For more than 100 years, marine biologists at Friday Harbor Laboratories have studied the ecology of everything from tiny marine plants to giant sea stars. Now, as the oceans are undergoing a historic shift in chemistry, the lab is establishing itself as a place to study what that will mean for marine life. And the University of Washington laboratory is uniquely placed in naturally acidic waters that may be some of the first pushed over the edge by human-generated carbon emissions. A paper published last month in Limnology and Oceanography tracks about two years of ...

Case Western Reserve scientists have discovered that speed matters when it comes to how messenger RNA (mRNA) deciphers critical information within the genetic code -- the complex chain of instructions critical to sustaining life. The investigators' findings, which appear in the March 12 journal Cell, give scientists critical new information in determining how best to engage cells to treat illness -- and, ultimately, keep them from emerging in the first place. "Our discovery is that the genetic code is more complex than we knew," said senior researcher Jeff Coller, PhD, ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A new molecule-making machine could do for chemistry what 3-D printing did for engineering: Make it fast, flexible and accessible to anyone. Chemists at the University of Illinois, led by chemistry professor and medical doctor Martin D. Burke, built the machine to assemble complex small molecules at the click of a mouse, like a 3-D printer at the molecular level. The automated process has the potential to greatly speed up and enable new drug development and other technologies that rely on small molecules. "We wanted to take a very complex process, ...

A new study finds that Interleukin-3 (IL-3), an inflammatory factor most associated with allergic reactions, appears to have an important role in the overwhelming, life-threatening immune reaction called sepsis. In the March 13 issue of Science, investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) describe finding that the presence of IL-3 is essential to the development of sepsis in a mouse model of the condition and that IL-3 levels in human patients with sepsis are higher in those at greater risk of dying. "Sepsis is an extremely dangerous conditions that claims ...

An international research team has shed new light on the diet of some of the earliest recorded humans in Sri Lanka. The researchers from Oxford University, working with a team from Sri Lanka and the University of Bradford, analysed the carbon and oxygen isotopes in the teeth of 26 individuals, with the oldest dating back 20,000 years. They found that nearly all the teeth analysed suggested a diet largely sourced from the rainforest. This study, published in the early online edition of the journal, Science, shows that early modern humans adapted to living in the rainforest ...

An international study involving the University of Southampton suggests there could be a rise in measles cases of 100,000 across the three countries most affected by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa due to health system disruptions. The research in the journal Science, led by Princeton and Johns Hopkins University in the USA, predicts that the size of a measles outbreak will increase from 127,000 at the start of the Ebola epidemic in early 2014, to 227,000 after 18 months of the outbreak. This would result in an additional 5,000 measles deaths, and potentially as many ...

Irvine, Calif. - What does it mean to be happy? Is it how happy you say you are, or is it how happy you act? Previous research has found that political conservatives report being happier than political liberals. But UC Irvine psychologists have discovered that those on the left exhibit happier speech patterns and facial expressions. "The so-called 'happiness gap' between liberals and conservatives is more complicated than we thought," said Sean Wojcik, a doctoral student in psychology & social behavior at UCI and lead author of the study, which appears this month in Science. Prior ...

This is shown in a study to be published in the renowned journal Science by a team of researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. They link the findings to changes in the Arctic caused by man-made global warming. "When the great air streams in the sky above us get disturbed by climate change, this can have severe effects on the ground," says lead-author Dim Coumou. "While you might expect reduced storm activity to be something good, it turns out that this reduction leads to a greater persistence of weather systems in the Northern hemisphere mid-latitudes. ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass--Researchers at MIT have developed a method to stimulate brain tissue using external magnetic fields and injected magnetic nanoparticles -- a technique allowing direct stimulation of neurons, which could be an effective treatment for a variety of neurological diseases, without the need for implants or external connections. The research, conducted by Polina Anikeeva, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, graduate student Ritchie Chen, and three others, has been published in the journal Science. Previous efforts to stimulate the ...

SAN DIEGO (Thursday, March 12, 2015) -- If you're looking to improve your heart health by changing your diet, when you eat may be just as important as what you eat. In a new study published today in Science, researchers at San Diego State University and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies found that by limiting the time span during which fruit flies could eat, they could prevent aging- and diet-related heart problems. The researchers also discovered that genes responsible for the body's circadian rhythm are integral to this process, but they're not yet sure how. Previous ...

Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists have simplified the chemical synthesis of small molecules, eliminating a major bottleneck that limits the exploration of a class of compounds offering tremendous potential for medicine and technology. Scientists led by Martin Burke, an HHMI early career scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, used a single automated process to synthesize 14 distinct classes of small molecules from a common set of building blocks. Burke's team envisions expanding the approach to enable the production of thousands of potentially ...

Boston, Mass., USA - Today at the 93rd General Session and Exhibition of the International Association for Dental Research, researcher Michael L. Meier, Center for Dental Medicine, University of Zürich, Switzerland, will present a study titled "Distinct Brain Mechanisms Related to Dental Pain Relief." The IADR General Session is being held in conjunction with the 44th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research and the 39th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research. Local anesthesia has made life more comfortable for dental ...

