Although drug prescriptions are notoriously difficult to read, prescribing errors due to a lack of knowledge of drug properties are a worse problem.
Now, a new information icon system has been developed by researchers in France. The researchers describe their system, a graphical language for medical knowledge visualisation called VCM (Visualisation des Connaissances Médicales), in the open access journal BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.
At the cores of many galaxies, supermassive black holes expel powerful jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. Just how they perform this feat has long been one of the mysteries of astrophysics. The leading theory says the particles are accelerated by tightly-twisted magnetic fields close to the black hole, but confirming that idea required an elusive close-up view of the jet's inner throat.
Research published today in the open access journal BMC Pediatrics suggests that very preterm babies, born between 28 and 31 weeks, could benefit from skin-to-skin cuddling with their mother before and during painful procedures such as a heel lance.
ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Antibodies present in people with good oral health could become the first tool for dental professionals to assess a patient's probable response to periodontal disease treatments, say researchers at the University of Michigan.
The antibody is to a protein called HtpG, the bug that makes it is Porphyromonas gingivalis, an important pathogen in periodontal disease. The antibody also has potential as a vaccine candidate, according to Charles Shelburne, assistant research scientist at the U-M School of Dentistry.
ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Scientists using a bionic boot found that during walking, the ankle does about three times the work for the same amount of energy compared to isolated muscles---in other words, the spring in your step is very real and helps us move efficiently.
While much has been done measuring the efficiency of individual muscles, this is the first known study to measure the energy efficiency of a body part such as the ankle, said Daniel Ferris, associate professor with the University of Michigan Division of Kinesiology and lead researcher on the project.
COLUMBIA, Mo. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but humans may have even less to work with than previously thought. University of Missouri researchers found that the average person can keep just three or four things in their working memory or conscious mind at one time. This finding may lead to better ways to assess and help people with attention-deficit and focus difficulties, improve classroom performance and enhance test scores.
VALHALLA, April 23, 2008—A team of researchers at New York Medical College has discovered why birds, unlike mammals, lack a tissue that is specialized to generate heat. A paper published April 21, 2008 in the online peer-reviewed journal BMC Biology contains the surprising implication that the same lack of heat-generating tissue may have contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — New research by Brown University biologists shows that fruit flies live longer when they dont produce germline stem cells the cells that create eggs and sperm.
The work suggests a provocative general principle at work: Signals from reproductive tissue directly control lifespan and metabolism in the whole organism. The work, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also offers a first glimpse of how this control in the fly might occur at the molecular level.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--An international team of researchers led by MIT has explained how contaminated batches of the blood-thinner heparin were able to slip past traditional safety screens and kill dozens of patients recently in the United States and Germany.
The team, led by Professor Ram Sasisekharan of MIT, identified the chemical structure of the contaminant, known as oversulfated chondroitin sulfate (OSCS). The researchers present their findings and offer new approaches to detecting the contaminant in a report appearing today in the online edition of Nature Biotechnology.
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine are the first to show that the location of protein-destroying machines in nerve cells in the brain may play an important role in how memories are formed a finding with potential implications for treating Alzheimers and other brain diseases. The research is published in the current issue of Learning & Memory.
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