Two out of three medical students do not know when to wash their hands

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — Only 21 percent of surveyed medical students could identify five true and two false indications of when and when not to wash their hands in the clinical setting, according to a study published in the December issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of APIC -- the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.

Three researchers from the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hospital Epidemiology at Hannover Medical School in Hannover, Germany collected surveys from 85 medical students in their third year of study during a lecture class that all students must pass before bedside training and contact with patients commences. Students were given seven scenarios, of which five ("before contact to a patient," "before preparation of intravenous fluids," "after removal of gloves," "after contact to the patient's bed," and "after contact to vomit") were correct hand hygiene (HH) indications. Only 33 percent of the students correctly identified all five true indications, and only 21 percent correctly identified all true and false indications.

Additionally, the students expected that their own HH compliance would be "good" while that of nurses would be lower, despite other published data that show a significantly higher rate of HH compliance among nursing students than among medical students. The surveyed students further believed that HH compliance rates would be inversely proportional to the level of training and career attainment of the physician, which confirms a previously discovered bias among medical students that is of particular concern, as these higher-level physicians are often the ones training the medical students at the bedside.

"There is no doubt that we need to improve the overall attitude toward the use of alcohol-based hand rub in hospitals," conclude the authors. "To achieve this goal, the adequate behavior of so-called 'role models' is of particular importance."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Elsevier, via AlphaGalileo.

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Journal Reference:

K. Graf and I.F. Chaberny, R.-P. Vonberg. Beliefs about hand hygiene: A survey in medical students in their first clinical year. American Journal of Infection Control, Volume 39, Issue 10 (December 2011)

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Three new planets and a mystery object discovered outside our solar system

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Three planets -- each orbiting its own giant, dying star -- have been discovered by an international research team led by a Penn State University astronomer.

Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, astronomers observed the planets' parent stars -- called HD 240237, BD +48 738, and HD 96127 -- tens of light years away from our solar system. One of the massive, dying stars has an additional mystery object orbiting it, according to team leader Alex Wolszczan, an Evan Pugh Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State, who, in 1992, became the first astronomer ever to discover planets outside our solar system. The new research is expected to shed light on the evolution of planetary systems around dying stars. It also will help astronomers to understand how metal content influences the behavior of dying stars.

The research will be published in December in the Astrophysical Journal. The first author of the paper is Sara Gettel, a graduate student from Penn State's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the paper is co-authored by three graduate students from Poland.

The three newly-discovered planetary systems are more evolved than our own solar system. "Each of the three stars is swelling and has already become a red giant -- a dying star that soon will gobble up any planet that happens to be orbiting too close to it," Wolszczan said. "While we certainly can expect a similar fate for our own Sun, which eventually will become a red giant and possibly will consume our Earth, we won't have to worry about it happening for another five-billion years." Wolszczan also said that one of the massive, dying stars -- BD +48 738 -- is accompanied not only by an enormous, Jupiter-like planet, but also by a second, mystery object. According to the team, this object could be another planet, a low-mass star, or -- most interestingly -- a brown dwarf, which is a star-like body that is intermediate in mass between the coolest stars and giant planets. "We will continue to watch this strange object and, in a few more years, we hope to be able to reveal its identity," Wolszczan said.

The three dying stars and their accompanying planets have been particularly useful to the research team because they have helped to illuminate such ongoing mysteries as how dying stars behave depending on their metallicity. "First, we know that giant stars like HD 240237, BD +48 738, and HD 96127 are especially noisy. That is, they appear jittery, because they oscillate much more than our own, much-younger Sun. This noisiness disturbs the observation process, making it a challenge to discover any companion planets," Wolszczan said. "Still, we persevered and we eventually were able to spot the planets orbiting each massive star."

Once Wolszczan and his team had confirmed that HD 240237, BD +48 738, and HD 96127 did indeed have planets orbiting around them, they measured the metal content of the stars and found some interesting correlations. "We found a negative correlation between a star's metallicity and its jitteriness. It turns out that the less metal content each star had, the more noisy and jittery it was," Wolszczan explained. "Our own Sun vibrates slightly too, but because it is much younger, its atmosphere is much less turbulent."

Wolszczan also pointed out that, as stars swell to the red-giant stage, planetary orbits change and even intersect, and close-in planets and moons eventually get swallowed and sucked up by the dying star. For this reason, it is possible that HD 240237, BD +48 738, and HD 96127 once might have had more planets in orbit, but that these planets were consumed over time. "It's interesting to note that, of these three newly-discovered stars, none has a planet at a distance closer than 0.6 astronomical units -- that is, 0.6 the distance of the Earth to our Sun," Wolszczan said. "It might be that 0.6 is the magic number at which any closer distance spells a planet's demise."

