Hamilton, ON (August 16, 2011) -- A successful new rehabilitation approach to treating children with cerebral palsy puts its focus on where a child lives and plays, not just improving the child's balance, posture and movement skills. Called a "context-focused intervention", McMaster University and the University of Alberta researchers report in a new study this approach is just as beneficial as traditional child-focused therapy, offering parents an additional treatment option for their child. The McMaster study, in conjunction with researchers at the University of Alberta's ...

Despite the rapid retreat of Arctic sea ice in recent years, the ice may temporarily stabilize or somewhat expand at times over the next few decades, new research indicates. Results of a study by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) appear this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), published by the American Geophysical Union. The National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR's sponsor, funded the work. "As we learn more about climate variability, new and unexpected research results are coming to light," says Sarah Ruth, program ...

Toronto, August 17, 2011—Hospitals could reduce health care costs arising from pressure ulcers, commonly known as bedsores, by investing in pressure-reduction mattresses for elderly patients in emergency departments, according to new research from the University of Toronto. In emergency departments (EDs), elderly patients are at high risk for pressure ulcers in part because they spend hours lying on hard surfaces. The researchers found that while the average cost of upgrading from standard to pressure-redistribution mattresses would be 30 cents per patient, the corresponding ...

Every day we make thousands of tiny predictions — when the bus will arrive, who is knocking on the door, whether the dropped glass will break. Now, in one of the first studies of its kind, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are beginning to unravel the process by which the brain makes these everyday prognostications. While this might sound like a boon to day traders, coaches and gypsy fortune tellers, people with early stages of neurological diseases such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases could someday benefit from this research. In ...

Towing Guru provides a full range of services in online marketing for towing companies. There are countless opportunities for towing marketing on the Internet. Google's My Maps is an exceptional free tool that can improve a towing company's search engine optimization (SEO), which gets local businesses found by consumers. What a towing company can do in My Maps is provide a valuable service for consumers. At the same time, My Maps is a powerful towing marketing strategy. Google My Maps is a customizable tool used to create user-generated maps. A towing company might ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) -- Consumers who set ambitious goals have a greater level of satisfaction compared to those who set conservative goals, according to a recently published paper by the Cecile K. Cho, a University of California, Riverside assistant marketing professor. Cho and her co-author and Gita Venkataramani Johar, a professor at Columbia University, set up two experiments to compare people who set ambitious goals to those who set conservative goals. They focused on situations in which goals were achieved, and measured the level of satisfaction with ...

(WASHINGTON, August 17, 2011) –Patients with clinically diagnosed superficial vein thrombosis (SVT), a blood clot in the veins just beneath the skin that commonly resolves on its own without treatment, are four to six times more likely to develop venous thromboembolism (VTE), a dangerous, often life-threatening condition, according to study results published today in Blood, the Journal of the American Society of Hematology (ASH). Recent studies have shown that patients diagnosed with SVT using ultrasound to confirm the presence of a clot showed increased risk of VTE; ...

Organic semiconductors hold immense promise for use in thin film and flexible displays – picture an iPad you can roll up – but they haven't yet reached the speeds needed to drive high definition displays. Inorganic materials such as silicon are fast and durable, but don't bend, so the search for a fast, durable organic semiconductor continues. Now a team led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard universities has developed a new organic semiconductor material that is among the speediest yet. The scientists also accelerated the development process by using a predictive ...

The Eastern Pacific Ocean is fired up with two tropical storms today, Fernanda and Greg, and both were caught in one image from the GOES-11 satellite. Both appear to be chasing each other to the west, and Fernanda appears a little more organized in satellite imagery and stronger than her "little brother." The newest tropical storm, Greg, formed this morning, August 17 off the west coast of Mexico from a low previously known as System 99E. Greg is about 135 miles (220 km) south-southwest of Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Because Greg is close to the western coast of Mexico, the ...

A growing body of recent research indicates that, in Earth's warming climate, there is no "tipping point," or threshold warm temperature, beyond which polar sea ice cannot recover if temperatures come back down. New University of Washington research indicates that even if Earth warmed enough to melt all polar sea ice, the ice could recover if the planet cooled again. In recent years scientists have closely monitored the shrinking area of the Arctic covered by sea ice in warmer summer months, a development that has created new shipping lanes but also raised concerns about ...

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- New research using a technique that measures the isotopes of lead and neodymium in lunar crustal rocks shows that the moon and Earth may be millions of years younger than originally thought. The common estimate of the moon's age is as old as 4.5 billion years old (roughly the same age as the solar system) as determined by mineralogy and chemical analysis of moon rocks gathered during the Apollo missions. However, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist Lars Borg and international collaborators have analyzed three isotopic systems, including ...

When it comes to improving bone health in postmenopausal women — and people of all ages, actually — a Florida State University researcher has found a simple, proactive solution to help prevent fractures and osteoporosis: eating dried plums. "Over my career, I have tested numerous fruits, including figs, dates, strawberries and raisins, and none of them come anywhere close to having the effect on bone density that dried plums, or prunes, have," said Bahram H. Arjmandi, Florida State's Margaret A. Sitton Professor and chairman of the Department of Nutrition, Food and Exercise ...

