The human body is a cross between a factory and a construction zone -- at least on the cellular level. Certain proteins act as project managers, which direct a wide variety of processes and determine the fate of the cell as a whole. One group of proteins called the WD-repeat (WDR) family helps a cell choose which of the thousands of possible gene products it should manufacture. These WDR proteins fold into a three-dimensional structure resembling a doughnut -- an unusual shape that allows WDR proteins to act as stable platforms on which large protein complexes can assemble ...

Offering a potential early intervention for Alzheimer's disease (AD), researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Cenna Biosciences, Inc. have identified compounds that block the production of beta amyloid peptides in mice. The study is reported April 29 in PLOS ONE. If the results ultimately translate to human treatment, the most promising compound - a peptide dubbed P8 - could be administered to individuals at high risk of developing the disease, long before the tell-tale signs of dementia occur and perhaps with few side effects, due to ...

Understanding extinct species diets may require a greater understanding of the relationship between skull biomechanics and the animals' ancestry than previously thought, according to a new study published April 29, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Zhijie Jack Tseng and John Flynn from the American Museum of Natural History. The diet of long-extinct animals may be inferred by using modern animals with similar skull shapes and tooth patterns as models, but scientists aren't sure if diet is the main factor influencing skull shape and biomechanics. To understand ...

April 24, 2015. Almost since the time of Melville's epic hunt, scientists have been fascinated by the remarkable attributes of the sperm whale and its kin, the smaller pigmy and dwarf whales. Capable of diving to great depths and gifted with an acute sense of echolocation, these animals have remained inseparable from maritime lore. An international team of scientists, led by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County's Curator of Marine Mammals Dr. Jorge Velez-Juarbe, has discovered a new species of an extinct pigmy sperm whale from Panama that clarifies key aspects ...

(Philadelphia, PA) - For more than 100 years, exposing students to basic and clinical research has been an essential component of a medical school education in the United States. However, today, new models of medical education in which research plays a minimal role are likely to create a two-tiered system of education, decrease the physician-scientist pipeline and diminish the application of scientific advances to patient care. Those are the concerns outlined in "American Medical Education at a Crossroads" - a position paper published April 29 by Science Translational ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Kaiba was just a newborn when he turned blue because his little lungs weren't getting the oxygen they needed. Garrett spent the first year of his life in hospital beds tethered to a ventilator, being fed through his veins because his body was too sick to absorb food. Baby Ian's heart stopped before he was even six months old. Three babies all had the same life-threatening condition: a terminal form of tracheobronchomalacia, which causes the windpipe to periodically collapse and prevents normal breathing. There was no cure and life-expectancies were ...

Having to pay for dental health care can put a considerable strain on household finances in many countries, according to an international study led by King's College London. The new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, assessed the extent of household 'catastrophic dental health expenditure' (CDHE) in 41 low and middle income countries. Expenditure was defined as catastrophic if it was equal to or higher than 40% of the household's capacity to pay. Up to 7% of the households surveyed in these countries had incurred catastrophic dental health expenditure in ...

New Haven, Conn.--Improving access to public toilets in South African urban settlements may reduce both the incidence of sexual assaults by nearly 30% and the overall cost to society, a study by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Management found. The research was published April 29 in PLOS ONE. Development and human rights organizations have pointed to inadequate local sanitation facilities as a key factor in a woman's risk for physical or sexual assault. Many women in South Africa must travel out of their homes to public toilets, ...

The Public Health Agency of Sweden has developed a method of typing that can allow laboratories to faster establish the presence of hospital outbreaks of the intestinal bacterium Clostridium difficile. The findings are now published in PLOS ONE. The Clostridium difficile bacteria exist in the intestines of 2-5 per cent of the healthy population, and is rather common among infants. In certain circumstances the bacteria can induce diarrhea in persons treated with antibiotics. The diarrhea is in some cases serious. The majority of the cases occur at hospitals. This is ...

HOUSTON - (April 29, 2015) - Researchers in the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston Methodist and the Texas Children's Hospital have expanded the use of virus-specific cell therapy in cord blood transplant patients to successfully prevent three of the most problematic post-transplant viruses affecting this group of patients that have yet to be addressed clinically - cytomegalovirus (CMV), Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), and adenovirus. The team published their results of a clinical trial that evaluated the safety and efficacy of the therapy ...

Scientists have identified chemical markers in urine associated with body mass, providing insights into how obesity causes disease. Being overweight or obese is associated with higher risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer, but the mechanisms connecting body fat and disease are not well understood. The new study, led by Imperial College London, shows that obesity has a 'metabolic signature' detectable in urine samples, pointing to processes that could be targeted to mitigate its effects on health. The findings are published in Science Translational Medicine. Urine ...

Locally-sourced antibiotics can be as effective as 'internationally quality-assured' (IQA) antibiotics for treating multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in Pakistan, and may help avoid delays in starting treatment while programmes wait for drugs to arrive from overseas, according to new research published in PLOS ONE. The study is the first to compare outcomes of MDR-TB patients treated using IQA drugs with those treated using locally procured drugs in the same hospitals over the same period. It was a collaboration between researchers from the London School of ...

Government policies that support UK pharmaceutical science and enhance export income are costing the NHS millions and undermine the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. In an essay published today by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, health economists Professor Alan Maynard and Professor Karen Bloor describe an inflationary regulatory system that lacks accountability, is not evidence-based and subverts the efficiency of the technology appraisal work carried out by NICE, a target of pharmaceutical industry hostility since it was established in 1999. Professors ...

