Tech

The benefits of blueberry consumption have been demonstrated in several nutrition studies, more specifically the cardio-protective benefits derived from their high polyphenol content. Blueberries have shown potential to have a positive effect on everything from aging to metabolic syndrome. Recently, a researcher from Texas Woman's University (TWU) in Denton, TX, examined whether blueberries could play a role in reducing one of the world's greatest health challenges: obesity.

SAN DIEGO, April 8, 2011 -- A reformed Medicaid program must put coordinated primary care at the forefront of its efforts, the American College of Physicians (ACP) said in a new position paper released today at Internal Medicine 2011, ACP's annual scientific meeting. Medicaid and Health Care Reform highlights how primary care physicians will assume a major role in providing care to Medicaid beneficiaries.

The hand moves the computer mouse, but the cursor doesn't comply. The cursor doesn't go where told.

The hand tries again. The cursor shoots past the intended target.

The hand tries a third time – and the cursor loops farther from the target than where it started. And the user is frustrated.

So it often goes for computer users whose motor disabilities prevent them from easily using a mouse.

STANFORD, Calif. — Doctors at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System are testing a new kind of clinical trial that's not only less costly but guides doctors to switch to the best treatment even before the trial is completed. The new approach — called a point-of-care clinical trial — was developed by Stanford University biostatistician Philip Lavori, PhD, and a Boston-based team as an alternative to expensive, lengthy, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials to compare drugs and procedures that are already in regular use.

College Park, Md.—Nearly 5 million American children participate in the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, but until now no one has looked at the gender messages young people get when they start collecting those coveted badges.

PHILADELPHIA — The advancements of our electronic age rests on our ability to control how electric charge moves, from point A to point B, through circuitry. Doing so requires particular precision, for applications ranging from computers, image sensors and solar cells, and that task falls to semiconductors.

Now, a research team at the University of Pennsylvania's schools of Engineering and Applied Science and Arts and Sciences has shown how to control the characteristics of semiconductor nanowires made of a promising material: lead selenide.

ARLINGTON, Va. - Marking a milestone for the Navy, the Office of Naval Research and its industry partner on April 6 successfully tested a solid-state, high-energy laser (HEL) from a surface ship, which disabled a small target vessel.

The Navy and Northrop Grumman completed at-sea testing of the Maritime Laser Demonstrator (MLD), which validated the potential to provide advanced self-defense for surface ships and personnel by keeping small boat threats at a safe distance.

Mohammad Golabi, a soil science professor at the University of Guam, has put his years of research on vetiver grass to practical use in shielding the reefs in Pago Bay from the harmful effects of construction-induced run-off.

College Park, Md. (April 8, 2011) -- How to put more bang in your biofuels? Nanoparticles! A new study in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy shows that the addition of alumina nanoparticles can improve the performance and combustion of biodiesel, while producing fewer emissions.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's proposal to change Medicare for those under age 55 is nothing short of a complete reconceptualization of the health insurance program, says a University of Illinois elder law expert.

Richard L. Kaplan, a professor of law and expert on retirement issues, says the Ryan proposal would scrap Medicare's current defined-benefit program in favor of a defined-contribution arrangement in which the government would provide seniors with a stipulated amount of money to purchase health insurance from private insurers.

Doren in the Austrian Bregenzerwald, February 2007: a slope 650 meters long breaks, resulting in a massive slide into the valley below. The nearest residential buildings are very close to the 70-meter-high rim. This barely avoided catastrophe is not the only incident. Geologists have been monitoring increasingly unstable masses of earth over the past few years in the Alps and other Alpine regions, which have slipped down slopes and on slid unchecked down valleys to more stable substrates.

With a push to make hospitals and doctors more accountable for health care quality, more attention must be paid to the accuracy and reliability of measures used to evaluate caregivers, says a prominent Johns Hopkins patient safety expert.

SEATTLE—A video-based decision aid helped severely obese people to make more informed choices about bariatric surgery and reach more certainty about them, according to a trial involving 152 Group Health patients, e-published in Obesity in advance of print. This randomized controlled trial is the first to test shared decision making for weight-loss surgery.

Researchers in countries such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Poland study sand drift, but most of them are focusing on sand dunes along the coastline, not on the plains further inland.

"Sand dunes are dynamic. For all we know, they may have been formed last year. But sand plaines are much older and in periods more stable. Thin organic layers present in sands are interesting, when trying to understand sand drift in pre-historic times," says botanist Lisbeth Prøsch-Danielsen at the University of Stavanger's Museum of Archaeology.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — As recently as the 1990s, the Veterans Affairs health care system had a subpar reputation for quality, but two new studies of standard quality metrics, both led by Amal Trivedi, assistant professor of community health at Brown University and a physician at the Providence VA Medical Center, show that the system that cares for more than 5 million patients has improved markedly in the last decade.