The brain is a privileged organ in the body. So vital to life, the brain is protected from alterations elsewhere in the body by a highly regulated gateway known as the blood-brain barrier, which allows only selected molecules to pass through. In certain diseases, however, such as multiple sclerosis, the barrier can be improperly breached. These "leaks" can allow immune cells and inflammatory molecules to pass through, causing inflammation that leads to neuronal damage. In a new study, researchers have made insights into how the blood-brain barrier, or BBB, is maintained, ...

The widespread use of cloth masks by healthcare workers may actually put them at increased risk of respiratory illness and viral infections and their global use should be discouraged, according to a UNSW study. The results of the first randomised clinical trial (RCT) to study the efficacy of cloth masks were published today in the journal BMJ Open. The trial saw 1607 hospital healthcare workers across 14 hospitals in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, split into three groups: those wearing medical masks, those wearing cloth masks and a control group based on usual practice, ...

(Boston)-- Individuals with mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI), particularly those who have had loss of consciousness (LOC), show structural brain abnormalities in their white matter as measured by Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). These findings, which appear in the journal NeuroImage: Clinical, is the only study to date to demonstrate that mTBI with LOC is associated with brain abnormalities that lead to decreased performance in verbal memory. Blast-related TBI has been a common injury among returning troops due to the widespread use of improvised explosive devices ...

WASHINGTON (April 22, 2015) -- New research published this week in Nature has found several drugs could lead to new treatment options for multiple sclerosis (MS), including two drugs that effectively treat MS at the source, in vivo. When administered at the peak of disease, these two drugs showed a striking reversal of disease severity. At the pathological level, MS is a disease in which the immune system attacks the protective myelin sheath, a type of insulation that covers nerves, ultimately disrupting communication between the brain and the body and leading to nerve ...

April 22, 2014 (SILVER SPRING, Md.) - Ebola survivors experienced negative health effects that persisted more than two years after the 2007-2008 Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BDBV) outbreak in Uganda that claimed 39 lives. These findings are detailed in a paper published online today in Lancet ID. This represents the largest long-term study to-date on Ebola survivors, and examines health events more than two years after initial exposure to BDBV. "Defining EVD-related health consequences could help improve patient care for survivors," said Dr. Hannah Kibuuka, the principal ...

As baby boomers age, the number of people diagnosed with Parkinson's disease is expected to increase. Patients who develop this disease usually start experiencing symptoms around age 60 or older. Currently, there's no cure, but scientists are reporting a novel approach that reversed Parkinson's-like symptoms in rats. Their results, published in the journal ACS Nano, could one day lead to a new therapy for human patients. Rajnish Kumar Chaturvedi, Kavita Seth, Kailash Chand Gupta and colleagues from the CSIR-Indian Institute of Toxicology Research note that among other ...

If you've studied ingredient labels on food packaging, you've probably noticed that soy lecithin is in a lot of products, ranging from buttery spreads to chocolate cake. Scientists have now found a potential new role for this all-purpose substance: dispersing crude oil spills. Their study, which could lead to a less toxic way to clean up these environmental messes, appears in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. Ram B. Gupta and colleagues explain that applying chemical dispersants is one of the most effective ways to help get rid of oil spills quickly. The dispersants ...

For years, health advocates have been pushing to ban some flame retardants for their potentially harmful effects, especially on young children and infants. Now scientists report these compounds could play a role in a common health problem for one of our most beloved pets: cats. In the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, a new study found that cats with hyperthyroidism had high levels of certain flame retardants, hinting at a possible link. Jessica Norrgran and colleagues explain that more than 10 percent of older cats develop hyperthyroidism, a hormonal disorder ...

In the last 10 years, computer security researchers have shown that malicious hackers don't need to see your data in order to steal your data. From the pattern in which your computer accesses its memory banks, adversaries can infer a shocking amount about what's stored there. The risk of such attacks is particularly acute in the cloud, where you have no control over whose applications are sharing server space with yours. An antagonist could load up multiple cloud servers with small programs that do nothing but spy on other people's data. Two years ago, researchers in ...

Tropical plantations in Southeast Asia have supplied most of the essential, natural rubber for truck, car and airplane tires for the past century. Now the tire industry and others say they're finally overcoming long-standing challenges to turn a desert shrub into an alternative source of the stretchy material. An article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) explains that the latest developments will help diversify an otherwise vulnerable supply chain. Alexander Tullo, a senior correspondent at C&EN, explains that natural rubber has unique properties that make it ideal ...

Rapidly swinging from extremes of joy and energy to sadness, fatigue, and confusion, bipolar disorder (BD) patients feel desperate and largely alone in the world. And according to the National Institutes of Health, between 25-50 percent of the roughly 3% of Americans living with BD attempt suicide at least once. Lithium is among the most effective therapies for BD, and remains the first-line treatment even as other mood stabilizing drugs have become available. But about half of the patients prescribed lithium do not respond to the treatment. A new Tel Aviv University ...

TORONTO, April 22, 2015 -- A genetic test that can prevent 'killer' bees from spreading around the world has been created in a research effort led by University of Sydney scholars jointly with York University scientists. "Our genetic test is highly accurate and considerably more sophisticated than the old tests that have a high tendency to misclassify hybrid bees," says Professor Amro Zayed in the department of Biology, Faculty of Science. Africanized honeybees are highly aggressive and very difficult to manage relative to European honeybees used by Canadian and Australian ...

