Karyotype is usually a stable feature of each species since chromosomal changes, if they occur, may contribute to the formation of barriers between populations causing the establishment of reproductive isolation and speciation as possible consequences. Indeed, mating between individuals with different karyotypes frequently produces hybrids with a reduced fertility (or sterile) due to mis-segregation of chromosomes during meiosis. Despite the occurrence of this general rule, it seems that some animal species failed their examination in genetics and adopt different rules. ...

MADISON, Wis. – Scientists today disclosed a new method to convert lignin, a biomass waste product, into simple chemicals. The innovation is an important step toward replacing petroleum-based fuels and chemicals with biorenewable materials, says Shannon Stahl, an expert in "green chemistry" at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Lignin is the substance that makes trees and cornstalks sturdy, and it accounts for nearly 30 percent of the organic carbon in the biosphere. Stahl, senior author of a new report in the journal Nature, notes that lignin is a waste product ...

Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany and collaborators from Heidelberg University, in the joint Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit, have obtained the first structure of the immature form of HIV at a high enough resolution to pinpoint exactly where each building block sits in the virus. The study, published online today in Nature, reveals that the building blocks of the immature form of HIV are arranged in a surprising way. "The structure is definitely different from what we'd expected," says John Briggs from EMBL, who led ...

A new policy paper led by University of York scientists, in partnership with Proforest, aims to increase awareness among researchers of the High Conservation Value (HCV) approach to safeguarding ecosystems and species. The HCV approach is widely used in sustainable land management schemes to identify important ecosystems and species to conserve, but is little known in academia and the scientific evidence base is lacking. The policy paper encourages new research into the effectiveness of the HCV process and greater knowledge exchange between scientists, HCV users and ...

If chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients with a good or poor prognosis could be identified already at the time of diagnosis, physicians would have better possibilities to adjust their therapeutic and follow-up strategies. Now researchers at Uppsala University, together with international colleagues, have discovered a new correlation between specific molecular features of the disease and subgroups of patients with different prognosis. The results have been published in the journal Lancet Haematology. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is an incurable tumour disease ...

Some MRSA bugs in UK hospitals can be traced back to a type of bacteria found in farm animals, a study suggests. A strain of drug-resistant bacteria carried by some livestock – the MRSA strain Staphylococcus aureus CC398 – has also been found in patients, researchers say. People and animals generally harbour distinct variants of CC398, which the team say evolved from the same original bacteria. However, the CC398 strain found in livestock can be transmitted to humans, and the study shows that this has happened on many occasions. The study provides new ...

Using the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) in near-infrared light [1], the team of astronomers observed 92 nearby stars to probe exozodiacal light from hot dust close to their habitable zones and combined the new data with earlier observations [2]. Bright exozodiacal light, created by the glowing grains of hot exozodiacal dust, or the reflection of starlight off these grains, was observed around nine of the targeted stars. From dark clear sites on Earth, zodiacal light looks like a faint diffuse white glow seen in the night sky after the end of twilight, or ...

Researchers from Australia report that low birth weight and preterm birth are linked to increased risk for osteoarthritis (OA)-related hip replacements in adulthood. Findings published in the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) journal, Arthritis Care & Research, indicate that low birth weight and pre-term babies were not at greater risk of knee arthroplasty due to OA as adults. According to the ACR, 27 million Americans over the age of 25 are diagnosed with clinical OA. Symptoms of OA range from mild to severe and include pain, stiffness, and swelling of joints. ...

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., Nov. 3, 2014 – The March of Dimes is calling for a nationwide effort to reduce U.S. preterm births to 5.5 percent of all live births by 2030. Seven other developed countries already have preterm birth rates below 6 percent, and 15 have rates below 7 percent. The U.S. rate of 11.4 percent in 2013 is one of the highest. The U.S. ranked 37th out of 39 high resource countries in 2010. "The United States spends more money per capita on health care than almost any other country in the world, and yet our premature birth rate and our infant mortality ...

Bird populations across Europe have experienced sharp declines over the past 30 years, with the majority of losses from the most common species, say the University of Exeter, the RSPB and the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS) in a new study. However numbers of some less common birds have risen. The study, published today in the journal Ecology Letters, reveals a decrease of 421 million individual birds over 30 years. Around 90 percent of these losses were from the 36 most common and widespread species, including house sparrows, skylarks, grey partridges ...

THE cancer drug eribulin, originally developed from sea sponges, could give women with advanced triple negative breast cancer an average of five extra months of life, according to research presented at the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer Conference in Liverpool today (Monday). Researchers led by Professor Chris Twelves, based at the University of Leeds and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, looked at two major clinical trials of more than 1,800 women with breast cancer that had started to spread to other parts of the body. The phase III trials – ...

Bariatric (weight loss) surgery, such as gastric bypass or gastric banding, could reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by around 80% in obese people, compared with standard care, new research published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal suggests. Being overweight or obese is the main modifiable risk factor for type 2 diabetes. More than 80% of adults with type 2 diabetes are overweight or obese [1]. In England, just over a quarter of adults (26%) were classified as obese in 2010 (body mass index [BMI] 30kg/m2 or over)[2]. Up to 3% of people with ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) today announced a new way to dramatically increase crop yields by improving upon Mother Nature's offerings. A team led by Associate Professor Zachary Lippman, in collaboration with Israeli colleagues, has discovered a set of gene variations that can boost fruit production in the tomato plant by as much as 100%. Plant breeders will be able to combine different gene variants among the set to create an optimal plant architecture for particular varieties and growing conditions. The set of mutations ...

