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EurekAlert! - Breaking News
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The premier online source for science news since 1996. A service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Clinical trials can be improved by managing the learning curve
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center looked for a learning curve phenomenon in the data record of a large, multi-site clinical trial. Their findings point to ways to improve the quality of future trials through better training and simulation exercises.
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30 million women to benefit from health reform law
Thirty million women will benefit from the new health reform law over the next decade, either through new or strengthened insurance coverage, according to a new report from The Commonwealth Fund. The law will stabilize and reverse the growing exposure to health costs that women now experience by subsidizing health insurance for up to 15 million currently uninsured women, and strengthening existing coverage for 14.5 million women who are considered underinsured.
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Transforaminal steroid injection for lumbar radicular pain proves superior to placebo
A recent study from Australian researchers determined that transforaminal injection of steroids was a viable alternative to surgery for lumbar radicular pain due to disc herniation. Full details of the study appear in the August issue of Pain Medicine, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, the Faculty of Pain Medicine of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists, and the International Spine Intervention Society.
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New study: Tools that assess bias in standardized tests are flawed
Overturning more than 40 years of accepted practice, new research proves that the tools used to check tests of "general mental ability" for bias are themselves flawed. This key finding challenges reliance on such exams to make objective decisions for employment or academic admissions even in the face of well-documented gaps between mean scores of white and minority populations.
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Rocks on Mars may provide link to evidence of living organisms roughly 4 billion years ago
A new article in press of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters unveils groundbreaking research on the hydrothermal formation of clay-carbonate rocks in the Nili Fossae region of Mars. The findings may provide a link to evidence of living organisms on Mars, roughly 4 billion years ago in the Noachian period.
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Western diet link to ADHD
A new study from Perth's Telethon Institute for Child Health Research shows an association between ADHD and a "Western-style" diet in adolescents. The research findings have just been published online in the international Journal of Attention Disorders. Leader of Nutrition studies at the Institute, Associate Professor Wendy Oddy, said the study examined the dietary patterns of 1800 adolescents from the long-term Raine Study and classified diets into 'Healthy' or 'Western' patterns.
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A new ground zero for prostate cancer
A type of prostate cell that has been largely ignored by cancer researchers can trigger malignant prostate cancer. The studies provide researchers with a new tool for exploring the genetic changes that lead to prostate cancer. The advance may help in developing new treatments for the disease, which causes some 32,000 deaths in the United States annually.
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Snake venom studies yield insights for development of therapies for heart disease and cancer
Researchers seeking to learn more about stroke by studying how the body responds to toxins in snake venom are this week releasing new findings that they hope will aid in the development of therapies for heart disease and, surprisingly, cancer.
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Signs of reversal of Arctic cooling in some areas
Parts of the Arctic have cooled clearly over the past century, but temperatures have been rising steeply since 1990 also there. This is the finding of a summer temperature reconstruction for the past 400 years produced by tree rings from regions beyond the Arctic Circle. German and Russian researchers analysed tree growth using ring width of pine from Russia's Kola Peninsula and compared their findings with similar studies from other parts of the Arctic.
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Unexpected viral 'fossils' found in vertebrate genomes
Over millions of years, retroviruses, which insert their genetic material into the host genome as part of their replication, have left behind bits of their genetic material in vertebrate genomes. In a recent study, published July 29 in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, a team of researchers have now found that human and other vertebrate genomes also contain many ancient sequences from Ebola/Marburgviruses and Bornaviruses -- two deadly virus families.
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