Montréal, December 5, 2014 - A new study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) sheds new light on a well-known mechanism required for the immune response. Researchers at the IRCM, led by Tarik Möröy, PhD, identified a protein that controls the activity of the p53 tumour suppressor protein known as the "guardian of the genome". The researchers study the development of T cells and B cells, which are lymphocytes (or immune cells) that play a central role in protecting our ...

The drugs we release into the environment are likely to have a significant impact on plant growth, a new study has revelealed. By assessing the impacts of a range of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, researchers at the University of Exeter Medical School and Plymouth University have shown that the growth of edible crops can be affected by these chemicals - even at the very low concentrations found in the environment. Published in the Journal of Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, the research focused its analysis on lettuce and radish plants and tested the ...

CORAL GABLES, Fla (December 4, 2014) -- How does the brain determine what matters? According to a new scientific article, a brain structure called the insula is essential for selecting things out of the environment that are "salient" for an individual, and dysfunction of this system is linked to brain disorders such as autism, psychosis and dementia. In psychology and neuroscience, the term "salient" is used to describe a thing, person, place or event that stands out, or that is set apart from others. The current article, published online by Nature Reviews Neuroscience ...

Apixaban (trade name Eliquis) has been approved since July 2014 for acute treatment of adults with deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism. In addition, the drug can be used for low-dose long-term treatment to prevent recurrent thrombosis or pulmonary embolism. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether in these cases the drug offers patients an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapies. According to the findings, considerable added benefit of apixaban is proven for the initial treatment ...

Emergencies at educational establishments are on the increase in recent years and campus officials are beginning to recognize that better communications with their students are now needed. Writing in the International Journal of Business Information Systems, US researchers describe how social networking sites might be exploited when an emergency situation arises to help safeguard students as well as keeping those not directly involved in the situation informed of events. The same insights might be applied in the business environment too. Wencui Han of the Department of ...

The El Niño Southern Oscillation is Earth's main source of year-to-year climate variability, but its response to global warming remains highly uncertain. Scientists see a large amount of variability in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) when looking back at climate records from thousands of years ago. Without a clear understanding of what caused past changes in ENSO variability, predicting the climate phenomenon's future is a difficult task. A new study shows how this climate system responds to various pressures, such as changes in carbon dioxide and ice ...

Athens, Ga. - A new article detailing the relationship of two U.S. Supreme Court cases and how they work together to uphold freedom of expression has been published in the Georgia Law Review by William E. Lee, professor of journalism in the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Lee's article focuses on New York Times v. Sullivan and its companion case, Abernathy v. Sullivan, in which the court upheld the First Amendment rights of both the press and ministers active in the civil rights movement. These rulings affect today's citizen ...

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is among the most frequent leukemias affecting adults in Western countries. It usually occurs in older patients, does not cause any symptoms for a long time and is often only discovered by accident. Despite treatment, relapses frequently occur. The immunologists Dr. Kristina Heinig and Dr. Uta Höpken (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, MDC, Berlin-Buch) and the hematologist Dr. Armin Rehm (MDC and Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin) have now discovered why this is so. In a mouse model they developed, the ...

This news release is available in German. How can light which has been captured in a solar cell be examined in experiments? Jülich scientists have succeeded in looking directly at light propagation within a solar cell by using a trick. The photovoltaics researchers are working on periodic nanostructures that efficiently capture a portion of sunlight which is normally only poorly absorbed. Until recently, light trapping within periodically nanostructured solar cells could only be analysed using indirect methods, as captured light is not visible from outside ...

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags--devices that can transmit data over short distances to identify objects, animals or people--have become increasingly popular for tracking everything from automobiles being manufactured on an assembly line to zoo animals in transit to their new homes. Now, thanks to a new NIST report, the next beneficiaries of RFID technology may soon be law enforcement agencies responsible for the management of forensic evidence. A typical RFID system consists of a microchip programmed with identifying data--the "tag"--and a two-way radio transmitter-receiver, ...

A study of more than 9,000 men with fertility problems has revealed a correlation between the number of different defects in a man's semen and the likelihood that the man has other health problems. The study, conducted by investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine, also links poor semen quality to a higher chance of having various specific health conditions, such as hypertension, and more generally to skin and endocrine disorders. The findings, to be published online Dec. 10 in Fertility and Sterility, may spur more-comprehensive approaches to treating ...

Nagoya, Japan - Professor Stephan Irle and Yoshio Nishimoto at the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (ITbM) of Nagoya University and Dr. Dmitri Fedorov of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST, Tsukuba) have developed a novel ultrafast quantum chemical method enabling rapid simulations of molecules containing more than a million atoms without detrimental loss in accuracy. This method consists of a combination of the Fragment Molecular Orbital (FMO) approach and the Density-Functional Tight-Binding (DFTB) method, called FMO-DFTB ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- A "Viewpoint" published in JAMA urges readers to be patient with the new federal Open Payments Program database. The site, designed to report drug and device industry payments to physicians, debuted substantially incomplete, the authors wrote, but it is too important to dismiss before its shortcomings are addressed. "Viewed in the abstract, the value inherent in the transparency offered by the OPP database is beyond dispute," wrote Dr. Eli Y. Adashi, former dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown University, and Sachin ...

