PHILADELPHIA –This week, a strategic roadmap to help to the nation's health care system cope with the impending public health crisis caused Alzheimer's disease and related dementia will be published in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association. The plan aims to link the latest scientific findings with clinical care and bring together patients, families, scientists, pharmaceutical companies, regulatory agencies, and advocacy organizations behind a common set of prioritized goals. The consensus document is the outcome of a June meeting of leading ...

The public oppose the cancer drugs fund but support the new pricing system for branded medicines, according to a new study. When asked if the NHS should pay more for cancer drugs compared to medicines for an equally serious condition, the majority of 4,118 people surveyed across Britain said it shouldn't. Medicines were favoured, however, if they met the criteria by which the value of new medicines is to be assessed as part of the value-based pricing scheme, due to be introduced from January 2014. Treatments were preferred if they were for severe diseases, if they ...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. - Influenza outbreaks in the United States typically begin with the arrival of cold weather and then spread in seasonal waves across geographic zones. But the question of why epidemics can vary from one season to the next has baffled scientists. In a paper titled "Deviations in Influenza Seasonality: Odd Coincidence or Obscure Consequence," Elena Naumova, Ph.D., professor of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts School of Engineering, and collaborators from the U.S. and India suggest that the search for answers has been thwarted, in ...

Cambridge, Mass. – September 7, 2012 - An international, Harvard-led team of researchers have demonstrated a new type of light beam that propagates without spreading outwards, remaining very narrow and controlled along an unprecedented distance. This "needle beam," as the team calls it, could greatly reduce signal loss for on-chip optical systems and may eventually assist the development of a more powerful class of microprocessors. Based at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Carnot de Bourgogne, CNRS, in ...

New evidence shows that birds may choose their mate with the help of smell. They prefer a dissimilar mate because this gives their young a more efficient immune system. This has been shown in a new study by researchers from Lund University in Sweden, in a Swedish-French collaboration. Humans and many animals can choose a suitable mate by smell. Choosing a mate with the right smell can give the offspring an efficient immune system. This is because each individual's smell can be said to reflect information on the individual's genes. By finding the mate whose genes best ...

Sticking yourself in the finger day after day: For many diabetics, this means of checking blood glucose is an everyday part of life. Especially for patients with Type-1 diabetes, who always have to keep a close eye on their levels, since their bodies are incapable of producing the insulin to break down the glucose in the blood. Several times a day, they have to place a tiny drop of blood on a test strip. It is the only way they can ascertain the blood glucose value, so they can inject the correct amount of insulin needed. And this pricking is not only a burdensome: it may ...

Somali immigrants to the UK and USA appear to integrate better and have fewer mental health problems if they are allowed to work and they receive practical support during the first few years of their time in the new country, according to a study led by researchers at Queen Mary, University of London (UK) and published in BioMed Central Public Health today (Friday). [1] The study used a survey and focus groups to investigate the experiences of Somalis living in London (UK) and Minneapolis (USA). After adjusting for various factors such as age, sex and marital status, the ...

Archaeologists from the University of Leicester who are leading the search for the lost grave of King Richard III announced today that they have made a new advance in their quest. They have uncovered evidence of the lost garden of Robert Herrick – where, historically, it is recorded there was a memorial to Richard III. Now the 'time tomb team' as they have become to be known has discovered paving stones which they believe belong to the garden. The University of Leicester is leading the archaeological search for the burial place of King Richard III with Leicester City ...

Washington D.C., September 7, 2012 – Every year 100 million people are pushed into poverty because they have to pay for health services directly. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Results for Development Institute has partnered with the world's premier global health journal, The Lancet, on a special collection of papers exploring the social, political, and economic issues around the global movement towards universal health coverage (UHC) – defined by the World Health Organization as everyone in a population having access to appropriate, promotive, preventive, ...

Antibiotic treatment with amoxicillin/clavulanate improves moderate exacerbations in patients with mild-to-moderate chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and significantly prolongs the time between exacerbations, according to a new study from researchers in Spain. "The existing evidence for antibiotic therapy in non-severe exacerbations of COPD is weak," said lead author Carl Llor, MD, PhD of the University Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. "The results of our multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial show that antibiotic treatment is ...

Researchers in Aalto University have developed a new concept for computing, using water droplets as bits of digital information. This was enabled by the discovery that upon collision with each other on a highly water-repellent surface, two water droplets rebound like billiard balls. In the work, published in the journal Advanced Materials, the researchers experimentally determined the conditions for rebounding of water droplets moving on superhydrophobic surfaces. In the study, a copper surface coated with silver and chemically modified with a fluorinated compound was ...

Today the drilling starts for a seismic monitoring network on the Marmara Sea near Istanbul. Specially designed seismic sensors in eight boreholes on the outskirts of Istanbul and around the eastern Marmara Sea will monitor the seismic activity of the region with high precision. In each of the respective 300 meter deep holes several borehole seismometers will be permanently installed at various depths. These detect even barely perceptible earthquakes with very small magnitudes at a high resolution and can thus provide information about the earthquake rupture processes associated ...

