The ability to accurately repair DNA damaged by spontaneous errors, oxidation or mutagens is crucial to the survival of cells. This repair is normally accomplished by using an identical or homologous intact sequence of DNA, but scientists have now shown that RNA produced within cells of a common budding yeast can serve as a template for repairing the most devastating DNA damage – a break in both strands of a DNA helix. Earlier research had shown that synthetic RNA oligonucleotides introduced into cells could help repair DNA breaks, but the new study is believed to be ...

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) -- among other telescopes -- have determined that our own Milky Way galaxy is part of a newly identified ginormous supercluster of galaxies, which they have dubbed "Laniakea," which means "immense heaven" in Hawaiian. This discovery clarifies the boundaries of our galactic neighborhood and establishes previously unrecognized linkages among various galaxy clusters in the local Universe. "We have finally established the contours that define the supercluster of galaxies we can call home," said ...

Traumatic Axonal Injury is a form of traumatic brain injury that can have detrimental effects on the integrity of the brain's white matter and lead to cognitive impairments. A new study from the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas investigated white matter damage in the acute and chronic stages of a traumatic axonal injury in an effort to better understand what long-term damage may result. The study, published online July 21 in the Journal of Neurotrauma, looked at 13 patients ages 16 to 60 with mild to severe brain injuries from the intensive ...

CHICAGO (September 3, 2014): Patients who underwent weight loss operations in recent years, when most bariatric surgical centers were accredited, had fewer postoperative complications and were 2.3 times less likely to die in the hospital than patients who had bariatric procedures performed before a national movement toward facility accreditation was taking place, according to new study findings. Study authors, who published their results in the September issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, say these findings suggest that accreditation of bariatric ...

New Rochelle, NY, September 2, 2014—A lifelong gluten-free diet (GFD) is the conventional approach to managing celiac disease, a chronic inflammatory disorder affecting the small intestine that can result in malnutrition. However, recent evidence shows that a GFD may not be sufficient to prevent serious complications related to celiac disease. A detailed discussion of the metabolic disorders and functional abnormalities that can develop, and nutritional treatments for these is presented in a Review article published in Journal of Medicinal Food, a peer-reviewed journal ...

Despite the revolutionary biotechnological advancements of the last few decades, an ideal anti-cancer treatment — one that's immediately lethal to cancer cells, harmless to healthy cells, and resistant to cancer's relapse — is still a dream. But a concept called "synthetic lethality" holds great promise for researchers. Two genes are considered synthetically lethal when their combined inactivation is lethal to cells, while inhibiting just one of them is not. Synthetic lethality promises to deliver personalized, more effective, and less toxic therapy. If a particular gene ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (Sept. 3, 2014) – A team of researchers from Korea and Canada have found that transplantation of B10 cells (a stable immortalized human bone marrow derived –mesenchymal stem cell line; B10 hMSC) directly into the bladder wall of mice modeled with spinal cord injury (SCI) helped inhibit the development of bladder fibrosis and improved bladder function by promoting the growth of smooth muscle cells in the bladder. The study will be published in a future issue of Cell Transplantation and is currently freely available on-line as an unedited early e-pub ...

PHILADELPHIA – Patients with sepsis, one of the most time-sensitive and hard-to-detect illnesses in medicine, are more likely to survive the life-threatening condition when treated at a hospital that sees a higher volume of sepsis cases. New research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania shows a clear relationship between hospitals that treat the most cases of severe sepsis and lower rates of inpatient deaths among those patients. The study, led by David F. Gaieski, MD, an associate professor of Emergency Medicine at Penn, is published online ...

In the October issue of BioScience, a group of ecotoxicologists argue that the US Environmental Protection Agency's (USEPA) current practices for evaluating pesticide safety are inadequate and likely to result in decisions biased toward industry interests. In their article, Michelle Boone of Miami University and her colleagues note that most pesticide toxicity tests used in risk assessments are conducted by pesticide manufacturers themselves, which the authors believe can result in untenable conflicts of interest. Moreover, rigid inclusion criteria often mean that potentially ...

A gene crucial for brain and heart development may also be associated with sudden unexplained death in epilepsy (SUDEP), the most common cause of early mortality in epilepsy patients. Scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have created a new animal model for SUDEP and have shown that mice who have a partial deficiency of the gene SENP2 (Sentrin/SUMO-specific protease 2) are more likely to develop spontaneous seizures and sudden death. The finding occurred when observing mice originally bred for studying a link between SENP2 deficiency and cancer. "SENP2 ...

It's in the brain where we perceive the unpleasant sensations of pain, and researchers have long been examining how calcium channels in the brain and peripheral nervous system contribute to the development of chronic pain conditions. Neuroscientist Gerald Zamponi, PhD, and his team at the University of Calgary's Hotchkiss Brain Institute have discovered a new mechanism that can reverse chronic pain. Using an animal model, their research has found that pain signals in nerve cells can be shut off by interfering with the communication of a specific enzyme with calcium ...

A centuries-old clock built for a king is the inspiration for a group of computer scientists and electrical engineers who hope to harvest power from the air. The clock, powered by changes in temperature and atmospheric pressure, was invented in the early 17th century by a Dutch builder. Three centuries later, Swiss engineer Jean Leon Reutter built on that idea and created the Atmos mechanical clock that can run for years without needing to be wound manually. Now, University of Washington researchers have taken inspiration from the clock's design and created a power ...

