After decades of public safety campaigns focused on drinking and driving, it may be time to focus on the seventh leading cause of injury-related death, according to Bureau of Occupational Health and Injury Prevention at New York State Department of Health and Columbia University scholars looking at New York State.
If you have walked into a hotel room in Hawaii where you are paying $400 a night and been met with a card telling you they aren't going to give you towels and sheets because they are "conserving' water, and you snorted derisively, you would be about the 10 millionth person to do so. Hawaii has no water issues, you know, and this is just a way to boost the profit line of the company at your expense.
Such "greenwashing," a corporation's practice of promoting environmentally friendly programs while hiding ulterior motives, is commonplace under the guise of "sustainability" and "corporate responsibility."
Goldenrod, Himalayan balsam, Chinese windmill palm: three plants, one problem. All are native to continents other than Europe, but were introduced to Switzerland as garden or ornamental plants. At some point they "escaped" into the wild, where they now threaten the native flora.
This phenomenon isn't limited to Switzerland: biological invasions happen on every continent every day. A major driver of this is global trade, which is increasingly shifting to the internet and being conducted on auction platforms like eBay. As a result, one click is all it takes to spread potentially invasive plants from continent to continent - and unintentionally encouraging biological invasions.
Monitoring online auctions
More than half (53 percent) of U.S. consumers want to know what’s in their DNA, according to a new survey, yet only 7 percent of respondents say that their doctor has discussed genetic screening with them.
The nationwide survey, conducted by marketing research company ORC International among a representative sample of 1,020 adults, explored knowledge of and attitudes toward genetic testing among adult consumers. The strong interest in genetic screening that is evident from the survey can be attributed to a variety of factors, but may point to an interest among consumers in using genetic screening to be more proactive about their healthcare.
When cells from the connective tissue collide, they repel one another - this phenomenon was discovered more than 50 years ago. It is only now, however, that researchers at the University of Basel have discovered the molecular basis for this process, as they report in the journal Developmental Cell. Their findings could have important implications for cancer research.
Fibroblasts are motile constituents of the connective tissue and also regulate its stiffness. Moreover, fibroblasts play an important role in malignant skin diseases such as melanoma. In research, they serve as a model system for studying cell migration.
Signaling pathway identified
Everyone knows that exercise improves health, and ongoing research continues to uncover increasingly detailed information on its benefits for metabolism, circulation, and improved functioning of organs such as the heart, brain, and liver. With this knowledge in hand, scientists may be better equipped to develop "exercise pills" that could mimic at least some of the beneficial effects of physical exercise on the body.
A review of current development efforts in Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, ponders whether such pills will achieve their potential therapeutic impact, at least in the near future.
Glioblastoma is an aggressive brain cancer that kills two-thirds of patients within five years. A patient's outlook with recurrence of the disease is considered to be weeks or months.
An experimental gene therapy essentially doubled the overall survival of patients with recurrent glioblastoma compared to the current standard of care, a researcher said October 1st at the Cancer Therapy&Research Center (CTRC) at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
Strategic voting is an important factor in Canadian electoral campaigns. "People vote strategically when they think neither their first nor their second choice has any chance of winning in their electorate. They vote for their third choice party in the hopes of blocking an outcome that would be even worse," said Jean-François Daoust, a researcher at the University of Montreal's Department of Political Science who studied the phenomenon as part of his doctoral work. He was directed by André Blais, who holds the university's Research Chair for Electoral Studies, and his findings, which drew on Quebec's 2012 provincial elections, were recently published in Politiques et sociétés.
Humans have been breeding crops until they're bigger and more nutritious since the early days of agriculture, but genetic manipulation isn't the only way to give plants a boost. In a review paper, two integrative biologists present how it is possible to engineer the plant soil microbiome to improve plant growth, even if the plants are genetically identical and cannot evolve.
These artificially selected microbiomes, which can also be selected in animals, can then be passed on from parents to offspring.
People tend to associate the ability to think creatively with stereotypical masculine qualities, according to a paper in Psychological Science, which suggests that the work and achievements of men tend to be evaluated as more creative than similar work and achievements produced by women.
Research suggests that when people think about "creative thinkers" they tend to think of characteristics typically ascribed to men but not women, including qualities like risk-taking, adventurousness, and self-reliance. Lead author Devon Proudfoot of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and colleagues Aaron Kay and Christy Zoval hypothesized that this could ultimately lead people to view creative thinking as an ability more common among men than women.
A new analysis leads the authors to advance the belief that viruses are living entities that share a long evolutionary history with cells, based on a method for tracing viral evolution back to a time when neither viruses nor cells existed in the forms recognized today.
Until now, viruses have been difficult to classify, said University of Illinois crop sciences and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, who led the new analysis with graduate student Arshan Nasir. In its latest report, the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses recognized seven orders of viruses, based on their shapes and sizes, genetic structure and means of reproducing.
Patients with advanced gastrointestinal neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) have limited treatment options and there are few oncologists who are specialized in this relatively rare disease. But now results from a multi-center randomized international trial of an innovative treatment show a marked improvement in the length of time patients with mid-gut NETs live without the disease getting worse (progression-free survival, or PFS), researchers reported to the 2015 European Cancer Congress.
Current national guidelines on the diagnosis of miscarriage may still be associated with misdiagnoses, and should be reviewed in light of new evidence, suggests a study published in The BMJ today.
The Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecologists (RCOG) guidelines recommend a miscarriage diagnosis based on an ultrasound scan measurement of the gestational sac diameter (GSD) and the embryo's crown-rump length (CRL).
Guidelines on the cut off values for these measurements were updated in 2011 following concerns that the older recommendations were based on inadequate evidence and leading to misdiagnoses. These changes have been shown to be safe, according to a new study by Professor Tom Bourne at Imperial College London and colleagues.
