Research led by the University of Cambridge has found a link between impulsivity and flawed reasoning (such as believing in superstitious rituals and luck) in problem gamblers. Studying compulsive gamblers who were seeking treatment at the National Problem Gambling Clinic, the researchers found that those gamblers with higher levels of impulsivity were much more susceptible to errors in reasoning associated with gambling, such as superstitious rituals (e.g. carrying a lucky charm) and explaining away recent losses (e.g. on bad luck or 'cold' machines). The findings ...

Capturing birds using mist nets to study behaviour, movement or the demographics of a species is one of the most common research techniques in ornithology, yet until now there have been no large scale studies into the risks mist nets pose to birds. Writing in the British Ecological Society's Methods in Ecology and Evolution researchers from California used a dataset of over 345,000 records to evaluate the risks of mist netting. The research, led by Erica Spotswood from the University of California at Berkeley, used data from organisations across the United States and ...

The higher the number of drink fuelled memory blackouts a student experiences, the greater is his/her risk of sustaining a future injury while under the influence, reveals research published online in Injury Prevention. Memory blackouts refer to the inability to recall events; they do not refer to loss of consciousness as a result of drinking too much. Research indicates that alcohol alters nerve cell communication in the hippocampal region of the brain, which affects memory formation. Hazardous drinking - and its consequences - "are pervasive on college campuses," ...

Junior doctors have no idea what they should be doing when a major incident, such as a terrorist attack or transport disaster, occurs, reveals research published in the online journal BMJ Open. This knowledge gap could be critical, says the author, especially as the UK's current terrorism threat level is classified as "severe," meaning that a terrorist attack is highly likely. The Department of Health defines a major incident as "any event whose impact cannot be handled within routine service arrangements." It involves special procedures by one or more of the emergency ...

Outpatient electronic prescribing systems don't cut out the common mistakes made in manual systems, suggests research published online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). And not all systems are the same: some perform worse than others, the study shows. The rapid adoption of electronic prescribing systems has in part been fuelled by the belief that they would reduce the sorts of errors commonly made in manual prescribing systems, the authors say. The authors base their findings on an analysis of just under 4,000 computer generated ...

Sophia Antipolis, France: 30 June 2011: The European Society of Cardiology (ESC Working Group on Thrombosis) is calling for greater attention to be paid by health care staff to reducing bleeding in patients with acute coronary syndromes (ACS) undergoing percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI), and for increased research in the field. The position paper, published online today in The European Heart Journal, summarises current knowledge regarding the epidemiology of bleeding in ACS and PCI, and provides a European perspective on management strategies to minimise the extent ...

Modern humans never co-existed with Homo erectus—a finding counter to previous hypotheses of human evolution—new excavations in Indonesia and dating analyses show. The research, reported in the journal PLoS One, offers new insights into the nature of human evolution, suggesting a different role for Homo erectus than had been previously thought. The work was conducted by the Solo River Terrace (SoRT) Project, an international group of scientists directed by anthropologists Etty Indriati of Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia and Susan Antón of New York University. Homo ...

Biobanks are repositories for tissue samples, usually in the form of blood or saliva or leftover tissue from surgical procedures. These samples are collected and used for future research, including genetic research. They may be linked to personal health information regarding the sample donor. People who are eligible to donate these samples and researchers who want to use them face important questions with respect to whether and how informed consent should be obtained for sample and health information collection and use. A team of University of Iowa researchers led by ...

New Rochelle, NY, June 29, 2011—Sophisticated genetic tools and techniques for achieving targeted gene delivery and high gene expression levels in bone marrow will drive the successful application of gene therapy to treat a broad range of diseases. Examples of these cutting-edge methods are presented in a series of five provocative articles in the latest issue of Human Gene Therapy, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com). The articles are available free online at www.liebertpub.com/hum Barese and Dunbar highlight the advances ...

June 29, 2011 (Toronto) - The recurrence of an employee's medical leave of absence from work tends to happen much sooner with a mental health leave than a physical one, a Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) study shows. Most workers who take a mental health leave from their jobs do not have another disability leave for at least two years, according to a new study from CAMH. In contrast, most who have had a physical health disability leave have almost four years before a second episode. Mental health disability leaves cost approximately $51 billion a year ...

A powerful new class of therapeutics, known as recombinant attenuated Salmonella vaccines (RASV), holds great potential in the fight against fatal diseases including hepatitis B, tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, AIDS and pneumonia. Now, Qingke Kong and his colleagues at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, have developed a technique to make such vaccines safer and more effective. The group, under the direction of Dr. Roy Curtiss, chief scientist at Biodesign's Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology, demonstrated that a modified strain of Salmonella ...

Current or heavy smokers who were screened with low-dose spiral computed tomography (CT) scanning had a 20 percent reduction in deaths from lung cancer than did those who were screened by chest X-ray, according to results from a decade-long, large clinical trial that involved more than 53,000 people. The study, called the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), was conducted in individuals at high risk of developing lung cancer to compare the differences in death rates between smokers aged 55 to 74 who were screened annually with low-dose helical (or spiral) CT, versus ...

