University of Queensland scientists have found a genetic basis for height and body mass differences between European populations. Queensland Brain Institute researcher Dr Matthew Robinson said the findings could explain why people from northern European countries tended on average to be taller and slimmer than other Europeans. He said the genes that resulted in greater height correlated strongly with genes that reduced body mass index. "Our findings give a genetic basis to the stereotype of Scandinavians as being tall and lean," Dr Robinson said. The study paves ...

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University have found molecular evidence of how a biochemical process controls the lengths of protective chromosome tips, a potentially significant step in ultimately understanding cancer growth and aging. In a paper recently published as the cover story in the online journal eLife, biologist David C. Zappulla and graduate student Evan P. Hass show how in baker's yeast cells, two proteins work together to usher a key enzyme to the chromosome tip, the telomere, to restore its length, which diminishes with each round of cell division. That ...

A new study from researchers at Uppsala University shows that variation in genome size may be much more important than previously believed. It is clear that, at least sometimes, a large genome is a good genome. 'Our study shows that females with larger genome lay more eggs and males with larger genome fertilize more eggs', says research leader Göran Arnqvist, Professor of Animal Ecology at Uppsala University. The study of seed beetles is published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. The amount of nuclear DNA per cell, or the ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 14, 2015 - One in four middle-aged adults who survive to age 85 will develop heart failure, according to current estimates. Intervention programs to improve lifestyles are widely advocated, but do they actually work? Investigators in the U.S. and Taiwan independently examined programs that may reduce cardiovascular risk and concluded that both programs will reduce lifetime risk of heart failure. Results are reported in The American Journal of Medicine. A group of American investigators estimated whether greater adherence to the American Heart ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 14, 2015 - The latest issue of Biological Psychiatry presents the results of three studies implicating metabotropic glutamate receptor 2 (mGluR2) as a new molecular target for the treatment of addiction. Group II metabotropic glutamate receptors, which include the subtypes mGluR2 and mGluR3, have been known targets for addiction treatment. Unfortunately, mGluR2/3 agonists studied to date have shown important limitations, including development of tolerance and decreasing food intake along with drug intake. Thus, scientists have been working ...

This news release is available in German. FRANKFURT. Optogenetics is a quickly expanding field of research which has revolutionized neurobiological and cellbiological research around the world. It uses natural or tailored light-sensitive proteins in order to switch nerve cells on and off without electrodes with unprecedented accuracy in respect to time and location. The discovery of the light-gated ion channel channelrhodopsin in algae in 2002 was a key finding for this field. In 2005, Frankfurt scientists working with Prof. Alexander Gottschalk succeeded in transferring ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio--The next time someone accuses you of making an irrational decision, just explain that you're obeying the laws of quantum physics. A new trend taking shape in psychological science not only uses quantum physics to explain humans' (sometimes) paradoxical thinking, but may also help researchers resolve certain contradictions among the results of previous psychological studies. According to Zheng Joyce Wang and others who try to model our decision-making processes mathematically, the equations and axioms that most closely match human behavior may be ones ...

An international study led by a University of Queensland researcher has revealed more than half the world's sea turtles have ingested plastic or other human rubbish. The study, led by Dr Qamar Schuyler from UQ's School of Biological Sciences, found the east coasts of Australia and North America, Southeast Asia, southern Africa, and Hawaii were particularly dangerous for turtles due to a combination of debris loads and high species diversity. "The results indicate that approximately 52 per cent of turtles world-wide have eaten debris," Dr Schuyler said. The study ...

Melbourne summer temperatures have been steadily climbing over the past 25 years, but even more so during the two weeks of the Australian Open in late January, new data analysis reveals. The average afternoon temperature in January has risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius per decade since 1987. But in the two weeks of the Australian Open - usually held in mid-late January - temperatures have increased by 1.25 degrees per decade. Ben Hague, a third-year Atmosphere and Ocean Sciences student at the University of Melbourne, said extreme summer temperatures have also become more ...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (Sept. 14, 2015)--A new study finds that the characteristics of one's community may be as important as individual factors on the decision to become an organ donor. The study, published in The Milbank Quarterly, shows an association between sociodemographic/social capital measures and organ donor registrations across 4,466 Massachusetts neighborhoods. In order to increase organ donation registrations, the research suggests that future health policies adopt a community-level focus. The shortage of organs for transplantation has reached unprecedented ...

The globe's forests have shrunk by three per cent since 1990 - an area equivalent to the size of South Africa - despite significant improvements in conservation over the past decade. The UN's Global Forest Resources Assessment (GFRA) 2015 was released this week, revealing that while the pace of forest loss has slowed, the damage over the past 25 years has been considerable. Total forest area has declined by three per cent between 1990 and 2015 from 4,128 million hectares to 3,999 million hectares - a loss of 129 million hectares. Significantly, loss of natural forested ...

Alzheimer's-disease-related proteases, BACE1 and APH1B-y-secretase, control axonal guidance by regulating growth cone dynamics BACE1 is the major drug target for Alzheimer's disease, but we know surprisingly little about its normal function in the CNS. Soraia Barão and Bart De Strooper (VIB/KU Leuven) now show that this protease is critically involved in axonal guidance processes in thalamic and hippocampal neurons. An active membrane bound proteolytic CHL1 fragment is generated by BACE1 upon Sema3A binding. This fragment relays the Sema3A signal to the neuronal ...

