Patients with mild to moderate heart failure who received educational materials and self-management counseling in an attempt to improve adherence to medical advice did not have a reduced rate of death or hospitalization compared to patients who received educational materials alone, according to a study in the September 22/29 issue of JAMA. There have been advances in the development of effective therapies for heart failure, but challenges remain in the delivery of these therapies to patients. "Patient nonadherence to heart failure drugs ranges from 30 percent to 60 percent ...

Among patients receiving immunosuppressive therapy for severe aplastic anemia (a condition in which the bone marrow is unable to produce blood cells), the length of telomeres (chromosome markers of biological aging) was not related to the response to treatment but was associated with a higher rate of relapse (return to low blood cell counts) and lower overall survival, according to a study in the September 22/29 issue of JAMA. Severe aplastic anemia is characterized by life-threatening cytopenias (blood cell count below normal), but this condition can be treated by bone ...

The incidence of serious infection after common ultrasound-guided procedures, such as biopsy, fine-needle aspiration (a form of biopsy) and thoracentesis (procedure involving needle drainage of the chest cavity) is low, according to a study in the October issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology (www.ajronline.org). Ultrasound imaging, also called ultrasound scanning or sonography, involves exposing part of the body to high-frequency sound waves to produce pictures of the inside of the body. "Ultrasound-guided procedures are safe, effective and accurate in that ...

Adverse cardiac events are rare one year after patients are admitted to the emergency room with low-to-moderate risk chest pain and are discharged due to a negative cardiac computed tomography angiogram (CTA), according to a study in the October issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology (www.ajronline.org). Cardiac CTA is a noninvasive heart-imaging test that determines whether fatty deposits or calcium deposits have built up in the coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart muscle. Earlier discharge of patients with low-to-moderate risk chest pain after ...

The growing use of rapid response teams dispatched by hospitals to evaluate patients whose conditions have suddenly deteriorated may be masking systemic problems in how hospitals care for their sickest patients, says a prominent Johns Hopkins patient safety expert. In a commentary published in the Sept. 22 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Peter Pronovost, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and co-author Eugene Litvak, Ph.D., president of the Institute for Healthcare ...

Plants picked up to 150 years ago by Victorian collectors and held by the million in herbarium collections across the world could become a powerful – and much needed – new source of data for studying climate change, according to research published this week in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Ecology. The scarcity of reliable long-term data on phenology – the study of natural climate-driven events such as the timing of trees coming into leaf or plants flowering each spring – has hindered scientists' understanding of how species respond to climate change. But ...

Washington, D.C. (September 21, 2010) -- Laser ablation is well known in medical applications like dermatology and dentistry, and for more than a decade it has been used to vaporize materials that are difficult to evaporate for high-tech applications like deposition of superconductors. Now researchers in the Journal of Applied Physics, which is published by the American Institute of Physics have studied the properties of femtosecond laser ablation plumes to better understand how to apply them to specialized films. Salvatore Amoruso at University of Naples, Italy and ...

Washington, D.C. (September 21, 2010) -- For months, Anthony West could hardly believe what he and his colleagues were seeing in the lab -- or the only explanation for the unexpected phenomena that seemed to make sense. Several of the slightly doped high-purity barium titanate (BT) ceramics his research group was investigating were not following the venerable Ohm's Law, which relates electrical voltage to current and resistance. Applying or removing a voltage caused a gradual change in the materials' electrical resistance. The new effect was seen consistently regardless ...

Washington, D.C. (September 21, 2010) -- Research is closing in on the next-generation of ultra-high-density magneto-optical storage devices that could store more than 6,000 Terabits (6 petabits) of data, more than 70 times the contents of the entire U.S. Library of Congress, on a single 5-inch disc. Yet the vast storage amount is limited by the ability to write data quickly enough to the device. In the Journal of Applied Physics, researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University in China have demonstrated a way to record on ferromagnetic films using a laser-assisted ultrafast magnetization ...

Washington, D.C. (September 21, 2010) -- At its most basic level, understanding chemistry means understanding what electrons are doing. Research published in The Journal of Chemical Physics not only maps the movement of electrons in real time but also observes a concerted electron and proton transfer that is quite different from any previously known phase transitions in the model crystal, ammonium sulfate. By extending X-ray powder diffraction into the femtosecond realm, the researchers were able to map the relocation of charges in the ammonium sulfate crystal after they ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Patients who experience physical or psychological stress – including rigorous exercise – one or two days before a cancer treatment might be unknowingly sabotaging their therapy, new research suggests. Stress in the body – even physical stress caused by intense exercise – activates a stress-sensitive protein that can spark a series of events that allow cancer cells to survive such treatments as chemotherapy and radiation, according to the research. Though the study involved a series of experiments in breast cancer cell cultures, the researchers say ...

Broca's region is classically regarded as the motor centre for speech. Our ability to form phonemes and words is controlled here. According to the maps of the cerebral cortex developed by Korbinian Brodmann, which are still in use today, Broca's region is composed of two areas. Over the last few years, however, researchers have begun to question this subdivision as a result of experience gained in clinical studies and the findings of magnetic resonance imaging analyses. "Lesions in Broca's region could result in a dozen different language problems," says Professor Katrin ...

