Boston, MA (August 18, 2011) — In health care, more choice may not always lead to better choices, particularly for the elderly. In a new study, researchers from Harvard Medical School's Department of Health Care Policy found that the large variety of managed care plans offered by the Medicare Advantage program may be counter-productive. Elderly patients, particularly those with low cognitive ability, often make poor decisions—or no decisions at all—when faced with an overwhelming number of complex insurance choices. Ironically, those with impaired cognition may benefit ...

The presence of calcium in coronary arteries is a much better predictor of heart attack and stroke than C-reactive protein among people with normal levels of LDL cholesterol, according to a study of more than 2,000 people led by a Johns Hopkins heart specialist. Results of the study, published in the August 19, 2011 issue of The Lancet, have important implications for deciding whether cholesterol-lowering statin medication should be prescribed for people who have heart disease risk factors but normal levels of LDL, the so-called "bad" cholesterol. An estimated 6 million ...

Leaders in biomedical education at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are calling for a radical new approach to post-graduate training in the life sciences to address significant challenges, including an avalanche of new discoveries in the last decade and the need to transcend traditional departmental boundaries to understand biological processes at multiple levels. In a Leading Edge commentary published in the August 19, 2011 edition of Cell, the authors present a new model for biomedical education that would break down current silos of particular disciplines, ...

Malawian villagers have found an unlikely platform to expose injustice and abuse of power and bring their leaders to task, according to research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Malawi's public radio station broadcasts are providing an alternative programme of news stories. The programme features contributions by ordinary Malawians, highlighting their everyday experiences of abuse and violation. In a country where radio is the main form of mass media, the daily programme broadcast in Chichewa, the language spoken by most Malawians, has become ...

In cancer, tumors aren't uniform: they are more like complex societies, each with a unique balance of cancer cell types playing different roles. Understanding this "social structure" of tumors is critical for treatment decisions in the clinic because different cell types may be sensitive to different drugs. A common theory is that tumors are a hierarchical society, in which all cancer cells descend from special self-renewing cancer stem cells. This view predicts that killing the cancer stem cells might suffice to wipe out a cancer. New findings by scientists at the Broad ...

Irvine, Calif. — A vast network of previously unmapped glaciers on the move from thousands of miles inland to the Antarctic coast has been charted for the first time by UC Irvine scientists (http://www.ess.uci.edu/). The findings will be critical to tracking future sea rise from climate change. "This is like seeing a map of all the oceans' currents for the first time. It's a game changer for glaciology," said UCI earth system science professor Eric Rignot, lead author of a paper on the ice flow published online today in Science Express. "We're seeing amazing flows from ...

Boston, Mass. (Aug. 19, 2011)—Researchers at Harvard Medical School have discovered that structural elements in the cell play a crucial role in organizing the motion of cell-surface receptors, proteins that enable cells to receive signals from other parts of the organism. This discovery, published in the Aug. 19 issue of the journal Cell, fills a fundamental gap in the understanding of how cells relate to biochemical signals, including pharmaceuticals, and could have profound implications for drug development and the treatment of cancer and other diseases. The findings ...

Washington, DC (August 18, 2011) — High blood phosphate levels can set chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients on a rapid path to kidney failure, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN). To make matters worse, phosphate appears to interfere with the effectiveness of important kidney medications. The kidneys of patients with CKD cannot efficiently get rid of wastes such as excess phosphate in the blood. As a result, the kidneys become overloaded with phosphate. Carmine Zoccali, MD (CNR-IBIM, Clinical Epidemiology ...

A new lower-limb prosthetic developed at Vanderbilt University allows amputees to walk without the leg-dragging gait characteristic of conventional artificial legs. The device uses the latest advances in computer, sensor, electric motor and battery technology to give it bionic capabilities: It is the first prosthetic with powered knee and ankle joints that operate in unison. It comes equipped with sensors that monitor its user's motion. It has microprocessors programmed to use this data to predict what the person is trying to do and operate the device in ways that facilitate ...

Preschool teachers' use of sophisticated vocabulary and analytic talk about books combined with early support for literacy in the home can predict fourth-grade reading comprehension and word recognition, new research from Vanderbilt University's Peabody College finds. The findings, published in Child Development and included in a review article in the August 19, 2011 edition of Science, present evidence that there are lasting, complex and mutually reinforcing effects that flow from strong early childhood classrooms. "We need to take very seriously the importance ...

There is no scientific basis for teaching boys and girls separately, according to Lise Eliot from The Chicago Medical School. Her review reveals fundamental flaws in the arguments put forward by proponents of single-sex schools to justify the need of teaching teach boys and girls separately. Eliot shows that neuroscience has identified few reliable differences between boys' and girls' brains relevant to learning or education. Her work is published online in Springer's journal Sex Roles. The first issue Eliot highlights is that single-sex school advocates often claim differences ...

Researchers at Lund University have discovered a new function for vitamin C. Treatment with vitamin C can dissolve the toxic protein aggregates that build up in the brain in Alzheimer's disease. The research findings are now being presented in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The brains of people with Alzheimer's disease contain lumps of so-called amyloid plaques which consist of misfolded protein aggregates. They cause nerve cell death in the brain and the first nerves to be attacked are the ones in the brain's memory centre. "When we treated brain tissue from ...

