Culture

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- For most healthy bipeds, the act of walking is seldom given a second thought: One foot follows the other, and the rest of the body falls in line, supported by a system of muscle, tendon, and bones.

Upon closer inspection, however, locomotion is less straightforward. In particular, the ankle — the crucial juncture between the leg and the foot — is an anatomical jumble, and its role in maintaining stability and motion has not been well characterized.

AMHERST, Mass. – Online video is a "killer application" of the Internet, predicted to soon make up 86 percent of consumer traffic on the web, says computer science researcher Ramesh Sitaraman at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. But advertisers who want to capitalize on it face a huge question: How effective are video ads?

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA— Clinical trials are key to finding new cancer treatments, but with patient participation hovering around 5 percent, new strategies are needed to boost enrollment, particularly to study the rare cancers that have so few cases. One such strategy comes from a new abstract being presented October 28 at the 15th World Conference on Lung Cancer from researchers at Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania studying mesothelioma.

UCLA chemists for the first time have employed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) — a technique normally reserved for medical clinicians peering inside the human body — to better measure the temperature of gases inside a catalytic reactor.

The research, a major step toward bridging the gap between laboratory studies and industrial catalysis, could help improve the design and environmental impact of catalytic reactors, including tiny "lab-on-a-chip" devices, which are used in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals and other chemical products.

Johns Hopkins investigators have found that doctors-in-training are unlikely to introduce themselves fully to hospitalized patients or sit down to talk to them eye-to-eye, despite research suggesting that courteous bedside manners improve medical recovery along with patient satisfaction.

A report on the research, published online this month in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, calls for some simple adjustments to intern communications to make the whole experience of a hospital stay better.

Good news for parents: Those pricey piano lessons or random toy parts littering your floors may one day lead to the next scientific breakthrough.

That's according to new Michigan State University research linking childhood participation in arts and crafts activities to patents generated and businesses launched as adults.

In the study, which is published in the most recent edition of the journal Economic Development Quarterly, the researchers defined "childhood" as up to 14 years old.

Complete Care, a collaborative approach to meeting patient needs, is improving outcomes for Kaiser Permanente patients. Results from the program are featured in the November 2013 issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, and described in a journal editorial as, "a dramatic and impressive example of what is possible with a carefully designed and implemented system-level intervention."

Graphene may command the lion's share of attention but it is not the only material generating buzz in the electronics world. Vanadium dioxide is one of the few known materials that acts like an insulator at low temperatures but like a metal at warmer temperatures starting around 67 degrees Celsius. This temperature-driven metal-insulator transition, the origin of which is still intensely debated, in principle can be induced by the application of an external electric field. That could yield faster and much more energy efficient electronic devices.

Receiving an influenza vaccination was associated with a lower risk of major adverse cardiovascular events such as heart failure or hospitalization for heart attack, with the greatest treatment effect seen among patients with recent acute coronary syndrome (ACS; such as heart attack or unstable angina), according to a meta-analysis published in the October 23/30 issue of JAMA.

TORONTO, Oct. 22, 2013—Single women who are homeless visit a hospital Emergency Department an average of more than twice a year, 13 times more often than women in the general population, new research has found.

Single men who are homeless make an average of two visits a year to emergency, nine times more than men in the general population.

TORONTO, Oct. 22, 2013—Although homeless people account for a small proportion of Emergency Department visits, a small group of them are extremely high users and have multiple complex health care needs, new research has found.

TORONTO, ON, October 22, 2013 -- The flu vaccine may not only ward off serious complications from influenza, it may also reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke by more than 50 per cent among those who have had a heart attack, according to new research led by Dr. Jacob Udell, a cardiologist at Women's College Hospital and clinician-scientist at the University of Toronto. What's more, the vaccine's heart protective effects may be even greater among those who receive a more potent vaccine.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Two researchers at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business have teamed up with a researcher at American University to develop a framework to help prevent costly and deadly infections acquired by hospitalized patients. According to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), these transmissions strike one out of every 20 inpatients, drain billions of dollars from the national health care system and cause tens of thousands of deaths annually.

TORONTO, ON, October 22, 2013 — The flu vaccine may not only ward off serious complications from influenza, it may also reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke by more than 50 per cent among those who have had a heart attack, according to new research led by Dr. Jacob Udell, a cardiologist at Women's College Hospital and clinician-scientist at the University of Toronto. What's more, the vaccine's heart protective effects may be even greater among those who receive a more potent vaccine.