Tech

An innovative interventional radiology treatment has been found to offer chronic migraine sufferers sustained relief of their headaches, according to research being presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology's Annual Scientific Meeting. Clinicians at Albany Medical Center and the State University New York Empire State College in Saratoga Springs used a treatment called image-guided, intranasal sphenopalatine ganglion (SPG) blocks to give patients enough ongoing relief that they required less medication to relieve migraine pain.

Social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter play an increasingly central role in our lives. Centrality is also an important concept in the theory of social networks. Centrality of an individual, called a "node" in network theory, measures its relative importance within a network.

A newly characterized group of pharmacological compounds block both the inflammation and nerve cell damage seen in mouse models of multiple sclerosis, according to a study conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

In the 1990s, neuroscientists identified a class of drugs that showed promise in the area of stroke. NMDA receptor antagonists could limit damage to the brain in animal models of stroke. But one problem complicated testing the drugs in a clinical setting: the side effects included disorientation and hallucinations.

Now researchers have found a potential path around this obstacle. The results were published in Neuron.

If you live in a city, you know that a fair amount of your movement around town is social in nature. But how much, exactly? A new study co-authored by MIT researchers uses a new method to infer that around one-fifth of urban movement is strictly social, a finding that holds up consistently in multiple cities.

It is estimated that 8.1 million of the 29.1 million Americans living with diabetes are undiagnosed and many who have diabetes have poor glycemic control. Given that each year many Americans visit a dental provider but not a primary care provider, dental visits may be an opportune site for diabetes screening and monitoring glucose control for many at-risk patients.

The characteristic blue glow from a nuclear reactor is present in radiation therapy, too. Investigators from Dartmouth's Norris Cotton Cancer Center, led by Brian W. Pogue, PhD, and PhD candidates Adam K. Glaser and Rongxiao Zhang, published in Physics in Medicine and Biology how the complex parts of the blue light known as the Cherenkov Effect can be measured and used in dosimetry to make therapies safer and more effective.

Oil and gas operations in the United States produce about 21 billion barrels of wastewater per year. The saltiness of the water and the organic contaminants it contains have traditionally made treatment difficult and expensive.

The U.S. and other countries are enacting rules to clamp down on the sales of fake pharmaceuticals, which pose a public health threat. But figuring out a system to track and authenticate legitimate drugs still faces significant obstacles, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society.

Researchers from Chongqing University in China have developed a high sensitive fluorescence-based sensor device that can rapidly identify cancer related volatile organic compounds -- biomarkers found exclusively in the exhaled breath of some people with lung cancer.

Scientists have developed a new HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccine which protects against nine types of the virus - seven of which cause most cases of cervical cancer. The new vaccine offers significantly greater protection than the current vaccine, which protects against only two cancer causing types of HPV.

It's hard to hide from a bat: The camouflage and mimicry techniques that animals use to avoid becoming a meal aren't much use against a predator using echolocation. But a new study shows that moths can outsmart sonar with a flick of their long tails.

The study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows luna moths spin their trailing hindtails as they fly, confusing the sonar cries bats use to detect prey and other objects.

Graphene, a single-atom-thick lattice of carbon atoms, is often touted as a replacement for silicon in electronic devices due to its extremely high conductivity and unbeatable thinness. But graphene is not the only two-dimensional material that could play such a role.

University of Pennsylvania researchers have made an advance in manufacturing one such material, molybdenum disulphide. By growing flakes of the material around "seeds" of molybdenum oxide, they have made it easier to control the size, thickness and location of the material.

In the first clinical trial directly comparing three drugs most commonly used to treat diabetic macular edema, researchers found all were effective in improving vision and preventing vision loss. However, one drug, aflibercept, provided greater improvement for people with more severe vision loss when treatment was initiated. The trial was conducted by the National Eye Institute Diabetic Retinopathy Clinical Research Network (DRCR.net) including researchers from Joslin Diabetes Center. The results appeared in the February online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Cancer vaccines are designed to turn the body's own immune system specifically against tumor cells. Particularly promising are vaccines that are directed against so-called neoantigens: These are proteins that have undergone a genetic mutation in tumor cells and, therefore, differ from their counterparts in healthy cells. The tiny alteration - sometimes only a single protein building block has been changed - gives the protein on the tumor cell surface novel immunological characteristics that can be recognized as "foreign" by the immune system's T cells.