San Diego, CA (October 17, 2012) – A sweeping study on the issue of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in hospitals shows that using antimicrobial soap and ointment on all intensive-care patients significantly decreases bloodstream infection. The results, which are being presented for the first time at IDWeek 2012TM, may suggest a major change in health care practice that could help save lives. The study involved nearly 75,000 patients in 43 mostly community hospitals in 16 states and involved each hospital's own quality improvement team. Working with these teams enabled ...

SEATTLE – One of the world's leading bone marrow transplant experts is recommending a significant change to current transplant practice for patients who need marrow or adult stem cells from an unrelated donor to treat hematologic malignancies. Fred Appelbaum, M.D., director of the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, asserts that bone marrow – not circulating, peripheral blood, which is the current norm – should be the source for unrelated donor adult stem cells for most patients who require a transplant. The reason: because there is less ...

Ustekinumab, an antibody proven to treat the skin condition psoriasis, has now shown positive results in decreasing the debilitating effects of Crohn's Disease, according to researchers at the University of California San Diego, School of Medicine. The study will appear in the October 18, 2012 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Results from the clinical trial showed ustekinumab (Stelara) increased clinical response and remission in patients suffering from moderate-to-severe Crohn's Disease - a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that can lead ...

Qubit-based computing exploiting spooky quantum effects like entanglement and superposition will speed up factoring and searching calculations far above what can be done with mere zero-or-one bits. To domesticate quantum weirdness, however, to make it a fit companion for mass-market electronic technology, many tricky bi-lateral and multi-lateral arrangements---among photons, electrons, circuits, cavities, etc.---need to be negotiated. A new milestone in this forward march: a Princeton-Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) collaboration announces the successful excitation ...

ANAHEIM, Calif. – Oct.17, 2012. Nearly 38 percent of lesbians polled in a national survey were not routinely screened for cervical cancer, putting them at risk of developing a highly preventable cancer, according to a University of Maryland School of Medicine study being presented at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research. Cervical cancer is caused by a sexually transmitted virus, the human papillomavirus (HPV), and can be detected through regular Pap smears. The percentage of lesbians not being screened as recommended ...

The giant impact believed to have formed the Earth-Moon system has long been accepted as canon. However, a major challenge to the theory has been that the Earth and Moon have identical oxygen isotope compositions, even though earlier impact models indicated they should differ substantially. In a paper published today in the journal Science online, a new model by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), motivated by accompanying work by others on the early dynamical history of the Moon, accounts for this similarity in composition while also yielding an appropriate mass for Earth ...

It's a big claim, but Washington University in St. Louis planetary scientist Frédéric Moynier says his group has discovered evidence that the Moon was born in a flaming blaze of glory when a body the size of Mars collided with the early Earth. The evidence might not seem all that impressive to a nonscientist: a tiny excess of a heavier variant of the element zinc in Moon rocks. But the enrichment probably arose because heavier zinc atoms condensed out of the roiling cloud of vaporized rock created by a catastrophic collision faster than lighter zinc atoms, and the remaining ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Among the oddities of the outer solar system are the middle-sized moons of Saturn, a half-dozen icy bodies dwarfed by Saturn's massive moon Titan. According to a new model for the origin of the Saturn system, these middle-sized moons were spawned during giant impacts in which several major satellites merged to form Titan. Erik Asphaug, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will present this new hypothesis October 19 at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical ...

It takes both teeth and jaws to make a pretty smile, but the evolutionary origins of these parts of our anatomy have only just been discovered, thanks to a particle accelerator and a long dead fish. All living jawed vertebrates (animals with backbones, such as humans) have teeth, but it has long been thought that the first jawed vertebrates lacked pearly gnashers, instead capturing prey with gruesome scissor-like jaw-bones. However new research, led by the University of Bristol and published today in Nature, shows that these earliest jawed vertebrates possessed teeth ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Researchers at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore have identified numerous new subtypes of gastric cancer that are triggered by environmental factors. Reported in the Oct. 17, 2012, issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine, the findings are based on the science of epigenetics, a study of gene activity. The insights into the complexities of stomach cancer could lead to better treatment approaches for the second leading cancer killer in the world, behind lung cancer. "Gastric cancer is a heterogenous disease with individual patients ...

An Indiana University study that examined the effect of age and physical activity on lower leg muscle reflexes and coordination concluded that participation in physical activity was beneficial for lower leg muscle coordination across both sides of the body in both young and older study participants. Lower limb muscle communication is essential for everyday tasks, such as walking, balancing, and climbing stairs. "The results of this study suggest that participation in physical activity contributes to greater crossed-spinal reflex stability in both young and elderly subjects," ...

A mayfly trapped in 16-million-year-old-amber reveals a hitchhiking springtail, a wingless arthropod that is amongst the most commonly found bugs all over the world. The new research, published Oct 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE led by David Penney from the University of Manchester, UK, is the first to show that springtails travelled on winged insects like mayflies, and only the second example of this mode of travel by springtails in the past or present. Springtails are among the most abundant group of arthropods, found in large numbers in soil all over the world. ...

