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Bottom Line: Financial incentives didn't increase completion rates of colorectal cancer screening tests mailed to patients. In a randomized clinical trial of almost 900 patients, none of the incentives (an unconditional $10, a promised $10 upon completion of the fecal immunochemical test (FIT) kit to test for blood in a stool sample or chance at a lottery with a 1-in-10 chance of winning $100) was statistically better than no financial incentive to entice patients to complete the FIT.
Key takeaway: New research identifies guidelines for prioritizing the treatment of hepatitis C infections in the U.S. prison system, resulting in a significant improvement in health outcomes of incarcerated persons while simultaneously reducing new infections in the society.
A new area in artificial intelligence involves using algorithms to automatically design machine-learning systems known as neural networks, which are more accurate and efficient than those developed by human engineers. But this so-called neural architecture search (NAS) technique is computationally expensive.
Fulfilling the world's growing energy needs summons images of oil pipelines, electric wires and truckloads of coal. But Michigan State University scientists show a lot of energy moves nearly incognito, embedded in the products of a growing society.
And that energy leaves its environmental footprint home.
Luke Frishkoff, University of Texas at Arlington assistant professor of biology, explores how human land use expedites biodiversity loss in a paper recently published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
For a study conducted at the University of Toronto, Frishkoff, as a postdoctoral fellow, and his collaborators traveled to the Dominican Republic to take a census of the region's Anolis lizard species along an elevation gradient affected by deforestation. The species is a common group of tropical lizards that are a model system in ecology and evolutionary biology.
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have found that type IgG antibodies play an unexpected role in atherosclerosis. A study on mice shows that the antibodies stabilise the plaque that accumulates on the artery walls, which reduces the risk of it rupturing and causing a blood clot. It is hoped that the results, which are published in the journal Circulation, will eventually lead to improved therapies.
Thawing permafrost in high-altitude mountain ecosystems may be a stealthy, underexplored contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions, new University of Colorado Boulder research shows.
The new findings, published today in the journal Nature Communications, show that alpine tundra in Colorado's Front Range emits more CO2 than it captures annually, potentially creating a feedback loop that could increase climate warming and lead to even more CO2 emissions in the future.
When you flush the toilet, you probably don't think about the traces of the medicine and personal care products in your body that are winding up in sewage treatment plants, streams, rivers, lakes, bays and the ocean.
Most people who immigrated to the United States for a chance to live the "American Dream" are more satisfied with their lives in the "land of the free" than those who were born here, according to new research from Florida State University.
A team of researchers, including FSU Assistant Professor of Sociology Dawn Carr, found immigrants from white, Hispanic and other racial groups have higher levels of happiness and overall life satisfaction than those born in the United States.
Scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago have developed a way to identify the beginning of every gene -- known as a translation start site or a start codon -- in bacterial cell DNA with a single experiment and, through this method, they have shown that an individual gene is capable of coding for more than one protein.
Osteoarthritis (OA) has traditionally been viewed as a highly prevalent but milder condition when compared with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and some may believe that it is part of a normal aging process requiring acceptance, not treatment. A new study in Arthritis & Rheumatology indicates that OA and RA have similar impacts or burdens on patients when they first visit rheumatologists, however.
In an Addiction analysis of relevant published studies, investigators found some evidence for a positive association between anxiety during childhood and adolescence with later alcohol use disorders.
Previous studies have revealed a link between hot tea drinking and risk of esophageal cancer, but until now, no study has examined this association using prospectively and objectively measured tea drinking temperature. A new International Journal of Cancer study achieved this by following 50,045 individuals aged 40 to 75 years for a median of 10 years.
Labiodental sounds, such as F and V, have been known to be rarely met in hunter-gatherer languages. To understand how this has occurred, the authors undertook a massive statistical inquiry. 2,400 languages were analyzed, and a biomechanical model of mouth and lip movements was created.
It isn't easy being green. It takes thousands of genes to build the photosynthetic machinery that plants need to harness sunlight for growth. And yet, researchers don't know exactly how these genes work.