Bruegger's Bagels kicks off its annual fundraising for Children's Miracle Network Hospitals today with a coffee-flavored campaign that benefits children's hospitals across the U.S. The bagel chain, known for its authentic, award-winning New York style bagels, will donate a portion of proceeds from sales of its popular Bottomless Mugs through the end of the year. Bruegger's Bottomless Mug Club started more than 10 years ago, and has been helping out local children's hospitals since 2010. Guests who purchase the Bottomless Mug receive free coffee, tea and soda for the ...

Detroit - A Wayne State University researcher's take on the current state of brain chemical analysis is the cover story in a recent professional journal, accompanied by a podcast. In "Ultrafast Detection and Quantification of Brain Signaling Molecules with Carbon Fiber Microelectrodes," published in the Oct. 2 issue of Analytical Chemistry, Parastoo Hashemi, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, examines the use of carbon fiber microelectrodes (CFM) in neurochemical measurements, with an emphasis on the most recent findings ...

Both male and female scientists view gender discrimination as a major reason women choose to pursue careers in biology rather than physics, according to new research from Rice University. "Gender Segregation in Elite Academic Science," which appears in the October issue of Gender and Society, reveals differences in the way male and female scientists view disparities in the proportion of women in some science disciplines. The study surveyed 2,500 biologists and physicists at 30 elite institutions of higher education in the United States. Researchers also interviewed a ...

DURHAM -- Duke Medicine researchers studying the interaction of blood stem cells and the niche where they reside have identified a protein that may be a long-sought growth factor for blood stem cells. The protein is called pleiotrophin, and is produced by cells that line the blood vessels in bone marrow. In mouse studies conducted by the Duke researchers, the protein helps transplanted blood stem cells locate to the bone marrow, where they produce mature red and white blood cells in the body. The finding, reported in the Oct. 18, 2012, issue of the journal Cell Reports, ...

Charlottesville, VA (October 23, 2012). When faced with disease, patients and caregivers now readily turn to the Internet for information and emotional support. This is particularly true in the case of caregivers of children with hydrocephalus. Researchers at Children's of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham found that adults caring for children with hydrocephalus reported greater regular use of the Internet than the general population (91.7 percent compared with 74 percent). The majority of these caregivers (81.9 percent) also use the Internet to obtain ...

Concern is growing that human-generated noise in the ocean disrupts marine animals that rely on sound for communication and navigation. In the modern ocean, the background noise can be ten times louder than it was just 50 years ago. But new modeling based on recently published data suggests that 200 years ago – prior to the industrial whaling era -- the ocean was even louder than today due to the various sounds whales make. California researchers Michael Stocker and Tom Reuterdahl of Ocean Conservation Research in Lagunitas, Calif., present their findings at the 164th ...

An acoustic navigation system being developed by a team of University of Texas at Austin researchers studying the science of sound propagation inside burning buildings may one day become a life-saving addition to firefighters' arsenal of tools. The team will provide details about their multi-faceted research at the Acoustical Society of America's 164th Meeting, October 22-26, 2012, in Kansas City, Missouri. "Our study is focusing on locating open doors inside burning buildings to gain a better understanding of how acoustic propagation is affected when flames are between ...

Japan's Fukushima Dai'ichi nuclear disaster that occurred in 2011 -- a result of the strongest earthquake on record in the country and the powerful tsunami waves it triggered -- underscored the need for a method to monitor the status of nuclear fuel rods that doesn't rely on electrical power. During the disaster, the electrical power connection to the nuclear reactor failed and rendered back-up electrical generators, coolant pumps, and sensor systems useless. The nuclear plant's operators were unable to monitor the fuel rods in the reactor and spent fuel in the storage ...

People with perfect pitch seem to possess their own inner pitch pipe, allowing them to sing a specific note without first hearing a reference tone. This skill has long been associated with early and extensive musical training, but new research suggests that perfect pitch may have as much to do with genetics as it does with learning an instrument or studying voice. Previous research does draw a connection between early musical training and the likelihood of a person developing perfect pitch, which is also referred to as absolute pitch. This is especially true among speakers ...

PHILADELPHIA — Deciding the ideal treatment for patients with metastatic prostate cancer that stops responding to initial therapy could be guided by certain analyses of cancer cells isolated from the patients' blood, according to data published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "The growth and survival of prostate cancer cells are very dependent on signals that the cancer cells receive through a protein called the androgen receptor," said Daniel A. Haber, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer ...

MINNEAPOLIS, MN—October 23, 2012—A simple-to-use risk score can identify low-risk patients following a severe heart attack (STEMI) and may provide an opportunity to employ early discharge strategies to reduce length of hospital stay and save hospital costs without compromising the safety of the patient, based on a study presented by the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation on Oct. 23 at the 2012 Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) conference. Recently, there has been an emphasis on lowering both hospital length of stay and hospital readmission in patients ...

MINNEAPOLIS, MN—October 23, 2012—Contrary to previous data, patients with prior open heart surgery, or coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG), who have a severe heart attack (STEMI) and receive a coronary stent have similar outcomes to patients without previous CABG, based on study of a large, prospective, regional STEMI network, being presented Oct. 23 at the 2012 Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) conference. Recognizing that the majority of data indicating worse outcomes for STEMI patients with prior CABG came from an older era of heart attack treatment, ...