If you want to know the secrets of healthier eating, think of the kitchen fruit bowl. A fruit bowl makes fruit more convenient, attractive, and normal to eat than if the same fruit were in the bottom of the refrigerator. A new Cornell study analyzed 112 studies that collected information about healthy eating behaviors and found that most healthy eaters did so because a restaurant, grocery store, school cafeteria, or spouse made foods like fruits and vegetables visible and easy to reach (convenient), enticingly displayed (attractive), and appear like an obvious choice ...

Having a child diagnosed with epilepsy can be a frightening and confusing time. Now, parents share their arduous and "circuitous" journey to get referrals for pediatric epilepsy surgery once their child's disease stops responding to anti-seizure medications. The UCLA study sheds light on the difficulties parents face obtaining specialty and sub-specialty care for their children during an already stressful time. The study points to the need to develop interventions that target and remediate these barriers to comprehensive epilepsy care for children, said study first ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Individuals with Type 2 Diabetes have difficulty regulating their glucose -- or blood sugar -- levels, particularly after meals. Now, University of Missouri researchers have found that Type 2 diabetics can eat more protein at breakfast to help reduce glucose spikes at both breakfast and lunch. "People often assume that their glucose response at one meal will be identical to their responses at other meals, but that really isn't the case," said Jill Kanaley, professor and associate chair in the MU Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology. "For instance, ...

Weill Cornell Medical College researchers have shown for the first time that a gene previously implicated in blood vessel formation during embryonic development and tumor growth also induces immune suppression during tumor development. This finding, published April 29 in Nature Communications, opens the door for new therapeutic approaches and vaccine development in treating patients with melanoma and other advanced-staged cancers. Two decades ago, researchers discovered that a gene called Inhibitor of Differentiation 1 (Id1), which is normally found in the embryo, was ...

Chemotherapy can be very effective against small prostate tumors. Larger prostate tumors, however, accumulate cells that suppress the body's immune response, allowing the cancer to grow despite treatment. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine now find that blocking or removing these immune-suppressing cells allows a special type of chemotherapy -- and the immune cells it activates -- to destroy prostate tumors. This novel combination therapy, termed chemoimmunotherapy, achieved near complete remission in mouse models of advanced prostate ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - A new study using evidence from a highly detailed ice core from West Antarctica shows a consistent link between abrupt temperature changes on Greenland and Antarctica during the last ice age, giving scientists a clearer picture of the link between climate in the northern and southern hemispheres. Greenland climate during the last ice age was very unstable, the researchers say, characterized by a number of large, abrupt changes in mean annual temperature that each occurred within several decades. These so-called "Dansgaard-Oeschger events" took place ...

Video didn't killed the radio star, as the eponymous 1978 pop song predicted, and now, researchers have found, cross-channel discounts for online movie sales don't cannibalize online rentals of the same movie. Analyzing data from a major movie studio that distributes its catalog of titles online, Jing Gong, a doctoral candidate in information systems and management at Carnegie Mellon University, and her co-authors measured the impact of price discounts on own- and cross-channel sales of digital movies. They confirmed their expectation that digital movie consumers are ...

Seattle, WA, April 29, 2015 - Patients with esophageal cancer who survive 5 years after undergoing surgery might breathe a sigh of relief and become complacent about continued monitoring. In fact, there is little published information on the outcome of patients with locally advanced esophageal cancer (LAEC) who survive beyond the 5-year mark. A study that will be presented by Brendon Stiles, MD, Associate Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, at the 95th AATS Annual Meeting finds that these survivors still face ...

Danish researchers from the University of Copenhagen and Herlev Hospital have made a discovery that may change the principles for treating certain types of cancer. The discovery relates to the so-called telomeres that constitute the ends of human chromosomes. Short telomeres are related to unhealthy lifestyles, old age and the male gender - all of which are risk factors in terms of high mortality. Up until now, the assumption has been that short telomeres are related to ill health. The challenge for researchers worldwide has therefore been to find out whether or not the ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (April 28, 2015) - Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been transplanted to successfully treat a variety of diseases and conditions. The benefit of using MSCs is their ability to self-renew and differentiate into a variety of specialized cell types, such as osteoblasts (cells contributing to bone formation), chondrocytes (cartilage cells), adipocytes (fat cells), myocardiocytes (the muscle cells that make up the cardiac muscle), and neurons (nervous system cells). MSCs have shown the ability to modulate the immune response and therefore reduce local ...

A new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine has identified demographic, socioeconomic and cultural factors that contribute to a major gender disparity among U.S. men and women undergoing weight loss surgeries. Men undergo the surgeries in far lower numbers than women. The study is published in the March issue of the Journal of Laparoendoscopic & Advanced Surgical Techniques. Eighty percent of patients who undergo bariatric surgery, which involve procedures that either limit the amount of food that can be consumed or reduce ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- The adage "out of sight, out of mind" applies to electricity use, according to new research from Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. A study of 16 years of billing records from one South Carolina utility found that residential customers using automatic bill payments consumed 4 to 6 percent more power than those who did not. Commercial electricity customers used 8 percent more. And low-income residents who enrolled in budget billing to spread the cost of seasonal peak demand across the year used 7 percent more electricity. "It's a perverse ...