PHILADELPHIA — Treating the rare disease MPS I is a challenge. MPS I, caused by the deficiency of a key enzyme called IDUA, eventually leads to the abnormal accumulation of certain molecules and cell death. The two main treatments for MPS I are bone marrow transplantation and intravenous enzyme replacement therapy, but these are only marginally effective or clinically impractical, especially when the disease strikes the central nervous system (CNS). Using an animal model, a team from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has proven the efficacy ...

Argonne, Ill.– Scientists succeeded in obtaining an unprecedented view of a type of brain-cell receptor that is implicated in a range of neurological illnesses, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, depression, schizophrenia, autism, and ischemic injuries associated with stroke. The team of biologists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory used the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory to get an atomic-level picture of the intact NMDA (N-methyl, D-aspartate) receptor should serve as template and guide for the design ...

In recent years, increasing pressure from policymakers, consumers, and suppliers has prompted manufacturers to set environmental targets that go beyond reducing the pollutants they emit from their smokestacks or discharge into rivers and lakes. Today companies must also assess environmental performance at every step in their process, from the mining of primary materials to the use and recycling of their products. This perspective has given rise to the discipline known as life cycle engineering, which connects the engineers who grapple with the efficiencies of production ...

Research published recently in Science suggested that the makeup of the Earth's lower mantle, which makes up the largest part of the Earth by volume, is significantly different than previously thought. Understanding the composition of the mantle is essential to seismology, the study of earthquakes and movement below the Earth's surface, and should shed light on unexplained seismic phenomena observed there. Though humans haven't yet managed to drill further than seven and a half miles into the Earth, we've built a comprehensive picture of what's beneath our feet through ...

The way in which the Italian city of Venice dealt with the outbreak of the plague in the fourteenth century holds lessons on how to even mitigate the consequences of today's emerging threats, like climate change, terrorism, and highly infectious or drug-resistant diseases. So says Dr. Igor Linkov of the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, and a visiting professor of the Ca Foscari University in Italy. Linkov led an article on resilience management appearing in Springer's journal Environment Systems and Decisions. Venice was the hub of many trade routes into ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Researchers from MIT, Pennsylvania State University, and Carnegie Mellon University have devised a new way to separate cells by exposing them to sound waves as they flow through a tiny channel. Their device, about the size of a dime, could be used to detect the extremely rare tumor cells that circulate in cancer patients' blood, helping doctors predict whether a tumor is going to spread. Separating cells with sound offers a gentler alternative to existing cell-sorting technologies, which require tagging the cells with chemicals or exposing them to stronger ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Kit Lam and colleagues from UC Davis and other institutions have created dynamic nanoparticles (NPs) that could provide an arsenal of applications to diagnose and treat cancer. Built on an easy-to-make polymer, these particles can be used as contrast agents to light up tumors for MRI and PET scans or deliver chemo and other therapies to destroy tumors. In addition, the particles are biocompatible and have shown no toxicity. The study was published online today in Nature Communications. "These are amazingly useful particles," noted co-first author ...

WHAT: A laboratory study led by scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), lends further weight to the potential effectiveness of passive immunotherapy to suppress HIV in the absence of drug treatment. Passive immunotherapy for HIV is an experimental strategy that involves periodically administering broadly neutralizing HIV-specific antibodies (bNAbs) to control the virus. It would be advantageous to control HIV without antiretroviral drugs because of their cost, the potential for cumulative ...

Like a protective tent over a colony of harmful bacteria, biofilms make the treatment of skin infections especially difficult. Microorganisms protected in a biofilm pose a significant health risk due to their antibiotic resistance and recalcitrance to treatment, and biofilm-protected bacteria account for some 80 percent of total bacterial infections in humans and are 50 to 1,000 times more resistant to antibiotics than simpler bacterial infections. "In essence, we may have stumbled onto a magic bullet," said David Fox, a Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher on the ...

Scientists have developed what they believe is the thinnest-possible semiconductor, a new class of nanoscale materials made in sheets only three atoms thick. The University of Washington researchers have demonstrated that two of these single-layer semiconductor materials can be connected in an atomically seamless fashion known as a heterojunction. This result could be the basis for next-generation flexible and transparent computing, better light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, and solar technologies. "Heterojunctions are fundamental elements of electronic and photonic devices," ...

Personal protective equipment is critical but not enough to shield health care workers from Ebola* Free content Personal protective equipment designed to shield health care workers from contaminated body fluids of Ebola patients is not enough to prevent transmission, according to a commentary being published early online today in Annals of Internal Medicine. Despite the known effectiveness of barrier protection in blocking Ebola transmission, infections among health care workers have played a major role in outbreaks. William A. Fischer II, MD from the University of North ...

A study published in this week's PLOS Medicine on large-scale rural sanitation programs in India highlights challenges in achieving sufficient access to latrines and reduction in open defecation to yield significant health benefits for young children. The researchers, led by Sumeet Patil from the School of Public Health, University of California at Berkeley, and the Network for Engineering and Economics Research and Management in Mumbai, India conducted a cluster randomised controlled trial in 80 rural villages in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh to measure the effect ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois engineers are bringing a touch of color to glucose monitoring. The researchers developed a new continuous glucose monitoring material that changes color as glucose levels fluctuate, and the wavelength shift is so precise that doctors and patients may be able to use it for automatic insulin dosing - something not possible using current point measurements like test strips. "There are significant limitations to current continuous glucose monitoring technologies," said study leader Paul Braun, a professor of materials science and ...

