One recent spring day, John Durban, a NOAA Fisheries marine mammal biologist, stood on the California coast and launched an unmanned aerial vehicle into the air. The hexacopter--so called because it has six helicopter-type rotors--zipped over the ocean and hovered above a gray whale mother and her calf. The pair was migrating north from their calving grounds off Baja California, Mexico, to their summer feeding grounds in the Arctic. NOAA Fisheries scientists have stood at this point of land each year for the past 22 years, binoculars in hand, to estimate the number of ...

Life-threatening liver inflammation can be caused by excess alcohol, fatty foods, toxins, as well as viral, bacterial, and parasite infections. A study published on May 28th in PLOS Pathogens reports that a specific immune cell type in the liver can dampen the immune response, reduce inflammation, and protect against liver damage. Alain Beschin, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, and colleagues studied the immune response to trypanosome parasites in mice, where they frequently cause liver inflammation and failure. They focused on the role of monocytes, immune ...

The human sensory systems contend with enormous diversity in the natural world. But it has been known for a long time the brain is adapted to exploit statistical regularities that nonetheless arise amongst this diversity. Research publishing this week in PLOS Computational Biology reports that established statistical distributions of visual features, such as visual contrast, spatial scale and depth, differ between dark and bright components of the natural world. For scientists Emily Cooper and Anthony Norcia, gaining a more detailed description of statistical regularities ...

Retrograde amnesia is the inability to recall established memories. In humans, amnesia is associated with traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer's disease, and other neurological conditions. Whether memories lost to amnesia are completely erased or merely unable to be recalled remains an open question. Now, in a finding that casts new light on the nature of memory, published in Science, researchers from the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics demonstrated in mice that traces of old memories do remain in the amnestic brain, and that the cellular pathways underlying them ...

Elevated plasma triglyceride level is considered a risk factor for type-2 diabetes, but new findings suggest that a genetically-elevated triglyceride level is associated with protection against type-2 diabetes. Yann Klimentidis, an Assistant Professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona, and colleagues found that triglyceride-increasing alleles are associated with decreased type-2 diabetes incidence. Their findings were published recently in PLOS Genetics. Building on previous studies that hinted to the same association, ...

Dany Gaillard and colleagues at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have discovered a key molecular pathway that aids the renewal of taste buds, a finding that may help cancer patients suffering from an altered sense of taste during treatment. Their findings were published recently in the journal PLOS Genetics. "Many cancer drugs which circulate throughout the entire body, will target a tumor but in the process affect healthy cells," said the study's senior author Linda Barlow, a professor of cell and developmental biology at University of Colorado Anschutz ...

AURORA, Colo. (May 28, 2015) - Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have discovered a key molecular pathway that aids in the renewal of taste buds, a finding that may help cancer patients suffering from an altered sense of taste during treatment. "Many cancer drugs, which circulate throughout the entire body, will target a tumor but in the process affect healthy cells," said the study's senior author Linda Barlow, PhD, professor of cell and developmental biology at CU Anschutz. "That in turn will alter a person's sense of taste leading to ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Memories that have been "lost" as a result of amnesia can be recalled by activating brain cells with light. In a paper published today in the journal Science, researchers at MIT reveal that they were able to reactivate memories that could not otherwise be retrieved, using a technology known as optogenetics. The finding answers a fiercely debated question in neuroscience as to the nature of amnesia, according to Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor in MIT's Department of Biology and director of the RIKEN-MIT Center at the Picower Institute for Learning ...

This news release is available in Japanese. Long-held social biases can be reduced during sleep, a new report suggests. It adds further support to recent research that has shown that memories can be selectively reactivated and strengthened during slumber. Scientists have known that sleep boosts memory formation by resuscitating faint neuron activity shaped during earlier periods, when an individual was awake. This process can be experimentally stimulated by giving a sleeping individual cues related to an earlier period of learning. Now, Xiaoqing Hu and colleagues ...

This news release is available in Japanese. Xiaochun Qin and colleagues have provided a high-resolution crystal structure of a plant protein supercomplex critical to photosynthesis, shedding new light on how this extremely effective solar energy converter achieves its impressive performance. The photosynthesis of many plants relies upon the large light-harvesting complex I (LHC1), which surrounds photosystem I (PSI) and captures sunlight. LHC1 is able to transfer the energy it absorbs to the PSI core, where it is converted into chemical energy with close to 100% efficiency. ...

This news release is available in Japanese. Memories that have been destabilized and forgotten by mice can nevertheless be retrieved by activating memory engrams, or specific patterns of neurons that fire when memories are encoded, with light, researchers say. These findings provide fresh insight into memory consolidation, or the process by which new, unstable memories transform into stable, long-term memories. Until now, researchers have wondered whether memory consolidation was dependent upon the stabilization of these memory engrams. But Tomás Ryan and colleagues ...

This news release is available in Japanese. Armadas of icebergs that broke off the Greenland ice sheet into the northern Atlantic Ocean during the Last Glacial Period -- between about 110,000 and 12,000 years ago -- often increased methane production in the tropics, according to a new study. These findings illustrate how high-latitude events can influence tropical climate conditions, and they hint at the underlying mechanisms of abrupt climate changes. Such massive discharges of icebergs into the Atlantic are known as Heinrich Events, and researchers have wondered for ...

CHICAGO --- HIV has a voracious sweet tooth, which turns out to be its Achilles' heel, reports a new study from Northwestern Medicine and Vanderbilt University. After the virus invades an activated immune cell, it craves sugar and nutrients from the cell to replicate and fuel its wild growth throughout the body. Scientists discovered the switch that turns on the immune cell's abundant sugar and nutrient pipeline. Then they blocked the switch with an experimental compound, shutting down the pipeline, and, thereby, starving HIV to death. The virus was unable to replicate ...

