Researchers have identified a protein produced by white blood cells that puts the brakes on muscle repair after injury. By removing the protein CD163 from mice, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine could boost muscle repair and recovery of blood flow after ischemic injury (damage caused by restriction of blood flow). The findings point to a target for potential treatments aimed at enhancing muscle regeneration. Muscle breakdown occurs in response to injury or inactivity -- during immobilization in a cast, for example -- and in several diseases such as diabetes ...

This news release is available in Portuguese and Spanish. A recently published special issue of the Journal of Heredity focuses on case studies of real-world applications of conservation genetics in Latin America, from nabbing parrot smugglers to exposing fraudulent fish sales. The discipline of conservation genetics - the use of genetic techniques to further goals of conserving and restoring biodiversity - has been growing for at least four decades. But only relatively recently have genetic techniques been used not just to understand conservation problems, ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (August 5, 2015) -- Women may now have yet another reason to quit smoking given the results of a new study that is being reported online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). The Swedish study involving 25,474 women is the first to quantify the combined effects of smoking and age at menopause on overall mortality in terms of survival time by investigating the role of smoking as a possible effect modifier. A harmful association between younger age at menopause and overall mortality has already been documented. In ...

A new review highlights how an integrated pest management approach that utilizes a combination of chemical and nonchemical control options is the best strategy for getting rid of bed bug infestations; however, pest management professionals that are hired on a lowest bid basis are not likely to use such an approach. Efforts in multi-family settings are especially dependent on a collaborative community or building-wide effort involving residents, building staff, and pest control technicians. The review notes that to prevent reinfestation and reduce costs associated ...

Music is currently played in approximately 50% to 70% of surgical operations performed worldwide. In a new study of 20 operations conducted in the UK, repeated requests--for example, for a surgical instrument--were 5 times more likely to occur in surgeries with music than in those without. The findings suggest that music during surgery can lead to increased tensions due to frustration at ineffective communication. In addition, patient safety could potentially be affected due to miscommunication. "Our study shows that playing music in the operating theatre can run counter ...

SALT LAKE CITY - The BIG LoVE (Utah Better Identification of Germs-Longitudinal Viral Epidemiology) study, led by scientists at the University of Utah School of Medicine, finds that each bundle of joy puts the entire household at increased risk for infection with viruses that cause colds, flu, and other respiratory illnesses. People living in childless households were infected with viruses on average 3-4 weeks during the year. In households with one child, that number jumped to 18 weeks, and for those with six children, there was virus in the household for up to 45 weeks ...

The UK government's current alcohol guidelines are unrealistic and largely ignored because they have little relevance to people's drinking habits, according to a new report by the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group (SARG) in collaboration with the University of Stirling. The study, the first of its kind, explored how drinkers make sense of the current UK drinking guidelines which suggest men should not regularly exceed 3-4 units of alcohol per day, and women, 2-3 units daily. Leading researchers from the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies conducted focus groups ...

Researchers from the University of Surrey and Lund University (Sweden) investigated how frequent, long-distance travel is represented in mass and social media. They found that the images portrayed do not take into account the damaging side effects of frequent travel such as jet-lag, deep vein thrombosis, radiation exposure, stress, loneliness and distance from community and family networks. Instead, the study found that those with 'hypermobile' lifestyles were often seen as having a higher social status. By assessing how first-class flights, 'must-see' destinations and ...

Many mammals, including seals and rats, rely on their whiskers to sense their way through dark environments. Inspired by these animals, scientists working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Illinois' Advanced Digital Sciences Centre in Singapore have developed a robotic 'whisker' tactile sensor array designed to produce tomographic images by measuring fluid flow. The results are published today (Wednesday 05 August) in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. "When it is dark, whiskers play a key role for animals in exploring, hunting or even just ...

Cancer survival in England remains lower than countries with similar healthcare systems, according to a new Cancer Research UK funded study published in the British Journal of Cancer today. Cancer survival in England has steadily improved but the gap in survival remains. The research, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, compared survival for colon, breast, lung, ovarian, rectal and stomach cancers in England, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Sweden between 1995 and 2009, and survival trends in England up to 2012*. It included more than 1.9 million ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - Despite their beauty, flowers can pose a grave danger to bees by providing a platform of parasites to visiting bees, a team of researchers has determined. "Flowers are hotspots for parasite spread between and within pollinator populations," said Peter Graystock, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Entomology at the University of California, Riverside and a member of the research team. "Both the flower and bee species play a role in how likely parasite dispersal will occur." The study, published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society ...

The price fluctuation of fine wines can now be predicted more accurately using a novel artificial intelligence approach developed by researchers at UCL. The method could be used to help fine wine investors make more informed decisions about their portfolios and encourage non-wine investors to start looking at wine in this manner and hence increase the net trade of wine. It is expected that similar techniques will be used in other 'alternative assets' such as classic cars. Co-author, Dr Tristan Fletcher, an academic at UCL and founder of quantitative wine asset management ...

This is an observational study so no definitive conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect, but the authors call for more research that may "lead to updated dietary recommendations and development of functional foods." Previous research has suggested that beneficial effects of spices and their bioactive ingredient, capsaicin, include anti-obesity, antioxidant, anti-inflammation and anticancer properties. So an international team led by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences examined the association between consumption of spicy foods as part of ...