A team of researchers from the University of the Basque Country (Spain) has developed a method to determine the chemical composition of liquids seized by police and suspected to be explosive. Some of the samples analysed contained substances hazardous to health, such as methanol and boric acid. Each year police forces seize tonnes of pyrotechnic substances which, in principle, are for indoor firework manufacturing (i.e. flares or those used in artistic or sporting events), but which also may end up in the hands of violent groups and hooligans. A group of chemists from ...

Researchers have uncovered exactly how a human egg captures an incoming sperm to begin the fertilisation process, in a new study published this week in the journal Science. The research identifies the sugar molecule that makes the outer coat of the egg 'sticky', which is vital for enabling the sperm and egg to bind together. Researchers across the world have been trying to understand what performs this task for over thirty years. The scientists behind this study believe their work could help address some of the previously unexplained causes of human infertility and ...

Large-scale imaging shows mushroom body activity patterns are sparse and randomly distributed Cold Spring Harbor, NY – We know from experience that particular smells are almost inseparable in our minds with memories, some vague and others very specific. The smell of just-baked bread may trigger an involuntary mental journey, even if for a moment, to childhood, or to a particular day during childhood. Or it may, more diffusely, remind someone of grandma. How are these associations forged in the brain and how do we remember them? A research team at Cold Spring Harbor ...

This release is available in German. Boys are maturing physically earlier than ever before. The age of sexual maturity has been decreasing by about 2.5 months each decade at least since the middle of the 18th century. Joshua Goldstein, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock (MPIDR), has used mortality data to prove this trend, which until now was difficult to decipher. What had already been established for girls now seems to also be true for boys: the time period during which young people are sexually mature but socially not yet considered ...

TORONTO, Ont., Aug. 18, 2011_A new study has found no evidence that patients who had a heart ultrasound known as an echocardiogram before major surgery had improved survival rates one month or one year after their operation. Some groups of patients actually had worse survival rates, according to Dr. Duminda Wijeysundera, a scientist at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael's Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences. His study, published in the British Medical Journal, adds to a growing body of evidence that echocardiograms may not be ...

Athens, Ga. – Early Earth's atmosphere provided little shielding for ultraviolet light from space, so many prebiotic molecules, bombarded by it and light of other wavelengths, had a hard time surviving at all. But some molecules became photostable—able to withstand the assault and thrive as building blocks of life. Five of the many molecules that survived the bombardment from UV light were the nucleic acid bases adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine and uracil. Now, in just published research, a University of Georgia physicist and a collaborator in Germany have shown that ...

WASHINGTON – When it comes to mental illness, the sexes are different: Women are more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety or depression, while men tend toward substance abuse or antisocial disorders, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association. Published online in APA's Journal of Abnormal Psychology, the study looked at the prevalence by gender of different types of common mental illnesses. The researchers also found that women with anxiety disorders are more likely to internalize emotions, which typically results in withdrawal, loneliness ...

Vincent Fleury, a researcher at the Paris Diderot University, studied the early stage of development when embryonic cells first form a flat sheet of cells before folding into a U-shape, resembling a folded pancake. He demonstrated that the formation of a chicken's head is a consequence of the collision between both sides of the embryo flowing at constant speed towards each other. This study captured for the first time on film highly accurate observations of how a chicken embryo evolves during its first two days of development, using time-lapse microscopy. Prior attempts ...

This release is available in Spanish. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) researchers have developed an inexpensive way to grade the ethanol potential of perennial grasses at the biorefinery's loading dock. That future has been made possible by a team of Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists, including Ken Vogel, Rob Mitchell, and Steve Masterson at Lincoln, Neb.; Hans Jung at St. Paul, Minn.; Bruce Dien at Peoria, Ill.; and Michael Casler at Madison, Wis. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency, and this research supports the USDA priority ...

New Rochelle, NY, August 18, 2011—Recurring headaches are common during the year following a traumatic brain injury (TBI), regardless of the severity of the TBI, and they tend to occur more often among females and those with a pre-TBI history of headache, according to an article in Journal of Neurotrauma, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/neu More than 70% of patients who had suffered a TBI reported having headaches during the first year after their injury. This finding is a result of ...

SEATTLE – For the first time, researchers at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance have demonstrated the feasibility of using serial positron emission tomography (PET) scans, using a special estrogen-containing isotope, to confirm the relative effectiveness of estrogen-blocking and estrogen-depleting therapy in patients with metastatic breast cancer. The results of the research are published online in Clinical Cancer Research. The PET scans, taken before, during and after hormonal therapy, confirmed the superior effectiveness of estrogen-receptor-blocking drugs such as tamoxifen ...

In this study, Carsten Grabow and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany, created a model to test the speed of synchronisation of complex networks in collaboration with the Warwick Complexity Centre, UK. They tested this model using three very different oscillators acting on complex networks, which are known as Kuramoto, Rössler and pulse-coupled oscillators. As a result, for all tested networks they showed that the structure of the coupling between network nodes determines the speed of synchronisation. In short: ...

Washington, D.C.— Plant biologists have been working for years to nail down the series of chemical signals that one class of plant hormones, called brassinosteroids, send from a protein on the surface of a plant cell to the cell's nucleus. New research from Carnegie scientists Tae-Wuk Kim and Zhiyong Wang, with contributions from the University of California San Francisco, isolated another link in this chain. Fully understanding the brassinosteroid pathway could help scientists better understand plant growth and help improve food and energy crop production. Brassinosteroids ...