Jena (Germany) March 1938: The Italian elementary particle physicist Ettore Majorana boarded a post ship in Naples, heading for Palermo. But he either never arrives there - or he leaves the city straight away - ever since that day there has been no trace of the exceptional scientist and until today his mysterious disappearance remains unresolved. Since then, Majorana, a pupil of the Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi, has more or less been forgotten. What the scientific world does remember though is a theory about nuclear forces, which he developed, and a very particular elementary ...

Hodgkin's lymphoma--cancer of the lymph nodes--arises in more than 150 children and adolescents in Germany each year. Nine out of ten patients survive the disease, thanks to the highly effective treatments that are now available. Depending on the type of treatment given, however, there may be late sequelae, as discussed by Wolfgang Dörffel and colleagues in an original article in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2015; 112: 320-7). These authors studied the question of which types of treatment were more likely to be followed ...

An international team of researchers has for the first time predicted the occurrence of aurorae visible to the naked eye on a planet other than Earth. Mars' upper atmosphere may be indeed closer to Earth's than previously thought. Researchers showed that the upper atmosphere of Mars glows blue depending on the activity of the Sun. The result was achieved through numerical simulation and a laboratory experiment, called the Planeterrella, used to simulate the aurora. The study was published in the leading planetology publication Planetary and Space Science on 26 May. 'The ...

GAINESVILLE, FL -- As the container nursery industry faces severe restrictions on water use, researchers are looking to identify ways to minimize watering needs and eliminate excess watering. The authors of a new study say that understanding container-grown plants' capacity to "capture" sprinkler irrigation water can give growers important tools that help them adjust irrigation rates, reduce water use, and produce healthy plants. Jeff Million and Thomas Yeager from the Department of Environmental Horticulture at the University of Florida say that there has been limited ...

Brisbane flood victims suffered more psychological distress during the rebuilding phase than as waters inundated their homes and businesses, a Queensland University of Technology study has found. Kelly Dixon, from QUT's School of Psychology and Counselling, has looked at the mental health impacts caused by the Brisbane 2011 and the Mackay 2008 flood disasters. "The findings showed that aftermath stress contributed to poor mental health outcomes over and above the flood itself, prior mental health issues and demographic factors," Ms Dixon said. Presenting her findings ...

In a groundbreaking study published recently in the Journal Psychology, Professor Lea Waters from the Melbourne Graduate School of Education outlines how children can draw on their personal strengths to cope with the demands that lead to stress. "While some stress such as toxic stress caused by a long lasting intense negative experience can have a debilitating effect on the wellbeing of children, not all stress is bad or damaging," Professor Waters said. "Positive stress is a normal part of the developmental process. When managed well, it has the potential to help children ...

Warring armies use a variety of tactics as they struggle to gain the upper hand. Among their tricks is to attack with a decoy force that occupies the defenders while an unseen force launches a separate attack that the defenders fail to notice. A study published earlier this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) may employ similar tactics to distract the body's natural defenses. After infecting patients, Hepatitis C evolves many variants, among them an "altruistic" group of viral particles that appears ...

Millions of genetic variants have been discovered over the last 25 years, but interpreting the clinical impact of the differences in a person's genome remains a major bottleneck in genomic medicine. In a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine on May 27, a consortium including investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Partners HealthCare present ClinGen, a program to evaluate the clinical relevance of genetic variants for use in precision medicine and research. "We're dealing with massive amounts of information: more than 80 million genetic ...

Tremendous advances have been made in decoding the human genome in recent years but critical questions remain regarding what these variants mean and how they can be applied in clinical practice. In a comprehensive paper to be published in The New England Journal of Medicine on May 27, 2015, "ClinGen: The Clinical Genome Resource," a consortium including investigators from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) provide a detailed overview of ClinGen, an NIH-supported program to evaluate the clinical relevance of genetic variants for use in precision ...

Women who eat a Mediterranean diet could cut their risk of womb cancer by more than half (57 per cent), according to a study published today (Wednesday) in the British Journal of Cancer*. The Italian researchers looked at the diets of over 5,000 Italian women to see how closely they stuck to a Mediterranean diet and whether they went on to develop womb cancer**. The team broke the Mediterranean diet down into nine different components and measured how closely women stuck to them. The diet includes eating lots of vegetables, fruits and nuts, pulses, cereals and potatoes, ...

If greenhouse-gas emissions continue to rise, glaciers in the Everest region of the Himalayas could experience dramatic change in the decades to come. A team of researchers in Nepal, France and the Netherlands have found Everest glaciers could be very sensitive to future warming, and that sustained ice loss through the 21st century is likely. The research is published today (27 May) in The Cryosphere, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). "The signal of future glacier change in the region is clear: continued and possibly accelerated mass loss ...

The psychological strain of being told that you may have breast cancer may be severe, even if it turns out later to be a false alarm. This is the finding of new research from the University of Copenhagen, which has just been published in the scientific journal Annals of Family Medicine. Researchers call for improving screening accuracy, thus reducing the number of false-positive mammograms. It was a false alarm. You don't have breast cancer. This ought to be a happy message for women who have been through a mammography screening which initially showed signs of something ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. - Degeneration of the white matter of the brain may be an early marker of specific types of Alzheimer's disease (AD), including early-onset AD, according to results of a new study published in the journal Radiology. "Alzheimer's is a gray matter disease," said Federica Agosta, M.D., Ph.D., co-author of the study conducted at the Neuroimaging Research Unit, San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, Italy. "However, white matter damage has a central role in how the disease strikes and progresses." AD is an irreversible, progressive brain disease that ...

