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.
The American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) has released new guidelines on the management of asymptomatic neoplastic pancreatic cysts found incidentally during computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
The author of a commentary being published in Annals of Internal Medicine explains how the AGA's bold new recommendations will affect the way physicians consider diagnostic testing. The new guidelines back away from previous recommendations that were more aggressive.
Rather than promote invasive work-up, surveillance, or surgery for typical patients, the AGA guidelines restrict aggressive follow up to patients with more high-risk features.
An analysis conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) found that the risks of drinking raw (unpasteurized) cow's milk are significant. Consumers are nearly 100 times more likely to get foodborne illness from drinking raw milk than they are from drinking pasteurized milk. In fact, the researchers determined that raw milk was associated with over half of all milk-related foodborne illness, even though only an estimated 3.5% of the U.S. population consumes raw milk.
With each beat of a healthy heart, an electrical signal moves from the upper to the lower chambers of the heart. As this signal moves, it results in the heart contracting and pumping blood. Congenital heart block is a defect of the heart's electrical system that originates in the developing fetus, greatly slowing the rate of the heart and impacting its ability to pump blood.Although the condition can be diagnosed in utero, all attempts to treat the condition with a standard pacemaker have failed. Each year, approximately 500 pregnancies in the U. S. are affected by such fetal heart block - those babies may soon have the perfect solution.
Music perception is well preserved in human evolution but the specific biological determinants of music practice are largely unknown. A study of professional musicians found enhanced activity of genes involved in dopaminergic neurotransmission, motor behavior, learning and memory when they practiced. Several of those up-regulated genes are also known to be responsible for song production in songbirds and that suggests a potential evolutionary conservation in sound perception and production across species, according to the authors.
If you see a chicken, you know that's a chicken. If you see a cartoon of a chicken, you know that's a chicken.But can you draw a chicken from memory?Most people cannot draw anything that looks anything like a chicken, but is it because branding is not quality, our memories are poor, or we lose something between brains and fingers? What about something simpler and in the daily lives of Apple users more than chickens like the Apple logo? Can they draw it from memory? Probably not, as it turns out.
One of the dominant hypotheses of evolution is that our genus, Homo, evolved from small-bodied early humans to become the taller, heavier and longer legged Homo erectus that was able to migrate beyond Africa and colonize Eurasia.
Not so, according to a new anthropology paper.
You're out shopping for basic goods you have bought many times. Is choosing these products a complicated decision or a simple one?
It could be complex: Factors like price, quality, and brand loyalty may run through your mind. Indeed, some scholars have developed complicated models of consumer decision-making, in which people accumulate substantial product knowledge, then weigh that knowledge against the opportunity to explore less-known products.
The study of fluids in motion – now known as hydrodynamics – goes back to the Egyptians so it has been involved in a lot of experiments but now it has provided something new; experimental evidence that stars may generate...sound.
Banning sodas from school vending machines, building walking paths and playgrounds, adding supermarkets to food deserts and requiring nutritional labels on restaurant menus: Such changes to the environments where people live and work are among the growing number of solutions that have been proposed and attempted in efforts to stem the rising obesity epidemic with viable, population-based solutions. But which of these changes actually make an impact?
An extensive study of global habitat fragmentation - the division of habitats into smaller and more isolated patches - points to major trouble for a number of the world's ecosystems and the plants and animals living in them.
The study shows that 70 percent of existing forest lands are within a half-mile of the forest edge, where encroaching urban, suburban or agricultural influences can cause any number of harmful effects - like the losses of plants and animals.
The study also tracks seven major experiments on five continents that examine habitat fragmentation and finds that fragmented habitats reduce the diversity of plants and animals by 13 to 75 percent, with the largest negative effects found in the smallest and most isolated fragments of habitat.
Clear and realistic expectations are key to successfully hiring heads of departments, say Professor Pierre-Alain Clavien, University of Zurich, and Joseph Deiss, former President of the Swiss Confederation, in a commentary in Nature magazine.
Selecting a chair for a position in clinical academic medicine is often problematic, with the diverse demands placed on the position proving a constant source of debate. Today's heads of departments are not only expected to be outstanding physicians, researchers, and teachers, but also adroit and cost-conscious managers. Finding people with such an extraordinary skill set is a formidable task.
A controversial decision in 2011 to blow up Mississippi River levees reduced the risk of flooding in a city upstream, lowering the height of the rain-swollen river just before it reached its peak, according to a newly published computer modeling analysis led by UC Irvine scientists.
The work focused on a Missouri agricultural area called the New Madrid Floodway that was inundated when the levees were detonated. The researchers found that the region would have flooded anyway if the river had been allowed to overtop the levee banks. And separate modeling showed that the resulting damage to crops and buildings would have been similar either way, though the detonations did shift the damage zone toward Missouri and away from Illinois and Kentucky.
