Treating metabolic syndrome and undergoing carotid angioplasty may prevent recurrent stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA), according to revised American Heart Association/American Stroke Association guidelines. Last updated in 2006, the evidence-based guidelines for doctors will be published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association. "Patients who've had a stroke or TIA are at highest risk for having another event," said Karen Furie, M.D., M.P.H., writing committee chair and stroke neurologist. "Since the last update, we've had results from several studies ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A new paper from MIT neuroscientists, in collaboration with Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, offers evidence that it is easier to rewire the brain early in life. The researchers found that a small part of the brain's visual cortex that processes motion became reorganized only in the brains of subjects who had been born blind, not those who became blind later in life. The new findings, described in the Oct. 14 issue of the journal Current Biology, shed light on how the brain wires itself during the first few years of life, ...

INFORMATION: The Global Crop Diversity Trust (www.croptrust.org) The mission of the Trust is to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide. Although crop diversity is fundamental to fighting hunger and to the very future of agriculture, funding is unreliable and diversity is being lost. The Trust is the only organization working worldwide to solve this problem. The Trust is providing support for the ongoing operations of the seed vault, as well as organizing and funding the preparation and shipment of seeds from developing ...

Most flowering plants, equipped with both male and female sex organs, can fertilize themselves and procreate without the aid of a mate. But this may only present a short-term adaptive benefit, according to a team of researchers led by two University of Illinois at Chicago biologists, who report that long-term evolutionary survival of a species favors flowers that welcome pollen from another plant. "We've shown that a strong, short-term advantage experienced by individuals that have sex with themselves can be offset by long-term advantages to plant species that strictly ...

Two strains of the type of mosquito responsible for the majority of malaria transmission in Africa have evolved such substantial genetic differences that they are becoming different species, according to researchers behind two new studies published today in the journal Science. Over 200 million people globally are infected with malaria, according to the World Health Organisation, and the majority of these people are in Africa. Malaria kills one child every 30 seconds. Today's international research effort, co-led by scientists from Imperial College London, looks at ...

The four guidelines include one outlining the organisation of a PGD centre and three relating to the methods used: amplification-based testing, fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH)-based testing and polar body/embryo biopsy. "The guidelines are a detailed update to the Consortium's initial PGD guidelines, published in the same journal in 2005. They have been developed as a set which, taken together, form a complete best-practice compendium," said Gary Harton, chairman of ESHRE's PGD Consortium and Head of Molecular Genetics at Reprogenetics in Livingston, New Jersey. The ...

Researchers found that the combination of computed tomography (CT), postmortem CT angiography (CTA) and biopsy can serve as a minimally invasive option for determining natural causes of death such as cardiac arrest, according to a study in the November issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology (www.ajronline.org). In the last decade, postmortem imaging, especially CT, has gained increasing acceptance in the forensic field. However, CT has certain limitations in the assessment of natural death. "Vascular and organ pathologic abnormalities, for example, generally ...

Pathological protein deposits linked to Alzheimer's disease and cerebral amyloid angiopathy can be triggered not only by the administration of pathogenic misfolded protein fragments directly into the brain but also by peripheral administration outside the brain. This is shown in a new study done by researchers at the Hertie Institute of Clinical Brain Research (HIH, University Hospital Tübingen, University of Tübingen) and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), to be published in Science on October 21, 2010. Alzheimer's disease and a brain vascular ...

A new type of sound sensor system has been developed to predict the likelihood of a landslide. Thought to be the first system of its kind in the world, it works by measuring and analysing the acoustic behaviour of soil to establish when a landslide is imminent so preventative action can be taken. Noise created by movement under the surface builds to a crescendo as the slope becomes unstable and so gauging the increased rate of generated sound enables accurate prediction of a catastrophic soil collapse. The technique has been developed by researchers at Loughborough ...

Scientists at The University of Nottingham and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge have pin-pointed the 72 molecular switches that control the three key stages in the life cycle of the malaria parasite and have discovered that over a third of these switches can be disrupted in some way. Their research which has been funded by Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council (MRC) is a significant breakthrough in the search for cheap and effective vaccines and drugs to stop the transmission of a disease which kills up to a million children a year. Until ...

Power plants that burn fossil fuels remain the main source of electricity generation across the globe. Modern power plants have scrubbers to remove sulfur compounds from their flue gases, which has helped reduce the problem of acid rain. Now, researchers in India have devised a way to convert the waste material produced by the scrubbing process into value-added products. They describe details in the International Journal of Environment and Pollution. Fossil fuels contain sulfur compounds that are released as sulfur dioxide during combustion. As such, flue gas desulfurisation ...

Researchers from the University of Valencia (UV) have identified the effects of the way parents bring up their children on social structure in Spain. Their conclusions show that punishment, deprivation and strict rules impact on a family's self esteem. "The objective was to analyse which style of parental socialisation is ideal in Spain by measuring the psychosocial adjustment of children", Fernando García, co-author of the study and a researcher at the UV, tells SINC. The study, which has been published in the latest issue of the journal Infancia y Aprendizaje, was ...

