CINCINNATI – Researchers developed a new type of cell transplantation to treat mice mimicking a rare lung disease that one day could be used to treat this and other human lung diseases caused by dysfunctional immune cells. Scientists at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center report their findings in a study posted online Oct. 1 by Nature. In the study, the authors used macrophages, a type of immune cell that helps collect and remove used molecules and cell debris from the body. They transplanted either normal or gene-corrected macrophages into the respiratory ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass--Error-correcting codes are one of the glories of the information age: They're what guarantee the flawless transmission of digital information over the airwaves or through copper wire, even in the presence of the corrupting influences that engineers call "noise." But classical error-correcting codes work best with large chunks of data: The bigger the chunk, the higher the rate at which it can be transmitted error-free. In the Internet age, however, distributed computing is becoming more and more common, with devices repeatedly exchanging small chunks of ...

Contrary to the popular research-based assumption that the world's coral reefs are doomed, a new longitudinal study from UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) paints a brighter picture of how corals may fare in the future. An NCEAS working group reports that there will be winners and losers among coral species facing increasing natural and human-caused stressors. However, its experts demonstrate that a subset of the present coral fauna will likely populate the world's oceans as water temperatures continue to rise. The findings ...

PITTSBURGH—The notion of "group selection"—that members of social species exhibit individual behavioral traits that render a population more or less fit for survival—has been bandied about in evolutionary biology since Darwin. The essence of the argument against the theory is that it's a "fuzzy" concept without the precision of gene-based selection. Jonathan Pruitt, assistant professor of behavioral ecology in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Biological Sciences within the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, has published a paper today in the ...

Spiders found in international cargo brought into North America are sometimes submitted to arachnologists for identification. Often, these spiders are presumed to be of medical importance because of their size or similarity to spiders that are known to be venomous. In 2006, after witnessing multiple episodes where harmless spiders were mistaken for toxic ones, Dr. Richard Vetter, an arachnologist at the University of California, asked other arachnologists to provide data on specimens they found in international cargo that had been submitted to them for identification. ...

New insights into botulinum neurotoxins and their interactions with cells are moving scientists ever closer to safer forms of Botox and a better understanding of the dangerous disease known as botulism. By comparing all known structures of botulinum neurotoxins, researchers writing in the Cell Press journal Trends in Biochemical Sciences on October 1st suggest new ways to improve the safety and efficacy of Botox injections. "If we know from high-resolution structures how botulinum neurotoxins interact with their receptors, we can design inhibitors or specific antibodies ...

WASHINGTON— The Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE) proudly announces the publication of a Health Education & Behavior (HE&B) supplement devoted to the latest research and practice to promote healthy aging. The October 2014 supplement, "Fostering Engagement and Independence: Opportunities and Challenges for an Aging Society," contains a dozen peer-reviewed articles on innovative behavioral and psycho-social approaches to improve the health of the nation's fastest growing cohort - older adults. Together the articles describe promising advances in research directed ...

BEIJING; BERKELEY, CA; and UPTON, NY - The Daya Bay Collaboration, an international group of scientists studying the subtle transformations of subatomic particles called neutrinos, is publishing its first results on the search for a so-called sterile neutrino, a possible new type of neutrino beyond the three known neutrino "flavors," or types. The existence of this elusive particle, if proven, would have a profound impact on our understanding of the universe, and could impact the design of future neutrino experiments. The new results, appearing in the journal Physical Review ...

CUMBERLAND, MD (October 1, 2014)--When scientists talk about the consequences of climate change, it can mean more than how we human beings will be impacted by higher temperatures, rising seas and serious storms. Plants and trees are also feeling the change, but they can't move out of the way. Researchers at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and University of Vermont have developed a new tool to overcome a major challenge of predicting how organisms may respond to climate change. "When climate changes, organisms have three choices: migrate, adapt, ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — If a person is dually diagnosed with a severe mental illness and a substance abuse problem, are improvements in their mental health or in their substance abuse most likely to reduce the risk of future violence? Although some may believe that improving symptoms of mental illness is more likely to lessen the risk for future episodes of violence, a new study from the University at Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) suggests that reducing substance abuse has a greater influence in reducing violent acts by patients with severe mental illness. ...

New Rochelle, NY, October 1, 2014—Regulation of the human immune system's response to infection involves an elaborate network of complex signaling pathways that turn on and off multiple genes. The emerging importance of long noncoding RNAs and their ability to promote, fine-tune, and restrain the body's inflammatory response by regulating gene expression is described in a Review article in Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research (JICR), a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the JICR website. In the Review ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Relational aggression, or "mean girl" bullying, is a popular subject in news and entertainment media. This nonphysical form of aggression generally used among adolescent girls includes gossiping, rumor spreading, exclusion and rejection. As media coverage has illustrated, relational aggression can lead to tragic and sometimes fatal outcomes. Despite these alarming concerns, little has been done to prevent and eliminate these negative behaviors. Now, University of Missouri researchers have developed and tested an intervention that effectively decreases relational ...

This news release is available in French and Spanish. The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) has released a comprehensive report on the changing face of industrial pollution in North America, covering the years 2005 through 2010. This is the first time an edition of the CEC's Taking Stock series, which gathers data from pollutant release and transfer registers (PRTRs) in Canada, Mexico and the United States, has analyzed North American pollutant information over an extended timeframe. To view the report, visit http://www.cec.org/library. This volume ...

