Want to hit a fastball like the New York Mets do? It won't surprise you much to learn that baseball players don't think much about hitting the ball - much of it comes from trained muscle memory and a great deal of visual ocularity.

The latest episode of “It’s Okay to Be Smart” outlines the combination of practice, strength, brainpower, and good eyesight that helps players predict the correct time to swing the bat. Fortunately none of those things will make you field the ball like David Murphy, even if you hit like him.

MONTRÉAL (October 19, 2015)- Researchers from Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, formed a multidisciplinary sepsis and shock response team (SSRT) to help alert emergency department providers when these disorders are suspected. An automated electronic sepsis alarm for early recognition, followed by standardized multidisciplinary management of patients with suspected sepsis or shock with SSRT, improved the compliance with standard care measures and overall mortality.

An international team have used cutting edge genomic methods to uncover key biological insights that help explain the protective effects of the world's most advanced malaria vaccine candidate, RTS,S/AS01 (RTS,S). 

RTS,S is the first malaria vaccine candidate to complete phase 3 trials. Originally designed by scientists at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in 1987, development of the vaccine is now being advanced by a public-private partnership between GSK and PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.

Applying highly sensitive sequencing technology to more patient samples than previously tested, the team was able to determine that genetic variation in the protein targeted by RTS,S influences the vaccine's ability to ward off malaria in young children. 

Sepsis is an inflammatory response to infection that's known to develop in hospital settings and can turn deadly when it's not discovered early on.

In a new study, a hospital surveillance program focusing on reducing the risks of sepsis, known as the two-stage Clinical Decision Support (CDS) system, was found to reduce the risk of adverse outcomes, such as death and hospice discharge for sepsis patients, by 30% over the course of one year. 

The Death Star of the movie Star Wars may be fictional, but planetary destruction is real. Astronomers announced today that they have spotted a large, rocky object disintegrating in its death spiral around a distant white dwarf star. The discovery also confirms a long-standing theory behind the source of white dwarf "pollution" by metals.

"This is something no human has seen before," says lead author Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "We're watching a solar system get destroyed."

In 1939, a Russian engineer proposed a "flying submarine" -- a vehicle that can seamlessly transition from air to water and back again. While it may sound like something out of a James Bond film, engineers have been trying to design functional aerial-aquatic vehicles for decades with little success. Now, engineers may be one step closer to the elusive flying submarine.

The biggest challenge is conflicting design requirements: aerial vehicles require large airfoils like wings or sails to generate lift while underwater vehicles need to minimize surface area to reduce drag.

Women with particularly aggressive forms of breast cancer could be identified by a test that predicts whether the disease is likely to spread to the brain.

An analysis of almost 4,000 patients with breast cancer found that testing for high activity in a particular gene called alpha beta (αB)-crystallin could pick out women who were at greater risk of developing secondary brain tumors compared to women who tested negative.

A team including scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, found that women whose breast cancer had begun to spread and who tested positive in the αB-crystallin test were three times more likely to have disease that spread to the brain than those who tested negative.

Processing fabric for the latest fashions and other textile-based products today requires thousands of chemicals, some of which are toxic and cause 20 percent of the world's water pollution. To reduce its environmental footprint, the textile industry is making changes, designing safer chemicals and turning to nature to find replacements to potentially harmful compounds, according to an article in Chemical&Engineering News.