For advanced activities of our daily life (such as driving a car, or seeing a movie), to be awake is important. It has been known so far that neuropeptide in the brain called "Orexin"controls sleep and awakening besides appetite. Here, the research group led by Dr. Akihiro Yamanaka, National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), found that orexin-releasing neurons have the self-excitation mechanism that activate each other among them, and maintain awaking. From this result, the application to doze prevention or insomnia treatment can be expected. It is reported in ...

The Dying Swan is sometimes moving smoothly and gently, sometimes in a dramatic and fiery manner, as Tchaikovsky´s majestic music from the ballet Swan Lake is playing. Yet this is no ordinary ballet dancer, but a robot in the form of a swan, created at Mälardalen University and choreographed by professional dancer Åsa Unander-Scharin. The swan robot´s just over four-minute-long dance has so far been seen only by a select few. But it has already made a big impression. Tearful eyes and words like "touching", "fascinating" and "beautiful" are some of the reactions. - We ...

Sophia Antipolis, 21 September 2010: The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) welcomes a paper published today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC )(1) highlighting concerns over the use of oxygen therapy during MI in patients with normal oxygen levels. The publication adds to calls for revision of the STEMI guidelines around oxygen therapy and for a prospective, large scale randomised trials, issues that were both first raised in a Cochrane Review published in June (2). "The upcoming ESC Clinical Practice Guidelines for the management of STEMI, ...

The world's tiniest nuclear genome appears to have "snipped off the ends" of its chromosomes and evolved into a lean, mean, genome machine that infects human cells, according to research published today by University of British Columbia scientists. Until recently, E. cuniculi, a parasitic fungus commonly found in rabbits that can also be fatal to immunocompromised humans, has been widely regarded as having the smallest known nuclear genome. At 2.9 millions base pairs (Mbp) and approximately 2,000 genes, the genome of E. cuniculi is less than one-two thousandth the size ...

The horse was domesticated many thousands of years ago and has been hugely important in the development of human civilization. It is hard to overstate its role in agriculture, in transport and communications and even in military operations. More recently, equestrian sports have gained markedly in popularity, so even though the horse has largely been superseded in modern farming and military practice its connection to man remains as close as ever. Nevertheless, the horse retains at least some aspects of its wild origins. It is clear that horses are frequently subjected ...

As the United States prepares for the upcoming flu season, a group of researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health continues to model how H1N1 may spread. The work is part of an effort, called the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS), to develop computational models for conducting virtual experiments of how emerging pathogens could spread with and without interventions. The study involves more than 50 scientists with expertise in epidemiology, infectious diseases, computational biology, statistics, social sciences, physics, computer sciences ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed new software that offers significantly enhanced security for cloud-computing systems. The software is much better at detecting viruses or other malware in the "hypervisors" that are critical to cloud computing, and does so without alerting the malware that it is being examined. Cloud computing is being hailed as a flexible, affordable way of offering computer resources to consumers. Under the cloud-computing paradigm, the computational power and storage of multiple computers is pooled, and can be shared by ...

Researchers have found that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may be sufficient for the routine surveillance of some great vessel (primary blood vessels [e.g., aorta and vena cavae]) stents that are commonly used to treat congenital heart defects (a defect in the structure of the heart and great vessels that is present at birth) in children and young adults, according to a study in the October issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology (www.ajronline.org). MRI is a noninvasive medical test that helps physicians diagnose and treat medical conditions. "Computed tomography ...

Scientists at the University of Granada have developed a new therapy for the treatment of skin and lung cancer. This therapy involves the use of a suicide coliphage-gene (gene E) that can induce death to cells transfected with it.. Their studies have demostrated that this technique is not only effective in vitro (using tumour cell cultures), but also in vivo through the use of experimental animals in which tumours were induced. Although further research is required, the results obtained at the University of Granada revealed gene E's intensive antitumour activity, which ...

The prediction of the structure and function of biological macromolecules (i.e., the machinery of life) is of foremost importance in the field of structural biology. Since the elucidation of the three-dimensional structure of DNA (the molecule that carries all genetic information) by Watson and Crick, scientists have strived to decipher the hidden code that determines the evolution of the spatial arrangement of these molecules towards their functional native state. Attempts to follow these structural transitions experimentally and with atomic resolution are hampered by ...

"Yeah, I'm on my way home." "That's funny." "Uh-huh." "What? No! I thought you were – " "Oh, ok." Listening to someone talk on a cell phone is very annoying. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds out why: Hearing just one side of a conversation is much more distracting than hearing both sides and reduces our attention in other tasks. Lauren Emberson, a psychology Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, came up with the idea for the study when she was taking the bus as an undergraduate student at the ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 21, 2010 – For the past two decades, cancer therapy has become more sophisticated and effective, resulting in an ever-expanding group of long-term cancer survivors. There is also a growing awareness of the potentially negative effects of cancer treatment on the heart and the management of cardiac disease during and after cancer therapy. In the September/October issue of Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases an international group of experts takes an in-depth look at the ways in which cancer treatment profoundly impacts patients' cardiovascular ...

West Lafayette, IN—September 21, 2010— While most citizens recognize that corruption is "bad," the average citizen is unaware of the benefits enjoyed by politically connected firms, or how common government favors are worldwide. In the U.S., many citizens were outraged at the provision and size of bailouts for "too big to fail" banks. A new study from the journal Financial Management claims that not only does corruption exist in the corporate world, but that political connections are extremely important for corporate success. Author Mara Faccio studied several thousand ...