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ROCHESTER, Minn. - A short, preoperative team briefing prior to cardiac surgery - where each person on the team speaks - improves communication and reduces errors and costs, according to a pilot study conducted at Mayo Clinic.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--An ingenious new method of obtaining marine microbe samples while preserving the microbes' natural gene expression has yielded an unexpected boon: the presence of many varieties of small RNAs -- snippets of RNA that act as switches to regulate gene expression in these single-celled creatures.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 31, 2009 - Formerly depressed women show patterns of brain activity when they are criticized by their mothers that are distinctly different from the patterns shown by never depressed controls, according to a new study from Harvard University.
A frequent criticism of Jovians' proposed energy extraction from Casimir cavities using hydrogen atoms is that the energy required to push the gas into the Casimir cavity will at least equal the energy released by the photon.
People voluntarily pick what information they store in short-term memory. Now, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers can see just what information people are holding in memory based only on patterns of activity in the brain.
When it comes to assessing the romantic playing field -- who might be interested in whom -- men and women were shown to be equally good at gauging men's interest during an Indiana University study involving speed dating -- and equally bad at judging women's interest.
Researchers today unveiled a prototype of the next generation of firefighter turnout gear that not only offers increased protection from fire, but also provides protection from chemical and biological agents. To the casual observer, the new suit won't appear greatly different from other firefighter turnout gear. The new suit has all the functional features of a traditional suit, but with added protection. The thermal liner, an important component in heat protection, utilizes a new non-woven thermal material that incorporates new fiber technologies offering better protection from heat. In addition to using Kevlar, the creators developed a special ''breathable'' membrane that provides chemical and biological protection.
The idea that a woman's emotional state during pregnancy affects her unborn child has persisted for centuries and has, in recent years, been supported by science. Called the ''fetal programming hypothesis,'' it theorizes that certain disturbing factors occurring during certain sensitive periods of development in utero can ''program'' set points in a variety of biological systems in the unborn child. This, then, affects the ability of those biological systems to change later in life, resulting in difficulties adapting physiologically and ultimately predisposing a child to disease and disorder.
Cruise missiles have proven themselves in combat many times since the Gulf War, but the Navy would like to drive their cost down--the ones currently in service cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has a program to use commercially-based equipment to build a "cruise-like" missile with good performance at a price ten times less than the norm. The new missile is called, appropriately, the Affordable Weapon.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2002 to Jimmy Carter, for his "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."
