Unusually high clustering of last names within Italian academic institutions and disciplines indicates widespread nepotism in the country's schools, according to a new computational analysis.
Culture
New generation antidepressants, known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are associated with an increased risk of several severe adverse outcomes in older people compared with older tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs), finds a study published on bmj.com today.
The authors say the risks and benefits of different antidepressants should be carefully evaluated when prescribing these drugs to older people.
Older people taking new generation antidepressants are at more risk of dying or suffering from a range of serious health conditions including stroke, falls, fractures and epilepsy, a study involving researchers at The University of Nottingham has found.
A Franklin University professor recently developed an evolutionary computation approach that offers researchers the flexibility to search for models that can best explain experimental data derived from many types of applications, including economics.
To test the algorithm underlying that approach, Esmail Bonakdarian, Ph.D., an assistant professor of computing sciences and mathematics at Franklin, leveraged the Glenn IBM 1350 Opteron cluster, the flagship system of the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC).
PITTSBURGH—Ever since the Nobel Prize for nerve growth factor was awarded more than 30 years ago, researchers have been searching for ways to use growth factor clinically.
University of Pittsburgh Professor Yadong Wang has developed a minimally invasive method of delivering growth factor to regrow blood vessels. His research, which could be used to treat heart disease, the most common cause of death in the Western world, is published this week in the Aug. 1 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
High-calorie, high-sodium choices were on the menu when parents purchased lunch for their children at a San Diego fast-food restaurant. Why? Because both children and adults liked the food and the convenience.
Scheduling umpire crews in Major League Baseball (MLB) can be a daunting task. However, Tallys Yunes, assistant professor of management science at the University of Miami School of Business Administration and his collaborators have created a novel solution. The team developed an efficient method to generate high-quality schedules for the MLB.
The study is titled "Scheduling Major League Baseball Umpires and the Traveling Umpire Problem" published online ahead of print by the journal Interfaces, a popular outlet for practitioners in the field of Operations Research.
Researchers at Emory and Georgia Tech have developed a method for predicting which areas of the coronary arteries will develop more atherosclerotic plaque over time, based on intracoronary ultrasound and blood flow measurements.
The method could help doctors identify "vulnerable plaque," unstable plaque that is likely to cause a heart attack or stroke. It involves calculating shear stress, or how hard the blood tugs on the walls of the arteries, based on the geometry of the arteries and how fast the blood is moving.
New research raises troubling concerns about the use of aggressive drug therapies to treat a wide range of diseases such as MRSA, C. difficile, malaria, and even cancer.
"The universally accepted strategy of aggressive medication to kill all targeted disease pathogens has the problematic consequence of giving any drug-resistant disease pathogens that are present the greatest possible evolutionary advantage," says Troy Day, one of the paper's co-authors and Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Biology at Queen's.
Many medical devices, ranging from artificial hip joints to dentures and catheters, become sites for unwelcome guests -- complex communities of microbial pathogens called biofilms that are resistant to the human immune system and antibiotics, thus proving a serious threat to human health.
However, researchers may have a new way of looking at biofilms, thanks to a study conducted by University of Iowa biologist David Soll and his colleagues published in the Aug. 2 issue of the online, open access journal PLoS Biology.
Amsterdam, 1 August 2011 – When Robert Burns Woodward passed away in 1979 he left 699 pages of handwritten notes. Because R.B. Woodward was a Nobel Laureate (Chemistry, 1965) his family had carefully preserved his notes for posterity. A paper published in Elsevier's Tetrahedron summarizes the process of an extensive study uncovering the hidden treasures in these notes.
WASHINGTON – A new report from the National Research Council presents a framework for incorporating sustainability into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's principles and decision making. The framework, which was requested by EPA, is intended to help the agency better assess the social, environmental, and economic impacts of various options as it makes decisions.
FRAX® is a computer-based algorithm developed by the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Metabolic Bone Diseases to help predict the 10-year risk of fragility fracture. Now with 34 specific country models, FRAX is being used increasingly by physicians around the world to help assess their patients' fracture risk in the course of a clinical assessment.
One in six people over 75 are likely to have at least one abnormal liver test and those that have two or more are twice as likely to die from cancer and 17 times more likely to die from liver disease, according to research in the August issue of Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics.
UK researchers studied 13,276 patients who were registered with 53 family doctors and agreed to an in-depth health assessment. Patients were drawn at random from the general population and those who were terminally ill or living in nursing homes were excluded.
GALVESTON, July 25, 2011 – Inpatients cared for by hospitalists have higher Medicare costs in the 30 days after discharge than those whose personal physicians oversee their care. This is partly because hospitalists' patients are more likely to be discharged to a rehabilitation or nursing facility than to their homes and more likely to have subsequent emergency room visits and readmissions. Such "cost shifting" translates to more than $1.1 billion in Medicare expenses annually, contradicting beliefs that hospitalist care reduces overall costs.