CINCINNATI—Hepatitis B virus (HBV) continues to be a major health issue in the United States despite prevention strategies. Now, research at the University of Cincinnati (UC) provides evidence that current prevention and screening standards are worth the cost and may even need expansion to include more of the population, further helping prevent the spread of this life-threatening disease. The findings are published in the May 3, 2011 advance online edition of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Mark Eckman, MD, UC Health physician and professor of medicine, ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The cactus, stalwart of the desert, has quite a story to tell about the evolution of plant communities found the world over. In a paper published in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Brown University biologists and colleagues have discovered that the rapid speciation of cacti occurred between 5 and 10 million years ago and coincided with species explosions by other succulent plant groups around the world. The researchers propose that a prolonged dry spell and possibly lower levels of atmospheric ...

Have something to say about our conveyor systems? Tell us...and the rest of the world about it - we'd love to hear from you. Dorner Manufacturing has launched its new Dorner Conveyor Blog on http://blog.dornerconveyors.com. Each week Dorner engineers, product managers and others will be posting topics such as conveyor designs, unique applications, product development, conveyor maintenance, industry observations - virtually any topic related to conveyors and material handling. The interactive Dorner Conveyor Blog seeks readers' input by allowing people to voice their ...

SEATTLE – Many patients who undergo bone marrow or blood stem cell transplantation to treat blood cancers or a "pre-leukemic" condition called myelodysplasia experience a decline in mental and fine motor skills due to the toll of their disease and its treatment. A new study led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, published in the May 2, 2011 online edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, found that overall, these effects are largely temporary and that most patients can expect a return to normal motor and memory function within five years. However, ...

Many people reach toward the back of the fresh-produce shelf to find the freshest salad greens with the latest expiration dates. But a study led by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists may prompt consumers to instead look for packages that receive the greatest exposure to light--usually those found closest to the front. The study was led by postharvest plant physiologist Gene Lester while at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Crop Quality and Fruit Insects Research Unit in Weslaco, Texas. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency. Lester ...

WESTERVILLE, OH – Imagine a battlefield medic or emergency medical technician providing first aid with a special wad of cottony glass fibers that simultaneously slows bleeding, fights bacteria (and other sources of infection), stimulates the body's natural healing mechanisms, resists scarring, and—because it is quickly absorbed by surrounding tissue — may never have to be removed in follow-up care. Or, imagine diabetics with hard-to-heal wounds finding a source of relief from the battle against infections and limb amputation. Those scenarios are the hope of the developers ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A team of researchers is beginning to see exactly what the response to threats looks like in the brain at the cellular and molecular levels. This new information, including the discovery that a model of social stress can increase inflammation among brain cells, should provide new insight into how the stress response affects inflammatory and behavioral responses. It may also provide new targets for drugs treatments in the continuing struggle to curtail depression and anxiety. Scientists from Ohio State University's Institute of Behavioral Medicine ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A new study from Rhode Island Hospital has found that more than one in 10 catheter-related bloodstream infections due to Staph aureus in hospitalized adults are caused by infected peripheral venous catheters (PVC). The study points out the substantial medical burden that arises from complications from these infections due to the large number of such catheters used in hospitalized patients. The study is published in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology and is now available online in advance of print. Senior author Leonard Mermel, ...

This release is available in French. Montreal, May 3, 2011 – Most Canadian teenagers are expected to make their own decisions, while Chinese adolescents are still heavily influenced by their parents, according to a study published in the Journal of Business Research. Led by Concordia University and the University of Texas at Arlington researchers, the investigation found child-rearing practices appear to impact teen outlooks and decision-making patterns differently across cultures. Why? Parenting varies in both countries, since Canada is an individualist culture and ...

Boston- Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center have found that by adding one family physician per 1,000, or 100 per 100,000, could reduce hospital readmission costs by $579 million per year, or 83 percent of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) target. These findings currently appear on the website of the "Robert Graham Center," a primary care think tank. Growth of family physicians has fallen over the last decade due to payment disparities and other strong incentives for subspecialization, and lack of accountability ...

PITTSBURGH—Taking their cue from social media, educators at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a social networking application called Classroom Salon that engages students in online learning communities that effectively tap the collective intelligence of groups. Thousands of high school and university students used Classroom Salon (CLS), http://www.classroomsalon.org/, this past academic year to share their ideas about texts, news articles and other reading materials or their critiques of each others' writings. With the support of the Next Generation Learning Challenges ...

Rice University senior engineering students are using the sun to power an autoclave that sterilizes medical instruments and help solve a long-standing health issue for developing countries. The student's used Capteur Soleil, a device created decades ago by French inventor Jean Boubour to capture the energy of the sun in places where electricity -- or fuel of any kind -- is hard to get. In attaching an insulated box containing the autoclave, the students transform the device into a potential lifesaver. The Capteur Soleil, which sits outside Rice's Oshman Engineering ...

URBANA – A Vietnam veteran who conducted early-morning mine sweeps on that country's roads, University of Illinois nutrition professor John Erdman knows the damage that a traumatic brain injury (TBI) can cause. That's why he was happy to chair a committee that gave the Department of Defense recommendations that will improve the odds of recovery for persons wounded by roadside bombs. "Within the first 24 hours after head trauma, patients need to receive at least 50 percent of their normal caloric intake, including a higher-than-normal amount of protein, to reduce inflammation ...

