Screening families of patients with bowel cancer for a genetic condition would cut their risk of developing bowel, womb, and ovarian cancers, new research has found. In a major study, Dr Ian Frayling from Cardiff University's School of Medicine and researchers from the University of Exeter's Medical School assessed the effectiveness of introducing a UK-wide screening programme for a genetic condition known as Lynch Syndrome. Lynch syndrome is a caused by changes in genes which check the spelling in DNA. The condition increases the risk of people developing cancer, ...

The natural photo degradation of diazepam (valium) and similar medicines – followed by bacterial breakdown – may reduce their potentially harmful impact on the UK's freshwater environment, a team of researchers has said. Diazepam – used to treat anxiety and other similar conditions – has been detected in rivers across the UK and Europe, having been released from waste water treatment plants. At the levels recorded, it has the potential to produce harmful ecological effects in surface waters, including changing the behaviour of fish shoals and their ability to sense danger ...

Quantum entanglement refers to the "pairing" of two subatomic particles in such a way that they form a whole quantum system. Interest in entanglement is increasing today, as it challenges the foundations of quantum mechanics itself, and is also key for achieving quantum information processing and communication. Entanglement is thought to exist up to the everyday, or "macroscopic" realm – according to the predictions of quantum physics – but experimental proposals to show this often involve conditions that are difficult to achieve in today's labs. Publishing in Physical ...

Fish can live in almost any aquatic environment on Earth, but when the climate changes and temperatures go up many species are pushed to the limit. The amount of time needed to adjust to new conditions could prove critical for how different species cope in the future, reveals a new study from researchers at the University of Gothenburg, published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Climate change continues apace thanks to increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The greenhouse effect has led not only to an increase in average ...

A recent study completed at the University of Eastern Finland shows that dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease. The sources of polyunsaturated fatty acids include fish, vegetable oils, and nuts. The findings were published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis & Vascular Biology, an esteemed journal of the American Heart Association. Recent studies have not found an association between the consumption of saturated fats and the risk of cardiovascular diseases. It seems that the mere reduction of saturated fats from the diet does not ...

This news release is available in German. FRANKFURT. Truffles, along with caviar, are among the most expensive foods in the world. Because they grow underground, people use trained dogs or pigs to find them. But the distinctive smell of truffles is not only of interest to gourmets. A group of German and French scientists under the direction of the Goethe University Frankfurt have discovered that the smell of white truffles is largely produced by soil bacteria which are trapped inside truffle fruiting bodies. White truffles from the Piedmont region in Italy can reach ...

The greens and blues of the ocean color from NASA satellite data have provided new insights into how climate and ecosystem processes affect the growth cycles of phytoplankton—microscopic aquatic plants important for fish populations and Earth's carbon cycle. At the bottom of the ocean's food chain, phytoplankton account for roughly half of the net photosynthesis on Earth. Their photosynthesis consumes carbon dioxide and plays a key role in transferring carbon from the atmosphere to the ocean. Unlike the plant ecosystems on land, the amount of phytoplankton in the ocean ...

Thanks in part to support from NASA and the National Science Foundation, scientists have produced the first-ever detailed maps of bedrock beneath glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. This new data will help researchers better project future changes to glaciers and ice sheets, and ultimately, sea level. Researchers at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, or CReSIS, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, recently built detailed maps of the terrain beneath Greenland's Jakobshavn Glacier and Byrd Glacier in Antarctica. The results of this study were published ...

On Sept. 30, 2014, a sounding rocket will fly up into the sky – past Earth's atmosphere that obscures certain wavelengths of light from the sun -- for a 15-minute journey to study what heats up the sun's atmosphere. This is the fourth flight for the Very high Angular Resolution Ultraviolet Telescope, or VAULT, will launch from the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico. The instrument, now called VAULT2.0, has been refurbished with new electronics and an imaging detector to capture images more frequently than before. While in space, VAULT2.0 will observe ...

So long, solitons: University of Chicago physicists have shown that a group of scientists were incorrect when they concluded that a mysterious effect found in superfluids indicated the presence of solitons—exotic, solitary waves. Instead, they explain, the result was due to more pedestrian, whirlpool-like structures in the fluid. They published their explanation in the Sept. 19 issue of Physical Review Letters. The debate began in July 2013, when a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published results in Nature showing a long-lived structure ...

ANN ARBOR—Researchers at the University of Michigan have described a new approach to discovering potential cancer treatments that requires a fraction of the time needed for more traditional methods. They used the platform to identify a novel antibody that is undergoing further investigation as a potential treatment for breast, ovarian and other cancers. In research published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in the lab of Stephen Weiss at the U-M Life Sciences Institute detail an approach that replicates the native environment ...

What do seedless watermelon, salmon, and strawberries all have in common? Unlike most eukaryotic multicellular organisms that have two sets of chromosomes and are diploid, these organisms are all polyploid, meaning they have three or more sets of chromosomes—seedless watermelon and salmon have 3 and 4 sets of chromosomes, respectively, and strawberries have 10! While this might seem surprising, in fact most plant species are polyploid. Polyploidy, or genome doubling, was first discovered over a century ago, but only recently, with the development of molecular tools, has ...

