Sophia Antipolis, 7 December 2010: 'Some progress, but the big challenges remain'. This was the verdict after the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) hosted the 2010 European Summit on CVD Prevention on 30 November. The summit was attended by a broad cross-section of medical experts, healthcare organisations, national societies, regulators and representatives from the European Union (EU). The aim of this bi-annual event is to encourage concerted action towards a harmonised strategy for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in Europe. Much of the debate centred ...

Apros is already widely used for dependable analysis of combustion and nuclear power plants in particular but also of other industrial processes. Even the most difficult process failures can be simulated by using this software. Apros simulation software is the result of a quarter century's development work by VTT experts in co-operation with Fortum, and it is already used in 26 countries. Apros version 5.09 brings several new features for its end users. The separate phase thermal hydraulics calculation (6-equation model) of Apros has now been extended to cover all parts ...

Researchers at Umeå Plant Science Center in Sweden discovered, in collaboration with the Syngenta company, a previously unknown gene in sugar beets that blocks flowering. Only with the cold of winter is the gene shut off, allowing the sugar beet to blossom in its second year. The discovery of this new gene function makes it possible to control when sugar beets bloom. The new findings were recently published in the prestigious journal Science. Scientists at Umeå Plant Science Center and the international company Syngenta, in a joint study of genetic regulation in the ...

Washington, DC, 7 December 2010 – The enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 expands Medicare benefits to scores of previously uninsured individuals including many of our nation's children. While access to treatment is laudable, the quality of such treatment is the subject of an article in the December issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. In the article titled "Quality of Care for Childhood Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in a Managed Care Medicaid Program," Dr. Bonnie Zima and ...

Television's favourite Time Lord could not exist without his trusty sonic screwdriver, as it's proved priceless in defeating Daleks and keeping the Tardis in check. Now Doctor Who's famous cure-all gadget could become a reality for DIY-ers across the world, say engineers. Ultrasonic engineers at Bristol University and The Big Bang: UK Young Scientists and Engineers Fair are uncovering how a real life version of the fictional screwdriver - which uses sonic technology to open locks and undo screws - could be created. Professor of Ultrasonics, Bruce Drinkwater, who is ...

Cardiologists from the Mayo Clinic performed sheathless transradial percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) to remedy complex lesions, achieving a 90% success rate with no radial complications. Standard guiding catheters were used during the procedure. Details of this novel approach—overcoming the last hurdle to greater adoption of transradial PCI in the U.S.—are published in the December issue of Catheterization and Cardiovascular Intervention, the official journal of The Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions. PCI, commonly known as angioplasty, ...

On Tuesday 7 December 2010, maternal health professionals from Africa and Asia will be attending a workshop in Liverpool to discuss the effects of 'Making It Happen', a programme with a life-saving training package for health care providers at its heart. Participants will share successes and lessons learned from this maternal and newborn health intervention, to better determine how the programme can be scaled-up. Supported by the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), UNICEF and other bodies and in partnership with the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — In an era when social networking sites and blogs are visited by three quarters of online users, it's only natural that the medical profession would also tap into the power of social media tools. Caroline Richardson, M.D., associate professor of family medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, and her colleagues found that adding an interactive online community to an Internet-based walking program significantly decreased the number of participants who dropped out. Seventy-nine percent of participants who used online forums to motivate ...

When an antibiotic is consumed, researchers have learned that up to 90 percent passes through a body without metabolizing. This means the drugs can leave the body almost intact through normal bodily functions. In the case of agricultural areas, excreted antibiotics can then enter stream and river environments through a variety of ways, including discharges from animal feeding operations, fish hatcheries, and nonpoint sources such as the flow from fields where manure or biosolids have been applied. Water filtered through wastewater treatment plants may also contain used ...

Brussels, 7 December 2010 – Polar research must become an integral part of the European Union's research activities if Europe is to benefit from the dramatically changing face of the Polar Regions, the European Polar Board (EPB) said today at the launch of its strategic position paper on European polar research: "Relevance, Strategic Context and Setting Future Directions." European research activities in the Polar Regions are significant, amounting to over 300 million euro per year in recognition of the regions' key role as driver of the Earth's climate and the functioning ...

People who live in walkable communities are more civically involved and have greater levels of trust than those who live in less walkable neighborhoods. And this increase in so-called 'social capital' is associated with higher quality of life, according to Shannon Rogers and her team from the University of New Hampshire in the US. Their research, looking at the social benefits of walkability in communities, is published online in Springer's journal Applied Research in Quality of Life. A walkable community provides residents with easy access to post offices, town parks ...

Tel Aviv ― Career women who put babies on hold until after 40, or even 45, will be reassured by new research from Tel Aviv University. Even though there are associated risks for babies when postponing child-bearing, the neonates can overcome them, says Prof. Yariv Yogev of Tel Aviv University's Sackler School of Medicine and the Hospital for Women at Rabin Medical Center. Working as a clinician in Israel, a country that supports in vitro fertilization (IVF) in older women, Prof. Yogev and his colleagues investigated the outcomes for mothers of 45 or more and their ...

7 December 2010 – We commonly think of sleep as a healing process that melts away the stresses of the day, preparing us to deal with new challenges. Research has also shown that sleep plays a crucial role in the development of memories. An important component of anxiety disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), is the formulation of memories associated with fear. Therefore, researchers decided to evaluate whether sleep deprivation after exposure to an aversive event might eliminate the associated fear, due to the lack of memory consolidation that would ...

