Chevy Chase, MD— A recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM) found that early, prolonged treatment with the diabetes drug metformin may prevent or delay the development of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) in adolescence. PCOS affects 7 to 10 percent of women of childbearing age and is the most common cause of infertility, affecting an estimated 5 to 6 million women in the United States, according to The Hormone Foundation. "PCOS often presents in adolescence, with irregular menstrual cycles, ...

A scientist at The University of Nottingham is part of a team of astronomers which has discovered the most distant quasar to date — a development that could help further our understanding of a universe still in its infancy following the Big Bang. This brilliant and rare beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet found from a time when the Universe was less than 800 million years old — just a fraction of its current age. The object that has been found, named ULAS J1120+0641, is around 100 million years ...

Although women generally have worse knee function and more severe symptoms before undergoing surgery for knee replacement than men, they recover faster after the operation. Men take longer to recover but, after a year, they catch up with women and there are no differences in surgery outcomes at that time. These findings by Thoralf Liebs, from Hassenpflug University of the Schleswig-Holstein Medical Center in Germany, and colleagues, are published online in Springer's journal Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research. Although research to date shows conflicting results, ...

A new database of plants' traits will help scientists around the world learn more about how climate change is affecting ecosystems. The availability of plant trait data in the unified global database promises to support a paradigm shift in Earth system sciences. University of Minnesota researchers Peter Reich and Jacek Oleksyn, Department of Forest Resources, and Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, are members of the international collaborative that developed the database, which includes 3 million traits for 69,000 of the world's ...

Our skin is a communicative wonder: The nerves convey temperature, pressure, shear forces and vibrations – from the finest breath of air to touch to pain. At the same time, the skin is the organ by which we set ourselves apart from our environment and distinguish between environment and body. Scientists at TUM are now developing an artificial skin for robots with a similar purpose: It will provide important tactile information to the robot and thus supplement its perception formed by camera eyes, infrared scanners and gripping hands. As with human skin, the way the artificial ...

Tel Aviv — Parkinson's Disease, brought to public awareness by figures such as Michael J. Fox, is not just difficult to diagnose. It's also difficult to accurately estimate how many people actually suffer from the disease. Current statistics come from small-scale studies, usually based on information from hospital clinics, and no registries or formal databases exist to track how many people have the disease. Dr. Chava Peretz of Tel Aviv University's School of Public Health at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Ph.D. student Orly Chillag-Talmor from Haifa University and ...

Interruptions are frequent in football: Football players (m/f) spend on average 38 percent of the total game time not chasing the ball. This was established by sports scientists from the Chair of Training Science and Sports Informatics at TUM in a study of 56 football games. In some games, the interruptions took up as much as 53% of the time, thus exceeding the duration of the actual sports activity. In sum, interruptions in men's and women's football are about the same. The individual interruptions, though, are significantly longer in men's football. Cheering a goal, ...

A paper published online today in Nature reveals that glia play a key role in preventing the progression of the most prominent Rett Syndrome symptoms displayed by mouse models of the disease: lethality, irregular breathing and apneas, hypoactivity and decreased dendritic complexity. The discovery, funded in part by the Rett Syndrome Research Trust (RSRT) was led by Gail Mandel, Ph.D., an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Oregon Health and Science University. Rett Syndrome, the most physically disabling of the autism spectrum disorders, is caused ...

In December 2010, a pair of mismatched stars in the southern constellation Crux whisked past each other at a distance closer than Venus orbits the sun. The system possesses a so-far unique blend of a hot and massive star with a compact fast-spinning pulsar. The pair's closest encounters occur every 3.4 years and each is marked by a sharp increase in gamma rays, the most extreme form of light. The unique combination of stars, the long wait between close approaches, and periods of intense gamma-ray emission make this system irresistible to astrophysicists. Now, a team using ...

VIDEO: University of Western Ontario researchers Jody Culham and Jason Gallivan describe how they can use a fMRI to determine the action a person was planning, mere moments before that action... Click here for more information. Bringing the real world into the brain scanner, researchers at The University of Western Ontario from The Centre for Brain and Mind (http://www.uwo.ca/its/brain/) can now determine the action a person was planning, mere moments before that action is actually ...

VIDEO: This GOES-13 satellite imagery shows the Chilean caldera still emitting a steady stream of ash, three weeks after the initial eruption on June 4, 2011. The cold winter wind from... Click here for more information. The Puyehue-Cordón volcano in Chile continues to spew ash that is still disrupting travel as far as Australia and New Zealand this week. A new animation of satellite imagery just released from the NASA/NOAA GOES Project shows the ash spewing from the ...

Online parcel delivery specialist Parcel2Go has reaffirmed its view that companies in the UK should take measures to ensure their deliveries are not disrupted by industrial action. Royal Mail released its annual report this week, which revealed a GBP120m loss for the year - equivalent to over GBP2m a week. Chief executive Moya Greene has said the business must change, and it is believed up to 43,000 jobs are at risk as mail centres across the country face closure. In response, union officials said that attempts to use employees as a political football would "inevitably ...

Workers' compensation is a program designed to help both employees and employers if an occupational accident occurs and a worker is injured. Worker's compensation protects workers by providing coverage for medical expenses and loss of earnings in the even of an accident or health-related layoff. This program also protects employers by preventing civil lawsuits against employers when they are potentially responsible for an accident. Workers' compensation benefits for a permanent disability could give an injured worker lump sum payments for that person's lifetime. Filing ...

