VIDEO: Here are movies of dynamic behavior of a sugar chain on the basis of NMR-validated simulations. This chain has a particular sugar (green circle). Click here for more information. We often experience difficulties in identifying the accurate shape of dynamic and fluctuating objects. This is especially the case in the nanoscale world of biomolecules. The research group lead by Professor Koichi Kato of the Institute for Molecular Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences ...

65 million people around the world today suffer from epilepsy, a condition of the brain that may trigger an uncontrollable seizure at any time, often for no known reason. A seizure is a disruption of the electrical communication between neurons, and someone is said to have epilepsy if they experience two or more unprovoked seizures separated by at least 24 hours. Epilepsy is the most common chronic disease in pediatric neurology, with about 0.5𔂿% of children developing epilepsy during their lifetime. A further 30󈞔% of epileptic children develop refractory ...

Walking or cycling to work is better for people's mental health than driving to work, according to new research by health economists at the University of East Anglia and the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR). A report published today reveals that people who stopped driving and started walking or cycling to work benefited from improved wellbeing. In particular, active commuters felt better able to concentrate and were less under strain than if they travelled by car. These benefits come on top of the physical health benefits of walking and cycling that are ...

When active, the protein called Ral can drive tumor growth and metastasis in several human cancers including pancreatic, prostate, lung, colon and bladder. Unfortunately, drugs that block its activity are not available. A study published today in the journal Nature uses a novel approach to target the activation of these Ral proteins: "When you want to keep an alligator from biting you, you can tie its mouth shut. We took another approach – we put a stick in its mouth to hold it open," says Dan Theodorescu, MD, PhD, professor of Urology and Pharmacology, director of the ...

Things can go downhill fast when a patient has sepsis, a life-threatening condition in which bacteria or fungi multiply in a patient's blood -- often too fast for antibiotics to help. A new device inspired by the human spleen and developed by a team at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering may radically transform the way doctors treat sepsis. "Even with the best current treatments, sepsis patients are dying in intensive care units at least 30 percent of the time," said Mike Super, Ph.D., Senior Staff Scientist at the Wyss Institute. "We need ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---A potential way to treat muscular dystrophy directly targets muscle repair instead of the underlying genetic defect that usually leads to the disease. Muscular dystrophies are a group of muscle diseases characterized by skeletal muscle wasting and weakness. Mutations in certain proteins, most commonly the protein dystrophin, cause muscular dystrophy in humans and also in mice. A University of Michigan team led by cell biologist Haoxing Xu, discovered that mice missing a critical calcium channel inside the cell, called TRPML1, showed similar muscle ...

BOULDER, Colo – Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada have directly entangled three photons in the most technologically useful state for the first time, thanks in part to superfast, super-efficient single-photon detectors developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Entanglement is a special feature of the quantum world in which certain properties of individual particles become linked such that knowledge of the quantum state of any one particle dictates that of the others. Entanglement plays a critical role in quantum information ...

Treating advanced small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) with thoracic (or chest) radiation therapy in addition to standard treatment significantly prolongs long-term survival and reduces cancer recurrence in the chest by almost 50%, according to new research published in The Lancet and being presented simultaneously at ASTRO's 2014 Annual Meeting in San Francisco. The authors say that as the thoracic radiotherapy is well tolerated, it should to be routinely offered to all SCLC patients with extensive disease whose cancer responds to chemotherapy. SCLC is an aggressive cancer ...

Berkeley — The human brain is capable of a neural workaround that compensates for the buildup of beta-amyloid, a destructive protein associated with Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The findings, to be published Sunday, Sept. 14, in the journal Nature Neuroscience, could help explain how some older adults with beta-amyloid deposits in their brain retain normal cognitive function while others develop dementia. "This study provides evidence that there is plasticity or compensation ability in ...

The Asian monsoon already existed 40 million years ago during a period of high atmospheric carbon dioxide and warmer temperatures, reports an international research team led by a University of Arizona geoscientist. Scientists thought the climate pattern known as the Asian monsoon began 22-25 million years ago as a result of the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalaya Mountains. "It is surprising," said lead author Alexis Licht, now a research associate in the UA department of geosciences. "People thought the monsoon started much later." The monsoon, the largest ...

University of Leeds research has revealed that heart attack patients have a 46% increased chance of death within a month of discharge if they miss any one of nine types of care. There is also a 74% increased chance of dying within one year if any one component of care is missed. The nine pathways of care that have been identified are pre-hospital electrocardiogram, acute use of aspirin, restoring blood flow to the heart (known as reperfusion), prescription at hospital discharge of aspirin, timely use of four types of drug for heart attack (ACE-inhibitors, beta-blockers, ...

Bacteria are particularly ingenious when it comes to survival strategies. They often create a biofilm to protect themselves from a hostile environment, for example during treatment with antibiotics. A biofilm is a bacterial community that is surrounded by a protective slime capsule consisting of sugar chains and "curli". Scientists at VIB and Vrije Universiteit Brussel have for the first time created a detailed three-dimensional image of the pores through which the curli building blocks cross the bacterial cell wall, a crucial step in the formation of the protective slime ...

