News Articles

A new study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine found a dramatic increase in the number of adolescents undergoing "Tommy John" surgery to repair a pitching-related elbow injury in recent years, outstripping growth among major league pitchers. 

If you live in one of four major U.S. cities chances are you're letting the benefits of a ubiquitous natural resource go right down the drain instead of using it to cut down your water bill.
Toilet flushing is the biggest use of water in households in the United States and the United Kingdom, accounting for nearly one-third of potable water use. But there is no reason that clean, treated, municipal water needs to be used to flush a toilet -- rainwater could do the job just as well.
A new paper indicates it rains enough in Philadelphia, New York, Seattle and Chicago that if homeowners had a way to collect and store even just the rain falling on their roofs, they could flush their toilets often without having to use a drop of municipal water. 

A BLOOD test may be able to sound early warning bells that patients with advanced melanoma skin cancer are relapsing, according to a study* published in the journal Cancer Discovery today (Monday).
Scientists from the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute studied the DNA shed by tumours into the bloodstream - called circulating tumour DNA - in blood samples from seven advanced melanoma patients at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust.
In this early work they found they could see whether a patient was relapsing by tracking levels of circulating tumour DNA. And they found that new mutations in genes like NRAS and PI3K appeared, possibly causing the relapse by allowing the tumour to become resistant to treatment.

PULLMAN, Wash.--Washington State University researcher Joyce Ehrlinger has found that a person's tendency to be overconfident increases if he or she thinks intelligence is fixed and unchangeable.
Such people tend to maintain their overconfidence by concentrating on the easy parts of tasks while spending as little time as possible on the hard parts of tasks, said Ehrlinger, a WSU assistant professor of psychology. But people who hold a growth mindset--meaning they think intelligence is a changeable quality--spend more time on the challenging parts of tasks, she said. Consequently, their levels of confidence are more in line with their abilities.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Supervolcanoes capable of unleashing hundreds of times the amount of magma that was expelled during the Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980 are found in populated areas around the world, including the western United States.
A new study is providing insight into what may happen when one of these colossal entities explodes.
The research focuses on the Silver Creek caldera, which sits at the intersection of California, Nevada and Arizona. When this supervolcano erupted 18.8 million years ago, it flooded parts of all three states with river-like currents of hot ash and gas called pyroclastic flows. These tides of volcanic material traveled for huge distances -- more than 100 miles.

Left and right brained makes a difference, even for those good at math. Large numbers are processed in the left side of the brain while small numbers are processed in the right side of the brain, according to a new paper. The brain is divided into two halves - the left side controls the right half of the body, and vice versa. Generally, one side of the brain is more dominant than the other. For example, people who are right-handed tend to have more activity in the left side of their brains.

The technological capacity for generating virtual worlds from home computers will soon be widely available to the general public, as special head-mounted displays are brought to market that create the illusion of being immersed in virtual three-dimensional worlds. The fact that Virtual Reality (VR) can create these strong illusions is a main reason why VR brings new risks - recent studies have shown that immersion in VR can cause behavioral changes that last after subjects leave the virtual environment. And because VR can also create a situation in which the user's bodily appearance and visual environment is determined by the host of the virtual world, it raises the possibility that VR will create vast opportunities for psychological manipulation.

Superconductivity, a quantum phenomenon in which metals below a certain temperature develop flow of current with no loss or resistance, has been one of the most intriguing problems in physics, for over a century.
First discovered in the element mercury in 1911, superconductivity is said to occur when electrical resistance in a solid vanishes when that solid is cooled below a characteristic temperature, called the transition temperature, which varies from material to material. Transition temperatures tend to be close to 0 K or -273 C. At even slightly higher temperatures, the materials tend to lose their superconducting properties; indeed, at room temperature most superconductors are very poor conductors.

The decline in the fluidity, or dynamism, of the U.S. labor market has been occurring along a number of dimensions, including the rate of job-to-job transition, hires and separations, and geographic movement across labor markets, since at least the 1980s, according to a new paper to be presented next week at the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity.
Less fluidity in the labor market leads to fewer opportunities for workers to renegotiate their current position or change jobs and thus may have important implications for the macro economy in general, including on productivity.

Most patients with melanoma had few moles and no atypical moles, and in patients younger than 60, thick melanomas were more commonly found in those with fewer moles but more atypical moles, according to an article published online by JAMA Dermatology.
Studies have suggested that the number of total moles and atypical moles is associated with the risk of melanoma. Yet the relationship of those mole patterns with tumor thickness and cancer prognosis is complex.

Working with lab-grown human stem cells, a team of researchers suspect they have discovered how the Zika virus probably causes microcephaly in fetuses. The virus selectively infects cells that form the brain's cortex, or outer layer, making them more likely to die and less likely to divide normally and make new brain cells.
The researchers say their experiments also suggest these highly-susceptible lab-grown cells could be used to screen for drugs that protect the cells or ease existing infections.

Orlando, FL -Genetic research on concussions is progressing in many different avenues. However, researchers presenting their work at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Specialty Day, believe there may be a new genetic connection regarding recovery rates following a sports-related concussion.
"Athletes carrying a specific genotype (CACNA1E rs704326) in our study were found to have a much greater risk of a prolonged recovery following concussion," said lead author, Jane McDevitt, PhD from Temple University in Philadelphia. "Athletes who also reported having balance issues/deficits were also more likely to take a longer time to recover."