Heart valve replacements made from tissue (bioprosthetic valves) have long been thought to be spared the complication of blood clot formation. Researchers have now found that about 15 percent of all bioprosthetic aortic heart valve patients develop blood clots on the leaflets affecting valve opening, regardless of whether the patient received the new valve via open-heart surgery or a minimally-invasive catheter procedure, a new study from the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute shows.
Tech
The color of dinosaurs is a fascinating topic, and in recent years the discovery of melanosomes - small, pigment-filled sacs - associated with fossilized dinosaur feathers has given rise to all sorts of speculation about our prehistoric pals, from the hue of their plumage to color's impact on behavior.
Lung cancer screening programs that utilize standardized reporting and include cardiothoracic surgeons as part of a multidisciplinary team can successfully be adopted into clinical practice without an increase in surgical intervention for non-cancerous disease, according to an article in the October 2015 issue of The Annals of Thoracic Surgery.
Key points
The tungsten lightbulb has served well over the century or so since it was introduced, but its days are numbered now with the arrival of LED lighting, which consume a tenth of the power of incandescent bulbs and have a lifespan 30 times longer. Potential uses of LEDs are not limited to illumination: smart lighting products are emerging that can offer various additional features, including linking your laptop or smartphone to the internet. Move over Wi-Fi, Li-Fi is here.
At a Chevron oil refinery in Hawaii, researchers are growing microalgae in a 5,000-liter photobioreactor, flowing wastewater from the refinery through the reactor, and taking advantage of the algae's appetite for chemical nutrients to polish the water, removing noxious chemicals, including 90% of the ammonia-nitrogen and 97% of the phosphorus.
The dust has now settled on the latest product launch from Apple, which for many trumped headlines about refugees, poverty and the battles for the Republican nomination and leadership of the UK Labour Party. We have new iPads, iPhones and more. But how new are they really?
Each year approximately 5-20% of U.S. residents get the flu and more than 200,000 people are hospitalized for flu-related complications. The cobas Influenza A/B test offers an effective, new diagnostic tool for the upcoming flu season and enables health care providers to provide faster diagnosis and treatment for patients in primary and urgent care settings, while the patient waits.
As Nevada and California endure a fourth year of unprecedented drought and this year’s Sierra Nevada snowpack is verified as a 500-year low, a group of Ph.D. scientists from Nevada are knocking on the front door of the tech-industry with a pitch for investment in next generation weather intelligence.
Extreme weather events such as the ongoing drought and mega-fires in the West, record-setting hurricanes in the East, and flash floods across the Mid-West cause upwards of $11 billion in damages each year in the United States.
Research published recently in Science as Culture suggests that men are surprisingly positive and open to the concept of having cancer-detecting biosensors implanted within their bodies – effectively making them cyborgs.
Western University researchers are working on a way to use artificial intelligence to predict a patient's response to two common chemotherapy medications used to treat breast cancer - paclitaxel and gemcitabine.
Peter Rogan, PhD, and a team of researchers, including Stephanie Dorman, PhD, and Katherina Baranova, BMSc, at Western's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, are hoping to one day remove the guesswork from breast cancer treatment with this technique.
People fed β-glucan-enriched pasta for two months showed increased populations of beneficial bacteria in their intestinal tracts, and reduced populations of non-beneficial bacteria. They also showed reduced LDL (bad) cholesterol. This work is part of a broad effort to identify potential prebiotics--foods that could encourage the growth of health-promoting bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract.
A first draft of the "tree of life" for the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes -- from platypuses to puffballs -- has been released.
A collaborative effort among eleven institutions, the tree depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time, tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago.
Though England, Scotland and Wales hold the top three spots as the most violent countries in the developed world, in America the ability to obtain a gun until after you have committed a crime leads even the ultra-violent UK to claim America needs to change.
Many in America contend guns do not cause crime any more than spoons cause obesity and instead point to the mental health - and drug-use to combat it - relationship. There haven't been any mass shootings that have occurred which did not involve mental health drugs.
Sun Biomedical Limited has announced the first enrollment in a Phase II study of DMX-200, a treatment that combines two drugs to treat chronic kidney disease. DMX-200 combines a drug called irbesartan, an off-patent compound used to treat hypertension and nephropathy in Type II diabetic patients and propagermanium, a dietary supplement. The Company has previously published preclinical data showing that combining the drugs blocks an inflammatory response which prevents the kidneys from functioning properly and releasing protein into the urine, called proteinuria.
They're the latest rage in jewelry and gadgetry, but like all computer devices, smart watches are vulnerable to hackers, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.