This press release is available in French. Montreal, July 29 2012 – One of the mysteries of blindness has been solved. A team of international scientists in collaboration with the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI MUHC) identified a new gene responsible for Leber Congenital Amaurosis (LCA), a devastating genetic form of blindness in newborns. What makes this discovery so exceptional is that this new gene called NMNAT1 – known to be crucial for life – has never been associated with any human disease. This is the first time such a major correlation ...

Plastic electronics hold the promise of cheap, mass-produced devices. But plastic semiconductors have an important flaw: the electronic current is influenced by "charge traps" in the material. These traps, which have a negative impact on plastic light-emitting diodes and solar cells, are poorly understood. However, a new study by a team of researchers from the University of Groningen and the Georgia Institute of Technology reveals a common mechanism underlying these traps and provides a theoretical framework to design trap-free plastic electronics. The results are presented ...

A training tool that helps physicians involve patients in decision-making can reduce the use of antibiotics for acute respiratory infections, according to a study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Antibiotics are prescribed too often for acute respiratory infections, even though many are not bacterial infections and therefore will not respond to antibiotic use. Overuse of antibiotics is a health concern and may be contributing to antibiotic resistance. Researchers conducted a cluster randomized trial to determine the impact of a shared decision-making ...

Washington, July 30, 2012 -- Nurse burnout leads to higher healthcare-associated infection rates (HAIs) and costs hospitals millions of additional dollars annually, according to a study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). Researchers from the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing analyzed data previously collected by the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment ...

University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business -- A just completed multi-year research project by the Fisher CIO Leadership Program at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business has uncovered the most important, role specific career success factors of chief information officers. The study was initiated by Max Hopper, the iconic author of American Airlines industry-changing SABRE system and conducted by the Fisher CIO Leadership Program. Hopper was concerned that so many companies were failing to achieve much if any benefit from their expensive IT organizations, ...

By studying fruit flies, scientists at A*STAR's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) have successfully devised a fast and cost-saving way to uncover genetic changes that have a higher potential to cause cancer. With this new approach, researchers will now be able to rapidly distinguish the range of genetic changes that are causally linked to cancer (i.e. "driver" mutations) versus those with limited impact on cancer progression. This research paves the way for doctors to design more targeted treatment against the different cancer types, based on the specific ...

In order to observe the individual particles in a solution, Prof. Madhavi Krishnan and her co-workers «entice» each particle into an «electrostatic trap». It works like this: between two glass plates the size of a chip, the researchers create thousands of round energy holes. The trick is that these holes have just a weak electrostatic charge. The scientists than add a drop of the solution to the plates, whereupon each particle falls into an energy hole and remains trapped there. But the particles do not remain motionless in their trap. Instead, molecules in the solution ...

Archaeologists from the Department of Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn have been excavating for the past four years together with the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History in the Maya city of Uxul in Campeche, Mexico. The aim of the excavation project under the direction of Prof. Dr. Nikolai Grube and Dr. Kai Delvendahl is to investigate the process of centralization and collapse of hegemonic state structures in the Maya Lowlands using the example of a mid-sized classic Maya city (Uxul) and its ties to a supra-regional center (Calakmul). ...

A mathematical physicist and her colleague, both from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, are about to publish a study in EPJ B¹ on a family of taxation and wealth redistribution models. The findings could lead to numerical simulations of potential wealth distribution scenarios playing out over the long term and could be used for policy decision making. Maria Letizia Bertotti and Giovanni Modanese propose a mechanism of individual interaction of economic agents involved in wealth redistribution on a one-to-one level as a means of understanding their collective ...

Philadelphia, PA, July 30, 2012 – Is attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) due to a delay in brain development or the result of complete deviation from typical development? In the current issue of Biological Psychiatry, Dr. Philip Shaw and colleagues present evidence for delay based on a study by the National Institutes of Health. The cerebral cortex is the folded gray tissue that makes up the outermost portion of the brain, covering the brain's inner structures. This tissue has left and right hemispheres and is divided into lobes. Each lobe performs specific ...

A beautiful and colossal human sculpture is one of the latest cultural treasures unearthed by an international team at the Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP) excavation site in southeastern Turkey. A large semi-circular column base, ornately decorated on one side, was also discovered. Both pieces are from a monumental gate complex that provided access to the upper citadel of Kunulua, capital of the Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Patina (ca. 1000-738 BC). "These newly discovered Tayinat sculptures are the product of a vibrant local Neo-Hittite sculptural tradition," said Professor ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (July 30, 2012) - As the "individual mandate" of the Affordable Care Act moves forward, debate and speculation continue as to whether universal health insurance coverage will lead to significant cost savings for hospitals. The assumption is that providing appropriate primary care will improve the overall health of the population, resulting in less need for hospital services and less severe illness among hospitalized patients. Findings from a recent study published in Health Care Management Review challenge that assumption. Health Care Management Review ...

PHILADELPHIA (July 30, 2012)— When the longest cells in the body are injured at their farthest reaches, coordinating the cells' repair is no easy task. This is in part because these peripheral nerve cells can be extremely long – up to one meter in adult humans – which is a lot of distance for a molecular distress signal to cover in order to reach the "command center" of the cell's nucleus. Scientists have believed this process to be even more challenging because their textbook understanding for many years has been that the axons – the long extensions of nerve cells away ...