Kansas City, Mo. - If you never understood what "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" meant in high school, don't worry: biologists no longer think that an animal's "ontogeny", that is, its embryonic development, replays its entire evolutionary history. Instead, the new way to figure out how animals evolved is to compare regulatory networks that control gene expression patterns, particularly embryonic ones, across species. An elegant study published in the September 14, 2014 advance online issue of Nature from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research shows just how humbling ...

Instead, it may just lead to overdiagnosis and overtreatment, suggest the researchers, led by a team based at Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands. Their paper publishes as the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference opens next week (Monday 15 Sept), where experts from around the world will discuss how to tackle the threat to health and the waste of money caused by unnecessary care. The conference is hosted by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford in partnership with The BMJ's Too Much Medicine campaign. The upper age limit for ...

Dr Stephen Martin and colleagues argue that this strategy is failing patients and wasting healthcare resources. They call for a re-examination of the threshold and urge clinicians to be cautious about treating low risk patients with blood pressure lowering drugs. Their paper publishes as the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference opens next week (Monday 15 Sept), where experts from around the world will discuss how to tackle the threat to health and the waste of money caused by unnecessary care. The conference is hosted by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University ...

Scientists can now explain a third of the inherited risk of prostate cancer, after a major international study identified 23 new genetic variants associated with increased risk of the disease. The study brings the total number of common genetic variants linked to prostate cancer to 100, and testing for them can identify 1% of men with a risk of the disease almost six times as high as the population average. Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and in Cambridge, UK, and California led a huge search for new genetic variants including almost 90,000 men ...

Based on models and observations, climate scientists have devised a simplified formula to describe one of the consequences of climate change: regions already marked by droughts will continue to dry out in the future climate. Regions that already have a moist climate will experience additional rainfall. In short: dry gets drier; wet gets wetter (DDWW). However, this formula is less universally valid than previously assumed. This was demonstrated by a team of ETH climate researchers led by Peter Greve, lead author of a study recently published in Nature Geoscience. Traditional ...

Cells regulate protein functions in a wide variety of ways, including by modifying the protein structure. In an instant, a protein can take on another form and perform no or even the "wrong" function: in humans, proteins that fold wrongly can cause serious diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or cystic fibrosis. Some of these proteins also have a tendency to "infect" other molecules of the same type and congregate into insoluble so-called amyloid fibrils or plaques. These amyloids can damage cells and tissues and make people ill. Method breaks the shackles Until ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine have discovered how two genes – Period and Cryptochrome – keep the circadian clocks in all human cells in time and in proper rhythm with the 24-hour day, as well as the seasons. The finding, published today in the journal Genes and Development, has implications for the development of drugs for various diseases such as cancers and diabetes, as well as conditions such as metabolic syndrome, insomnia, seasonal affective disorder, obesity, and even jetlag. "Discovering how these circadian clock genes interact has ...

Health policies which favour using ranibizumab for treating eye disease in older people over safety concerns for a cheaper alternative should take account of a new Cochrane Review published today. The researchers looked at the results of studies which compared the safety of two drugs used for treating age-related macular degeneration, ranibizumab and bevacizumab. Contrary to what was argued by some experts the review has found that the cheaper drug, bevacizumab, does not appear to increase deaths or serious side-effects compared with ranibizumab in people with neovascular ...

Menlo Park, Calif. — A comprehensive look at how tiny particles in a lithium ion battery electrode behave shows that rapid-charging the battery and using it to do high-power, rapidly draining work may not be as damaging as researchers had thought – and that the benefits of slow draining and charging may have been overestimated. The results challenge the prevailing view that "supercharging" batteries is always harder on battery electrodes than charging at slower rates, according to researchers from Stanford University and the Stanford Institute for Materials & Energy Sciences ...

PISCATAWAY, NJ – Adolescents and young adults who smoke marijuana frequently may attempt to manage negative moods by using the drug, according to a study in September's Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. "Young people who use marijuana frequently experience an increase in negative affect in the 24 hours leading up to a use event, which lends strong support to an affect-regulation model in this population," says the study's lead author Lydia A. Shrier, M.D., M.P.H., of the division of adolescent and young adult medicine at Boston Children's Hospital. She notes ...

New research shows that patients with fibromyalgia have hypersensitivity to non-painful events based on images of the patients' brains, which show reduced activation in primary sensory regions and increased activation in sensory integration areas. Findings published in Arthritis & Rheumatology, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), suggest that brain abnormalities in response to non-painful sensory stimulation may cause the increased unpleasantness that patients experience in response to daily visual, auditory and tactile stimulation. Fibromyalgia ...

The story of cancer care seems so simple: find the mutated gene that causes cancer and turn it off or fix it. But rarely does a single gene cause cancer. More often, many genes are altered together to drive the disease. So the challenge becomes sorting out which altered genes are the most to blame in which cancers. A collaborative study between researchers at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) published today in the journal Clinical Cancer Research takes an important step toward answering this question in bladder cancer. Specifically, ...

WASHINGTON — Which is more likely to convince a smoker to quit? The words, "Warning: cigarettes cause cancer" beneath the image of an open mouth with a cancerous lesion and rotten teeth, or the same image with the words, "Warning: Quitting smoking reduces the risk of cancer"? The answer depends on how confident you are in your ability to quit, according to a study led by researchers at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center and published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research. The research, which involved 740 participants and three D.C. area institutions, ...