Washington, DC - July 30, 2015 - In research that could lead to protective probiotics to fight the "chytrid" fungus that has been decimating amphibian populations worldwide, Jenifer Walke, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, and her collaborators have grown bacterial species from the skin microbiome of four species of amphibians. The research appears July 10 in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. In the study, the investigators swabbed the four species, all of which inhabit Virginia. ...

PHILADELPHIA -- The importance of a diet rich in fish oils - now a billion dollar food-supplement industry -- has been debated for over half a century. A few large clinical trials have supported the idea that fish oils confer therapeutic benefits to patients with cardiovascular disease. Researchers think that hearts and blood vessels may benefit in part from their anti-inflammatory properties. Synthetic versions of marine fish lipid-derived molecules called specialized pro-resolving mediators (SPMs) show anti-inflammatory properties in cell cultures and live animal models. ...

Not every mom and dad agree on how their offspring should behave. But in genetics as in life, parenting is about knowing when your voice needs to be heard, and the best ways of doing so. Typically, compromise reigns, and one copy of each gene is inherited from each parent so that the two contribute equally to the traits who make us who we are. Occasionally, a mechanism called genomic imprinting, first described 30 years ago, allows just one parent to be heard by completely silencing the other. Now, researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine report on a ...

If the technical features of a new camera delight the tech experts but leave consumers scratching their heads, how should a retailer's website present those views and what sales results could it expect? A paper to be published in the September issue of the Journal of Retailing provides insights on the relatively new phenomenon of online user reviews. In "User Reviews Variance, Critic Reviews Variance, and Product Sales: An Exploration of Customer Breadth and Depth Effects," Feng Wang of Hunan University, Xuefeng Liu of Loyola University Maryland, and Eric Fang of ...

A national coalition of experts that includes two University of Washington researchers has a bold plan to reduce behavioral health problems such as violence and depression among young people across the country by 20 percent in a decade. And their proposal rests on one simple principle: prevention. The group's paper, recently published on the National Academy of Medicine website, recommends implementing evidence-based prevention programs on a national scale to reduce a host of problems ranging from drinking to delinquent behavior, anxiety and risky driving. It notes ...

Many physicians are pushing back against or debating new requirements for maintaining medical board certifications, which affect more than 250,000 physicians nationwide. Now, a new study by UC San Francisco and Stanford University researchers concludes that the cost of implementing the most recent requirements will be an estimated $5.7 billion over the next 10 years. In their study, published online on July 27, 2015, in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the researchers found that most costs of the latest maintenance-of-certification (MOC) requirements implemented for ...

Athens, Ga. - An international team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Georgia has discovered how parasitic plants, which steal their nutrients from another living plant, evolved the ability to detect and attack their hosts. Their findings, published recently in the journal Science, could lead to new techniques to control the thieving weeds. There are thousands of parasitic plant species, but the most burdensome for humans are those that infiltrate farmland and destroy crops. Parasite infestations reduce crop yields by billions of dollars each year, ...

In cells with latent HIV infection, the virus is dormant, and such cells are therefore not attacked by the immune system or by standard antiretroviral therapy. To eradicate the virus from the human body and truly cure a patient, reservoirs of latently infected cells need to be activated and eliminated "the so-called "kick-and-kill" approach. Two studies published on July 30th in PLOS Pathogens report encouraging results on the use of a combination of several drugs to efficiently reactivate HIV in cells with latent infection. Please contact plospathogens@plos.org if you ...

A deadly fungus identified in 2013 could devastate native salamander populations in North America unless U.S. officials make an immediate effort to halt salamander importation, according to an urgent new report published today in the journal Science. San Francisco State University biologist Vance Vredenburg, his graduate student Tiffany Yap and their colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles say the southeastern United States (particularly the southern extent of the Appalachian Mountain range and its southern neighboring ...

Scientists at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the School of Public Health of Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong have shown for the first time that it is possible to predict the timing and intensity of influenza outbreaks in subtropical climates like Hong Kong where flu seasons can occur at different times and more than once during a year. Results appear online in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. Since the 2013-2014 season, the Mailman School scientists have published weekly regional flu forecasts for over 100 ...

Worldwide, influenza kills an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 people each year. A new study publishing in PLOS Computational Biology has shown that for the first time it is possible to predict the timing and intensity of influenza outbreaks in subtropical climates, such as Hong Kong, where flu seasons can occur at irregular intervals year-round. The team of scientists from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the University of Hong Kong used data from a network of 50 outpatient clinics and laboratory reports in Hong Kong from 1998 to 2013 as a test case ...

This news release is available in Japanese. During the first ever landing of a probe on a comet, the world held its breath as Philae survived a bouncy landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12, 2014. This special issue of Science highlights seven new studies that delve further into the data that has been transmitted back by Philae. In a detailed account, Jens Biele et al. describe the critical moments where Philae descends on 67P, only to bounce off the soft, intended landing area and finally settle on a harder surface farther away. Analysis ...

This news release is available in Japanese. By studying how water striders jump on water, Je-Sung Koh and colleagues have created a robot that can successfully launch itself from the surface of water. As the team watched the water strider jump on water surfaces using high-speed cameras, they noticed that the long legs accelerate gradually, so that the water surface doesn't retreat too quickly and lose contact with the legs. Using a theoretical model of a flexible cylinder floating on liquid, the authors found that the maximum force of the water striders' legs is always ...