Tweets sent during last year's massive flooding on Colorado's Front Range were able to detail the scope of damage to the area's infrastructure, according to a study by the University of Colorado Boulder. The findings can help geotechnical and structural engineers more effectively direct their reconnaissance efforts after future natural disasters—including earthquakes, tsunamis and tornadoes—as well as provide them data that might otherwise be lost due to rapid cleanup efforts. "Because the flooding was widespread, it impacted many canyons and closed off access to communities ...

A new study led by a PhD researcher at The University of Western Australia has revealed that parts of the iconic Galapagos Islands have been overrun by invasive plants from other parts of the world. "People may be shocked that a place considered so iconic for biodiversity is so overrun with weeds in some areas despite ongoing control effort by National Park rangers, but this is really a global story," lead author from the UWA School of Plant Biology Mandy Trueman said. The results published in the open access journal Neobiota confirm that in the humid highland part ...

From the people who brought us peptoid nanosheets that form at the interface between air and water, now come peptoid nanosheets that form at the interface between oil and water. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed peptoid nanosheets - two-dimensional biomimetic materials with customizable properties - that self-assemble at an oil-water interface. This new development opens the door to designing peptoid nanosheets of increasing structural complexity and chemical functionality for a broad ...

SEATTLE—The number of bariatric surgeries done each year in the United States has ballooned. Now, in an August 27 state-of-the-art review in The BMJ and a September 3 editorial in JAMA, David Arterburn, MD, MPH, weighs the evidence on the benefits and risks of the various types of this surgery. "It's critical that we find effective—and cost-effective—ways to treat severe obesity," said Dr. Arterburn, an associate investigator at Group Health Research Institute, a Group Health physician, and an affiliate associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington School ...

Human breast milk is considered the most ideal source of nutrition for infants and it should have played a critical role in the evolution and civilizations of human beings. Unlike our intuitive perception, human milk contains a large number of bacterial species, including some opportunistic pathogens of humans. This phenomenon comes as no surprise to scientists and physicians. Indeed, the existence of milk microbiome is considered to be the result of co-evolutionary and co-adaptive interactions between the microbiome and human host. Furthermore, the dynamic balance in ...

Household air pollution, caused by the use of plant-based or coal fuel for cooking, heating, and lighting, is putting nearly three billion people worldwide at risk of ill health and early death, according to a new Commission, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal. A third of the world's population use plant-based solid fuels such as wood or charcoal, or coal, to cook, heat, and light their homes, primarily in Asia and Africa. These smoky, dirty fuels are often used in an open fire or simple stove, resulting in high levels of household air pollution in poorly ...

It's not always true that digital distribution of media will have lower carbon emissions than distribution by physical means, at least when file sizes are large. That's the conclusion of a study published in Yale's Journal of Industrial Ecology that looked at the carbon footprint of games for consoles such as PlayStation®3. Researchers found that Blu-ray Discs delivered via retail stores caused lower greenhouse gas emissions than game files downloaded over broadband Internet. For their analysis, the investigators estimated total carbon equivalent emissions for an 8.8-gigabyte ...

Breast cancer cells can lay the groundwork for their own spread throughout the body by coaxing cells within lymphatic vessels to send out tumor-welcoming signals, according to a new report by Johns Hopkins scientists. Writing in the Sept. 2 issue of Nature Communications, the researchers describe animal and cell-culture experiments that show increased levels of so-called signaling molecules released by breast cancer cells. These molecules cause lymphatic endothelial cells (LECs) in the lungs and lymph nodes to produce proteins called CCL5 and VEGF. CCL5 attracts tumor ...

A research consortium bringing together teams from Inserm, the Nancy and Poitiers University Hospitals, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, Atlanta, USA), and coordinated by the Inserm and University of Grenoble Environmental Epidemiology team (Unit 823), has just published an epidemiological study indicating that exposure to certain phenols during pregnancy, especially parabens and triclosan, may disrupt growth of boys during foetal growth and the first years of life. Bisphenol A was not associated with any definite modification in growth. These results ...

HOUSTON – (Sept. 3, 2014) – The percentage of Texans without health insurance dropped after the first enrollment period of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), according to a report released today by the Episcopal Health Foundation and Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. The report found that since the opening of the ACA's Health Insurance Marketplace, the percentage of uninsured adult Texans dropped by a little more than 2 percent. The report estimates 378,000 more Texans had health insurance in June 2014 than in September 2013. The small gain in Texans ...

Think again if you've always believed that events in the life cycle of animals happen consistently, almost rigidly, as part of the natural rhythm of nature. Studies by Sinlan Poo and David Bickford of the National University of Singapore, Singapore, show that Mother Nature is much more flexible than you might think. In a paper in Springer's journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, the researchers describe how Hansen's tree frog (Chiromantis hansenae) speeds up its life cycle to hatch earlier once its eggs are preyed upon. Hansen's tree frog is found in Thailand and ...

HOUSTON – (Sept. 3, 2014) – A better understanding of the pathology of a severe form of dwarfism as well as a possible window of treatment have been discovered by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). The preclinical research was published in a recent issue of the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research. Pseudoachondroplasia (PSACH) is a disorder that affects the cells in the growth plate, resulting in dwarfism, limb deformities, joint pain and early onset osteoarthritis. Children with PSACH show no signs of it at birth. Slowing ...

UCLA researchers were part of a team that has discovered the interplay of several genetic factors that may be involved in the development of early-onset ulcerative colitis, a severe type of inflammatory bowel disease. The early research findings in mice suggest possible new targets for prevention and treatment strategies to address the inflammation generated by early-onset ulcerative colitis. The rare disease affects infants and young children and can lead to early development of colon cancer and an increased risk of liver damage. Scientists from the David Geffen School ...