BOSTON (December 7, 2010) —Newly-created bioactive peptides promote wound healing through the growth of new blood vessels and epithelial tissue, such as skin. These wound-healing peptides, synthesized by researchers at the Tufts Center for Innovations in Wound Healing Research, increased angiogenesis in vitro by 200 percent. The discovery, reported online in advance of print this week in Wound Repair and Regeneration, provides a better understanding of the mechanisms regulating wound healing and may lead to new therapies for acute and chronic wound healing. "We identified ...

AUSTIN, Texas—The role a key molecule plays in a plant's ability to remember winter, and therefore bloom in the spring, has been identified by University of Texas at Austin scientists. Many flowering plants bloom in bursts of color in spring after long periods of cold in the winter. The timing of blooming is critical to ensure pollination, and is important for crop production and for droves of people peeping at wildflowers. One way for the plants to recognize the spring—and not just a warm spell during winter—is that they "remember" they've gone through a long enough ...

When two individuals face off in conflict, the classic problem in evolutionary biology known as the prisoner's dilemma says that the individuals are not likely to cooperate even if it is in their best interests to do so. But a new study suggests that with incentives to cooperate, natural selection can minimize conflict, changing the game from one of pure conflict to one of partial cooperation. The findings, published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that the prisoner's dilemma game, which has reigned as the dominant theoretical paradigm used to ...

MAYWOOD, Ill. -- A new technique that jumpstarts the growth of nerve fibers could reverse much of the damage caused by strokes, researchers report in the Jan. 7, 2011 issue of the journal Stroke. "This therapy may be used to restore function even when it's given long after ischemic brain damage has occurred," senior author Gwendolyn Kartje, MD, PhD and colleagues write. The article has been published online in advance of the print edition of Stroke. Kartje is director of the Neuroscience Institute of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and chief of ...

MAYWOOD, Ill. -- Surgery to remove tumors under the brain known as acoustic neuromas produces favorable outcomes in the "vast majority" of patients, according to one of the largest studies of its kind. Loyola University Hospital surgeons Dr. Douglas Anderson and Dr. John Leonetti followed 730 patients whom they had jointly operated on during a 21-year period. Patients ranged in age from 9 to 79, with a median age of 48. The average clinical followup was 32 months. Every patient survived the surgery, and the surgeons were able to completely remove the tumors in 95.1 percent ...

DURHAM, N.C. – The brain's visual neurons continually develop predictions of what they will perceive and then correct erroneous assumptions as they take in additional external information, according to new research done at Duke University. This new mechanism for visual cognition challenges the currently held model of sight and could change the way neuroscientists study the brain. The new vision model is called predictive coding. It is more complex and adds an extra dimension to the standard model of sight. The prevailing model has been that neurons process incoming ...

INDIANAPOLIS – A grant from the D. J. Angus-Scientech Educational Foundation has made it possible for a student from a suburban Indianapolis high school to co-author, along with his mentor and two other scientists, a theoretical physics study in a top tier peer-reviewed scientific journal, a paper which has been selected for rapid communication due to its importance to the field. "It is extremely rare for a high school student to be a co-author on a physics paper. Statistics on this aren't available, but it is likely less than 1 paper in 1,000, that's one tenth of one ...

HOUSTON (Dec. 7, 2010) – Private insurers appear to be more effective in controlling health care spending differences between two Texas cities than Medicare, according to researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health. Researchers found that sharp disparities in per-capita Medicare healthcare spending between McAllen and El Paso were significantly diminished when private insurance paid for health care costs in the under-65 population. "For a number of reasons, insurers generally are reluctant to intrude on ...

Among patients with a family or past history of colorectal cancer (CRC), testing between colonoscopies helps detect CRC and advanced tumors that are either missed or develop rapidly, according to a new study in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute. "By using fecal immunochemical testing — a new type of stool blood test — in the interval between surveillance colonoscopies, we were able to detect cancer much sooner than if we had waited for the scheduled surveillance," said Graeme P. Young, MD, AGAF, FRACP, ...

Are you ready for robots in the ER? A group of computer engineers at Vanderbilt University is convinced that the basic technology is now available to create robot assistants that can perform effectively in the often-chaotic environment of the emergency room. The specialists in emergency medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center are enthusiastic about the potential advantages. So, the two groups have formed an interdisciplinary team to explore the use of robotics in this critical and challenging setting. Team member Mitch Wilkes, associate professor of electrical ...

In these modern times, people can have jobs that weren't traditionally associated with their genders. Men are nurses; women are CEOs. A new study examines perceptions of people in high-powered jobs and finds that they're likely to be judged more harshly for mistakes if they're in a job that's not normally associated with their gender. "The reason I got interested is, there was so much talk about race and gender barriers being broken," says Victoria Brescoll, a psychological scientist at Yale University and first author of the study. In the 2008 presidential election, ...

Manhattan, KS —December 7, 2010— We've all been there: we are watching a movie with a parent or relative when a steamy love scene appears. A new study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology shows that all of that squirming and averting of eyes is normal, especially when you are accompanied by your parents. The authors of the study assert that not all movie-watching experiences are enjoyable or positive. Some movies make us feel downright uncomfortable or disturbed in their content and delivery, while others are inspirational, touching, or have us rolling on the floor. ...