Tech

In this week's PLoS Medicine, Liza Dawson (National Institutes of Health) and colleagues discuss the scientific and ethical issues associated with choosing clinical trial designs when there is no consensus on what constitutes usual care. For example, in 2002 a clinical trial designed to evaluate the best way of ventilating patients with a severe lung condition called acute respiratory distress syndrome sparked a major controversy.

Richard Feinman, PhD, professor of biochemistry and of family medicine at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, will speak at the annual conference of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) on October 2, 2009. EASD is holding its annual conference September 28 – October 2 in Vienna, Austria.

Dr. Feinman will be one of four speakers covering the topic, Controversies in Dietary Strategies in the Treatment of Diabetes.

Abnormal results on outpatient imaging tests sometimes may not receive timely follow-up even when clinicians receive and read results in an advanced, integrated electronic medical record system, according to a report in the September 28 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

BATON ROUGE – Complex interactions between the ocean and overlying atmosphere cause hurricanes to form, and also have a tremendous amount of influence on the path, intensity and duration of a hurricane or tropical weather event. As researchers develop new ways to better understand and predict the nature of individual storms, a largely unstudied phenomenon has caught the attention of scientists at LSU's Earth Scan Laboratory, or ESL.

MINNEAPOLIS—September 28, 2009—The latest research from Family Relations shows that parents in low-income environments are more prone to depression when there is a lack of social support. This is especially prevalent in rural regions, where mental health and social resources can be deficient.

Plaster made from lime is environment-friendly, repairable and sustainable. Despite this, lime plaster on historic buildings has been replaced in modern times by plaster containing Portland cement – which has caused severe damage to historic buildings. Experts, researchers, craftsmen, manufacturers and authorities from throughout the Nordic region are now assembling for the 10:th Jubilee Conference on lime and lime mortar, with the aim of promoting historic buildings, as well as new build, access to traditional building materials.

MADISON, WI, SEPTEMBER 28, 2009 -- Emphasizing cross-disciplinary concepts in teaching soil science courses, such as mass-volume relationships, can help undergraduates learn real-world, problem-solving skills that are crucial to their success in soil science careers.

Cleveland--Dave Wilson was dissatisfied with blurry, low-sensitivity optical images of diseased tissues. So, four years ago he set out to create a better imager.

Now, Wilson, a professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University, can identify a single cancer cell in preclinical imaging studies. And he can pinpoint exactly where the cell is located in a three-dimensional image.

A study conducted in Vietnam has added further weight to the view that parasitic gut worms, such as hookworm, could help in the prevention and treatment of asthma and other allergies.

Led by Dr Carsten Flohr, a Clinical Scientist from The University of Nottingham, and Dr Luc Nguyen Tuyen from the Khanh Hoa Provincial Health Service in central Vietnam, the study is the largest double-blind placebo controlled clinical trial to date looking at the potential links between hookworm and other gut worm infections and allergic conditions such as asthma and eczema.

TORONTO, ON – UofT researchers have used nanomaterials to develop a microchip sensitive enough to quickly determine the type and severity of a patient's cancer so that the disease can be detected earlier for more effective treatment.

Their groundbreaking work, reported Sept. 27 in Nature Nanotechnology heralds an era when sophisticated molecular diagnostics will become commonplace.

Their discovery, detailed this week in the advance online issue of the journal Nature Photonics, follows the team's demonstration last summer of an integrated circuit—an assembly of transistors that is the building block for all electronic devices—capable of working at 1.5 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. That temperature, equivalent to minus 457 degrees Fahrenheit, is not only less than the average temperature of deep space, but achievable only in special research laboratories.

In the never-ending battle to protect computer networks from intruders, security experts are deploying a new defense modeled after one of nature's hardiest creatures — the ant.

Since its inception, the EUWP program has produced advances in desalinization capability. The first generation EUWP technology demonstrator was designed as a deployable high water production unit more easily transported by the military and used for a variety of missions.

When adolescents graduate to young adulthood, their preventive care tends to fall by the wayside. A recent study has found that young adults are much less likely to use ambulatory or preventive care, even though their mortality rate is more than twice that of adolescents.

Diabetes prevalence is highest in the Southern and Appalachian states and lowest in the Midwest and the Northeast of America. Researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access journal Population Health Metrics have used two public data sources to investigate the prevalence of diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes mellitus at the State level.