Washington -- The Senate today gave overwhelming, bipartisanapproval to legislation to avert cuts in Medicare physician paymentupdates--the best outcome possible given the difficult circumstancesfacing us, Jeffrey P. Harris, MD, FACP, president of the AmericanCollege of Physicians (ACP) said today. We implore President Bushto immediately sign this bill into law. The votes in both the Senateand House in favor of H.R. 6331 are more than enough to override apresidential veto, but we hope that it doesnt come to that.
Culture
However much the likes of Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay might want to shake up our diets, culinary evolution dictates that our cultural cuisines remain little changed as generations move on, shows new research, published today, Thursday, 10 July, 2008, in the Institute of Physics (IOP)'s New Journal of Physics (NJP).
Naturopaths are strongly in favour of regulation of their industry, a University of Queensland researcher has found.
Naturopaths believed that regulation would lift the quality of practitioners, improve patient safety, promote research and allow for greater collaboration between complementary and conventional medicine, researcher Jon Wardle, a PhD student with the School of Population Health, said.
The economic and psychological term known as "sunk-cost fallacy" is a bias that leads someone to make a decision based solely on a previous financial investment. For example, a baseball fan might attend every game of the season only because he already purchased the tickets. But not everyone would force themselves to brave the pouring rain for a single game in one season simply because they previously paid for the seats.
As museums continue to digitize their art collections, it becomes increasingly easier for paintings to be forged. Two Penn State researchers are part of an international team working on a digital system to help detect original works from counterfeit ones.
James Z. Wang, associate professor of information sciences and technology, Jia Li, associate professor of statistics, and their colleagues published their work in the July issue of IEEE Signal Processing.
The Wilkins Ice Shelf is experiencing further disintegration that is threatening the collapse of the ice bridge connecting the shelf to Charcot Island. Since the connection to the island in the image centre helps to stabilise the ice shelf, it is likely the break-up of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk.
In the first in-depth study of its kind ever done in the Southeastern United States, researchers at the University of Georgia and Emory University have discovered a link between thunderstorms and asthma attacks in the metro Atlanta area that could have a "significant public health impact."
While a relationship between thunderstorms and increased hospital visits for asthma attacks has been known and studied worldwide for years, this is the first time a team of climatologists and epidemiologists has ever conducted a detailed study of the phenomenon in the American South.
RICHLAND, Wash. -- Many coaches inspire better performance by pressuring their teams. Now, proteomics researchers are using pressure to improve the performance of their analyses. In a simple solution to a time-consuming problem, the researchers have found that adding pressure early in their protocol squeezes four hours of waiting into a minute.
SALT LAKE CITY Certain songbirds can contract their vocal muscles 100 times faster than humans can blink an eye placing the birds with a handful of animals that have evolved superfast muscles, University of Utah researchers found.
"We discovered that the European starling (found throughout Eurasia and North-America) and the zebrafinch (found in Australia and Indonesia) control their songs with the fastest-contracting muscle type yet described," says Coen Elemans, who conducted the study as a postdoctoral researcher in biology at the University of Utah.
Elizaberta López Pérez, a Bachelor of Fine Arts and doctor in Painting at the University of Granada, has carried out one of the first studies in a Spanish university on the use of art therapy for the treatment of acute mental sick persons. Her work, based on psychoanalysis principles, starts from a basic premise: A work of art is a sign formed as a vital trace and its essential material is the humanity of the human being who leaves his memory in the world.
Depression is the most important single factor predisposing to suicide, and more than half of all subjects completing suicide are known to have suffered from depression. Unfortunately, depression is still often untreated or undertreated, even after a suicide attempt. Antidepressive drugs represent the cornerstone of treatment of depressive patients.
In a collaborative project scientists from the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin (MPI MolGen), Germany and Genomatix with a business in Munich, Germany and Ann Arbor, MI, USA, applied next generation sequencing and analysis methods to generate an unprecedented view at the human transcriptome.
CHICAGO—A newly identified fossil and the reinterpretation of previously known fossils, all from Europe and about 50 million years old, fill in a "missing link" in the evolution of flatfishes and explain one of nature's most extraordinary phenomena.
Hidden away in museums for more that 100 years, some recently rediscovered flatfish fossils have filled a puzzling gap in the story of evolution and answered a question that initially stumped even Charles Darwin.
All adult flatfishes--including the gastronomically familiar flounder, plaice, sole, turbot, and halibut--have asymmetrical skulls, with both eyes located on one side of the head. Because these fish lay on their sides at the ocean bottom, this arrangement enhances their vision, with both eyes constantly in play, peering up into the water.