Trained volunteers are as good as professional astronomers at finding jets shooting from massive black holes and matching them to their host galaxies, research suggests. Scientists working on citizen science project Radio Galaxy Zoo developed an online tutorial to teach volunteers how to spot black holes and other objects that emit large amounts of energy through radio waves. Through the project, volunteers are given telescope images taken in both the radio and infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum and asked to compare the pictures and match the "radio source" ...

A rare, deadly form of skin cancer known as desmoplasmic melanoma (DM) may possess the highest burden of gene mutations of any cancer, suggesting that immunotherapy may be a promising approach for treatment, according to an international team led by UC San Francisco scientists. One of these mutations, never before observed in any cancer, may shield nascent DM tumors from destruction by the immune system and allow further mutations to develop. "The focus of our lab has been to show that there's not just one 'melanoma' but many different types," said senior author Boris ...

In the course of billions of years continents break up, drift apart, and are pushed back together again. The cores of continents are, however, geologically extremely stable and have survived up to 3.8 billions of years. These cores that are called cratons are the oldest known geological features of our planet. It was assumed that the cratons are stable because of their especially solid structure due to relatively low temperatures compared to the surrounding mantle. A team of German-American scientists now discovered that these cratons that were assumed to be "as solid as ...

A novel research tool developed by researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London has identified a link between the negative symptoms experienced by people with schizophrenia and adverse clinical outcomes. Negative symptoms can include poor motivation, poor eye contact and a reduction in speech and activity. As a result, people with schizophrenia often appear emotionless, flat and apathetic. These contrast with positive symptoms - psychotic behaviours not seen in healthy people, such as delusions or hallucinations. Published ...

This news release is available in German. The scientific world was astonished when, in 2011, Chinese researchers claimed to have found evidence suggesting that minute fragments of plant genetic material - so-called microRNA molecules - of rice ingested from food could play a role in regulating physiological processes in the human body. If this is indeed true, it might even be possible to deliberately modify human physiological functions via this route, for instance by incorporating microRNAs into novel functional foods. As a strategy, this holds considerable potential. ...

Secukinumab (trade name: Cosentyx) has been approved since January 2015 for adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether this drug offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapy. Such an added benefit cannot be derived from the dossier, however: In patients who are candidates for systemic treatment, an indirect comparison provided no suitable data because the minimum study duration had not been reached. In adults in whom other systemic treatments ...

This news release is available in German. The recovery of waste heat in all kinds of processes poses one of the main challenges of our time to making established processes more energy-efficient and thus more environmentally friendly. The Spin Seebeck effect (SSE) is a novel, only rudimentarily understood effect, which allows for the conversion of a heat flux into electrical energy, even in electrically non-conducting materials. A team of physicists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the University of Konstanz, TU Kaiserslautern, and the Massachusetts Institute ...

PULLMAN, Wash.--Washington State University researchers have discovered how to stretch metal films used in flexible electronics to twice their size without breaking. The discovery could lead to dramatic improvements and addresses one of the biggest challenges in flexible electronics, an industry still in its infancy with applications such as bendable batteries, robotic skins, wearable monitoring devices and sensors, and connected fabrics. The work was led by Rahul Panat and Indranath Dutta, researchers in Voiland College's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, ...

September 8, 2015, New York, New York- Data from a three-country survey seeking to understand beliefs of adults on the role of diet for optimal health, as well as consumption of key micronutrients including Omega-3 and Vitamin D, will be published in the November/December issue of Nutrition Today. The survey of 3,000 American, British and German adults found that 72 percent reported having a "healthy" or "optimal" diet and more than half (52 percent) believed they consume all the key nutrients needed for optimal nutrition through food sources alone. However, the prevalence ...

Extinct Mediterranean forests of biblical times could return and thrive in warmer, drier future. The Mediterranean has cradled humanity and our cities, farms, domesticated animals, and logging habits for many thousands of years. During the last 5 to 8 millennia, as people developed farming and settled in cities, the landscape has gradually changed from a thick canopy of trees to open grass and shrubs. The ghosts of Sicily's extinct evergreen forests of holm oak (Quercus ilex) and olive trees (Olea europaea) remain in the record of pollen left in the lakebed sediments. ...

