Channel 42
Science is the answer to everything.

One of five Medicare beneficiaries discharged from the hospital is readmitted within 30 days, and half of nonsurgical patients are re-admitted to the hospital without having seen an outpatient doctor in follow-up, according to a Commonwealth Fund-supported study in today’s New England Journal of Medicine. All told, unplanned re-hospitalizations cost Medicare $17.4 billion in 2004, the study says.

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Computer simulations, paleomagnetism and plate motion histories described in today’s issue of Science reveal how hotspots, centers of erupting magma that sit atop columns of hot mantle that were once thought to remain firmly fixed in place, in fact move beneath Earth’s crust.

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A study carried out at the University of Granada concludes that this problem affects more women than men. The research work was carried out through a survey to 885 first-year students of 23 degrees given at the UGR who study mathematics. Tension, nervousness, concern, worry, edginess, impatience, confusion, fear and mental block are some of the symptoms of this disorder.

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An orbiting observatory may have found the first indirect evidence of dark matter particles colliding in space and disappearing, as if in a puff of smoke. The “smoke” in this.

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McGill University researchers have successfully amplified light with so-called “colloidal quantum dots,” a technology that had been written off by many as a dead-end.Professor Patanjali Kambhampati and colleagues at McGill University’s Department of Chemistry determined that colloidal quantum dots do indeed amplify light as promised. Their results were published in the March 2009 issue of Physical Review Letters.

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Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have shed light on how the neurotransmitter dopamine helps brain cells process important information.

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As we look at the world around us, images flicker into our brains like disparate pixels on a computer screen that change several times a second. Yet we don’t perceive the world as a constantly flashing computer display. Why not? Neuroscientists at The Johns Hopkins University think that part of the answer lies in a special region of the brain’s visual cortex which is in charge of distinguishing between background and foreground images.

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Dental amalgam has been proven safe and effective for years, yet unfounded controversy still surrounds it, a Medical College of Georgia researcher says.

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In 2008, residents of Hispaniola experienced one of their worst hurricane seasons in recent memory. Hispaniola, the Caribbean island containing Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is located directly within the hurricane belt, and was pummeled by five tropical cyclones last year: Fay, Gustav, Hanna, Ike, and low over the Dominican Republic on Sept. 24 what would become Kyle after moving north. More than 800 people were reported dead or missing from these storms.

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A study showing improved survival of starting antiretroviral treatment earlier than current US recommendations is being reported in the April 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The study found that not starting HIV patients at a CD4 count greater than 500 cells per cubic millimeter increased risk of death by 94 percent.

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