A research team led by physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) has proven a method that makes it possible to find the atomic structure of proteins in action by producing "snapshots" of them with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. What made it possible were the ultra-short X-ray pulses of a Free Electron Laser (XFEL). Physics professor Marius Schmidt and doctoral student Jason Tenboer recently completed the experiment with the XFEL at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. It confirms that the XFEL imaging method, ...

LOS ANGELES (Dec. 4, 2014) - Genetics may play a larger role in causing Lou Gehrig's disease than previously believed, potentially accounting for more than one-third of all cases, according to one of the most comprehensive genetic studies to date of patients who suffer from the condition also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The study, conducted by investigators at Cedars-Sinai and Washington University in St. Louis, also showed that patients with defects in two or more ALS-associated genes experience disease onset about 10 years earlier than patients ...

A team of scientists that included researchers from UCLA has discovered a novel mechanism of RNA regulation in embryonic stem cells. The findings are strong evidence that a specific chemical modification, or "tag," on RNA plays a key role in determining the ability of embryonic stem cells to adopt different cellular identities. The team also included scientists from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford University. Published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the research reveals that depleting or knocking out a key component of the machinery ...

Friday, December 5, 2014 - London, UK - The Biogerontology Research Foundation (BGRF), a UK-based charity founded to support ageing research and address the challenges of a rapidly ageing population, will present new economic longevity research at the second Big Data Science in Medicine congress in Oxford on December 8. The research, "Longevity expectations in the pension fund, insurance, and employee benefits industry", was recently published in the open-access journal Psychology Research and Behavior Management, and details an extensive survey of International Employee ...

A group of UCL researchers (Louvain Drug Research Institute) identified an unsuspected mechanism impacting the development of obesity and diabetes type 2 after following a diet with a high dose of fat nutrition. The team of Professor Patrice D. Cani - in direct collaboration with two French teams, a Swedish expert as well as other UCL-researchers (LDRI and Ludwig Institute) - made an important discovery related to the essential role of the intestinal immune system regarding the control of the energy metabolism. Today, the work of Doctor Amandine Everard (in charge of ...

Vienna, Austria - 5 December 2014: New 3D printed heart technology could reduce the number of heart surgeries in children with congenital heart disease, according to Dr Peter Verschueren who spoke on the topic today at EuroEcho-Imaging 2014.1 Dr Verschueren brought 3D printed models of the heart to his lecture including models used to plan real cases in patients. EuroEcho-Imaging is the annual meeting of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI), a branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and is held 3-6 December in Vienna, Austria. Dr Verschueren ...

Vienna, Austria - 05 December 2014: Austrian researchers have shown that a new technique which wraps chemotherapy drugs in a fatty cover (called a liposome) reduces heart damage, in a study presented today at EuroEcho-Imaging 2014 by Professor Jutta Bergler-Klein and Professor Mariann Gyöngyösi from the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. EuroEcho-Imaging is the annual meeting of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI), a branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and is held 3-6 December in Vienna. Professor Bergler-Klein said: ...

(BOSTON) -- Stem cells offer great potential in biomedical engineering due to their pluripotency, which is the ability to multiply indefinitely and also to differentiate and develop into any kind of the hundreds of different cells and bodily tissues. But the precise complexity of how stem cell development is regulated throughout states of cellular change has been difficult to pinpoint until now. By using powerful new single-cell genetic profiling techniques, scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Boston Children's Hospital have uncovered ...

Is the human immune system similar to the weather, a seemingly random yet dynamical system that can be modeled based on past conditions to predict future states? Scientists at VCU Massey Cancer Center's award-winning Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) Program believe it is, and they recently published several studies that support the possibility of using next-generation DNA sequencing and mathematical modeling to not only understand the variability observed in clinical outcomes of stem cell transplantation, but also to provide a theoretical framework to make transplantation a ...

On Dec. 4, 2014, the sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 1:25 p.m. EST. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. To see how this event may affect Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, ...

Forecasters at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center expect Super Typhoon Hagupit to reach peak intensity today, Dec. 4, and although expected to weaken, will remain a Category 4 typhoon when it approaches the east central Philippines. NASA's Terra satellite and NASA/JAXA's GPM and TRMM satellites have been providing forecasters with valuable data on the storm. Computer models have varied on their track for the storm based on the strength of an upper-level system, so satellite data is extremely valuable in helping determine where Hagupit will move. On Dec. 3, typhoon Hagupit ...

(Chapel Hill, N.C. - Dec 4, 2014) - Jessica Zègre-Hemsey, a cardiac monitoring expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her colleagues at the University of California San Francisco, revealed more than 2.5 million alarms were triggered on bedside monitors in a single month - the first figure ever reported from a real-world hospital setting. Alarm fatigue occurs when nurses and other clinicians are exposed to a high number of physiological alarms generated by modern monitoring systems. In turn, alarms are ignored and critical alarms are missed ...