This news release is available in Japanese. The international pet trade threatens to spread a deadly fungal infection to North America's rich wild salamander population and must be frozen, according to the authors of this Policy Forum. Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal) is a highly virulent, often fatal fungus that infects salamanders, and there is no effective way to control it after it infects a wild population, say Tiffany Yap and colleagues. It is theorized that Bsal started in Asia and spread to wild European salamanders via the international pet ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - July 30, 2015 - A study released today at the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery 12th Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California, indicates that strict adherence to two commonly-used tools to weigh the risk of treating unruptured aneurysms may not prevent the majority of morbidity-mortality outcomes associated with ruptured intracranial aneurysms. Thus, the International Study of Unruptured Intracranial Aneurysms (ISUIA) criteria and the PHASES score require additional research to determine their effectiveness. Published in 2003, the ISUIA study ...

Boston, MA -- New research from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health describes a molecular mechanism that helps explain how obesity-related inflammation can lead to type 2 diabetes. The findings describe a surprising connection between two molecular processes that are known to be involved in the development of metabolic disease--inflammation and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) dysfunction--and suggest that targeting this connection could aid in the development of new therapies. The study will be published in the July 31, 2015 issue of Science. Specifically, the researchers ...

Scientists have long worked to understand how crystals grow into complex shapes. Crystals are important in materials from skeletons and shells to soils and semiconductor materials, but much is unknown about how they form. Now, an international group of researchers has shown how nature uses a variety of pathways to grow crystals that go beyond the classical, one-atom-at-a-time route. The findings, published today (Thursday, July 30) in Science, have implications for decades-old questions in science and technology regarding how animals and plants grow minerals into shapes ...

IgA deficiency is one of the most common genetic immunodeficiency disorders in humans and is associated with an insufficiency or complete absence of the antibody IgA. Researchers led from Uppsala University and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now performed the first comparative genetic study of IgA deficiency by using the dog as genetic disease model. Novel candidate genes have been identified and the results are published in PLOS ONE. People with low IgA are at higher risk for developing recurrent infections, allergies and autoimmunity. The underlying genetic factors ...

Highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) has helped millions survive the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Unfortunately, HIV has a built-in survival mechanism, creating reservoirs of latent, inactive virus that are invisible to both HAART and the immune system. But now, researchers at UC Davis have identified a compound that activates latent HIV, offering the tantalizing possibility that the virus can be flushed out of the silent reservoirs and fully cured. Even better, the compound (PEP005) is already approved by the FDA. The study was published in the journal ...

(SEOUL and BOSTON) - The concept of walking on water might sound supernatural, but in fact it is a quite natural phenomenon. Many small living creatures leverage water's surface tension to maneuver themselves around. One of the most complex maneuvers, jumping on water, is achieved by a species of semi-aquatic insects called water striders that not only skim along water's surface but also generate enough upward thrust with their legs to launch themselves airborne from it. Now, emulating this natural form of water-based locomotion, an international team of scientists from ...

A study by researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Duke University helps explain why the candidate vaccine used in the HVTN 505 clinical trial was not protective against HIV infection despite robustly inducing anti-HIV antibodies: the vaccine stimulated antibodies that recognized HIV as well as microbes commonly found in the intestinal tract, part of the body's microbiome. The researchers suggest that these antibodies arose because the vaccine boosted an existing antibody response to the intestinal microbiome, which may explain why ...

Washington -- Thousands of nonhuman primates continue to be confined alone in laboratories despite 30-year-old federal regulations and guidelines mandating that social housing of primates should be the default. A new article co-authored by PETA scientists and Marymount University researchers, published in Perspectives in Laboratory Animal Science, argues that many laboratories cage primates alone--a harmful practice often done for convenience--and that the U.S. government isn't doing enough to address this growing problem. Decades of research shows that housing highly ...

Boulder, Colo., USA - Two hundred and fifty million years ago, all the major continents were joined together, forming a continent called Pangea (which means "all land" in Greek). The plate thickness of continents can now be measured using seismology, and it is surprisingly variable, from about 90 km beneath places like California or Western Europe, to more than 200 km beneath the older interiors of the U.S., Eastern Europe, and Russia. Authors Dan McKenzie, Michael C. Daly, and Keith Priestley wondered what the pattern of plate thickness looked like before Pangea broke ...

190 million Americans share the luxuries of human life with their pets. Giving dogs and cats a place in human homes, beds and--sometimes even, their wills--comes with the family member package. Amongst these shared human-pet comforts is the unique luxury to overeat. As a result, the most common form of malnutrition for Americans and their companion animals results not from the underconsumption, but the overconsumption of food. The obesity epidemic also causes a similar array of diseases in people and pets: diabetes, hyperlipidemia and cancer. During this year's ADSA-ASAS ...

Do you ever notice how stress and mental frustration can affect your physical abilities? When you are worried about something at work, do you find yourself more exhausted at the end of the day? This phenomenon is a result of the activation of a specific area of the brain when we attempt to participate in both physical and mental tasks simultaneously. Ranjana Mehta, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health, conducted a study evaluating the interaction between physical and mental fatigue and brain behavior. The study showed ...