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More Seniors Being Held for Observation

A new study finds that more elderly patients in the emergency departments of hospitals are being held for observation rather than admitted as inpatients. Pressure from Medicare to reduce unnecessary hospitalization may be driving the trend. But being classified as an outpatient, rather than being admitted, can increase out-of-pocket costs for patients. The study is reported in the June edition of Health Affairs.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Nobody wins when patients stay in the hospital unnecessarily, so the federal government in recent years has pushed hospitals to be careful about admitting Medicare recipients as inpatients. The apparent result is that more patients are being “held for observation” instead, according to a new study by Brown University gerontologists. While the shift in how hospitals care for elderly patients in the emergency department may reduce costs to Medicare, it can also increase out-of-pocket expenditures for patients. (more…)

Highway Through Amazon Worsens Effects of Climate Change, Provides Mixed Economic Gains

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Paving a highway across South America is providing lessons on the impact of road construction elsewhere.

That’s what a University of Florida researcher and his international colleagues have determined from analyzing communities along the Amazonian portion of the nearly 4,200-mile Interoceanic Highway, a coast-to-coast road that starts at ports in Brazil and will eventually connect to ones in Peru. (more…)

Prize-Winning Mentor Menachem Elimelech Encourages a Life of Balance

When it comes to advising graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, Yale faculty member Menachem Elimelech believes his job isn’t rocket science. (more…)

NASA’s Spitzer Finds First Objects Burned Furiously

PASADENA, Calif. — The faint, lumpy glow given off by the very first objects in the universe may have been detected with the best precision yet, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. These faint objects might be wildly massive stars or voracious black holes. They are too far away to be seen individually, but Spitzer has captured new, convincing evidence of what appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light.

The observations help confirm the first objects were numerous in quantity and furiously burned cosmic fuel.

“These objects would have been tremendously bright,” said Alexander “Sasha” Kashlinsky of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., lead author of a new paper appearing in The Astrophysical Journal. “We can’t yet directly rule out mysterious sources for this light that could be coming from our nearby universe, but it is now becoming increasingly likely that we are catching a glimpse of an ancient epoch. Spitzer is laying down a roadmap for NASA’s upcoming James Webb Telescope, which will tell us exactly what and where these first objects were.” (more…)

20 Years after Rio Earth Summit: Ecologists Call for Preservation of Planet’s Remaining Biological Diversity

ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Twenty years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 17 prominent ecologists are calling for renewed international efforts to curb the loss of biological diversity, which is compromising nature’s ability to provide goods and services essential for human well-being. (more…)

Bel Ami

Synopsis

Georges Duroy, travels through 1890s Paris, from cockroach ridden garrets to opulent salons, using his wits and powers of seduction to rise from poverty to wealth, from a prostitute’s embrace to passionate trysts with wealthy beauties, in a world where politics and media jostle for influence, where sex is power and celebrity an obsession. (more…)

Building Molecular ‘Cages’ to Fight Disease

UCLA-created nanoscale protein containers could aid drug, vaccine delivery

UCLA biochemists have designed specialized proteins that assemble themselves to form tiny molecular cages hundreds of times smaller than a single cell. The creation of these miniature structures may be the first step toward developing new methods of drug delivery or even designing artificial vaccines.

“This is the first decisive demonstration of an approach that can be used to combine protein molecules together to create a whole array of nanoscale materials,” said Todd Yeates, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a member of the UCLA–DOE Institute of Genomics and Proteomics and the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. (more…)

A Prime Seat to a Once-in-a-Lifetime Spectacle

Hosted by world-renowned astrophotographer Adam Block at the UA’s Mount Lemmon SkyCenter, a group of sky and astronomy enthusiasts watched Venus cross the sun from the highest vantage point in Southern Arizona.

On Nov. 24, 1639, in the tiny village of Much Hoole not far from Liverpool, England, a poor farmer’s son and self-taught astronomer affixed a sheet of paper in front of a makeshift telescope pointed at the sun and waited.

Thirty-five minutes before sunset, a dark, round spot appeared right next to the bright disc that was the sun’s face projected on the paper, and made Jeremiah Horrocks, only 20 years old at the time, the first known human to predict, observe and record a transit – the passage of a planet across the sun as seen from Earth.

Almost 373 years later, a group of sky enthusiasts is gathered beneath the dome of one of the University of Arizona’s observatories on Mount Lemmon just north of Tucson, Ariz. (more…)