The mechanism that causes high-performance athletes to "feel the burn" turns out to be the culprit in what makes people with chronic fatigue syndrome feel exhausted by the most common daily activities, new University of Florida Health research shows. Published in the February issue of the journal Pain, the study shows that the neural pathways that transmit feelings of fatigue to the brain might be to blame. In those with chronic fatigue syndrome, the pathways do their job too well. The findings also provide evidence for the first time that peripheral tissues such as ...

Boston, Mass., USA - Today at the 93rd General Session and Exhibition of the International Association for Dental Research, researcher M.J. Al-Musawi, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, will present a study titled "In Vitro Effects of Topical Neuromodulatory Medication on Orofacial Tissue." The IADR General Session is being held in conjunction with the 44th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research and the 39th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research. Systemic neuromodulatory medication (NM) such as Amitriptyline, ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a gene variant that may be used to predict people most likely to respond to an investigational therapy under development for Alzheimer's disease (AD). The study, published March 12 in Cell Stem Cell, is based on experiments with cultured neurons derived from adult stem cells. "Our results suggest that certain gene variants allow us to reduce the amount of beta amyloid produced by neurons," said senior author Lawrence Goldstein, PhD, director of UC San Diego Sanford Stem Cell Clinical ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - In the continuing debate over how much vitamin E is enough, a new study has found that high levels of blood lipids such as cholesterol and triglycerides can keep this essential micronutrient tied up in the blood stream, and prevent vitamin E from reaching the tissues that need it. The research, just published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, also suggested that measuring only blood levels may offer a distorted picture of whether or not a person has adequate amounts of this vitamin, and that past methods of estimating tissue levels are flawed. The ...

Social media has become an important way for institutions to communicate - both sending messages and receiving feedback - with clients and with the general public. Hospitals and other health care organizations use social media for a variety of purposes, but there has been little investigation of whether hospitals ratings that patients and other consumers submit via social media accurately reflect patient satisfaction or the quality of care delivered. A new study published online in the Journal of General Internal Medicine finds a correlation between how hospitals are rated ...

San Antonio -- March 12, 2015 -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft has measured a curious abundance of methane spewing into the atmosphere of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. A team of American and French scientists published findings in Geophysical Research Letters suggesting two scenarios that could explain the methane abundance observed in the plumes. In 2005 Cassini's magnetometer and imaging data revealed the surprising existence of geysers in the south polar region ejecting water vapor into space. Scientists now believe that Enceladus harbors an internal liquid-water ocean ...

Many of us are walking around all the time in a fog caused by "social jetlag." That's what happens when we lose sleep because our daily schedules don't match our bodies' natural rhythms. The condition can be a particular problem for shift workers, who work into the night or on a shifting schedule. Now, researchers report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on March 12 that sleep and workers' general wellbeing could be improved if work schedules took workers' biological clocks into account. "A 'simple' re-organization of shifts according to chronotype allowed workers ...

This news release is available in German. Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Germany (March 12th 2015) -- A team of researchers from the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Potsdam and the Charité University Hospital in Berlin have revealed how taste is encoded in patterns of neural activity in the human brain. Kathrin Ohla, the lead researcher on the team, said: "The ability to taste is crucial for food choice and the formation of food preferences. Impairments in taste perception or hedonic experience of taste can cause deviant eating behavior, and may lead to mal- or supernutrition. ...

Light can be used to activate normal, non-genetically modified neurons through the use of targeted gold nanoparticles, report scientists from the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. The new technique, described in the journal Neuron on March 12, represents a significant technological advance with potential advantages over current optogenetic methods, including possible use in the development of therapeutics toward diseases such as macular degeneration. "This is effectively optogenetics without genetics," said study senior author Francisco ...

Many animals, including humans, acquired essential 'foreign' genes from microorganisms co-habiting their environment in ancient times, according to research published in the open access journal Genome Biology. The study challenges conventional views that animal evolution relies solely on genes passed down through ancestral lines, suggesting that, at least in some lineages, the process is still ongoing. The transfer of genes between organisms living in the same environment is known as horizontal gene transfer (HGT). It is well known in single-celled organisms and thought ...

Findings from a new study that set out to investigate the evolution of immune defences could boost the development of industrial bacteria that are immune to specific viral infections. The study is published today in the journal Current Biology. Bacteria have many industrial uses including the production of cheese and yoghurt, paper making, biogas and the synthetic production of hormones like insulin. Viral infections of these bacterial cultures can halt production processes resulting in significant financial cost. Dr Edze Westra from the Environment and Sustainability ...

LA JOLLA--For infants with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), something as simple as a common cold or ear infection can be fatal. Born with an incomplete immune system, kids who have SCID--also known as "bubble boy" or "bubble baby" disease--can't fight off even the mildest of germs. They often have to live in sterile, isolated environments to avoid infections and, even then, most patients don't live past a year or two. This happens because stem cells in SCID patients' bone marrow have a genetic mutation that prevents them from developing critical immune cells, called ...

In a new study, published in Cell Reports, researchers at Uppsala University describe a novel mechanism by which lymphatic vessels form during embryonic development. The finding may open new possibilities for repairing damaged lymphatic vessels using stem cells. Olof Rudbeck, professor of medicine at Uppsala University, discovered the lymphatic vascular system in the 17th century. A research group at the institute bearing his name, the Rudbeck Laboratory at Uppsala University, has now discovered a novel origin of the lymphatic system. The prevailing textbook knowledge ...