Culture

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A new research brief from the US2010 Project shows that the average black or Hispanic household earning over $75,000 lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average white resident earningunder $40,000.