TORONTO, ON – Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, formulated by the theoretical physicist in 1927, is one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics. In its most familiar form, it says that it is impossible to measure anything without disturbing it. For instance, any attempt to measure a particle's position must randomly change its speed. The principle has bedeviled quantum physicists for nearly a century, until recently, when researchers at the University of Toronto demonstrated the ability to directly measure the disturbance and confirm that Heisenberg was too ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Tiny sea creatures called rhabdopleurids reside on the ocean floor, building homes of collagen on the shells of dead clams. Rhabdopleurid colonies are small, and the critters are by no means the dominant animals in their ecosystem. But they have lived this way -- and survived -- for more than 500 million years. And in doing so, they have outlasted more elaborate species that also descended from a common ancestor, according to a new study in the journal Lethaia. Though rhabdopleurids' age and modern existence are well-documented, the paper breaks new ground ...

New research offers a possible strategy for treating central nervous system diseases, such as brain and spinal cord injury, brain cancer, epilepsy, and neurological complications of HIV. The experimental treatment method allows small therapeutic agents to safely cross the blood-brain barrier in laboratory rats by turning off P-glycoprotein, one of the main gatekeepers preventing medicinal drugs from reaching their intended targets in the brain. The findings appeared online Sept. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and is the result of a study from ...

Hurricane Michael's eye was so clear on new satellite imagery from NASA that the surface of the Atlantic Ocean could be seen through it. NASA satellites have provided visible, infrared and microwave imagery of Hurricane Michael as it tracks north in the eastern Atlantic. A stunning visible image of Hurricane Michael was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite on Sept. 6 at 12:20 p.m. EDT. In the image, Michael's eye was so clear that the ocean surface is visible through it. Since that time infrared ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. – When stressed, about 30 percent of blacks hold onto too much sodium, the equivalent of eating a small order of fast food French fries or a small bag of potato chips, researchers say. "This response pattern puts you under a greater blood pressure load over the course of the day and probably throughout the night as well, increasing your risk of cardiovascular disease," said Dr. Gregory Harshfield, hypertension researcher at the Institute of Public and Preventive Health at Georgia Health Sciences University. In response to stress, they hold onto about 160 ...

At an airport, many people are essential for planes to take off. Gate staffs, refueling crews, flight attendants and pilots are in constant communication with each other as they perform required tasks. But it's the air traffic controller who talks with every plane, coordinating departures and runways. Communication must run through her in order for an airport to run smoothly and safely. In computational terms, the air traffic controller is the "betweenness centrality," the most connected person in the system. In this example, finding the key influencer is easy because ...

WASHINGTON — The nation's collection of climate models should advance substantially to deliver more detailed, smaller scale climate projections, says a new report from the National Research Council. To meet this need, the report calls for these assorted climate models to take a more integrated path and use a common software infrastructure while adding regional detail, new simulation capabilities, and new approaches for collaborating with their user community. From farmers deciding which crops to plant next season, to mayors preparing for possible heat waves, to insurance ...

Chevy Chase, MD—The Endocrine Society today issued a Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG) for the diagnosis and treatment of hypertriglyceridemia. Triglycerides are a type of fat found in the blood and are associated with cardiovascular risk. The CPG, entitled "Evaluation and Treatment of Hypertriglyceridemia: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline" appears in the September 2012 issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (JCEM), a publication of The Endocrine Society. The most common reasons for high triglycerides include being overweight, lack ...

A racial quota system at one of the leading universities in Brazil raised the proportion of black students from low-income families, without decreasing their efforts to succeed in school, a major new study finds. "Critics of affirmative action policies often argue that making it easier for people to get into college lowers their incentive to try hard academically. That argument doesn't stand up to our data," says Andrew Francis, an economist at Emory University and co-author of the study. Francis conducted the research with Maria Tannuri-Pianto, an economist at the ...

Northwestern University researchers have broken a world record by creating two new synthetic materials with the greatest amount of surface areas reported to date. Named NU-109 and NU-110, the materials belong to a class of crystalline nanostructure known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) that are promising vessels for natural gas storage for vehicles, catalysts, and other sustainable materials chemistry. The materials' promise lies in their vast internal surface area. If the internal surface area of one NU-110 crystal the size of a grain of salt could be unfolded, ...

DETROIT – Using a novel surgical approach, it's possible to rebuild a functional lower jaw and mouth, and preserve a patient's ability to eat and speak after removing an invasive facial tumor, according to a new report from Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. This case study not only documents a successful surgical technique to create a fully functional lower jaw, but also reports the rare occurrence of a bone cancer (osteosarcoma) that spread from the patient's right femur to his jaw bone. Most commonly, osteosarcoma is found in the long bones of the leg and does not ...

New research led by researchers at North Carolina State University shows that exposure to the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) early in life results in high levels of anxiety by causing significant gene expression changes in a specific region of the brain called the amygdala. The researchers also found that a soy-rich diet can mitigate these effects. "We knew that BPA could cause anxiety in a variety of species, and wanted to begin to understand why and how that happens," says Dr. Heather Patisaul, an associate professor of biology at NC State and lead author of a paper describing ...

Molybdenum is an essential metal required in all living beings from bacteria to plants to humans. But as vital as this metal is, no one understood the importance of its structure until the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry's Joel Weiner and his team jumped on the case. Molybdenum plays critical roles in human health. It does not act alone but is found attached to certain proteins, called molybdenum enzymes, by a very large organic molecule. The organic molecule that holds the molybdenum in place in a protein is extraordinarily complex. and "expensive" for the cell to make, ...