Zoonotic malaria has been shown to be caused by two genetically distinct Plasmodium knowlesi parasite subpopulations associated with different monkey host species in Malaysia, according to new research published in PLOS Pathogens. The authors believe this could have important implications for how the parasite adapts and spreads in humans. Plasmodium knowlesi is a zoonotic malaria parasite which is common in forest-dwelling macaques. In recent years, increasing numbers of cases of knowlesi malaria have been reported in humans. The disease is now the most common form of ...

Different people can vary substantially in their genetic susceptibility to viruses, including HIV. Although the biology that underlies this variation in humans is still being uncovered, it seems that we may be able to learn some key lessons from our closest cousins. A gene variant in chimpanzees in a Tanzanian wildlife preserve probably protects them from rapidly succumbing to the primate equivalent of HIV, Stanford University School of Medicine scientists report in the open access journal PLOS Biology, publishing May 28. The wild chimps inhabit Gombe Stream National ...

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Can we learn to rid ourselves of our implicit biases regarding race and gender? A new Northwestern University study indicates that sleep may hold an important key to success in such efforts. Building on prior research, the Northwestern investigators aimed to find out whether learning to alter habitual reactions to other people could be enhanced during sleep. Other researchers have documented many unsavory consequences of common social biases. When playing a videogame with instructions to shoot only people carrying weapons, players were more likely ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - A new study shows how huge influxes of fresh water into the North Atlantic Ocean from icebergs calving off North America during the last ice age had an unexpected effect - they increased the production of methane in the tropical wetlands. Usually increases in methane levels are linked to warming in the Northern Hemisphere, but scientists who are publishing their findings this week in the journal Science have identified rapid increases in methane during particularly cold intervals. These findings are important, researchers say, because they identify ...

TAMPA, Fla. - Advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients have few effective treatment options and low 5-year survival rates. The checkpoint inhibitors MEDI4736 and tremelimumab have both demonstrated acceptable safety and potential efficacy when used as single-agents in several different types of cancer. Scott J. Antonia, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Thoracic Oncology Department at Moffitt Cancer Center will be presenting data from a phase 1b dose-escalation and expansion study of MEDI4736 combined with tremelimumab at the 2015 American Society of Clinical Oncology ...

TAMPA, Fla. - Prostate cancer is the second most common type of cancer in men and is predicted to result in an estimated 220,00 cases in the United States in 2015. In recent years, an emphasis has been placed on chemoprevention - the use of agents to prevent the development or progression of prostate cancer. A team of researchers led by Nagi B. Kumar, Ph.D., R.D., F.A.D.A. at Moffitt Cancer Center recently published results of a randomized trial that assessed the safety and effectiveness of the active components in green tea to prevent prostate cancer development in men ...

TAMPA, Fla. - Chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMML) is a rare type of myelodysplastic, myeloproliferative neoplasm characterized by increased numbers of peripheral monocytes and less than 20 percent blasts. CMML has few treatment options and patients only survive on average for 12 to 24 months. Preclinical studies suggest that JAK2 inhibitors may be an effective treatment option for CMML. Eric Padron, M.D., assistant member of the Malignant Hematology Program at Moffitt Cancer Center will report on the first phase 1 study of the JAK2 inhibitor ruxolitinib in CMML patients ...

TAMPA, Fla. - The monoclonal antibody nivolumab has shown promise as a therapeutic agent, particularly by improving the survival rates of melanoma patients. Jeffrey S. Weber, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Donald A. Adam Comprehensive Melanoma Research Center at Moffitt Cancer Center will be presenting data from a retrospective analysis of the safety of nivolumab in 4 ongoing phase I-III studies in melanoma patients at the 2015 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting in Chicago. Nivolumab targets a protein called the programmed death-1 (PD-1) receptor. The ...

Many living things can respond to electric fields, either moving or using them to detect prey or enemies. Weak electric fields may be important growth and development, and in wound healing: it's known that one of the signals that guides cells into a wound to repair it is a disturbance in the normal electric field between tissues. This ability to move in response to an electric field is called galvanotaxis or electrotaxis. UC Davis dermatology professor Min Zhao, Peter Devroetes at Johns Hopkins University and colleagues hope to unravel how these responses work, studying ...

Unstable funding is threatening the viability of academic biomedical research in this country, according to a new paper published this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The paper was written jointly by the deans of 19 prominent medical schools around the country. Among this group is University of Maryland School of Medicine Dean E. Albert Reece. "We must reinvigorate the federal-academic partnership for research across all sciences," the authors write. If the current trends in funding continue, both established investigators and early-career scientists ...

CHICAGO (May 28, 2015): Traumatic injury is the leading cause of death among people under age 45, but if trauma physicians could deliver plasma to these injury victims within minutes of their arrival in the emergency room, more of them would stand a better chance of survival. When they arrive at the hospital, trauma victims can often wait 30 minutes or longer to receive plasma because the traditional way of giving them plasma involves two time-consuming steps: testing for blood type and then thawing frozen plasma. "There's a golden hour after trauma where you need to ...

Using a complex modeling program that helps analyze the physical dynamics of large, structurally complex protein molecules, a research team has made progress towards finding a weak spot in the architecture of a group of enzymes that are essential to antibiotic resistance in a number of bacteria. In an article published in PLOS ONE, University of North Carolina at Charlotte senior biology major Jenna R. Brown and her faculty mentor, UNC Charlotte professor of bioinformatics and genomics Dennis R. Livesay, present an analysis of the four currently known protein structures ...