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.
Using an inexpensive drug for every hip or knee replacement since 2013 has helped St. Michael's Hospital reduce its number of red blood cell transfusions performed during these surgeries by more than 40 per cent without negatively affecting patients, according to new research.
The drug tranexamic acid, known as TXA, prevents excessive blood loss during surgeries.
TXA had been shown to be effective in orthopedic, trauma and cardiac patients but less than half of eligible patients at St. Michael's received this drug because of a previous province-wide shortage. The drug was given only to patients at high risk of requiring a blood transfusion.
Examination of fossil fragments from Panama has led Smithsonian scientists and colleagues to the discovery of a new genus and species of river dolphin that has been long extinct. The team named it Isthminia panamensis. The specimen not only revealed a new species to science, but also shed new light onto the evolution of today's freshwater river dolphin species.
Despite billions of dollars in outreach programs designed to lure women into computer programming, and companies mandating that more women be hired, most females would rather go into something involving people.
Yet a new survey of 270 high school students concludes that three times as many girls would interested in enrolling in a computer science class if the classroom was redesigned to be less "geeky" and more inviting.
So we can knock Barbie dolls and pink clothes, but they are appealing to the market that is rather than the market some academics would like it to be. The notion that women and men are the same has become passe.
Diets rich in fish oil versus diets rich in lard produce very different bacteria in the guts of mice, reports a study from Sahlgrenska Academy published in Cell Metabolism.
The researchers transferred these microbes into other mice to see how they affected health. The results suggest that gut bacteria share some of the responsibility for the beneficial effects of fish oil and the harmful effects of lard.
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory smashes large nuclei together at close to the speed of light to recreate the primordial soup of fundamental particles that existed in the very early universe. Experiments at RHIC have shown that this primordial soup, known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP), flows like a nearly friction free "perfect" liquid.
New RHIC data just accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters now confirm earlier suspicions that collisions of much smaller particles can also create droplets of this free-flowing primordial soup, albeit on a much smaller scale, when they collide with the large nuclei.
A recent study found that the herbicide atrazine, common for weed control in corn and sorghum crops in large-scale farming operations, does not have any measurable impact on aquatic plant life over the long term.Atrazine has been used for decades and some studies have contended that it might have an impact in laboratory experiments. It has a “level of concern” as identified by United States Environmental Protection Agency, The study authors say this research is the first to address atrazine levels as they would “naturally occur in agricultural areas during rainfall runoff events.”
Both daily and less frequent use of marijuana among college students has risen sharply, to the highest prevalence since the Monitoring The Future study began.
In a silver lining aspect, cigarette smoking continues to decline - marijuana use surpassed daily cigarette smoking in 2014. Smoking tobacco using a hookah (a type of water pipe) in the prior 12 months rose substantially among college students, from 26 percent in 2013 to 33 percent in 2014.
Scientists have pinpointed a population of neurons in the brain that influences whether one drink leads to two, which could ultimately lead to a cure for alcoholism and other addictions.
A new study finds that alcohol consumption alters the structure and function of neurons in the dorsomedial striatum, a part of the brain known to be important in goal-driven behaviors. The findings could be an important step toward creation of a drug to combat alcoholism.
"Alcoholism is a very common disease," said Jun Wang, M.D., Ph.D., the lead author on the paper and an assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Experimental Therapeutics at the Texas A&M College of Medicine, "but the mechanism is not understood very well."
In the attempt to choose a mate, it's no surprise that females will select the more "attractive" of two males, but now a new study reveals that female túngara frogs are susceptible to the "decoy" effect, where the introduction of a third, inferior mate results in the female choosing the less attractive of the first two options.
The results of this study counter the rational choice models that are currently used in sexual selection theory, suggesting they may prove inadequate to explain decisions in socially complex and dynamic mating arenas.
To detect the occurrence of the decoy effect in frogs' mating choices, Amanda Lea and Mike Ryan conducted experiments using 80 female túngaras, which are known to be attracted to male calls of low frequency and long duration.
Hospira has announced that Inflectra, (infliximab), the first monoclonal antibody (mAb) biosimilar therapy, has been registered in Australia. This registration paves the way for the Federal Government to reduce the cost of some of the most expensive medicines on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). A biosimilar is a biologic medicine that has been developed to treat the same diseases as the originator product and the marketing hope is that it will deliver a 20-30 percent reduction in the price paid for the therapy.
Young people who identify with the goth subculture might be at increased risk of depression and self-harm, according to new research published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal.
The findings show that teenagers who identified very strongly with being a goth at age 15 were three times more likely to be clinically depressed and were five times more likely to self-harm at age 18 than young people who did not identify with the goth subculture.
"Our study does not show that being a goth causes depression or self-harm, but rather that some young goths are more vulnerable to developing these conditions," says lead author Dr Lucy Bowes from the University of Oxford in the UK.
Most people know smoking is risky, by now it is something of an IQ test if you take up that habit. There is no amount of awareness that will stop all people from doing all things, young people like to rebel and if they get hooked on nicotine, it can be difficult to pull away after they come to their senses.
But both harm reduction and smoking cessation can help once people decide to quit: There are other tobacco products, like snus or chewing tobacco, and then there are nicotine replacements, like gums, patches and e-cigarettes.
Yet they are all made by corporations and each corporation believes it will benefit by confusion, so a large number of people aren’t aware of the differences. Unfortunately, overly broad US Food and Drug Administration labels don't help.