A new study of the Amazon River basin shows lowland rivers that carry large volumes of sediment meander more across floodplains and create more oxbow lakes than rivers that carry less sediment. The findings have implication for the Amazonian river system, which may be significantly altered by proposed mega-dams that would disrupt sediment supplies. Researchers from Cardiff University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences examined 20 reaches within the Amazon Basin from Landsat imagery spanning nearly 20 years (1985 to 2013). They found rivers transporting larger amounts ...

CINCINNATI—An antibody abundant in mice and previously thought to offer poor assistance in fighting against infection may actually play a key role in keeping immune responses in check and preventing more serious self-inflicted forms of kidney disease, researchers say. Led by researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and published online Nov. 2, 2014, in the journal Nature, the study finds that the mouse antibody IgG1, which is made in large quantities and resembles a human antibody known as IgG4, may actually ...

Two photons in free space do not interact. Light waves can pass through each other without having any influence on each other at all. For many applications in quantum technology, however, interaction between photons is crucial. It is an indispensable prerequisite for transmitting information through tap-proof quantum channels or for building optical logic gates. At the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), scientists have now succeeded in establishing a strong interaction between two single photons. This opens up completely new possibilities for quantum optics. The ...

As a child, it was fascinating to put a flashlight up to our palms to see the light shine through the hand. Washington University in St. Louis engineers are using a similar idea to track movement inside the body's tissues to improve imaging of cancerous tissues and to develop potential treatments. Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the School of Engineering & Applied Science is applying a novel time-reversal technology that allows researchers to better focus light in tissue, such as muscles and organs. Current ...

Nate Silver and Richard Feynman walk into a bar and bump into a biologist . . . While this may sound like the setup to some late-night nerd sketch, researchers have taken this premise and applied it to an increasingly cumbersome problem in modern biology, namely, finding meaning in the rising oceans of genomic data. In this specific instance, the data comprisesreams of cancer mutations that genome-wide studies are publishing at a dizzying rate. The challenge is finding new and efficient ways to parse the signal from the noise (and there is no shortage of noise). As ...

A disappearing act was the last thing Rice University physicist Randy Hulet expected to see in his ultracold atomic experiments, but that is what he and his students produced by colliding pairs of Bose Einstein condensates (BECs) that were prepared in special states called solitons. Hulet's team documented the strange phenomenon in a new study published online this week in the journal Nature Physics. BECs are clumps of a few hundred thousand lithium atoms that are cooled to within one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero, a temperature so cold that the atoms march ...

Antibodies, in charge of recognizing and homing in on molecular targets, are among the most useful tools in biology and medicine. Nanobodies – antibodies' tiny cousins – can do the same tasks, for example marking molecules for research or flagging diseased cells for destruction. But, thanks to their comparative simplicity nanobodies offer the tantalizing prospect of being much easier to produce. Unfortunately, their promise hasn't been fully realized, because scientists have lacked an efficient way of identifying the nanobodies most closely tuned to their ...

Invisible tattoos could replace the permanent dark ink tattoos used to ensure that breast cancer patients having radiotherapy are treated in exactly the same spot during each session, according to results from a pilot study to be presented at the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer Conference today (Sunday)*. Research suggests that the permanent pin prick marks made on the skin of women having radiotherapy reminds them of their diagnosis for years to come, reducing body confidence and self-esteem. It's also more difficult to spot these tattoos in dark-skinned ...

Scientists have identified more than 800 markers in the blood of cancer patients that could help lead to a single blood test for early detection of many types of cancer in future, according to research presented at the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer Conference in Liverpool today (Sunday). This is the first time that cancer-specific blood markers have been comprehensively reviewed and identified for further clinical development. This study, by the UK Early Cancer Detection Consortium*, funded by Cancer Research UK, has analysed 19,000 scientific papers ...

Charlottesville, VA (November 1, 2014). The Journal of Neurosurgery Publishing Group is pleased to announce today's publication of "Pediatric hydrocephalus: systematic literature review and evidence-based guidelines," a supplement to the November issue of the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics. Authored by a volunteer task force from the pediatric neurosurgery community, the supplement offers a thorough evaluation of the current treatments for pediatric hydrocephalus as well as up-to-date evidence-based recommendations for their use. Hydrocephalus is a condition in which ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Last week, the federal government revealed that it will fine more than 2,600 hospitals in the coming year, because too many Medicare patients treated at these hospitals are ending up back in the hospital within 30 days of going home. Two new conditions have been added in this round of penalties: elective hip and knee replacement and chronic lung disease. Now, a new University of Michigan analysis shows that penalties for chronic lung disease will have a greater impact on hospitals that care for poor and minority patients. The findings are published ...

Newly-identified cancer cell fingerprints in the blood could one day help doctors diagnose a range of children's cancers faster and more accurately, according to research* presented at the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer Conference next week. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, found unique molecular fingerprints for 11 types of children's tumours,** which could be used to develop blood tests to diagnose these cancers. This may eventually lead to a quicker, more accurate way to diagnose tumours, ...