenon that can send solar particles into space and can reach ...

Montreal, November 26, 2012 – What if factory foremen treated their workers less like the machines they operate, and more like people, with personality strengths and differences? Surely the workers would benefit, but might the employers also see positive results in the workplace, as well as being able to cut costs? That's what Concordia researcher Mohammed Othman set out to prove in his paper "Integrating workers' differences into workforce planning," recently published in the journal Computers & Industrial Engineering. Currently, explained Othman, two types of researchers ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- If you want to get rid of unwanted, negative thoughts, try just ripping them up and tossing them in the trash. In a new study, researchers found that when people wrote down their thoughts on a piece of paper and then threw the paper away, they mentally discarded the thoughts as well. On the other hand, people were more likely to use their thoughts when making judgments if they first wrote them down on a piece of paper and tucked the paper in a pocket to protect it. "However you tag your thoughts -- as trash or as worthy of protection -- seems to ...

A study led by academics at the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory and the School of Journalism at Cardiff University have used Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to analyse 2.5 million articles from 498 different English-language online news outlets over ten months. The researchers found that: • As expected, readability measures show that online tabloid newspapers are more readable than broadsheets and use more sentimental language. Among 15 US and UK newspapers, the Sun is the easiest to read, comparable to the BBC's children's news programme, ...

Among the most important techniques developed in atomic physics over the past few years are methods that enable the storage and cooling of atoms and ions at temperatures just above absolute zero. Scientists from Bangalore and Mainz have now demonstrated in an experiment that captured ions can also be cooled through contact with cold atoms and may thus be stored in so-called ion traps in a stable condition for longer periods of time. This finding runs counter to predictions that ions would actually be heated through collisions with atoms. The results obtained by the joint ...

The possible kinematics and their corresponding geometries were once regarded as an already-solved problem. The de Sitter relativity research group formed by researchers from Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, and Beijing Normal University, restudied the problem and showed that additional, previously unknown realizations exist of possible kinematical algebras, each of which has so(3) isotropy and a ten-generators symmetry group. They presented these geometries corresponding to all these realizations and provided a classification in an article, entitled "Geometries ...

Soil respiration is a critical hydrological process that plays an important role in the terrestrial carbon cycle. Associate Professor CHEN ShuTao and his colleagues from the School of Environmental Science and Engineering at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology set out to estimate annual soil respiration from terrestrial ecosystems in China. They have tabulated published estimates of annual soil respiration and developed an empirically based, semi-mechanistic model that includes climate and soil properties. They found that the highest and lowest annual ...

About 250 million years ago, four major floral provinces existed on the Earth's surface, the Gondwana Floral Province in temperate Southern Hemisphere, the Angara Floral Province in temperate Northern Hemisphere, and the Euroamerican and the Cathaysian floral provinces in tropical equatorial regions. These floras evolved as the continents drifted. The Cathaysian Flora is mainly distributed in most areas of today's China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. North China lies at the center of the origin of the Cathaysian Flora. During the Permian, the southern part of the North China ...

Archean cartons are commonly underlain by a cold, thick (>200 km), isotopically enriched, and compositionally refractory lithospheric keel, and represent some of the most stable regions on our planet. However, the North China Craton (NCC), an old continental geological structure dating back 4.0 Ga, is underlain by a thin lithosphere ( END ...