On 10th July 2012, the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) published the results of a literature search for evidence-based guidelines for the treatment of obesity in type 2 diabetes. The aim of the report was to identify those recommendations from current guidelines of high methodological quality that may be relevant for a possible new obesity module in the disease management programme (DMP) for type 2 diabetes. Diet, exercise and behavioural therapy generally advised IQWiG found that the recommendations of the various guidelines for the ...

(PROVIDENCE, R.I.) – Coaches can help athletes score touchdowns and perfect their golf swing, but can they also influence weight loss? Researchers from The Miriam Hospital's Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center say health coaches could play an important role in the battle of the bulge, according to the findings of a pilot study published online in the journal Obesity. In the first study of its kind, obese individuals participating in a low-intensity behavioral weight loss program who were supported by either a professional health coach or a peer coach lost clinically ...

Nothing inspires environmentalism quite like a smog-filled sky or a contaminated river, according to a new study that also indicates that environmentalism isn't just for the prosperous. People living in China's cities who say they've been exposed to environmental harm are more likely to begreen: re-using their plastic grocery bags or recycling. Moreover, the study, published this week in the international journal AMBIO, indicates that the poor would sacrifice economic gain to protect their environment. "The human and natural worlds are tightly coupled and we cannot ...

For millions of people around the world being sick doesn't mean making a trip to the local pharmacy for medicines like Advil and Nyquil. Instead it means turning to the forest to provide a pharmacopeia of medicines to treat everything from tooth aches to chest pains. But while questions persist about whether such natural remedies are as effective as their pharmacological cousins, one Harvard researcher is examining the phenomenon from a unique perspective, and trying to understand the economic benefits people receive by relying on such traditional cures. As reported ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A study co-written by a University of Illinois business professor shows that higher wages are associated with lower levels of employee theft, shedding light on the impact that compensation practices have on shaping employee honesty and ethical norms in organizations. Using data sets from the convenience-store industry, Clara Xiaoling Chen, a professor of accountancy, and co-author Tatiana Sandino, of the University of Southern California, found that after controlling for each store's employee characteristics, monitoring environment and socio-economic ...

CORAL GABLES, FL (July 11, 2012)—Emotional problems in childhood are common. Approximately 8 to 22 percent of children suffer from anxiety, often combined with other conditions such as depression. However, most existing therapies are not designed to treat co-existing psychological problems and are therefore not very successful in helping children with complex emotional issues. To develop a more effective treatment for co-occurring youth anxiety and depression, University of Miami (UM) psychologist Jill Ehrenreich-May and her collaborator Emily L. Bilek analyzed the efficacy ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Interactive proofs, which MIT researchers helped pioneer, have emerged as one of the major research topics in theoretical computer science. In the classic interactive proof, a questioner with limited computational power tries to extract reliable information from a computationally powerful but unreliable respondent. Interactive proofs are the basis of cryptographic systems now in wide use, but for computer scientists, they're just as important for the insight they provide into the complexity of computational problems. Twenty years ago, researchers showed ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — For the human brain, learning a new task when rules change can be a surprisingly difficult process marred by repeated mistakes, according to a new study by Michigan State University psychology researchers. Imagine traveling to Ireland and suddenly having to drive on the left side of the road. The brain, trained for right-side driving, becomes overburdened trying to suppress the old rules while simultaneously focusing on the new rules, said Hans Schroder, primary researcher on the study. "There's so much conflict in your brain," said Schroder, "that ...

(SALT LAKE CITY)—Alternating hemiplegia of childhood (AHC) is a rare disorder that usually begins in infancy, with intermittent episodes of paralysis and stiffness, first affecting one side of the body, then the other. Symptoms mysteriously appear and disappear, again and again, and affected children often experience dozens of episodes per week. As they get older, children fall progressively behind their peers in both intellectual abilities and motor skills, and more than half develop epilepsy. Unfortunately, medications that work for epilepsy have been unsuccessful in ...

Kansas City, Missouri - The vomeronasal organ (VNO) is one of evolution's most direct enforcers. From its niche within the nose in most land-based vertebrates, it detects pheromones and triggers corresponding basic-instinct behaviors, from compulsive mating to male-on-male death matches. A new study from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, published online in Nature Neuroscience on July 29, 2012, extends the scientific understanding of how pheromones activate the VNO, and has implications for sensory transduction experiments in other fields. "We found two new ...

Sandwiching individual graphene sheets between insulating layers in order to produce electrical devices with unique new properties, the method could open up a new dimension of physics research. Writing in Nature Materials, the scientists show that a new side-view imaging technique can be used to visualize the individual atomic layers of graphene within the devices they have built. They found that the structures were almost perfect even when more than 10 different layers were used to build the stack. This surprising result indicates that the latest techniques of isolating ...

BOSTON, MA—A research team led by Xian Chang Li, MD, PhD, Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) Transplantation Research Center, has shed light on how a population of lymphocytes, called CD4+ T cells, mature into various subsets of adult T helper cells. In particular, the team uncovered that a particular cell surface molecule, known as OX40, is a powerful inducer of new T helper cells that make copious amounts of interleukin-9 (IL-9) (and therefore called TH9 cells) in vitro; such TH9 cells are responsible for ongoing inflammation in the airways in the lungs in vivo. The ...