Body

Giving beta-blocker medication to patients with heart disease undergoing noncardiac surgery appears to be associated with a lower risk of death and major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) 30 days after surgery in patients with heart failure (HF) or a recent myocardial infarction (MI, heart attack), according to a study published by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication.

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training appears to be lower in more rural counties, those with higher proportions of black and Hispanic residents and lower household incomes, and in the South, Midwest and West, according to a study by Monique L. Anderson, M.D., of the Duke Clinical Research Institute, Durham, N.C. and colleagues.

Drinking more milk as a teenager apparently does not lower the risk of hip fracture as an older adult and instead appears to increase that risk for men, according to a study published by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication.

While drinking milk during adolescence is recommended to achieve peak bone mass, milk's role in hip fractures later in life has not been established. Drinking more milk is associated with attaining greater height, which is a risk factor for hip fracture, according to the study background.

The odds of preterm delivery appear to increase for pregnant women exposed to phthalates, chemicals people are exposed to through contaminated food and water and in a variety of products including lotions, perfumes and deodorants, according to a study published by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication.

ITHACA, N.Y. – A famous math problem that has vexed mathematicians for decades has met an elegant solution by Cornell University researchers. Graduate student Yash Lodha, working with Justin Moore, professor of mathematics, has described a geometric solution for the von Neumann-Day problem, first described by mathematician John von Neumann in 1929.

Young adults who survived childhood cancer are more likely than their peers to be frail, according to a St. Jude Children's Research Hospital study, which reported the condition is more common among female survivors than women decades older. The research appears in the November 18 online edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Why do the faces of some primates contain so many different colors — black, blue, red, orange and white — that are mixed in all kinds of combinations and often striking patterns while other primate faces are quite plain?

UCLA biologists reported last year on the evolution of 129 primate faces in species from Central and South America. This research team now reports on the faces of 139 Old World African and Asian primate species that have been diversifying over some 25 million years.

AMHERST, Mass. – For 40 years, scientists thought they understood how certain bacteria work together to anaerobically digest biomass to produce methane gas, important in bioenergy and the major source of greenhouse gas. But now microbiologists in Derek Lovley's lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst show for the first time that one of the most abundant methane-producing microorganisms on earth makes direct electrical connections with another species to produce the gas in a completely unexpected way.

PITTSBURGH—With the temperature outside falling, the plight of the homeless during the winter months is coming into sharper focus. New research by a University of Pittsburgh professor—showing that competition can spur the homeless to save more—offers a possible insight into helping the homeless improve their future prospects.

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 18, 2013 – University of Utah biologists found that when mother mice compete socially for mates in a promiscuous environment, their sons play hard and die young: They attract more females by making more urinary pheromones, but smelling sexier shortens their lives.

"If your sons are particularly sexy, and mate more than they would otherwise, it's helping get your genes more efficiently into the next generation," says biology professor Wayne Potts, senior author of the new study.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have found an innovative way to study glucose regulation in the body: by transferring the vital insulin-producing cells from the pancreas to the eye, the latter can serve as a kind of window through which health reports can be obtained from the former. The results, which are expected to have a significant impact on diabetes research, are published in scientific journal PNAS.

Bioengineers at the University of California, San Diego have used the genomic sequences of 55 E. coli strains to reconstruct the metabolic repertoire for each strain. Surprisingly, these reconstructions do an excellent job of predicting the kind of environment where each strain will thrive, the researchers found.

Almost 650 years of annual change in sea-ice cover can been seen in the calcite crust growth layers of seafloor algae, says a new study from the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM).

"This is the first time coralline algae have been used to track changes in Arctic sea ice," says Jochen Halfar, an associate professor in UTM's Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences. "We found the algal record shows a dramatic decrease in ice cover over the last 150 years."

(SALT LAKE CITY)—Drugs known as PDE3 inhibitors save many lives by helping failing hearts do a better job of pumping blood. But those same medications come with a sometimes deadly cost when taken for long periods: an increased risk for sudden cardiac death.

The drugs work by inhibiting PDE3A, an enzyme that regulates how the heart pumps blood. When PDE3A is inhibited, the heart contracts more forcefully, pumping more blood.

Adelaide researchers have found that a specific gene plays an important role in suppressing lymphoma, a type of blood cell cancer.

The caspase-2 gene is related to a family of proteins that are essential for the self-destruction of cells in the body, a process known as apoptosis.