Observations of dying stars, their metal content, and how they affect the planets around them could provide clues about the fate of our own solar system. "Of course, in about five-billion years, our Sun will become a red giant and likely will swallow up the inner planets and the planets' accompanying moons. However, if we're still around in, say, one-billion to three-billion years, we might consider taking up residence on Jupiter's moon, Europa, for the remaining couple billion years before that happens," Wolszczan said. "Europa is an icy wasteland and it is certainly not habitable now, but as the Sun continues to heat up and expand, our Earth will become too hot, while at the same time, Europa will melt and may spend a couple billion years in the Goldilocks zone -- not to hot, not to- old, covered by vast, beautiful oceans."

Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds is organizing a conference in January 2012 to discuss planets and their dying stars. The conference will be held in Puerto Rico and is scheduled to take place at exactly 20 years from when Wolszczan used the 1,000-foot Arecibo radiotelescope to detect three planets orbiting a rapidly spinning neutron star -- the very first discovery of planets outside our solar system. This discovery opened the door to the current intense era of planet hunting by suggesting that planet formation could be quite common throughout the universe and that planets can form around different types of stellar objects. More information about the conference is online.

In addition to Wolszczan and Gettel at Penn State, other members of the research team include Andrzej Niedzielski and Gracjan Maciejewski; and three graduate students, Grzegorz Nowak, Monika Adamów, and Pawel Zielinski, who are all from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland.

Funding for this research was provided by NASA and the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

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Three key questions for the IT industry

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — Today's multicore processors are not being utilized in a sufficiently intelligent way. They get too hot and run slowly because they are used inefficiently. At the same time, transistors are becoming so small that they will ultimately become unreliable. Major European research organizations are now attempting to create a revolution in computer architecture.

Are you disappointed with the performance of your new computer or phone? Then perhaps rightly so. Their clock frequency has not risen significantly since 2000. Overheating problems and limited battery capacity are forcing manufacturers to limit power usage substantially, typically to 100 W per chip.

"You can't sell a mobile device with bulky sophisticated cooling. So we can't increase the clock frequency, a problem that multicore processors were designed to avoid," says Per Stenström, Professor of Computer Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology and project coordinator for a new center called Eurecca.

"So far, multicore systems have merely yielded marginal performance improvements. It will be increasingly difficult to keep all the processors busy without exceeding the power limit."

Today modern microprocessors typically have six cores. The problem is that no one can as yet optimally program even two-core (two parallel processors on the same chip) computers. The same problem has also baffled giants such as Intel and Microsoft. Basically what is needed is moving from sequential to parallel programming -- i.e. the art of getting several processors to operate together as efficient, well trained sports teams instead of inefficiently coordinated superstars. This second technological challenge goes by the name of concurrency.

"The industry is not yet mature for this step, and we lag behind in terms of education and research," says Per Stenström.

That's why three leading universities in computer architecture are now founding the European Research Center on Computer Architecture (EuReCCA). The planned center so far comprises fifty research scientists, but computer technology institutions from all parts of Europe are joining at a rapid rate, all coordinated by Chalmers. The aim is to make pioneering progress in the development of systems involving multicore processors and paradigms for their productive programming, which should ultimately result in new generations of products and innovative company start-ups.

Eurecca should above all boost the competitive power of the European computer industry, which is a world leader in computers for embedded applications such as cars and mobile phones. A modern car contains no less than about fifty processors. British ARM processors are found in mobile phones from manufacturers such as Nokia, SonyEricsson and Apple. European research projects normally run for three years, but Eurecca will be set up as a longer term Eurolab structure.

"We want to have a permanent structure in order to sustain a long-term focus on bringing innovations out to industry. This has not worked in a satisfactory way in Europe so far. To build up functional systems of knowledge transfer is not something that can be done in three years," says Per Stenström.

The Eurolab structure is also needed to build up streamlined education in computer technology at master and doctoral level throughout Europe. The aim is to get together to nurture a new generation of computer architects ready to lead system innovations based on the parallel philosophy in high demand.

The third technical challenge is miniaturization. Transistor dimensions are halved every 18 months. Soon, transistors will be only a few tens of atoms in size. Along the way they become increasingly unreliable, which will present an enormous challenge for computer system designers in the future. No one currently knows how to tackle this.

"We quite simply have to create a revolution in computer architecture," says Per Stenström, who expects national and European funding for Eurecca, as well as investments from industry.

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