ANN ARBOR--One out of every four dollars employers pay for health care is tied to unhealthy lifestyle choices or conditions like smoking, stress and obesity, despite the fact that most large employers have workplace wellness programs.

In the largest study of its kind, researchers from the University of Michigan looked at 10 modifiable health risks in roughly 223,500 people across seven industries, said Michael O'Donnell, first author on the study and director of the
U-M Health Management Research Center at the School of Kinesiology.

Researchers have created a computer model that captures humans' unique ability to learn new concepts from a single example. Though the model is only capable of learning handwritten characters from alphabets, the approach underlying it could be broadened to have applications for other symbol-based systems, like gestures, dance moves, and the words of spoken and signed languages. Recent years have seen steady advances in machine learning, yet people are still far better than machines at learning new concepts, often needing just an example or two compared to the tens or hundreds machines typically require. What's more, after learning a concept for the first time, people can typically use it in rich and diverse ways.

In one of the most comprehensive studies to date to analyze job outcomes for U.S. university graduates with funded doctoral degrees, researchers found that nearly 40% of the doctoral recipients evaluated went into industry, and that these employees were more likely to work at high-wage establishments compared to their counterparts in academia. The study provides unique insights into where research-funded Ph.D.'s go when they graduate and enter the private sector, an area for which there is little existing data but results for which could help illuminate the impact of research on the economy. While the U.S. investment in scientific research can be documented readily, the output is harder to track. To overcome this obstacle, Nikolas Zolas et al.

LSD is known to cause changes in consciousness, including "ego-dissolution", or a loss of the sense of self. Despite a detailed knowledge of the action of LSD at specific serotonin receptors, it has not been understood how this these pharmacological effects can translate into such a profound effect on consciousness Today, a new report presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology in Hollywood, Florida, provides evidence to show that LSD reduces connectivity within brain networks, or the extent to which nerve cells or neurons within a network fire in synchrony. LSD also seems to reduce the extent to which separate brain networks remain distinct in their patterns or synchronization of firing.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- The anti-hormone therapy tamoxifen can reduce breast cancer recurrence by about half in women with hormone-sensitive breast cancer. But it works better in some women than others. Researchers are not sure why.

"We do know that some tumors are inherently resistant to tamoxifen because of tumor genetic changes," says Daniel L. Hertz, Pharm.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor in the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy and member of the U-M Comprehensive Cancer Center.

"These tumor have found pathways to overcome anti-estrogen treatment. But we also believe some patients may be less likely to benefit from tamoxifen or endocrine therapy because of their genetics," Hertz says.

The thalidomide tragedy, which resulted in thousands of deaths and disabilities in the late 1950s and early 1960s, changed medicine forever. One of its outcomes was the establishment of more robust mechanisms for the regulation of medicines and medical devices.

Despite popular perceptions that cheerleading is dangerous, it is relatively safe - but it's not perfect and when injuries do happen they tend to be severe.

A new movie is out this month on NFL concussions, and the doctor who is the subject of the piece says football for anyone under age 18 should be banned - but an upcoming white paper from the American Council on Science and Health notes that a ban may be too heavy-handed. Cheerleading also has a lot of head injuries and concussions are not the top injury in youth football.

More women than men suffer from chronic pain, described as pain that persists for more than six months. In addition, much of this pain remains undiagnosed or untreated.

As well as the pain associated with menstruation or the bearing of children, waiting rooms of pain physicians, rheumatologists and gastroenterologists show clear majorities of women.

Clouds can increase warming in the changing Arctic region more than scientists expected, by delivering an unexpected double-whammy to the climate system, according to a new study by researchers at NOAA, the University of Colorado Boulder and colleagues.

Many strokes that required immediate treatment in emergency rooms may have been preventable, but stroke prevention has not advanced the way therapy for acute stroke has. Stroke prevention has fallen by the wayside as stroke patient outcomes have improved but the close monitoring of blood pressure, cholesterol levels and cardiac conditions remain important, finds a paper in JAMA Neurology.

Using a prevention scale they developed for this study, University of California Irvine neurologist Dr. Mark Fisher and colleagues discovered that 76 percent of acute stroke patients exhibited some degree of stroke preventability, while 26 percent exhibited high preventability.