INDIANAPOLIS – A study published earlier this year in the peer reviewed online journal BMC Public Health has found that residing in a neighborhood with adverse living conditions such as low air quality, loud traffic or industrial noise, or poorly maintained streets, sidewalks and yards, makes mobility problems much more likely in late middle-aged African Americans with diabetes. "We followed a large group of African Americans for 3 years and found an extremely strong correlation between diabetes and adverse neighborhood conditions. The study participants were between ...

Jena (21 October 2010) Scientists from the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (Germany) were successful in improving a fabrication process for Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) probe tips. Atomic Force Microscopy is able to scan surfaces so that even tiniest nano structures become visible. Knowledge about these structures is for instance important for the development of new materials and carrier systems for active substances. The size of the probe is highly important for the image quality as it limits the dimensions that can be visualized – the smaller the probe, the smaller ...

PITTSBURGH—An analysis of plant and petroleum-derived plastics by University of Pittsburgh researchers suggests that biopolymers are not necessarily better for the environment than their petroleum-based relatives, according to a report in Environmental Science & Technology. The Pitt team found that while biopolymers are the more eco-friendly material, traditional plastics can be less environmentally taxing to produce. Biopolymers trumped the other plastics for biodegradability, low toxicity, and use of renewable resources. Nonetheless, the farming and chemical processing ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Being the right size and existing in the limbo between a solid and a liquid state appear to be the secrets to improving the efficiency of chemical catalysts that can create better nanoparticles or more efficient energy sources. When matter is in this transitional state, a catalyst can achieve its utmost potential with the right combination of catalyst particle size and temperature, according to a pair of Duke University researchers. A catalyst is an agent or chemical that facilitates a chemical reaction. It is estimated that more than 90 percent of chemical ...

PITTSBURGH—Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have devised an innovative and elegantly concise algorithm that can efficiently solve systems of linear equations that are critical to such important computer applications as image processing, logistics and scheduling problems, and recommendation systems. The theoretical breakthrough by Professor Gary Miller, Systems Scientist Ioannis Koutis and Ph.D. student Richard Peng, all of Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department, has enormous practical potential. Linear systems are widely used to model real-world ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Step aside copper and make way for a better carrier of information -- light. As good as the metal has been in zipping information from one circuit to another on silicon inside computers and other electronic devices, optical signals can carry much more, according to Duke University electrical engineers. So the engineers have designed and demonstrated microscopically small lasers integrated with thin film-light guides on silicon that could replace the copper in a host of electronic products. The structures on silicon not only contain tiny light-emitting ...

Growing up with lots of sisters makes a man less sexy. For rats, anyway. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that the sex ratio of a male rat's family when he's growing up influences both his own sexual behavior and how female rats respond to him. David Crews, a psychobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin, is interested in how early life affects behavior later. This is an area that has received a lot of attention recently, such as research showing that the position of a fetus in the uterus ...

A commentary published in the journal, Science Translational Medicine, examines the structures of translational research investment in the UK. The commentary has been written by researchers from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) comprehensive Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) at Guy's and St Thomas' and King's College London. The authors consider the results of substantial Government and charitable investment in translational research taking place within the NHS. The commentary follows the progress of the research and development funding streams available ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Does the environment encountered early in life have permanent and predictable long-term effects in adulthood? Such effects have been reported in numerous organisms, including humans. But now a biology graduate student at the University of California, Riverside reports that how individuals fare as adults is not simply a passive consequence of the limits that early conditions may impose on them. Studying how adult Trinidadian guppies (small freshwater fish) responded to their early food conditions, Sonya Auer found that the guppies had compensated ...

VIDEO: Martha Askins explains problem-solving skills training. Click here for more information. BOSTON - Mothers who have children diagnosed with cancer now have a better approach to address and cope with stresses associated with their child's disease. A new certified intervention has proven to be more effective long term compared to other psychological methods, as reported today at the 42nd Congress of the International Society of Pediatric Oncology. In a joint ...

CHICAGO (October 21, 2010) – Occupants in motor vehicles with airbags are much less likely to suffer kidney or renal damage in a crash than are occupants in vehicles without airbags, according to a new study in the September Journal of the American College of Surgeons. Little is known about how to prevent or reduce injury to solid organs from motor vehicle collisions. In fact, this study is the first to evaluate the protective effect of airbags on a specific organ system – in this case, the kidney and other renal, or upper urinary tract, organs. The researchers found ...

CHICAGO (October 21, 2010) – Telementoring may be an effective way for subspecialist surgeons to assist remotely located general surgeons in the care of patients in need of emergency subspecialty surgical procedures, according to new research findings published in the September issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. In the study, eight general surgery residents with no formal subspecialty training participated in three mock operations using animal cadavers intended to simulate live procedures. When telementored, the residents achieved higher overall ...

Two new studies have determined that everolimus-eluting stent (EES) implantation reduced the incidence of restenosis and repeat revascularization in patients with calcified culprit lesions, and had fewer clinical events. Results show the rate of major cardiac adverse events in EES-treated patients with calcified lesions were higher than in those for noncalcified lesions, but remained lower than the results of previously reported stent studies. Details of both studies are published in the November issue of Catheterization and Cardiovascular Intervention, a peer-reviewed ...