The technology used to replace lost teeth with titanium dental implants could be improved. By studying the surface structure of dental implants not only at micro level but also at nano level, researchers at the University of Gothenburg; Sweden, have come up with a method that could shorten the healing time for patients. "Increasing the active surface at nano level and changing the conductivity of the implant allows us to affect the body's own biomechanics and speed up the healing of the implant," says Johanna Löberg at the University of Gothenburg's Department of Chemistry. ...

MONTREAL, June 14, 2011 – Patients posting their opinions about doctors on online ratings websites are much less likely to discuss physicians with low perceived quality and are more prone than offline populations to exaggerate their opinions, according to a paper being presented at a healthcare conference sponsored by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®). "Patients need high quality information about the most consequential service that they consume: healthcare," said Ritu Agarwal, professor of information systems and director ...

The brain is constantly changing as it perceives the outside world, processing and learning about everything it encounters. In a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, scientists find a surprising connection between two types of perception: If you're looking at a group of objects and getting a general sense of them, it's difficult for your brain to learn relationships between the objects. It's not known how these two ways of perceiving are related, says Nicholas Turk-Browne, ...

A unique example of some of the lowest surface brightness galaxies in the universe have been found by an international team of astronomers lead by the Niels Bohr Institute. The galaxy has lower amounts of heavier elements than other known galaxies of this type. The discovery means that small low surface brightness galaxies may have more in common with the first galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang than previously thought. The results have been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. As the name implies, the galaxies are faint and therefore ...

Researchers have developed a new method of eliciting and analyzing opinions from a large group of experts and laypeople to aid complex decision-making, adapting online and social media technologies to lower the cost of such activities while expanding the types of people who can be queried. The system, called ExpertLens, incorporates elements of such well-known approaches as the Delphi method, the Nominal Group Technique and crowdsourcing that are used to collect opinions about problems or to create forecasts. The online system and the associated methodology have performed ...

Fear burns memories into our brain, and new research by University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientists explains how. Scientists have long known that fear and other highly emotional experiences lead to incredibly strong memories. In a study appearing online today (Tuesday, June 14) in advance of publication in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, UC Berkeley's Daniela Kaufer and colleagues report a new way for emotions to affect memory: The brain's emotional center, the amygdala, induces the hippocampus, a relay hub for memory, to generate new neurons. In a fearful ...

CHICAGO – Twice a month a jam session takes place on the third floor of Northwestern Memorial's Prentice Women's Hospital. A diverse group of men and women, ranging in age and ethnicity, gather in a circle with instruments in hand and sing together. This is no ordinary jam band; all its members have Parkinson's disease. They are participating in Creative Arts for Parkinson's, a music and drama therapy program offered through Northwestern's Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Center. Creative Arts for Parkinson's is lead by specially trained music and drama therapists ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N. C., -- June 14, 2011 – Over the past decade, much progress has been made regarding the understanding and promise of personalized medicine. Scientists are just beginning to consider the impact of gene-diet interactions in different populations in regards to disease prevention and treatment. The latest research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the laboratories of Floyd H. "Ski" Chilton, Ph.D., professor of physiology and pharmacology and director of the Center for Botanical Lipids and Inflammatory Disease Prevention, and Rasika Mathias, Sc.D, ...

Soil chemistry plays an important role in the composition of surface waters. In areas with limited human activities, properties of catchment soils directly relate to the exported nutrients to surface waters. Phosphate sorption research is common in agricultural and forest soils, but data from alpine areas are limited. Scientists from the Biology Centre of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Repbublic, from the Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes, and from the Forest Sciences Center of Catalonia, have conducted research of the impact European alpine soils have on numerous ...

Birds with high levels of stress hormones have the highest mating success and offer better parental care to their brood, according to new biology research at Queen's University. "Having high levels of glucocorticoid or stress hormone is often thought to indicate an individual in poor condition who has a low level of mating success. However, our research indicates that tree swallows with the highest levels of stress hormone have the highest reproductive success," says Frances Bonier (Biology) who investigates the way animals cope with challenges in their environment. The ...

NEW YORK – Mental health screening has been demonstrated to successfully connect African-American middle school students from a predominantly low-income area with school-based mental health services, according to results of a new study led by the TeenScreen National Center for Mental Health Checkups at Columbia University. The study was published in a recent online early edition of the Community Mental Health Journal. Previous research has demonstrated substantial disparities in access to specialized mental health services between African-American and white youth; data ...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - When University of Maryland psychologist Andrea Chronis-Tuscano testified before a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hearing last March, it changed her mind about possible risks of artificial food coloring for children, and drove her to look more closely at the products in her own pantry that she feeds her kids. Chronis-Tuscano walked in to the meeting certain that NO convincing scientific evidence supports the idea that food coloring additives cause Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD - nor that strict diets eliminating dyes effectively ...

VIDEO: A time-lapse video of an amorphous silicon surface. The lumps are clusters of about five atoms of silicon. The "hopping " motion of the lumps shows that a-Si is a glass.... Click here for more information. CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Using high-resolution imaging technology, University of Illinois researchers have answered a question that had confounded semiconductor researchers: Is amorphous silicon a glass? The answer? Yes – until hydrogen is added. Led by ...