NASA's TRMM and Aqua satellites have been providing views of the outside and inside of Hurricane Cristobal as it heads for Bermuda. The National Hurricane Center posted a Tropical Storm Watch for Bermuda as Cristobal heads in that direction. Strong winds and flooding associated with Tropical Storm Cristobal caused deaths in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite captured rainfall data from Cristobal on August 24, 2014 at 1150Z (7:50 a.m. EDT). Light to moderate rainfall was occurring throughout much of the ...

Massive Hurricane Marie appears like a giant fish about to swallow tiny Tropical Depression Karina on satellite imagery today from NOAA's GOES-West satellite. Karina, now a tropical depression is being swept into Marie's circulation where it is expected to be eaten, or absorbed. An image from NOAA's GOES-West satellite on Aug. 26 at 8 a.m. EDT shows Karina being drawn into the powerful and large circulation of Hurricane Marie to the east of the depression. The image was created by NASA/NOAA's GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Forecasters ...

NASA's Terra satellite passed over Hurricane Marie when its eye was just to the west of Socorro Island in the Eastern Pacific. Marie's eye may have been near the island, but the storm extended several hundreds of miles from there. On Aug. 25 at 18:20 UTC (2:20 p.m. EDT) the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured Hurricane Marie's center just west of Socorro Island. The image showed Marie's tightly wound center and eye. A thick band of powerful thunderstorms surrounded the center of circulation, and bands ...

Scientists at the University of Warwick have provided the first evidence that the lack of a naturally occurring protein is linked to early signs of dementia. Published in Nature Communications, the research found that the absence of the protein MK2/3 promotes structural and physiological changes to cells in the nervous system. These changes were shown to have a significant correlation with early signs of dementia, including restricted learning and memory formation capabilities. An absence of MK2/3, in spite of the brain cells (neurons) having significant structural ...

Irvine, Calif. — Existing power plants around the world will pump out more than 300 billion tons of carbon dioxide over their expected lifetimes, significantly adding to atmospheric levels of the climate-warming gas, according to UC Irvine and Princeton University scientists. Their findings, which appear Aug. 26 in the journal Environmental Research Letters, are the first to quantify how quickly these "committed" emissions are growing – by about 4 percent per year – as more fossil fuel-burning power plants are built. Assuming these stations will operate for 40 years, ...

Washington, DC—Weight loss surgery can curb alterations in brain activity associated with obesity and improve cognitive function involved in planning, strategizing and organizing, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). Obesity can tax the brain as well as other organs. Obese individuals face a 35 percent higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease compared to normal weight people. Bariatric surgery is used to help people who are dangerously obese lose weight. Bariatric surgery procedures ...

The world's accounting system for carbon emissions, run by the United Nations, disregards capital investments in future coal-fired and natural-gas power plants that will commit the world to several decades and billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study from Princeton University and the University of California-Irvine published Aug. 26 in the journal Environmental Research Letters. In the paper, Robert Socolow, a Princeton professor, emeritus, of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and co-author Steven Davis, a professor of earth system science ...

A new argument has just been added to the growing case for graphene being bumped off its pedestal as the next big thing in the high-tech world by the two-dimensional semiconductors known as MX2 materials. An international collaboration of researchers led by a scientist with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has reported the first experimental observation of ultrafast charge transfer in photo-excited MX2 materials. The recorded charge transfer time clocked in at under 50 femtoseconds, comparable to the fastest times ...

PRINCETON, N.J.—Expanding the age of eligibility for measles vaccination from 12 to 15 months could have potentially large effects on coverage in Africa, according to a new report published by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. If combined with improvements to the vaccination process itself, such a change could help the country inch closer to the national coverage levels required for measles eradication. The findings were published in Epidemiology & Infection. "The age of routine vaccination is usually set to around 12 ...

At the stroke of a pen a New Zealand endemic tree has for the last 31 years been incorrectly regarded the same as a group of 'weedy' Australian shrubs and small trees. A New Zealand botanist has completed a 15-year study to reveal some surprises and discover astonishing cryptic diversity behind what was long considered a single tree species. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys. Known to botanists as Kunzea ericoides, this species was one of the many discoveries made in the north-western South Island of New Zealand by Jules Sébastien César Dumont ...

An international team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) -- among other telescopes -- has obtained the best view yet of a collision between two galaxies when the Universe was only half its current age. To make this observation, the team also enlisted the help of a gravitational lens, a galaxy-size magnifying glass, to reveal otherwise invisible detail. These new studies of galaxy HATLAS J142935.3-002836 have shown that this complex and distant object looks surprisingly like the comparatively ...

ROSEMONT, Ill.—Each year, more than 300,000 Americans, primarily adults over age 65, sustain a hip fracture, a debilitating injury that can diminish life quality and expectancy, and result in lost work days and substantial, long-term financial costs to patients, families, insurers and government agencies. And while surgery, the primary treatment for hip fractures, successfully reduces mortality risk and improves physical function, little is known about the procedure's value and return on investment. A new study, appearing in the journal Clinical Orthopaedics and Related ...