NASA's Genesis mission crash-landed back on Earth in 2004. The spacecraft spent more than two years in orbit around the sun collecting solar wind, which consists of charged particles, on various ultra-pure collector materials. Fortunately, the collector with the greatest scientific value survived the crash almost intact. Its primary purpose was to measure the relative abundances of the three isotopes of oxygen: 16O, 17O and 18O. Despite the length of the mission, the solar wind is so rarefied that the small number of atoms collected required a dedicated mass spectrometer, ...

Milan, Italy, 29 June 2011 – Children with dyslexia often find it difficult to count the number of syllables in spoken words or to determine whether words rhyme. These subtle difficulties are seen across languages with different writing systems and they indicate that the dyslexic brain has trouble processing the way that sounds in spoken language are structured. In a new study published in the June issue of Elsevier's Cortex, researchers at Cambridge have shown, using a music task, that this is linked to a broader difficulty in perceiving rhythmic patterns, or metrical ...

Atmospheric aerosol particles (otherwise known as Particulate Matter) have been masking the true rate of greenhouse gas induced global warming during the industrial period. New investigations show that the aerosol cooling effect will be strongly reduced by 2030, as air pollution abatements are implemented worldwide and the presently available advanced control technologies are utilized. These actions would increase the global mean temperature by ca. 1 degree Celsius. This is one of the main research outcomes of the recently concluded EU EUCAARI (European Integrated project ...

Research carried out by scientists from the Peninsula Medical School at the University of Exeter and the National University of Singapore has analysed the complex 'cross talk' between hydrogen sulphide (H2S ) and nitric oxide (NO), both gasses that occur naturally in the body, and found that the interaction may offer potential strategies in the management of heart failure. The research is published in the leading international journal Antioxidants and Redox Signaling. Both gases interact naturally with each other within the body and the balance between the two and ...

Researchers looked at changes in the behaviour of bluetongue – a viral disease of cattle and sheep - from the 1960s to the present day, as well as what could happen to the transmission of the virus 40 years into the future. They found, for the first time, that an outbreak of a disease could be explained by changes to the climate. In Europe, more than 80,000 outbreaks of bluetongue were reported to the World Animal Health Organisation between 1998 and 2010, and millions of animals died as a result of the disease. Bluetongue was previously restricted to Africa and Asia, ...

New research shows significantly higher osteoarthritis (OA) incidence rates in military populations than among comparable age groups in the general population. The magnitude of the difference in OA rates between military service members and the general population also increased with advancing age category. Black service members had higher OA rates than white military personnel or those in other race categories according to the study findings published in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a peer-reviewed journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR). Close to 27 million ...

Scientists who pioneered a revolutionary 3-D microscope technique are now describing an extension of that technology into a new dimension that promises sweeping applications in medicine, biological research, and development of new electronic devices. Their reports on so-called 4-D scanning ultrafast electron microscopy, and a related technique, appear in two papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Chemistry Nobel Laureate Ahmed H. Zewail and colleagues moved high-resolution images of vanishingly small nanoscale objects from three dimensions to four dimensions ...

That axiom of sustainability — "recycle and reuse" — could help ease concerns about a reliable supply of substances, indispensible for a modern technological society, that are produced almost exclusively in the Peoples' Republic of China. That's the conclusion of a study on these so-called "rare earth" elements in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology. Xiaoyue Du and Thomas E. Graedel note that the dozen-plus rare earth elements (REEs) have unique physical and chemical properties making them essential for defense applications, computers, cell phones, electric ...

Scientists are reporting development and successful testing of a rapid and accurate test to tell the difference between bacterial and viral infections. Those common afflictions often have similar symptoms but vastly different treatments — antibiotics work for bacterial infections but not for viruses. The report appears in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry. Robert Marks, Daria Prilutsky, and colleagues cite the importance of determining the source of an infection in order to quickly start the right treatment. If left untreated until results of a throat culture, for instance, ...

How people choose to consume resources and use contraception influences their responses to climate change, according to a team of psychologists. Janet K. Swim, professor of psychology, Penn State, and her colleagues report that growing consumption and growing population are two significant contributors to human impact on the environment. Both substantially increase carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, the researchers report in a special issue of American Psychologist that focuses on how psychology contributes to understanding and addressing global climate change. "Engaging ...

An emerging field of science termed "isoscapes" is making it possible to pinpoint the geographical origins of illegal drugs, trafficked endangered animals, dismembered human body parts at crime scenes, and even pricey scotch whiskey and cheese, according to an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the American Chemical Society's weekly newsmagazine. In the article, Sarah Everts, C&EN European correspondent, explains how isoscapes has even led to development of one of the newest and most unusual maps of the world. It is a map showing the ...

WASHINGTON, June 29, 2011 — Imagine a new genre of tiny implantable sensors, airborne and stationary surveillance cameras and sensors and other devices that operate without batteries on energy collected from the motion of a heart beat and have wireless communications capability. And the power plant for those devices is a "nanogenerator" that could even produce energy to charge an iPod from the movements of a person walking down the street. That's the topic of a new episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS) award-winning "Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions" podcast ...

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – One-third of immigrant children and more than 70 percent of foreign-born, nonelderly adults living in New Jersey five years or less lack health coverage, a Rutgers statewide survey finds. The report, "Health, Coverage and Access to Care of New Jersey Immigrants," by the Rutgers Center for State Health Policy (CSHP), also concludes immigrants face significant access-to-care barriers and their lack of health insurance is a much larger problem than for New Jerseyans born in the United States. The research describes the health profile, insurance status ...