Biological sensors, or biosensors, are like technological canaries in the coalmine. By converting a biological response into an optical or electrical signal, they can alert us to dangers in our external and internal environments. They can sense toxic chemicals and particles in the air and enzymes, molecules, and antibodies in the body that could indicate diabetes, cancer, and other diseases. An optical biosensor works by absorbing a specific bandwidth of light and shifting the spectrum when it senses minor changes in the environment. The narrower the band of absorbed ...

It's old news that open-source 3D printing has a lot going for it: it's cheap, green and incredibly useful for making everything from lab equipment to chess pieces. Now it's time to add another star to the 3D printing constellation. It may help lift some of the world's most destitute people from poverty while cleaning up a major blight on the earth and its oceans: plastic trash. At the center of the movement is a new set of standards inspired by fair trade products ranging from diamonds to chocolate. "We are creating a new class of material called ethical 3D printing ...

Washington, D.C., October 1, 2014—Use of specific dietary supplements can have a positive effect on health care costs through avoided hospitalizations related to Coronary Heart Disease (CHD), according to a new article published in the Journal of Dietary Supplements(1). The article, "From Science to Finance—A Tool for Deriving Economic Implications from the Results of Dietary Supplement Clinical Studies," published by Christopher Shanahan and Robert de Lorimier, Ph.D., explores a potential cost-benefit analysis tool that, when applied to a high-risk population (U.S. adults ...

Reston, Va. (October 1, 2014) – Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering found that PET/CT imaging of patients younger than 40 who were initially diagnosed with stage I–III breast cancer resulted in change of diagnosis. As reported in the October issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, while guidelines recommend FDG-PET/CT imaging only for women with stage III breast cancer, it can also help physicians more accurately diagnose young breast cancer patients initially diagnosed with earlier stages of the disease. Assessing if and how far breast cancer has spread throughout ...

As the threat of antibiotic resistance grows, scientists are turning to the human body and the trillion or so bacteria that have colonized us — collectively called our microbiota — for new clues to fighting microbial infections. They've logged an early success with the discovery of a new antibiotic candidate from vaginal bacteria, reports Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society. Matt Davenport, a C&EN contributing editor, explains that the human microbiota produces thousands of small molecules. Some have been discovered ...

Here's another reason why it's a good idea to hit the gym: it can improve memory. A new Georgia Institute of Technology study shows that an intense workout of as little as 20 minutes can enhance episodic memory, also known as long-term memory for previous events, by about 10 percent in healthy young adults (see a video demo). The Georgia Tech research isn't the first to find that exercise can improve memory. But the study, which was just published in the journal Acta Psychologica, took a few new approaches. While many existing studies have demonstrated that months of ...

Materials – Vehicle Lightweighting ... For about the price of leather seats, automakers can trim approximately 362 pounds off the body and chassis of a midsize passenger vehicle, according to an Oak Ridge National Laboratory study. Researchers analyzed an array of materials – carbon fiber, advanced high-strength steel, aluminum alloys, magnesium alloys – that could replace steel. While the carbon fiber composite option reduced weight by 35 percent at an additional cost of $1,317, a combination of advanced high-strength steel and alloys resulted in a 25 percent weight ...

Pity the poor lithium ion. Drawn relentlessly by its electrical charge, it surges from anode to cathode and back again, shouldering its way through an elaborate molecular obstacle course. This journey is essential to powering everything from cell phones to cordless power tools. Yet, no one really understands what goes on at the atomic scale as lithium ion batteries are used and recharged, over and over again. Michigan Technological University researcher Reza Shahbazian-Yassar has made it his business to better map the ion's long, strange trip—and perhaps make it smoother ...

People who are unable to button up their jacket or who find it difficult to insert a key in lock suffer from a condition known as apraxia. This means that their motor skills have been impaired – as a result of a stroke, for instance. Scientists in Munich have now examined the parts of the brain that are responsible for planning and executing complex actions. They discovered that there is a specific network in the brain for using tools. Their findings have been published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers from Technische Universität München (TUM) and the Klinikum ...

Researchers have discovered a new type of brain activity that underlies the timing of voluntary actions, allowing them to forecast when a spontaneous decision will occur more than a second in advance. 'Experiments like this have been used to argue that free will is an illusion, but we think that this interpretation is mistaken,' says Zachary Mainen, a neuroscientist at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, in Lisbon, Portugal, who led the research, published on Sept. 28, 2014, in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The scientists used recordings of neurons in an area ...

The peptide —a small protein— beta-amyloid is strongly associated with Alzheimer's disease; however, researchers are still looking for unequivocal proof that this peptide is the causal agent of the onset and development of the disease. The main obstacle impeding such confirmation is that beta-amyloid is not harmful when found in isolation but only when it aggregates, that is when it self-assembles to form the so-called amyloid fibrils "We are not dealing with a single target, beta-amyloid alone, but with multiple ones because each aggregate of peptide, which can go from ...

Current changes in the ocean around Antarctica are disturbingly close to conditions 14,000 years ago that new research shows may have led to the rapid melting of Antarctic ice and an abrupt 3-4 metre rise in global sea level. The research published in Nature Communications found that in the past, when ocean temperatures around Antarctica became more layered - with a warm layer of water below a cold surface layer - ice sheets and glaciers melted much faster than when the cool and warm layers mixed more easily. This defined layering of temperatures is exactly what is ...