Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), an antibiotic-resistant superbug, can cause life-threatening skin, bloodstream and surgical site infections or pneumonia. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine now report that cigarette smoke may make matters worse. The study, published March 30 by Infection and Immunity, shows that MRSA bacteria exposed to cigarette smoke become even more resistant to killing by the immune system. "We already know that smoking cigarettes harms human respiratory and immune cells, and now we've shown ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- The micro RNA miR-22 has long been known for its ability to suppress cancer. However, questions remain about how it achieves this feat. For example, which molecules are regulating miR-22, and which are miR22 targets? Researchers at UC Davis have unraveled some of these relationships, identifying several interactions that directly impact liver and colon cancer. The work provides new insights into how miR-22 operates and could potentially lead to new cancer therapies. The study was published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. "There are quite ...

WASHINGTON, April 2, 2015 -- It's supposed to help keep our bodies healthy in stressful situations. But the constant stress of our everyday lives means we're getting overexposed to cortisol. Raychelle Burks, Ph.D., explains why too much cortisol is bad for you in the latest episode of the Reactions series Get To Know A Molecule. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/fPnDaRYXHs4. INFORMATION: Subscribe to the series at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions, and follow us on Twitter @ACSreactions to be the first to see our latest videos. The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit ...

For more than 50 years, scientists thought that the horned anole lizard -- sometimes called the "Pinocchio Lizard" for its long, protruding nose -- was extinct. But it turns out this is a tall tale. Scientists re-discovered the lizard in 2005, living elusively at the tops of tall trees in the cloud forests of Ecuador -- the only place in the world that it is known to exist. A team led by a Virginia Tech scientist recently uncovered new information about the role that the lizard's long nose plays. Only the males have long noses, and they appear to be used in social ...

HANOVER, N.H. - The placenta can be used to reliably measure arsenic exposure in pregnant women and how much of the toxic metal is transferred to their fetuses, a Dartmouth College study shows. The study, the largest ever analysis of household drinking water arsenic and the mother-to-fetus connection, appears in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology. A PDF is available on request. Recent studies have used the placenta to identify early effects of exposure to lead, mercury, cadmium and other metals. Previous studies also have shown that arsenic ...

Up to 60% of persons living with HIV (PLHA) in the U.S. are neither taking antiretroviral therapy (ART) nor well engaged in HIV primary care, with racial/ethnic minorities more likely to experience barriers to engagement along this HIV continuum of care than their White counterparts. In fact, only 30% of persons living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA) in the United States have achieved "viral suppression," the ultimate goal of HIV treatment. Indeed, PLHA poorly engaged in HIV primary care and/or who are not on ART are at elevated risk for a host of poor outcomes, including more frequent ...

The age to receive full Social Security benefits should be closer to 70, according to a report published in the journal Daedalus. "We're living longer and healthier than ever before, but the statutory age of retirement for receiving Social Security benefits doesn't reflect that," says lead author S. Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology in the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. When Social Security was enacted in 1935, the age of full retirement was set at 65. Back then, a 25-year-old had a 62.4 percent chance of living to retirement age, and ...

People over 60 are at higher risk of being diagnosed with lung or bowel cancer as an emergency in hospital than younger people, according to a Cancer Research UK-supported report *, published today by BMJ Open (Thursday). The researchers also found that women and less affluent people are at higher risk of an emergency lung cancer diagnosis. While being unmarried, divorced or widowed was associated with having bowel cancer diagnosed as an emergency. The Cancer Research UK review looked at over 20 studies featuring more than 687,000 lung or bowel cancer cases, of which ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - In the first three years after Massachusetts implemented its 2006 health care reform, which reduced the number of uninsured people in the state by roughly half, the rate of preventable hospitalizations did not decline compared with states with similar populations that did not expand health insurance coverage. Nor did the reform reduce racial and ethnic disparities in the rate of such hospitalizations. Those are some of the chief findings of a new study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Boston University School of Medicine, published today ...

While testosterone replacement therapies may be controversial in males, new research in The FASEB Journal may extend this controversy to females too. That's because research involving mice, appearing in the April 2015 issue, suggests that there is an association between low levels of androgens (which includes testosterone), and atherosclerosis and obesity in females. "We hope that our study will contribute to intensified research efforts on the definition of androgen deficiency in women (e.g. which levels of androgens in the blood should be considered too low?), the ...

A molecular pathway known to suppress tumors appears to also be a major player in clearing cells of damaged proteins implicated in neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS and certain types of dementia, new research in roundworms and human cells suggests. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers, publishing April 2 in the journal PLOS Biology, say their findings shed new light on how a cell's protein quality control mechanism works - and how this system could be harnessed one day to combat diseases caused by a buildup of proteins in cells. To function ...

A pair of images of a young star, made 18 years apart, has revealed a dramatic difference that is providing astronomers with a unique, "real-time" look at how massive stars develop in the earliest stages of their formation. The astronomers used the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to study a massive young star called W75N(B)-VLA 2, some 4200 light-years from Earth. They compared an image made in 2014 with an earlier VLA image from 1996. "The comparison is remarkable," said Carlos Carrasco-Gonzalez of the Center of Radioastronomy and ...

