Economic issues play a significant role in determining whether first-time students enrolling in a four-year college will complete their degree and graduate within six years.

The direct medical costs of falls in adults with a transfemoral amputation are described in a new article.

As the Missouri River flows across the Great Plains to where it meets the Mississippi River at St. Louis, it accumulates such a large sediment load that it has earned the nickname 'Big Muddy.' A recent study looks at the history of the river, damages and changes from the 2011 flood, and its current post-flood condition. The study concludes that the river needs a comprehensive plan with multi-state cooperation.

Among patients unresponsive to an antidepressant medication, adding the antipsychotic aripiprazole modestly increased the likelihood of remission from depression compared to switching to the antidepressant bupropion, according to a study.

Among older patients using medium to high doses of the anti-inflammatory steroid prednisolone, treatment with the osteoporosis drug alendronate was associated with a significantly lower risk of hip fracture, according to a study.

The US Preventive Services Task Force recommends that primary care professionals individualize the decision to offer or refer adults without obesity who do not have high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol or blood sugar levels or diabetes to behavioral counseling to promote a healthful diet and physical activity. Existing evidence indicates a positive but small benefit of behavioral counseling for the prevention of cardiovascular disease in this population.

Physicians report success in a small study of a modified skin biopsy that hastens the earlier diagnosis of an inherited and progressively fatal nerve disease and seems to offer a clearer view of the disorder's severity and progression. With a quicker and less invasive way to visualize the hallmark protein clumps of the rare but lethal disease -- familial transthyretin amyloidosis -- the researchers say they hope to more rapidly advance clinical trials of treatments that may slow the disease and extend patients' lives.

Generosity makes people happier, even if they are only a little generous. People who act solely out of self-interest are less happy. Merely promising to be more generous is enough to trigger a change in our brains that makes us happier, neuroeconomists found in a recent study.

Spray cooling is one of the most promising methods for cooling high heat flow electronics. Two-phase spray cooling, in particular, has been shown to cool heat fluxes orders of magnitude higher than traditional cooling methods but the complex physics of it demands deeper understanding. To tackle this, researchers investigated the basic physics of droplet impingement using a computational approach called the lattice-Botzmann method.

A new treatment rapidly removes the oral blood thinner dabigatran (PRADAXA®) from circulation within minutes, allowing life-saving clots to form normally.

Researchers are reporting progress in developing a method to accurately determine the functional age of cells, a step that could eventually help clinicians recommend ways to delay some health effects of aging and potentially improve treatments.

A new tool for computational design allows users to turn any 3-D shape into a collapsible telescoping structure. New mathematical methods capture the complex and diverse properties of such structures, which are valuable for a variety of applications in 3-D fabrication and robotics -- particularly where mechanisms must be compact in size and easily deployable.

The concept of a simple technique to remove thin layers from otherwise thick, rigid semiconductor crystals has been actively explored for years. In a significant advance, a research group has successfully applied their new 'controlled spalling' layer transfer technique to gallium nitride (GaN) crystals, a prevalent semiconductor material, and created a pathway for producing many layers from a single substrate.

The warmer Arctic has triggered cooler winters and springs in North America, which has in turn weakened vegetation growth and lowered carbon uptake capacity in its ecosystems, research shows.

Men and women react differently to compounds associated with immune system response to bipolar disorder, according to an international team of medical researchers. The findings suggest that bipolar disorder could one day be diagnosed by measuring biological changes in the body, and that treatments could be tailored differently for men and women.