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Former patients believe that intensive care unit (ICU) follow-up services are important for their physical, emotional and psychological recovery. Research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Critical Care found that patients valued continuity of care after hospital discharge, information and reassurance from an expert familiar with their experience, and the opportunity to give feedback to ICU staff.

By doing a set of vigorous visual exercises on a computer every day for several months, patients who had gone partially blind as a result of suffering a stroke were able to regain some vision, according to scientists who published their results in the April 1 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Such rigorous visual retraining is not common for people who suffer blindness after a stroke. That's in contrast to other consequences of stroke, such as speech or movement difficulties, where rehabilitation is common and successful.

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(New York, NY) – Calling professional medical associations' (PMAs) dependence on funding from pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers a threat to quality patient care and professional integrity, a group of influential medical leaders today urged these organizations to reduce and eventually eliminate industry contributions.

Science fiction fans still have another two months of waiting for the new Star Trek movie, but fans of actual science can feast their eyes now on the first movie ever of carbon atoms moving along the edge of a graphene crystal. Given that graphene – single-layered sheets of carbon atoms arranged like chicken wire – may hold the key to the future of the electronics industry, the audience for this new science movie might also reach blockbuster proportions.

Here's another reason why dieters should avoid all-you-can-eat buffets: When faced with a large variety of items, consumers tend to underestimate how much of each item is present, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Authors Joseph P. Redden (University of Minnesota) and Stephen J. Hoch (University of Pennsylvania) investigated consumers' perceptions of quantity in a set of experiments that may help us understand how quantity perceptions influence portion sizes.

Why do some consumers prefer local products and others gravitate toward global brands? A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research examines why some people might choose a local brand instead of a recognizable global brand like Coke or Pepsi.

Here's another reason to hate leftovers. A research study appearing in the April 2009 issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology (http://www.jleukbio.org) sheds light on one cause of arthritis: bacteria. In the study, scientists from the United States and The Netherlands show that a specific gene called NOD2 triggers arthritis or makes it worse when leftover remnants of bacteria cell walls, called muramyl dipeptide or MDP, are present.

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