Persons sleeping less than 6 hours or more than 10 hours suffer from low-grade inflammation more often than persons sleeping 7-8 hours per night. This was observed in a University of Eastern Finland study focusing on the health and lifestyle habits among middle-aged men. "Earlier studies have found a relation between reduced sleep and low-grade inflammation," says Maria Luojus, MHSc, one of the study researchers. Furthermore, low-grade inflammation occurs in overweight, depression and diabetes. The study is the first to analyse the association between sleep duration ...

Results of a 20-year follow-up of the academic EORTC 22881-10882 boost no-boost trial presented as a "Best Abstract" at the European Cancer Congress 2015 in Vienna show that young age, high-grade invasive tumor, and the presence of associated ductal carcinoma in situ were all factors increasing the local recurrence rate. An earlier analysis had already shown that young age and high-grade invasive carcinoma were the most important risk factors for local relapse in this trial conducted from 1989 to 1996. Dr. Conny Vrieling of the Clinique des Grangettes in Geneva, Switzerland, ...

A new study has confirmed that regular smokers have a significantly increased risk of tooth loss. Male smokers are up to 3.6 times more likely to lose their teeth than non-smokers, whereas female smokers were found to be 2.5 times more likely. The research, published in the Journal of Dental Research, is the output of a long-term longitudinal study of the EPIC Potsdam cohort in Germany carried out by researchers at the University of Birmingham and the German Institute of Human Nutrition. Tooth loss remains a major public health problem worldwide. In the UK, 15% of ...

Malnutrition is a known complication of weight loss surgery, but findings from a small study by researchers at Johns Hopkins show many obese people may be malnourished before they undergo the procedure. "Our results highlight the often-overlooked paradox that abundance of food and good nutrition are not one and the same," says senior investigator Kimberley Steele, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "Overweight and obese people can suffer from nutritional deficiencies, and those who care for them should be aware ...

Telecommunication networks will soon reach the physical limits of current technology and in order to overcome the current bottleneck, they will have to exploit the quantum properties of light. Roberto Morandotti and his INRS team are paving the way to this technological revolution by removing the technical barriers of quantum photonics through the use of their optical chips. Recently they directly generated cross-polarized (orthogonal) photon pairs on a chip, a first in quantum optics. Polarization will now be among the controllable parameters for harnessing light in a ...

The first images of motor proteins in action are published in the journal Nature Communications today. These proteins are vital to complex life, forming the transport infrastructure that allows different parts of cells to specialise in particular functions. Until now, the way they move has never been directly observed. Researchers at the University of Leeds and in Japan used electron microscopes to capture images of the largest type of motor protein, called dynein, during the act of stepping along its molecular track. Dr Stan Burgess, at the University of Leeds' ...

Elephants born into stressful situations have fewer offspring and age faster, researchers at the University of Sheffield have found. Scientists discovered that Asian elephants born during times when their mothers experience highest stress levels produce significantly fewer offspring in their lifetime despite having higher rates of reproduction at an early age. The research team, from the University's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, also found that those animals born under stress declined much more rapidly in older age, decades later. Lead author Dr Hannah ...

Eating a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra virgin olive oil was associated with a relatively lower risk of breast cancer in a study of women in Spain, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. Breast cancer is a frequently diagnosed cancer and a leading cause of death in women. Diet has been extensively studied as a modifiable risk factor in the development of breast cancer but epidemiologic evidence on the effect of specific dietary factors is inconsistent. The Mediterranean diet is known for its abundance of plant foods, fish and ...

A new study reveals that insurance status, marital status, and county-level income may affect the chances of survival in young patients with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the findings indicate that efforts are needed to address the social factors that impact critical aspects of health in these patients. AML will affect approximately 20,830 and kill 10,460 Americans in 2015. Tremendous progress has been made in identifying disease characteristics that cause a patient to have ...

A new protocol to treat babies born in withdrawal from drugs can be used widely to improve outcomes for these babies. The protocol reduces length of stay and the duration of treatment with opioids that are used therapeutically to wean babies off of drugs. "The incidence of neonatal abstinence syndrome after an infant's in utero exposure to opioids has risen dramatically in recent years," says Eric Hall, PhD, a researcher in the Perinatal Institute at Cincinnati Children's and lead author of the study. "After adoption of the protocol, opioid treatment went from 34 to ...

Pedalling like Chris Froome or Alberto Contador might seem appealing, but Oxford University researchers have found that for most of us it's likely to reduce rather than improve our performance. A team from Oxford's Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences looked at a common measure of aerobic fitness called VO2 max. While it can be measured accurately in a laboratory, it is often more practical to use techniques that estimate VO2 max for individuals by getting them to exercise to their maximal level. These include the 'bleep test' of shuttle runs used by police forces ...

Astronomers have successfully peered through the 'amniotic sac' of a star that is still forming to observe the innermost region of a burgeoning solar system for the first time. In a research paper published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, an international team of astronomers describe surprising findings in their observations of the parent star, which is called HD 100546. Lead author Dr Ignacio Mendigutía, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds, said: "Nobody has ever been able to probe this close ...

New research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) shows that current and former users of marijuana are more likely to have prediabetes--the state of poor blood sugar control that can progress to type 2 diabetes--than never users of marijuana. However the researchers, led by Mike Bancks (University of Minnesota School of Public Health, Minneapolis, MN, USA) failed to establish a direct link between marijuana use and type 2 diabetes. Marijuana is the most frequently used illicit drug in America (and is estimated to ...