Music During Surgery May Aid Recovery

Patients undergoing surgery who listen to soothing talk and music while under anesthesia may wake up feeling less pain and require less pain medicine. German researchers randomly assigned 385 surgery patients to one of two groups. The first wore earphones during their operations, listening to an audiotape that played soothing background music along with positive…

No One Loves Arby’s Like I Do

My childhood was defined by two rituals: three hours of Mormon Church service on Sundays and a trip to Arby’s almost as regularly. The Arby’s location in my Texas hometown possessed all the visual splendor that the church I was raised in did not: stained glass and smoky wood paneling, sauce packets stored in a…

How to Collect Salt

“You need ocean water,” says Kuuleialoha Gaisoa, 45, whose family has been harvesting salt in Hanapepe, on the west side of Kauai, for generations. In Hawaiian, the word for salt is pa’akai, meaning “to solidify the sea,” and the salt from the patch that Gaisoa works is known throughout the islands for its sweet, briny…

Kernels of history

Earlier this year Douglas J. Kennett, a UC Santa Barbara professor of anthropology, demonstrated that maize, or corn, became a staple crop in the Americas 4,700 years ago. It turns out he was just beginning to tell the story of the world’s biggest grain crop. In a new paper in the Proceedings of the National…

UC Riverside School of Medicine to serve as lead site for clinical trial on stuttering

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The School of Medicine at the University of California, Riverside, will serve as lead site for a Phase 2 clinical trial evaluating ecopipam, an investigational first-in-class drug being tested for the treatment of stuttering in adults and Tourette syndrome in pediatric patients. Emalex Biosciences Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that developed ecopipam,…

Cancer researchers identify potential new class of drugs to treat blood and bone marrow cancers

CLEVELAND – A new study by researchers in Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Institute and Lerner Research Institute describes a novel class of targeted cancer drugs that may prove effective in treating certain common types of leukemia. The results first appeared online in Blood Cancer Discovery. Myeloid leukemias are cancers derived from stem and progenitor cells…