June 29, 2011 -- The onset of puberty is a critical moment for reaching girls with health messages and information, and the stakes are particularly high in countries where the HIV/AIDS epidemic rages and where threats to female reproductive health abound. Yet to date, the healthcare community in low-resource countries has tended to neglect this opportunity and instead concentrate efforts on young women who are older and of reproductive age. In Tanzania, a multi-year project to address this gap has been led by Marni Sommer, DrPH, MSN, RN, at Columbia University's Mailman ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Researchers at the UC Davis Cancer Center have discovered a way of sensitizing muscle-invasive bladder cancer cells so that they succumb to the toxic effects of chemotherapy. The finding adds to mounting evidence that tiny strands of RNA — called microRNA — play key roles in some of the deadliest types of cancer. In the current study, published online June 28 in International Journal of Cancer, researchers boosted the production of a microRNA found in bladder cancer cell lines — encoded for by the gene miR-34a — and found that this resulted in ...

U.S. immigration law provides a host of visa alternatives to help individuals gain legal status to work in America. These options include everything from investor-related opportunities to visas for health care workers and L-1 visas for executives. One key program for American companies that require temporary services of non-immigrant workers with professional degrees is the H-1B visa, often used to employ accountants, scientists, engineers and computer programmers, among other professions. Recent criticism has suggested that the H-1B program has failed to meet the needs ...

BOSTON--Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have demonstrated a molecular strategy they say could make a much larger variety of tumors treatable with PARP inhibitors, a promising new class of cancer drugs. Currently, the role of PARP inhibitors has mainly been restricted to cancers whose cells lack functioning versions of the damage-repair proteins BRCA1 or BRCA2 -- chiefly certain breast and ovarian cancers. In a paper published online by Nature Medicine, Geoffrey Shapiro, MD, and colleagues report that the BRCA1 repair protein is dependent on another protein, ...

As technologies develop at an exponential pace, courts across the country are left scrambling to address the issues they create. The world we live in is becoming smaller and smaller as social media and smart phones provide more and more information about users' personal lives. Invariably, judges and members of law enforcement are forced to confront the privacy concerns these platforms generate. Specifically, courts all across the United States are in the midst of resolving the issue of whether searching cell phones without a warrant during an arrest infringes on individuals' ...

HOUSTON - Current and former heavy smokers can now be screened more effectively for lung cancer. Results from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) revealed that detecting small lung cancers with computed tomography (CT) reduces lung cancer specific mortality by 20 percent. Prior to the trial, lung cancer, often diagnosed in the later stages of the disease, had shown no benefit from screening because screening with standard chest X-rays did not detect cancers early enough. The trial, funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), is the driving force behind a new ...

"Money, money, money Must be funny Money, money, money Always sunny In the rich man's world." -ABBA, 1976 We rely on money in our day-to-day life and it is constantly in our minds. After all, money makes the world go round, doesn't it? Now, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, tries to better understand the psychological effect of money and how it affects our behavior, feelings and emotions. Jia Liu, at the University of Groningen, co-wrote the article along with ...

For years, homosexuality was grounds for discharge from the armed services of the United States. In 1993, President Clinton initiated the controversial "don't ask, don't tell" ("DADT") policy as a compromise that required gay soldiers to be discreet about their sexuality or face being thrown out of the military. DADT ruled the military policy on homosexuality for 17 years. But, on December 22, President Obama signed into law a bill that will allow gay men and women to serve openly in uniform for the first time in U.S. History. After certification ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- At the smallest scales, magnetism may not work quite the way scientists expected, according to a recent paper in Physical Review Letters by Rafał Oszwałdowski and Igor Žutić of the University at Buffalo and Andre Petukhov of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. The three physicists have proposed that it would be possible to create a quantum dot -- a kind of nanoparticle -- that is magnetic under surprising circumstances. Magnetism is determined by a property all electrons possess: spin. Individual spins are akin to tiny bar ...

Four attorneys from Hacker Murphy, LLP, in Latham, NY, have been selected for inclusion in 2011 New York Super Lawyers. The four attorneys are James E. Hacker, David R. Murphy, John F. Harwick and Mark R. Sonders. The Super Lawyers selections are based on an annual process in given jurisdictions. Only five percent of the lawyers in each jurisdiction are typically selected. Three of the four Hacker Murphy attorneys selected this year for the New York Super Lawyers list have been selected before. James E. Hacker was selected from 2006 to 2009. David R. Murphy and Mark ...

Houston personal injury attorney Benny Agosto Jr. of Abraham, Watkins, Nichols, Sorrels, Agosto & Friend is receiving nationwide recognition once again. While attorney Benny Agosto is often recognized for his dedication to the Houston community and the legal profession, this time he is being singled out for his work on the widely published immigration article "But Your Honor, He's an Illegal! Can the Undocumented Worker's Alien Status Be Introduced at Trial?" Co-authored with Texas Southern University Law Prof. Lupe Salinas and Texas attorney Eloisa ...

Reston, Va. (June 29, 2011) – A new treatment option may soon be available for children with neuroblastoma according to research published in the July issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. The study tested the principle that combined positron emission tomography and X-ray computed tomography (PET/CT) may be used to select children with primary refractory or relapsed high-risk neuroblastoma for treatment with a molecular radiotherapy known as 177Lu-DOTATATE. This therapeutic option was found to be viable option for children with neuroblastomas. Neuroblastoma is a ...