UBC scientists have opened the doors to new research into malnutrition by creating an animal model that replicates the imbalance of gut bacteria associated with the difficult-to-treat disease. Malnutrition affects millions of people worldwide and is responsible for one-fifth of deaths in children under the age of five. Children can also experience impaired cognitive development and stunted growth. The problem arises when people don't have enough food to eat and their diet lacks proper nutrients. The disease also has a lot to do with environmental factors and it has ...

In vitro studies of the cellular effects of modeled osteopathic manipulative therapy (OMT) provide proof of concept for the manual techniques practiced by doctors of osteopathic medicine (DOs), according to researchers from the University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix. The study, published in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, focused on modeling two common OMT techniques, myofascial release and counterstrain. Researchers subjected fibroblast matrices to various strains and employed a scratch wound strain model to test the ability of OMT ...

A new strain of yeast called Yarrowia lipolytica Y-3492 was found to be very active in waste water treatment. The discovery was made by by microbiologists from Kazan Federal University during their research at Western Siberian peat bogs. The strain is said to be effective against nitro compounds which are used in explosives, herbicides, insecticides, polymers, dyes, and some medications. Oil refineries and military equipment plants produce especially high amounts of such waste. The research was conducted with the use of widely known trinitrotoluene (TNT). It is well-known ...

COLLEGE STATION -- It's happy hour at a lab in College Station. The cocktail of choice, developed by scientists with Texas A&M AgriLife Research, is one that stops or prevents the deadly Pierce's disease on wine grapes. The discovery could turn a new leaf on the multimillion-dollar U.S. wine industry. Hear, hear. The study, published in the academic journal PLOS ONE, describes the use of four bacteriophages that were identified for their ability to attack the bacteria that causes the devastating disease in grapes and several other plants. A bacteriophage, or phage, ...

A paper from the University of Exeter has highlighted the dangers of relying on climate-based projections of future crop pest distributions and suggests that rapid evolution can confound model results. Crop pests and pathogens are destructive organisms which pose a huge threat to food security and land management across the world. Much research has been carried out into why the pests are spreading, where they are likely to establish next, what damage they will do and what can be done to reduce their impact. In a new synthesis, published today in the Annual Review of ...

Diagnosis of deadly brain conditions could be helped by new research that shows how infectious proteins that cause the disease spread. The study reveals how the proteins - called prions - spread from the gut to the brain after a person or animal has eaten contaminated meat. Scientists say their findings could aid the earlier diagnosis of prion diseases - which include variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in people and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cows. In people, the disease remains very rare - 229 people have died from vCJD since it was first identified ...

The Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists, and the American Society of ExtraCorporeal Technology have released a set of clinical practice guidelines to address management of a patient's temperature during open heart surgery. The guidelines appear in the August issue of The Annals of Thoracic Surgery and were published simultaneously in two other journals. Numerous strategies are currently used to optimally manage the practice of cooling the blood, temperature maintenance (control of body temperature during surgery), and rewarming ...

This news release is available in French. While it is already possible to obtain in vitro pluripotent cells (ie, cells capable of generating all tissues of an embryo) from any cell type, researchers from Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla's team have pushed the limits of science even further. They managed to obtain totipotent cells with the same characteristics as those of the earliest embryonic stages and with even more interesting properties. Obtained in collaboration with Juanma Vaquerizas from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine (Münster, Germany), these ...

Women who exercised during their teen years were less likely to die from cancer and all other causes during middle-age and later in life, according to a new study by investigators at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Shanghai Cancer Institute in China. The study was published online July 31 in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association of Cancer Research. Lead author Sarah Nechuta, Ph.D., MPH, assistant professor of Medicine in the Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center, said understanding the long-term impact of modifiable ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- UF Health researchers have found that care linked to heart attacks and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, among disabled adults covered by Medicaid has improved with the expansion of a new health care program in Texas over the last decade. This approach to health care delivery is growing in popularity across the country, with the number of states implementing similar programs increasing from eight in 2004 to 18 in 2014. These programs have two components: managed care and home- and community-based health services. Managed care is reputed ...

Toxic is bad. Or is it? New studies of seagrasses reveal that they are surprisingly good at detoxifying themselves when growing in toxic seabed. But if seagrasses are stressed by their environment, they lose the ability and die. All over the world seagrasses are increasingly stressed and one factor contributing to this can be lack of detoxification. Seagrass meadows grow along most of the world's coasts where they provide important habitats for a wide variety of life forms. However in many places seagrass meadows have been lost or seriously diminished and in several places, ...

Increasing the number of female speakers at a scientific conference can be done relatively quickly by calling attention to gender disparities common to such meetings and getting more women involved in the conference planning process, suggests a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researcher. Reporting online Aug. 4 in the journal mBio, Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, professor and chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Bloomberg School, lays out how the American Society of Microbiology General Meeting was able ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - New mothers take a close look at their personal relationship with their husband or partner when deciding how much they want him involved in parenting, new research finds. The study found that mothers limited the father's involvement in child-rearing when they perceived their couple relationship to be less stable. Mothers also limited fathers who were less confident in their own ability to raise children. The bottom line is that new mothers are assessing their partners' suitability to be a parent, said Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, co-author of the study and ...