Preschool children seem to grasp the true concept of counting only if they are taught to understand the number value of groups of objects greater than three, research at the University of Chicago shows. "We think that seeing that there are three objects doesn't have to involve counting. It's only when children go beyond three that counting is necessary to determine how many objects there are," said Elizabeth Gunderson, a UChicago graduate student in psychology. Gunderson and Susan Levine, the Stella M. Rowley Professor in Psychology, Comparative Human Development and ...

Father's Day this Sunday is a chance to recognize dads for putting up with all manner of nonsense that kids manage to cook up on the way to adulthood. But a new study by researchers at the University of Arizona shows just how important dad's job as a role model actually is. The study, "Impact of Fathers on Risky Sexual Behavior in Daughters: A Genetically and Environmentally Controlled Sibling Study," is due to be published in the journal Development and Psychopathology. When it comes to girls and their decisions about sex, it turns out a father's influence really ...

WASHINGTON, June 14, 2011 — The latest episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS) award-winning podcast series, "Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions," focuses on advances toward using material obtained from fruit to make plastic components for cars and other motor vehicles. The program explains how nano-cellulose material from bananas, pineapple, and other fruit can be used to make strong, light-weight, and more sustainable motor vehicle parts. It is based on a presentation earlier in 2011 at the ACS 241st National Meeting & Exposition in Anaheim, Calif. "The ...

MADISON, WI, JUNE 14, 2011 - Tropical maize proves to be a valuable genetic resource, containing genetics not found in USA Corn Belt maize. Most tropical maize varieties respond to the long summer day lengths that occur in U.S. growing regions by flowering late. This delayed flowering response results in poor yields, effectively trapping the useful genes and hindering their incorporation into maize hybrids adapted to the most productive corn growing regions. Scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service and North Carolina ...

Over half the world's population speaks more than one language. But it's not clear how these languages interact in the brain. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that Chinese people who are fluent in English translate English words into Chinese automatically and quickly, without thinking about it. Like her research subjects, Taoli Zhang of the University of Nottingham is originally from China, but she lives in the UK and is fluent in English. She co wrote the ...

Cancer is crafty. When one avenue driving its growth is blocked by drugs targeting that path, the malignancy often creates a detour, finding an alternative route to get around the roadblock. In a study at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, researchers found that when a common type of prostate cancer was treated with conventional hormone ablation therapy blocking androgen production or androgen receptor (AR) function– which drives growth of the tumor – the cancer was able to adapt and compensate by activating a survival cell signaling pathway, effectively circumventing ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Millions of Americans have implantable medical devices, from pacemakers and defibrillators to brain stimulators and drug pumps; worldwide, 300,000 more people receive them every year. Most such devices have wireless connections, so that doctors can monitor patients' vital signs or revise treatment programs. But recent research has shown that this leaves the devices vulnerable to attack: In the worst-case scenario, an attacker could kill a victim by instructing an implantable device to deliver lethal doses of medication or electricity. At the Association ...

Over the next few years, it is likely that daily deal sites will have to settle for lower shares of revenues from businesses compared with their current levels, and it will be harder and more expensive for them to find viable candidates to fill their pipelines of daily deals, according to Utpal Dholakia, associate professor of management at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business. In his third study – the most exhaustive study done to date on the daily deals industry – Dholakia found that there is very little difference between companies in the ever-expanding ...

Despite living in the countryside, where open space is plentiful and there is often significant agricultural production, California's more than half a million rural elders are far more likely to be overweight or obese, physically inactive and food insecure than their suburban counterparts, according to a new policy brief from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. All three conditions are risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and repeated falls — conditions also more prevalent among rural elders. Approximately 710,000 Californians aged 65 and over live in ...

PORTLAND, Ore. -- An Oregon-pioneered program aimed at improving health care for those with advanced illness is now receiving national attention. AARP recently released a report about the Physicians Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment, or POLST, program. The program was created to honor the treatment wishes of patients with advanced progressive illness or frailty. The AARP report titled, "Improving Advanced Illness Care: The Evolution of State POLST Programs," examines the evolution of POLST which, to date, has been implemented in at least 12 states. The report can ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The interaction between a Hessian fly's saliva and the wheat plant it is attacking may be the key to whether the pest eats like a king or dies like a starving pauper, according to a study done at Purdue University. "The insect induces or suppresses susceptibility in the plant," said Christie Williams, a research scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service and a Purdue associate professor of entomology. "It's not that the fly larva is making holes and retrieving nutrients as once thought. The larva is doing something ...

NEW YORK (June 15, 2011) -- Ever since the Institute of Medicine issued its landmark report "To Err Is Human" in 1999, significant attention has been paid to improving patient safety in hospitals nationwide. However, a high number of adverse events, including major injury and even death, occur in private physician offices and outpatient clinics as well. In a new study -- the first of its kind -- researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College found that the number and magnitude of events resulting from medical errors is surprisingly similar inside and outside hospital walls. Published ...