A new model for HIV progression finds that it spreads in a similar way to some computer worms and predicts that early treatment is key to staving off AIDS. HIV specialists and network security experts at UCL noticed that the spread of HIV through the body using two methods - via the bloodstream and directly between cells - was similar to how some computer worms spread through both the internet and local networks respectively to infect as many computers as possible. They worked together to create a model for this 'hybrid spreading', which accurately predicted patients' ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (April 2, 2015) - A team of Whitehead Institute scientists has discovered that during division, stem cells distinguish between old and young mitochondria and allocate them disproportionately between daughter cells. As a result, the daughter cell destined to remain a stem cell receives predominantly young mitochondria, while the cell meant to differentiate into another cell type carries with it a higher compliment of the aged organelles. This asymmetric apportioning of cellular contents may represent a mechanism through which stem cells prevent the accumulation ...

Characteristics passed between generations are not decided solely by DNA, but can be brought about by other material in cells, new research shows. Scientists studied proteins found in cells, known as histones, which are not part of the genetic code, but act as spools around which DNA is wound. Histones are known to control whether or not genes are switched on. Researchers found that naturally occurring changes to these proteins, which affect how they control genes, can be sustained from one generation to the next and so influence which traits are passed on. The finding ...

Variations in the color of grapevine berries within the Pinot family result from naturally-occurring genetic mutations that selectively shut down the genes responsible for the synthesis of red pigments, called anthocyanins. This has led to the emergence of Pinot blanc and Pinot gris from Pinot noir. Frédérique Pelsy and her colleagues, from the "Grapevine Health and Wine Quality" research unit at INRA Colmar, France, published these findings in PLOS Genetics on 2 April 2015. The vine stocks used in viticulture are obtained by grafting; therefore, for any given ...

Infants have innate knowledge about the world and when their expectations are defied, they learn best, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found. In a paper to be published April 3 in the journal Science, cognitive psychologists Aimee E. Stahl and Lisa Feigenson demonstrate for the first time that babies learn new things by leveraging the core information they are born with. When something surprises a baby, like an object not behaving the way a baby expects it to, the baby not only focuses on that object, but ultimately learns more about it than from a similar yet ...

French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier discovered a key concept necessary for thermoelectric (TE) temperature control in 1834. His findings were so significant, TE devices are now commonly referred to Peltier devices. Since his work, there have been steady advancements in materials and design. Despite the technological sophistication Peltier devices, they are still less energy efficient than traditional compressor/evaporation cooling. In the 1960's, Peltier devices were primarily made from Bismuth-Telluride (Bi2Te3) or Antimony-Telluride (Sb2Te3) alloys and ...

MIAMI - A first-of-its-kind study observed how oil droplets are formed and measured their size under high pressure. They further simulated how the atomized oil spewing from the Macondo well reached the ocean's surface during the Deepwater Horizon accident. The findings from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and University of Western Australia research team suggest that the physical properties in deep water create a natural dispersion mechanism for oil droplets that generates a similar effect to the application of chemical ...

Binge-drinking during adolescence may perturb brain development at a critical time and leave lasting effects on genes and behavior that persist into adulthood. The findings, by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine using an animal model, are reported online in the journal Neurobiology of Disease. "This may be the mechanism through which adolescent binge-drinking increases the risk for psychiatric disorders, including alcoholism, in adulthood," says lead author Subhash Pandey, professor of psychiatry and director of neuroscience alcoholism ...

Irvine, Calif. -- A newly developed website provides parents and children with individualized information and support -- based on factors like coping style and levels of worry and fear -- to help lower anxiety before outpatient surgery in children, according to a pair of articles in the April issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia. The papers report on the development of the "Web-based Tailored Intervention Preparation for Surgery" (WebTIPS) project, which provides information and strategies to help children and parents prepare for surgery and anesthesia. A preliminary evaluation ...

Based on research in fruit flies, it has long been suspected that the most common mutation linked to both sporadic and familial Parkinson's disease (PD) wreaks its havoc by altering the function of mitochondria in neurons that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. Using stem cells derived from patients who have PD, scientist at the Buck Institute have confirmed that finding in human cells for the first time. In research published in the April 2nd early online edition of Stem Cell Reports, Buck researchers also provide a valuable tool for testing potential treatments ...

BOSTON -- Pseudogenes, a sub-class of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) that developed from the genome's 20,000 protein-coding genes but lost the ability to produce proteins, have long been considered nothing more than genomic "junk." Yet the retention of these 20,000 mysterious remnants during evolution has suggested that they may in fact possess biological functions and contribute to the development of disease. Now, a team led by investigators in the Cancer Research Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has provided some of the first evidence that one ...

The ability to learn associations between events is critical for survival, but it has not been clear how different pieces of information stored in memory may be linked together by populations of neurons. In a study published April 2nd in Cell Reports, synchronous activation of distinct neuronal ensembles caused mice to artificially associate the memory of a foot shock with the unrelated memory of exploring a safe environment, triggering an increase in fear-related behavior when the mice were re-exposed to the non-threatening environment. The findings suggest that co-activated ...

(Boston)--Using patient-derived stem cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) to study the genetic lung/liver disease called alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAT) deficiency, researchers have for the first time created a disease signature that may help explain how abnormal protein leads to liver disease. The study, which appears in Stem Cell Reports, also found that liver cells derived from AAT deficient iPSCs are more sensitive to drugs that cause liver toxicity than liver cells derived from normal iPSCs. This finding may ultimately lead to new treatments for the condition. IPSC's ...