In the beginning there were four "fundamental" elements besides Hydrogen- not Earth, Air, Fire, or Water, but rather Helium 3, Helium 4, Deuterium and Lithium-7, four "light" isotopes produced by primordial nucleosynthesis (during the Big Bang). The four elements remain, but the calculations simply do not add up. The "metal-poor" stars are celestial bodies composed of mainly primitive material. Based on the Standard Cosmological Model - the most accepted theory today to explain the universe - scientists have calculated how much Li7 should be in them, but the measurements ...

The permanence of memories has long thought to be mediated solely by the production of new proteins. However, new research from the University of Alberta has shown that the electrical activity of the brain may be a more primary factor in memory solidification. "It's not just protein synthesis, long the dominant biological model, but also 'offline' memory rehearsal in the brain that leads to memory solidification," says Clayton Dickson, psychology professor at the University of Alberta and one of the authors of the new study. "Although the protein synthesis idea is entrenched ...

Case Western Reserve University scientists have discovered that a protein called Kruppel-like Factor 4 (KLF4) controls mitochondria -- the "power plants" in cells that catalyze energy production. Specifically, they determined KLF4's pivotal role through its absence -- that is, the mitochondria malfunction without enough of the protein, which in turn leads to reduced energy. This decline is particularly problematic in the heart because lower energy can lead to heart failure and death. The researchers' findings appear in the August edition of The Journal of Clinical Investigation ...

(SALT LAKE CITY)--By coordinating with state health departments and communicating with each other about patients with C. difficile and antibiotic-resistant infections, hospitals, long-term acute-care facilities and nursing homes could reduce the number of such hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) by an estimated 619,000 cases in the next five years, a new Centers for Disease Control 9 (CDC)-led report has found. As highlighted in the CDC's monthly Vital Signs monthly report, published on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2015, mathematical modeling was used to project the number of infections ...

This news release is available in Japanese. Astronomers using the Subaru Telescope's Hyper Suprime-Cam prime-focus camera recently observed the nearby large spiral galaxy M81, together with its two brightest neighbors, M82 and NGC3077. The results of their observations are deep, super wide-field images of the galaxies and their populations of young stars. As part of a Galactic Archaeology study, the team discovered that the spatial distribution of the young stars around these galaxies follows very closely that of their distribution of neutral hydrogen. "This ...

Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have cooled a gas to the quietest state ever achieved, hoping to detect faint quantum effects lost in the din of colder but noisier fluids. While the ultracold gas's temperature - a billionth of a degree above absolute zero - is twice as hot as the record cold, the gas has the lowest entropy ever measured. Entropy is a measure of disorder or noise in a system; a record low temperature gas isn't necessarily the least noisy. "This 'lowest entropy' or 'lowest noise' condition means that the quantum gas can be used to ...

Glenview, Ill. (August 4, 2015)--Researchers have found the risk for hospital readmission to be nearly three times higher after COPD exacerbation if a follow-up visit to a pulmonologist is skipped. The Israeli study published today in the journal CHEST The Association Between Hospital Readmission and Pulmonologist Follow-up Visits in Patients With COPD examined the impact of a pulmonologist follow-up visit during the month after discharge from the hospital on reducing readmissions. COPD exacerbations account for 500,000 hospital admissions and $18 billion in direct health-care ...

Glenview, Ill. (August 4, 2015) -- A case study published in the August issue of the journal CHEST found lenalidomide treatments may have an immediate effect in the treatment of sarcoidosis-related symptoms. Sarcoidosis, a disease that involves abnormal collections of inflammatory cells that can form nodules in various organs, can affect individuals from all racial and age groups. To date, no optimal therapies have been effective in managing this condition. This finding was reported in the case of a 71-year-old woman with a long-standing history of refractory pulmonary ...

An expanded program of treatment for hypertension could prevent about 800,000 cardiovascular disease (CVD) events every year in China, according to a modeling study published this week in PLOS Medicine. The predictions of this simulation, reported by Andrew Moran of Columbia University and colleagues, indicate that such a program should also be borderline cost-effective, provided low cost essential anti-hypertensive drugs are used. Hypertension is the leading cardiovascular risk factor in China, the world's most populous country. About 325 million adults in China have ...

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS- Marketers would love to get inside the consumer brain. And now they can. Researchers at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see if what people say about brands matches what they are actually thinking. In their paper, "From 'Where' to 'What': Distributed Representations of Brand Associations in the Human Brain (Journal of Marketing Research: August 2015, Vol. 52, No. 4), co-authors Ming Hsu and Leif Nelson, Berkeley-Haas marketing professors, and Yu-Ping ...

While most people might know some algae as "pond scum," to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), they are tiny organisms that could provide a source of sustainable fuels. Like plants, they can convert light into energy-rich chemical compounds; unlike plants, they require less space and don't need arable soil to grow. Some algae like Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (or "Chlamy," as it's known to its large research community) produce energy-dense oils or lipids when stressed, and these lipids can then be converted into fuels. However, researchers walk a fine line in not killing ...

Most robots on a factory floor are fairly ham-handed: Equipped with large pincers or claws, they are designed to perform simple maneuvers, such as grabbing an object, and placing it somewhere else in an assembly line. More complex movements, such as adjusting the grasp on an object, are still out of reach for many industrial robots. Engineers at MIT have now hit upon a way to impart more dexterity to simple robotic grippers: using the environment as a helping hand. The team, led by Alberto Rodriguez, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and graduate student ...