Dolphins sleep with only one half of their brains at a time, and according to new research published Oct. 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE, this trait allows them to stay constantly alert for at least 15 days in a row. Brian Branstetter from the National Marine Mammal Foundation and colleagues found that dolphins can use echolocation with near-perfect accuracy continuously for up to 15 days, identifying targets and monitoring their environment. The researchers studied 2 dolphins, one male and one female, and found that they were capable of this task with no signs ...

Men and women with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) may show subtle but significant differences in the cognitive functions impacted by the condition, according to new research published Oct 17 by Meng-Chuan Lai and colleagues from the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, UK in the open access journal PLOS ONE. Though individuals with autism show sex-specific differences in serum biomarkers, genetics and brain anatomy, little is known about any sex-dependent differences in cognition caused by ASC. Following their previous report on behavioral sex differences ...

Children with autism have difficulty identifying inappropriate social behavior, and even when successful, they are often unable to justify why the behavior seemed inappropriate. New brain imaging studies show that children with autism may recognize socially inappropriate behavior, but have difficulty using spoken language to explain why the behavior is considered inappropriate, according to research published Oct. 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Elizabeth Carter from Carnegie Mellon University and colleagues. The authors say the results of their functional ...

Crows fed on prion-infected brains from mice can transmit these infectious agents in their feces and may play a role in the geographic spread of diseases caused by prions, such as chronic wasting disease or scrapie. The new research published Oct. 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Kurt VerCauteren from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other colleagues, shows that prions can pass through crows' digestive systems without being destroyed, and may be excreted intact after ingestion by the birds. According to the authors, their results demonstrate a potential ...

European astronomers have discovered a planet with about the mass of the Earth orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system — the nearest to Earth. It is also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun. The planet was detected using the HARPS instrument on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. The results will appear online in the journal Nature on 17 October 2012. Alpha Centauri is one of the brightest stars in the southern skies and is the nearest stellar system to our Solar System -- only 4.3 light-years away. It is ...

Women whose first pregnancy is ectopic are likely to have fewer children in the following 20-30 years than women whose first pregnancy ends in a delivery, miscarriage or abortion, according to results from a study of nearly 3,000 women in Denmark. In addition, these women have a five-fold increased risk of a subsequent ectopic pregnancy. The first study to look at long-term reproductive outcomes in women whose first pregnancy was ectopic is published online today (Thursday) in Europe's leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction [1]. Ectopic pregnancies ...

PHILADELPHIA - Changes in the ability to smell and taste can be caused by a simple cold or upper respiratory tract infection, but they may also be among the first signs of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Now, new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has revealed an association between an impaired sense of smell and myasthenia gravis (MG), a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease characterized by fluctuating fatigue and muscle weakness. The findings are published in the latest edition ...

Men have borne the brunt of worsening mental health across the population of England since the start of the economic downturn in 2008, reveals research published in the online journal BMJ Open. But unemployment and a falling household income don't seem to be the culprits, prompting the authors to suggest that it is the threat of losing their jobs that has affected men's mental health. They base their findings on data taken from the national representative annual Health Survey for England for adults aged 25 to 64, between 1991 and 2010. Response rates during this ...

Bariatric surgery—restrictive gastric banding and other types of gastric bypass—can radically reduce risk factors for heart disease and stroke, and within a short period of time, indicates an analysis of the available evidence, published online in Heart. The impact is much greater and faster than drug treatments for weight management or diabetes, say the authors, and in some cases, could be life-saving. Being obese or overweight kills more than 2.6 million people every year. And the evidence shows that excess body fat produces harmful chemicals and skews gut hormones ...

BATON ROUGE – LSU's John Fleeger, professor emeritus in LSU's Department of Biological Sciences, is part of a multi-disciplinary national research group that recently discovered the impact of nutrient enrichment on salt marsh ecosystems is marsh loss and that such loss is seen much faster than previously thought. Globally between a quarter and half of the area of the world's tidal marshes has already been lost, and although multiple factors – sea-level rise, development, loss of sediment supply – are known to contribute to marsh loss, in some locations the causes have remained ...

Fresh examinations of lunar rocks gathered by Apollo mission astronauts have yielded new insights about the moon's chemical makeup as well as clues about the giant impacts that may have shaped the early beginnings of Earth and the moon. Geochemist James Day of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and colleagues Randal Paniello and Frédéric Moynier at Washington University in St. Louis used advanced technological instrumentation to probe the chemical signatures of moon rocks obtained during four lunar missions and meteorites collected from the Antarctic. ...

An international consortium of scientists has published a high resolution draft of the barley genome. The research, published in the journal Nature, will help to produce new and better barley varieties that are vital for the beer and whisky industries. The UK team behind the research was led by Professor Robbie Waugh of Scotland's James Hutton Institute who worked with researchers at The Genome Analysis Centre, Norwich. Barley is the second most important crop in UK agriculture and malting barley underpins brewing and pub industries worth some £20 billion to the UK ...

As the climate changes, conservationists are divided over the most effective way to preserve animal and plant diversity because they cannot simply preserve the status quo. Ensuring species can shift to track the climate to which they are suited is a complex problem, especially when there are competing demands on land use. A simple prediction is that more habitat would help species to shift, but it is not obvious what the best spatial locations for habitat would be. A new study led by scientists at the University of York says that well placed habitat "stepping stones" would ...