Coral reefs face a suite of perilous threats in today's ocean. From overfishing and pollution to coastal development and climate change, fragile coral ecosystems are disappearing at unprecedented rates around the world. Despite this trend, some species of corals surrounding the island of Moorea in French Polynesia have a natural protector in their tropical environment: coral guard-crabs. New research from the National Museum of Natural History's Smithsonian Marine Station scientist Seabird McKeon and the museum's predoctoral fellow Jenna Moore of the Florida Museum of Natural ...

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. (September 30, 2014) – People who suffer from asthma may think there's not a lot they can do to control their asthma besides properly taking medications and avoiding allergic triggers. According to a new article in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, the scientific publication of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI), asthma sufferers can learn lessons about managing their asthma by examining their lifestyle. The woman described in the Annals article improved her asthma once she and her doctor determined her ...

Administration of high-dose vitamin D3 compared with placebo did not reduce hospital length of stay, intensive care unit (ICU) length of stay, hospital mortality, or the risk of death at 6 months among patients with vitamin D deficiency who were critically ill, according to a study published in JAMA. The study is being posted early online to coincide with its presentation at the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine annual congress. A high prevalence of low vitamin D levels has been confirmed in patients who are critically ill. Many studies suggest that a low vitamin ...

A species of gut bacteria called Clostridium ramosum, coupled with a high-fat diet, may cause animals to gain weight. The work is published this week in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. A research team from the German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke in Nuthetal observed that mice harboring human gut bacteria including C. ramosum gained weight when fed a high-fat diet. Mice that did not have C. ramosum were less obese even when consuming a high-fat diet, and mice that had C. ramosum but consumed a low-fat ...

Boston, MA – A retrospective study led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), has found an overuse of colonoscopies for colorectal cancer screening and surveillance. The study demonstrated that endoscopists commonly recommended shorter follow-up intervals than established guidelines support, and these recommendations were strongly correlated with subsequent colonoscopy overuse. "Our study shows that a high percentage of follow-up colonoscopies are being performed too early, resulting in use of scarce health care resources with potentially limited clinical ...

Three-dimensional metal printing technology is an expanding field that has enormous potential applications in areas ranging from supporting structures, functional electronics to medical devices. Conventional 3D metal printing is generally restricted to metals with a high melting point, and the process is rather time consuming. Now scientists at the Beijing Key Laboratory of CryoBiomedical Engineering, part of the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have developed a new conceptual 3D printing method with "ink" consisting of ...

Scientists across China and the United States collaborating on the PandaX search for dark matter from an underground lab in southwestern China report results from the first stage of the experiment in a new study published in the Beijing-based journal SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy. PandaX is the first dark matter experiment in China that deploys more than one hundred kilograms of xenon as a detector; the project is designed to monitor potential collisions between xenon nucleons and weakly interactive massive particles, hypothesized candidates for dark matter. In ...

The conversion of forests, grasslands, shrublands and wetlands to cropland over the course of three centuries profoundly changed the surface of the Earth and the carbon cycle of the terrestrial ecosystem in Northeast China. In a new study published in the Beijing-based journal SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences, a team of researchers from Beijing Normal University, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, and the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, present new calculations on carbon emissions triggered ...

Consuming an alcoholic beverage may make men more responsive to the smiles of others in their social group, according to new research in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings suggest that, for men, alcohol increases sensitivity to rewarding social behaviors like smiling, and may shed light on risk factors that contribute to problem drinking among men. "This experimental alcohol study, which included a social context, finds the clearest evidence yet of greater alcohol reinforcement for men than women," says ...

A new study confirms that the exposure to tar tended to be lower for smokers of slim cigarettes than of regular cigarettes. Similarly, exposure to nicotine tended to be lower. Slim cigarettes are an increasingly popular type of cigarette in several countries around the world. Previous studies have shown that the levels of certain toxic chemicals in the smoke of these cigarettes are lower than those in regular cigarettes. However, because lower levels of chemicals in the smoke are not necessarily linked to a reduced exposure to harmful chemicals, concerns had been raised ...

Genomic data could predict whether statins will benefit a patient or not, according to an article in the open access journal Genome Biology. The research suggests that genomic data alone can explain around 15% of patients' responses to a cholesterol-lowering statin, and further studies could increase the accuracy of these predictions. The study looked at data from 372 participants in an American clinical trial for the statin, Simvastatin, and found that certain genetic signatures were more common in patients whose cholesterol was effectively lowered by the treatment, ...

Washington, DC – Monday, September 29: Between 1970 and 2010 populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish around the globe dropped 52 percent, says the 2014 Living Planet Report released today by World Wildlife Fund (WWF). This biodiversity loss occurs disproportionately in low-income countries—and correlates with the increasing resource use of high-income countries. In addition to the precipitous decline in wildlife populations the report's data point to other warning signs about the overall health of the planet. The amount of carbon in our atmosphere ...

New research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) suggests that the protective effect of physical activity against diabetes is weakest among those at high genetic risk. The research is by Dr Yann Klimentidis, an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, in Tucson, AZ, USA, and colleagues. It is well established that physical activity reduces type 2 diabetes risk. However, the extent of protection afforded by physical activity may differ according to genetic ...