A study led by Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers of 192 pharmaceutical advertisements in biomedical journals found that only 18 percent were compliant with Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines, and over half failed to quantify serious risks including death. The study, is published online today in the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) One. "Marketing research has consistently shown that journal advertising is the most profitable form of drug marketing, with an estimated return on investment of five dollars for every dollar spent," said Dr. Deborah ...

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – (August 17, 2011) – 23andMe, Inc., a leading personal genetics company has replicated over 180 genetic associations from a list of associations curated by the National Human Genome Research Institute's Office of Population Genomics ("GWAS Catalog") demonstrating that self-reported medical data is effective and reliable to validate known genetic associations. The results, available online in the journal PLoS ONE establish 23andMe's methodology as a significant research platform in a new era of genetic research. "In this paper we confirm that self reported ...

B chromosomes have a functional effect on sex determination in a species of cichlid fishes from Lake Victoria, according to a study by Japanese researchers to be published in open-access journal PLoS Genetics on August 18th, 2011. The researchers found sex-ratio distortions caused by B chromosomes in the breeding line of the cichlids, as well as several protein-coding genes in the B chromosomes. The resultant ratio was female biased, suggesting a role for B chromosomes in female sex determination. The B chromosome was first identified by E. B. Wilson in 1907. B chromosomes ...

Washington, D.C. – Cells with too few or too many chromosomes have long been known to be a hallmark of cancer — but the cause of this abnormal number of chromosomes has been little understood. Now, in the August 19th issue of Science, researchers at the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, a part of Georgetown University Medical Center, have identified a gene that is commonly mutated in human cancers and have demonstrated its direct role in causing aneuploidy, an abnormal number of chromosomes. The researchers found that 20 percent of the brain cancer (glioblastoma ...

New research by scientists in the Department of Biology at the University of York shows that species have responded to climate change up to three times faster than previously appreciated. These results are published in the latest issue of the leading scientific journal Science. Faster distribution changes. Species have moved towards the poles (further north in the northern hemisphere, to locations where conditions are cooler) at three times the rate previously accepted in the scientific literature, and they have moved to cooler, higher altitudes at twice the rate previously ...

Philadelphia, PA, August 18, 2011 – Investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have determined that the majority of primary care providers continue to recommend annual cervical cancer screening, and less than 15% would extend the screening interval when using the Papanicolaou test and human papillomavirus (HPV) test together, as some guidelines suggest. The results of the study are published online today in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (AJOG). Current cervical cancer screening guidelines, issued by the American Cancer Society ...

VIDEO: Before they start attaching themselves to kinetochores (green), microtubules nudge chromosomes (red) into position in a "belt " around the center of the spindle. Click here for more information. Heidelberg, 19 August 2011 – When an egg cell is being formed, the cellular machinery which separates chromosomes is extremely imprecise at fishing them out of the cell's interior, scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Over the past 530 million years, the vertebrate lineage branched out from a primitive jawless fish wriggling through Cambrian seas to encompass all the diverse forms of fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals. Now researchers combing through the DNA sequences of vertebrate genomes have identified three distinct periods of evolutionary innovation that accompanied this remarkable diversification. The study, led by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and published this week in Science, focused on regulatory elements that orchestrate ...

VIDEO: The researchers found a 10 percentage point gap in research funding -- even after taking into consideration demographics, education and training, employer characteristics, NIH experience and research productivity. For example,... Click here for more information. LAWRENCE, Kan. – Black scientists were significantly less likely than their white counterparts to receive research funding from the National Institutes of Health, according to an analysis of data from 2000 to ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—August 18, 2011—A scientist at the Gladstone Institutes has discovered how a gene known as SIRT3 contributes to a suite of health problems sweeping across America, offering new insight into how to combat these potentially fatal conditions. In a paper being published today in Molecular Cell, Gladstone Senior Investigator Eric Verdin, MD, describes how SIRT3, when switched off, accelerates the build-up of fats throughout the body. This can lead to obesity, high blood pressure and a decreased ability to process sugar—the combination of which is known as ...

Severe sepsis is common and often fatal, although evidence-based therapies have improved patient outcomes. In recent study, researchers from the Medical College of Wisconsin and Orlando Regional Medical Center found that the number of severe sepsis hospitalizations per 100,000 people increased from 143 in 2000 to 343 in 2007. The mean number of organ failures per patient during hospitalization increased from 1.6 to 1.9, although the mean length of hospital stay decreased from 17.3 to 14.9 days, and the mortality rate decreased from 39% to 27%. However, more patients with ...

The prevalence of physician-diagnosed asthma is increasing partly because of a link between asthma and obesity. Several factors lead to asthma-like symptoms in obese patients, including the mechanical effect of increased body mass index on lung volumes, which increases the work required for breathing. Researchers from the Countess of Chester Hospital and the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom recently found that obese patients may be more at risk for asthma misdiagnosis due to the similarity of symptoms experienced, such as breathlessness. Out of 91 subjects, ...

A new drug which offers a radically different approach to treating certain types of heart failure has been shown to improve cardiac function in heart failure patients in its first clinical trials. Current treatments for heart failure are aimed at a wide range of targets, but omecamtiv mercabil is the first of a new class of drugs – called cardiac myosin activators – which target the motor proteins that cause muscle contraction. Cardiac myosin activators prolong the interaction between the motor proteins myosin and actin to prolong the contraction of the left ventricle, ...