At the request of customers, software development firm Halfpricesoft has launched the new edition of check printing software to make it easier to print Quickbooks compatible checks. "We have a strong following of small business customers who love our other time-saving and money-saving software titles." said Dr. Ge, founder of Louisville, Ky.-based Halfpricesoft, "With ezCheckPrinting, check writing and printing software, user never need to re-order the expensive pre-printed checks. And new blank check printing feature makes it even easier to print pre-printed ...

HOUSTON (May 2, 2011) – Colorectal cancer screening rates increased for Medicare beneficiaries when coverage was expanded to average-risk individuals, but racial disparities still exist, according to researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). "Despite the expansion of Medicare coverage for colorectal cancer screening, disparities persisted among the ethnic groups we examined," said Arica White, Ph.D., M.P.H., former doctoral student at The University of Texas School of Public Health, part of UTHealth. In 1998, Medicare began covering ...

NEW YORK – May 3, 2011 –A study by Columbia Business School Professors Amit Khandelwal, a Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business senior scholar and assistant professor, Finance and Economics, and Shang-Jin Wei, director, Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business, and N.T. Wang Professor of Chinese Business and Economy, Finance and Economics, alongside JaeBin Ahn, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Columbia University, provides the first empirical evidence that quantifies the role of intermediary firms in developing and expanding international trade ...

WASHINGTON, DC (May 3, 2011) – A coalition of 30 leading global health organizations that work on vaccines, drugs, and other tools and technologies that save lives today released a list of recommendations for US policymakers and regulators, calling for acceleration of scientific innovations and streamlining the approval of safe and affordable inventions in order to save more lives around the world. The Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC), a group funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and designed to give a greater voice for those advancing technologies ...

PHILADELPHIA — Biophysicists at the University of Pennsylvania have helped develop a new technique for studying how proteins respond to physical stress and have applied it to better understand the stability-granting structures in normal and mutated red blood cells. The research was conducted by Dennis Discher and Christine Krieger in the Molecular and Cell Biophysics Lab in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science, along with researchers from the New York Blood Center and the Wistar Institute. Discher's research was published online in the journal Proceedings ...

HOUSTON -- (May 3, 2011) -- A Rice University-led team of physicists this week offered up one of the first theoretical explanations of how two dissimilar types of high-temperature superconductors behave in similar ways. The research appears online this week in the journal Physical Review Letters. It describes how the magnetic properties of electrons in two dissimilar families of iron-based materials called "pnictides" (pronounced: NICK-tides) could give rise to superconductivity. One of the parent families of pnictides is a metal and was discovered in 2008; the other ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT chemical engineers have designed a new type of drug-delivery nanoparticle that exploits a trait shared by almost all tumors: They are more acidic than healthy tissues. Such particles could target nearly any type of tumor, and can be designed to carry virtually any type of drug, says Paula Hammond, a member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the particles in the journal ACS Nano. Like most other drug-delivering nanoparticles, the new MIT particles are cloaked in a polymer ...

Ecstasy – the illegal "rave" drug that produces feelings of euphoria and emotional warmth – has been in the news recently as a potential therapeutic. Clinical trials are testing Ecstasy in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. But headlines like one in Time magazine's health section in February – "Ecstasy as therapy: have some of its negative effects been overblown?" – concern Ronald Cowan, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of Psychiatry. His team reports in the May issue of Neuropsychopharmacology that recreational Ecstasy use is associated with a chronic ...

Boston, MA – A common component in webcams may help drug makers and prescribers address a common side-effect of drugs called cardiotoxicity, an unhealthy change in the way the heart beats. Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have used the basic webcam technology to create a tool to look at the effects of medications in real time on heart cells, called cardiomyocytes. These findings were published in the journal, Lab on a Chip on April 11, 2011. Researchers developed a cost-effective, portable cell-based biosensor for real time cardiotoxicity detection using ...

An ancient, bipedal hominid needs a new nickname. Paranthropus boisei, a 2.3 million to 1.2 million-year-old primate, whom researchers say is an early human cousin, probably didn't crack nuts at all as his common handle suggests. "Nutcracker Man" most likely ate grass and possibly sedges, said geochemist Thure Cerling, lead author of a study published in the May 2 online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Cerling and colleagues determined P. boisei's diet by analyzing carbon isotope ratios in the tooth enamel of 24 teeth from 22 ...

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.—Fungi play significant ecological and economic roles. They can break down organic matter, cause devastating agricultural blights, enter into symbiotic relationships to protect and nourish plants, or offer a tasty repast. For industrial applications, fungi provide a source of enzymes to catalyze such processes as generating biofuels from plant biomass. One large fungal group with such enzymes are the rust plant pathogens which cannot survive on their own so they use crops as hosts, leading to reduced yields and potentially hindering efforts to grow biomass ...

Durham, NC – Most of us wouldn't consider slow-moving snails to be high-metabolism creatures. But at one point in the distant past, snail metabolism sped up, says a new study of marine snails in the journal Paleobiology. "Many of the marine snails we recognize today — such as abalone, conchs, periwinkles and whelks — require more than twice as much energy to survive as their ancestors did," said co-author Seth Finnegan of the California Institute of Technology. The findings come from a new analysis of snail fossils formed one to two hundred million years ago, during ...