Alexandria, VA – The U.S. Geological Survey's website states it in no uncertain terms: "There is no such thing as 'earthquake weather.'" Yet, from at least the time of Aristotle, some people have professed links between atmospheric conditions and seismic shaking. For the most part, these hypotheses have not held up under scientific scrutiny and earthquake researchers have set them aside as intriguing but unfounded ideas. However, in the last decade new efforts to identify effects of weather-related, or in some cases climate-related, processes on seismicity have drawn new ...

Philadelphia, October 23—A new study shows that New Jersey's law requiring novice drivers to display a red decal on their license plates has prevented more than 1,600 crashes and helped police officers enforce regulations unique to new drivers. The first-in-the-nation decal provision went into effect in May 2010 as part of N.J.'s Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) law. Nearly every state has a GDL law on the books, but "Kyleigh's Law," named for a teen driver killed in a 2006 N.J. crash, is the first one that requires drivers under age 21 to display their probationary status ...

For seven years, Carsten René Jørgensen from the Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences at Aarhus University has collaborated with the Clinic for Personality Disorders, Aarhus University Hospital, Risskov on examining the extent to which modern psychoanalytic psychotherapy can help the Danes suffering from severe borderline personality disorders. Among the first to examine these forms of modern psychoanalytic treatment of severe personality disorders, the study shows a clear trend; a vast majority of patients do better after a two-year course of treatment. - ...

Fostering and improving medical research education is crucial to biomedical research and clinical patient treatment, and as such it has been identified as the main challenge in every joint European Science Foundation (ESF) - European Research Medical Councils (EMRC) strategy report. A new policy report entitled "Medical Research Education in Europe" has just been published looking at crucial factors to improve medical research education throughout Europe. The new science policy briefing report features an overview of medical researchers' training across Europe. It identifies ...

Leading clinicians and health researchers from across Europe say much greater emphasis must be placed on the scientific evidence for the effectiveness of treatments and other healthcare interventions to ensure patients receive the best care available. The call is contained in a Science Policy Briefing published by the European Medical Research Councils, which also made ten key recommendations on how to improve the quality of research and healthcare in Europe. The briefing, 'Implementation of Medical Research in Clinical Practice', says that there must be much greater ...

Biologists record increasing amounts of plastic litter in the Arctic deep sea: studies confirm that twice as much marine debris is lying on the seabed today compared to ten years ago Bremerhaven, 22nd October 2012. The seabed in the Arctic deep sea is increasingly strewn with litter and plastic waste. As reported in the advance online publication of the scientific journal Marine Pollution Bulletin by Dr. Melanie Bergmann, biologist and deep-sea expert at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association. The quantities of waste observed ...

Lead scientist Professor Simon Cutting, from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, has developed the jabs through the use of probiotic spores. He carried out fundamental studies into the biology of the bacterium Bacillus subtilis which attracted the attention of microbiologists due to its ability to form spores that can last millions of years before germinating under the appropriate environmental conditions. Professor Cutting says: "The mechanisms by which this process occurs have fascinated microbiologists for decades making it one of the most intensively ...

Turbulent flows have challenged researchers for centuries. It is impossible to predict chaotic weather more than a week in advance. Wind resistance on a plane or a car cannot be calculated precisely, since it is determined by atmospheric turbulence. Now, however, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have succeeded in developing a statistical model that can replicate the chaotic flows and thereby provide a better understanding of the process. The research results are published in the scientific journal, Physics of Fluids. "Without knowing the movements in detail, we ...

A research team from the University of Bristol's Centre for Quantum Photonics (CQP) have brought the reality of a quantum computer one step closer by experimentally demonstrating a technique for significantly reducing the physical resources required for quantum factoring. The team have shown how it is possible to recycle the particles inside a quantum computer, so that quantum factoring can be achieved with only one third of the particles originally required. The research is published in the latest issue of Nature Photonics. Using photons as the particles, the Bristol ...

This press release is available in German. What happens in the brain when we see, hear, think and remember? To be able to answer questions like this, neuroscientists need information about how the millions of neurons in the brain are connected to each other. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have taken a crucial step towards obtaining a complete circuit diagram of the brain of the mouse, a key model organism for the neurosciences. The research group working with Winfried Denk has developed a method for preparing the whole mouse ...

Mucus coats our airways' internal surfaces. The viscous gel humidifies the lungs and prevents viruses and other small particles like diesel soot from entering the body unchecked. Previously unclear was the extent to which such nanoparticles are able to move through the lungs' mucus. Here, the research evidence was contradictory. Scientists could not explain why, in inhaled medication development, drug nanoparticles often simply got stuck in the mucus never making it to their target destination inside the lung cells. Now, as part of a German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded ...

An excellent review article from two scientists at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in the USA to be published in Alcohol Clin Exp Res 2012, describes the epidemiologic and basic scientific evidence linking alcohol consumption to the risk of breast cancer. The authors point out deficiencies in the epidemiologic data, especially that the pattern of drinking (regular moderate versus binge drinking) has generally not been taken into consideration, important given that binge drinking is associated with much higher blood alcohol concentrations and acetaldehyde ...

By demonstrating that it is possible to inhibit the viral infection in vitro by blocking the bonding between the virus and these receptors, the researchers have opened the way to a new antiviral strategy. These works were published on line in the review "Cell Host & Microbe" of October 18, 2012. The Dengue virus circulates in four different forms (four serotypes). It is transmitted to humans by mosquitoes. It is a major public health problem. Two billion people throughout the world are exposed to the risk of infection and 50 million cases of Dengue fever are recorded by ...