When it comes to courting, one common spider species is quick to learn, and that learning process involves eavesdropping on the visual cues of rivals to win their mate. The latest discovery in a research partnership represented by Alma College, The Ohio State University at Newark and the University of Cincinnati is the featured article in the August issue of the international research journal Animal Behaviour. Previous studies by the researchers explored how brush-legged wolf spiders (Schizocosa ocreata) used visual eavesdropping to try to outdo a male rival's leg-tapping ...

Cholera is a diarrhoeal disease that is caused by an intestinal bacterium, Vibrio cholerae. Recently an outbreak of cholera in Haiti brought public attention to this deadly disease. In this work, the goal of our differential equation model is to find an effective optimal vaccination strategy to minimize the disease related mortality and to reduce the associated costs. The effect of seasonality in pathogen transmission on vaccination strategies was investigated under several types of disease scenarios, including an endemic case and a new outbreak case. This model is an extension ...

WASHINGTON -- Chronic marijuana use by teenage boys does not appear to be linked to later physical or mental health issues such as depression, psychotic symptoms or asthma, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Rutgers University tracked 408 males from adolescence into their mid-30s for the study, which was published in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors. "What we found was a little surprising," said lead researcher Jordan Bechtold, PhD, a psychology research fellow ...

HIV can continue to grow in patients who are thought to be responding well to treatment, according to research by the University of Liverpool. During treatment for HIV the virus hides in blood cells that are responsible for the patient's immune response. The virus does this by inserting its own genetic information into the DNA of the blood cells, called CD4 Tlymphocytes. The study by the University's Institute of Infection and Global Health measured the levels of integrated HIV in the CD4 cells of patients undergoing uninterrupted treatment for up to 14 years, and ...

A super-dense star formed in the aftermath of a supernova explosion is shooting out powerful jets of material into space, research suggests. In a study published today, a team of scientists in the Australia and the Netherlands has discovered powerful jets blasting out of a double star system known as PSR J1023+0038. It was previously thought that the only objects in the Universe capable of forming such powerful jets were black holes. PSR J1023+0038 contains an extremely dense type of star astronomers call a neutron star, in a close orbit with another, more normal ...

Flight simulators for the training of air pilots are well known. But what about riding simulators? Although the first horse simulator was used at the French National Equestrian School in Saumur already in the 1980s, riding simulators for dressage, show jumping, polo or racing, have become available only recently. They look like horses and respond to the aids of the rider via sensors which measure the force exerted by the reins and the rider's legs. Via a screen in front of the simulator, the rider immerses himself into a virtual equestrian world. Simulators are aimed ...

Scientists first had to re-think death before they could develop a way of testing the potential harm to the environment caused by thousands of chemicals humankind uses each day. Researchers led by Dr Roman Ashauer, of the Environment Department at the University of York, refined the technique of survival analysis used routinely by toxicologists, biologists, medical researchers and engineers. The research could pave the way for testing the estimated 15,000 substances discovered daily. Survival analysis which helps to predict a huge range of functions such as the survival ...

New research by scientists at New Zealand's University of Otago and GNS Science is helping to solve the puzzle of how bacteria are able to live in nutrient-starved environments. It is well-established that the majority of bacteria in soil ecosystems live in dormant states due to nutrient deprivation, but the metabolic strategies that enable their survival have not yet been shown. The researchers took an extreme approach to resolving this enigma. They studied a strain of acidobacteria named Pyrinomonas methylaliphatogenes that was cultivated from heated and acidic geothermal ...

A study including researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago found evidence that gut microbes affect circadian rhythms and metabolism in mice. We know from studies on jet lag and night shifts that metabolism--how bodies use energy from food--is linked to the body's circadian rhythms. These rhythms, regular daily fluctuations in mental and bodily functions, are communicated and carried out via signals sent from the brain and liver. Light and dark signals guide circadian rhythms, but it appears that microbes ...

The more than 200 species in the family Mormyridae communicate with one another in a way completely alien to our species: by means of electric discharges generated by an organ in their tails. In a 2011 article in Science that described a group of mormyrids able to perceive subtle variations in the waveform of electric signals, Washington University in St. Louis biologist Bruce Carlson, PhD, noted that another group of mormyrids are much less discriminating (see illustration). The fish with nuanced signal discrimination can glean a stunning amount of information from ...

Cleaning up municipal and industrial wastewater can be dirty business, but engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed an innovative wastewater treatment process that not only mitigates carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but actively captures greenhouse gases as well. The treatment method, known as Microbial Electrolytic Carbon Capture (MECC), purifies wastewater in an environmentally-friendly fashion by using an electrochemical reaction that absorbs more CO2 than it releases while creating renewable energy in the process. "This energy-positive, carbon-negative ...

(BOSTON) - Super productive factories of the future could employ fleets of genetically engineered bacterial cells, such as common E. coli, to produce valuable chemical commodities in an environmentally friendly way. By leveraging their natural metabolic processes, bacteria could be re-programmed to convert readily available sources of natural energy into pharmaceuticals, plastics and fuel products. "The basic idea is that we want to accelerate evolution to make awesome amounts of valuable chemicals," said Wyss Core Faculty member George Church, Ph.D., who is a pioneer ...