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COLUMBIA, MD and WASHINGTON, DC (November 19, 2014) - Today, the National Center for Healthy Housing (NCHH) and Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University released Healthcare Financing of Healthy Homes Services: Findings from a 2014 Survey of State Reimbursement Policies, a report documenting current Medicaid reimbursement practices for environmental health services in the homes of lead-exposed children and people with asthma and highlighting opportunities for increasing access to these benefits.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19, 2014--When the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded this October to three Japanese-born scientists for the invention of blue light emitting diodes (LEDs), the prize committee declared LED lamps would light the 21st century. Now researchers from the Netherlands have found a novel way to ensure the lights of the future not only are energy efficient but also emit a cozy warmth.

Blueberries are super stars among health food advocates, who tout the fruit for not only promoting heart health, better memory and digestion, but also for improving night vision. Scientists have taken a closer look at this latter claim and have found reason to doubt that the popular berry helps most healthy people see better in the dark. Their report appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. --U.S. children's hospitals delivering the highest-quality care for children undergoing heart surgery, also appear to provide care most efficiently at a low cost, according to research led by the University of Michigan and presented Tuesday at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in Chicago.

Congenital heart defects are the most common birth defects, and each year more than 30,000 congenital heart operations are performed across U.S. children's hospitals. Congenital heart defects are also one of the most expensive pediatric conditions to treat.

A Georgia Tech professor is offering an alternative to the celebrated "Turing Test" to determine whether a machine or computer program exhibits human-level intelligence. The Turing Test - originally called the Imitation Game - was proposed by computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950. In practice, some applications of the test require a machine to engage in dialogue and convince a human judge that it is an actual person.

Empagliflozin (trade name Jardiance) has been approved since May 2014 for adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus in whom diet and exercise alone do not provide adequate glycaemic control. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether the drug offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapies in these patient groups.

Following a 5,000 km long ocean survey, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents a new way to measure how the acidification of water is affecting marine ecosystems over an entire oceanic basin.

Flexible electronic sensors based on paper -- an inexpensive material -- have the potential to some day cut the price of a wide range of medical tools, from helpful robots to diagnostic tests. Scientists have now developed a fast, low-cost way of making these sensors by directly printing conductive ink on paper. They published their advance in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Children who receive a heart transplant as soon as a suitable donor is available are predicted to have better quality-adjusted survival -- even if they have antibodies that may attack the new heart -- than children who wait for a donor to which they do not have antibodies according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2014.

When the costs of care while waiting for an urgent transplant are considered, transplantation with the first suitable heart is also cheaper than waiting for a better-matched organ, researchers said.

Electronic cigarettes offer smokers a realistic way to kick their tobacco smoking addiction. In a new study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, scientists at KU Leuven report that e-cigarettes successfully reduced cravings for tobacco cigarettes, with only minimal side effects.

Electronic cigarettes (e-cigs) were developed as a less harmful alternative to tobacco cigarettes. They contain 100 to 1,000 times less toxic substances and emulate the experience of smoking a tobacco cigarette.

Exposure to peanut proteins in household dust may be a trigger of peanut allergy, according to a study published today in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

UCLA biochemists have created the largest-ever protein that self-assembles into a molecular "cage." The research could lead to synthetic vaccines that protect people from the flu, HIV and other diseases.

At a size hundreds of times smaller than a human cell, it also could lead to new methods of delivering pharmaceuticals inside of cells, or to the creation of new nanoscale materials.

A new treatment for Marfan syndrome, a rare genetic disease that can lead to heart problems, works as well as the currently recommended medical therapy, beta blockers, according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Angela Sharkey, M.D., professor of pediatrics at Saint Louis University, and a study author, said researchers found losartan, which had been more effective in an animal model of Marfan syndrome, was equally effective to a high dose of the beta blocker atenolol.

An international team of scientists, coordinated by a researcher from the U. of Granada, has found that seed dormancy (a property that prevents germination under non-favourable conditions) was a feature already present in the first seeds, 360 million years ago.

Seed dormancy is a phenomenon that has intrigued naturalists for decades, since it conditions the dynamics of natural vegetation and agricultural cycles. There are several types of dormancy, and some of them are modulated by environmental conditions in more subtle ways than others.

Professor Dan Davis and his team at the Manchester Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research, working in collaboration with global healthcare company GSK, investigated how different types of immune cells communicate with each other - and how they kill cancerous or infected cells. Their research has been published in Nature Communications.