The first practical guide to ensure the safe use of flavourings in e-cigarettes has been published (Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology DOI: 10.1016/j.yrtph.2015.05.018). E-cigarettes and other vaping products contain a nicotine-based liquid that is vapourised and inhaled. There is no combustion so the user inhales vapour, not smoke. This means that e-cigarettes deliver nicotine without smoke toxicants. However, some in the public health community still have expressed concerns over the potential health impacts of flavourings used in e-cigarettes. This is why the ...

The spinal tumor grew back. Even though the 16-year old patient endured surgery a year earlier to remove and diagnose the lesion, it was back and its cause unknown. Determined to identify the tumor tissue and set the patient on an appropriate treatment regimen, Albert Telfeian, M.D., a neurosurgeon at Rhode Island Hospital and Hasbro Children's Hospital, performed the first reported case of extracting the tumor endoscopically while the patient was awake and under a local anesthetic. The minimally invasive procedure enabled accurate diagnosis, which evaded multiple physicians ...

New research published today in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) indicates that consuming greater quantities of dietary fibre reduces the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Over 360 million people worldwide are estimated to be affected by diabetes, and this number is projected to increase to more than 550 million by 2030, with serious consequences for the health and economy of both developed and developing countries. While previous research has found an association between increased dietary fibre intake and a reduced risk ...

Professor Teppo Järvinen and colleagues say drug treatment "can achieve at best a marginal reduction in hip fractures at the cost of unnecessary harms and considerable waste of monetary resources." The article is part of The BMJ's Too Much Medicine campaign -- to highlight the threat to human health and the waste of resources caused by unnecessary care. Worldwide, about 1.5 million hip fractures occur each year. They impose an enormous burden on healthcare resources and, with a growing elderly population, their incidence is predicted to rise. Before the late ...

The results show that pills containing one of the newer types of progestogen hormone (drospirenone, desogestrel, gestodene, and cyproterone) are associated with an increased risk of VTE than pills containing older progestogens (levonorgestrel and norethisterone). The researchers, based at the University of Nottingham, say this is "an important clarifying study" that "has sufficient power to provide reliable comparative findings for different formulations of combined oral contraceptives." About 9% of women of reproductive age worldwide use oral contraceptives, rising ...

James Rucker, a psychiatrist and honorary lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, describes how these drugs "were extensively used and researched in clinical psychiatry" before their prohibition in 1967. He explains that many trials of psychedelics published before prohibition, in the 1950s and 1960s, suggested "beneficial change in many psychiatric disorders". However, research ended after 1967. In the UK psychedelic drugs were legally classified as schedule 1 class A drugs - that is, as having "no accepted medical ...

PHILADELPHIA -- HDL is the 'good cholesterol' that helps remove fat from artery walls, reversing the process that leads to heart disease. Yet recent drug trials and genetic studies suggest that simply pushing HDL levels higher doesn't necessarily reduce the risk of heart disease. Now, a team led by scientists from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has shown in a large, forward-looking epidemiological study that a person's HDL function -- the efficiency of HDL molecules at removing cholesterol -- may be a better measure of coronary heart disease ...

A risk gene for dyslexia is associated with impairments in visual motion detection, according to a study published May 27 in The Journal of Neuroscience. Mutations in the gene DCDC2 have previously been associated with dyslexia, and this study found that dyslexics with an altered copy of the gene are unable to detect certain types of visual motion. The researchers used a series of visual tests to compare typical readers with two groups of dyslexics -- one with and one without a specific deletion in the DCDC2 gene. The subjects were presented with images of patterned ...

Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation scientists have pinpointed a cell that begins the process of scarring in fatty tissue. The findings cast new light on a biological process that occurs with obesity and can lead to diabetes. "Scarring can be an important part of the healing process when a person suffers an injury," said OMRF's Lorin Olson, Ph.D., who led the research. "But excessive scarring, or fibrosis, can contribute to many dangerous health conditions." The new research appears in the June 1 issue of the journal Genes & Development. Using experimental models, ...

One of the major challenges of cocaine addiction is the high rate of relapse after periods of withdrawal and abstinence. But new research reveals that changes in our DNA during drug withdrawal may offer promising ways of developing more effective treatments for addiction. Withdrawal from drug use results in reprogramming of the genes in the brain that lead to addictive personality, say researchers from McGill University and Bar Ilan University in a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience. "We inherit our genes from our parents and these genes remain fixed ...

New York, NY--May 25, 2015--Under the direction of Latha Venkataraman, associate professor of applied physics at Columbia Engineering, researchers have designed a new technique to create a single-molecule diode, and, in doing so, they have developed molecular diodes that perform 50 times better than all prior designs. Venkataraman's group is the first to develop a single-molecule diode that may have real-world technological applications for nanoscale devices. Their paper, "Single-Molecule Diodes with High On-Off Ratios through Environmental Control," is published May 25 ...

DALLAS, May 26, 2015 -- Drinking two or more alcoholic beverages daily may damage the heart of elderly people, according to research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging. The study correlated weekly alcohol consumption among 4,466 people -- average age 76 -- to the size, structure and motion of various parts of the heart. Researchers found: The more people drank, the greater the subtle changes to the heart's structure and function. Among men, drinking more than 14 alcoholic beverages weekly (heavy drinking) was linked with ...