In the most comprehensive study ever on the impact of smoking on cardiovascular disease in older people, epidemiologist Dr. Ute Mons from the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) analyzed 25 individual studies, compiling data from over half a million individuals age 60 and older. Twice as many smokers die from cardiovascular disease than life-long non-smokers do. The increase in risk depends on the number of cigarettes that a person has smoked in his or her lifetime. After one quits smoking, this risk continues to decrease. On average, ...

In the quantum world of light, being distinguishable means staying lonely. Only those photons that are indistinguishable can wind up in a pair, through what is called Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. This subtle quantum effect has been successfully imaged for the first time by two doctoral students from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw. Physicists have long known that photons can become bunched together. However, technological limitations have prevented the phenomenon from actually being observed directly. Only recently has this feat been achieved by two ...

Bethesda, MD, April 20, 2015: The Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP), the premier global, non-profit organization serving molecular diagnostic professionals, today published a special article in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics titled, "Do Circulating Tumor Cells, Exosomes, and Circulating Tumor Nucleic Acids Have Clinical Utility?" The report provides a thorough overview of research to-date on the minimally invasive "liquid biopsy" approaches to cancer diagnostics. "As a group of molecular diagnostic experts, we were intrigued and excited by the emerging ...

Hasbro Children's Hospital study finds link between adverse childhood experiences and pediatric asthma Children who experience violence, substance abuse at home report significantly higher rates of asthma PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Robyn Wing, M.D., an emergency medicine physician at Hasbro Children's Hospital, recently led a study that found children who were exposed to an adverse childhood experience (ACE) were 28 percent more likely to develop asthma. The rate of asthma occurrence further increased in children with each additional ACE exposure. The study, recently published ...

Scientists have for the first time captured live images of the process of taste sensation on the tongue. The international team imaged single cells on the tongue of a mouse with a specially designed microscope system. "We've watched live taste cells capture and process molecules with different tastes," said biomedical engineer Dr Steve Lee, from The Australian National University (ANU). There are more than 2,000 taste buds on the human tongue, which can distinguish at least five tastes: salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami. However the relationship between the ...

Rather than slowing down, ants speed up in response to a higher density of traffic on their trails, according to new research published in Springer's journal The Science of Nature - Naturwissenschaften. When the researchers increased the supply of food by leaving food next to the trail, ants accelerated their speed by 50 percent. This was despite more than double the density of traffic. When food increases in supply, more forager ants are sent out to carry it back to the nest. With this increase in ant density, the number of encounters between outbound and incoming individuals ...

The ability of materials to conduct heat is a concept that we are all familiar with from everyday life. The modern story of thermal transport dates back to 1822 when the brilliant French physicist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier published his book "Théorie analytique de la chaleur" (The Analytic Theory of Heat), which became a corner stone of heat transport. He pointed out that the thermal conductivity, i.e., ratio of the heat flux to the temperature gradient is an intrinsic property of the material itself. The advent of nanotechnology, where the rules of classical ...

Scientists at The University of Manchester have made an important finding that could help develop an early test for kidney disease. Dr Rachel Lennon from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell-Matrix Research has been studying why some people are more susceptible to kidney disease because of their race and gender. She explains: "It's well known that impaired kidney function is more common in Afro-Caribbean individuals compared to those from a Caucasian background, and in men compared to women. However, the reasons for the difference in susceptibility are only just being ...

This news release is available in German. The size of the neonatal skull is large relative to the dimensions of the birth canal in the female pelvis. This is the reason why childbirth is slower and more difficult in humans than in most other primates. Scientists from the Universities of Oslo and Vienna, identified adaptations in the morphology of the human body, which were unknown so far. The results of this new study appeared in the current edition of PNAS. Upright walking and difficult birth In hominids, upright walking evolved 4-5 million years ago. The ...

Is it possible to prevent mental health problems in higher education students? The answer is "yes" according to a team of psychologists from Loyola University Chicago who conducted a careful, systematic review of 103 universal interventions involving over 10,000 students enrolled in 2- and 4-year colleges and universities and graduate programs. The findings appear in the May 2015 issue of Prevention Science, published by Springer. Researchers indicated that universal prevention interventions - that is, programs targeting general students, not just students who are at ...

Researchers from Plymouth University Peninsula Schools of Medicine and Dentistry are part of a team led by the University of Oxford, who have carried out new research that suggests mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) could provide an alternative non-drug treatment for people who do not wish to continue long-term antidepressant treatment. The results are published in "The Lancet". The results come from the first ever large study to compare MBCT - structured training for the mind and body which aims to change the way people think and feel about their experiences ...

Fragments of asteroids regularly land on Earth as meteorites. If you examine such a find, you can see that it comprises millimetre-sized round stones, known as chondrules. These small particles are believed to be the original building blocks of the solar system. However, the research community has not previously been able to explain how the chondrules formed asteroids. A new study shows that asteroids were formed by capturing chondrules with the help of gravitational force. "The chondrules are of exactly the right size to be slowed down by the gas that orbited the young ...

Researchers at the Institut Hospital del Mar d'Investigacions Mèdiques (IMIM) have identified a new way of treating colorectal cancer. In the study published in the journal Science Signaling, the team led by LLuís Espinosa, investigator of IMIM's research group into stem cells and cancer, have shown that inhibition of endosomal activity is a potential therapeutic strategy for the treatment of cancers with the BRAF mutated gene. This discovery is an important step in the personalisation of the treatment of colorectal cancer, as the presence of this mutation is ...