A pair of studies suggests that a region of the brain - called the insular cortex - may hold the key to treating addiction. Scientists have come to this conclusion after finding that smokers who suffered a stroke in the insular cortex were far more likely to quit smoking and experience fewer and less severe withdrawal symptoms than those with strokes in other parts of the brain. "These findings indicate that the insular cortex may play a central role in addiction," said Amir Abdolahi Ph.D., M.P.H., lead author of the studies. "When this part of the brain is damaged during ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 8, 2015 - Gastric cancer poses a significant health problem in developing countries and is typically associated with late-stage diagnosis and high mortality. A new study in The American Journal of Pathology points to a pivotal role played by the biomarker microRNA (miR)-506 in gastric cancer. Patients whose primary gastric cancer lesions express high levels of miR-506 have significantly longer survival times compared to patients with low miR-506 expression. In addition, miR-506 suppresses tumor growth, blood vessel formation, and metastasis. "Epithelial-to-mesenchymal ...

1. ACP recommends policies for practicing telemedicine in primary care Free: http://www.annals.org/article.aspx?doi=10.7326/M15-0498 Editorial: http://www.annals.org/article.aspx?doi=10.7326/M15-1416 URLs go live when embargo lifts In a new position paper, the American College of Physicians (ACP) says that telemedicine can improve access to care, but policies are needed to balance the benefits and risks for both patients and physicians. The authors note that conscious scrutiny is especially important as policymakers and stakeholders shape the landscape for ...

An international team led by researchers at Uppsala University reports a surprising discovery from the genomes of eight Iberian Stone-Age farmer remains. The analyses revealed that early Iberian farmers are the closest ancestors to modern-day Basques, in contrast previous hypotheses that linked Basques to earlier pre-farming groups. The team could also demonstrate that farming was brought to Iberia by the same/similar groups that migrated to northern and central Europe and that the incoming farmers admixed with local, Iberian hunter-gather groups, a process that continued ...

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers say they have discovered a new way that the most prevalent disease-causing fungus can thwart immune system attacks. The findings, published Sept. 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer new clues about how Candida albicans, the fungus responsible for vaginal yeast infections and the mouth infection thrush, is able to cause a deadly infection once it enters the bloodstream. When the body is faced with an infection, cells give a burst of free radicals to kill the germs. C. albicans ...

Boston, MA -- A new study led by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health finds that mobile phone records can be used to predict the geographical spread and timing of dengue epidemics. More people around the world are becoming vulnerable to this deadly virus as climate change expands the range of the mosquito that transmits dengue and infected travelers spread the disease across borders. Utilizing the largest data set of mobile phone records ever analyzed to estimate human mobility, the researchers developed an innovative model that can predict epidemics ...

Researchers at LSTM have shown that under certain circumstances evolution can be highly predictable, especially in terms of how creatures become resistant to dangerous toxins. Biologists looking at the control of malaria have known for some time that mosquito populations often become resistant to insecticides designed to kill them, but in a paper published today in the journal PNAS, researchers examine the response of a variety of insects, reptiles, amphibians and mammals to a natural selection pressure in the form of cardiac glycosides - toxins produced by certain plants ...

Methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin, is especially high in Arctic marine life but until recently, scientists haven't been able to explain why. Now, research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health suggests that high levels of methylmercury in Arctic life are a byproduct of global warming and the melting of sea-ice in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. To mitigate global warming, many governments are turning to hydroelectric power but the research also suggests that flooding for hydroelectric ...

In one of the largest and most detailed studies of animal molecular biology ever undertaken, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Toronto discovered the assembly instructions for nearly 1,000 protein complexes shared by most kinds of animals, revealing their deep evolutionary relationships. Those instructions offer a powerful new tool for studying the causes of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cancer. Proteins come together to form protein complexes, or molecular machines, to carry out many specific biological functions in ...

(BOSTON) -The CRISPR-Cas9 system has been in the limelight mainly as a revolutionary genome engineering tool used to modify specific gene sequences within the vast sea of an organism's DNA. Cas9, a naturally occurring protein in the immune system of certain bacteria, acts like a pair of molecular scissors to precisely cut or edit specific sections of DNA. More recently, however, scientists have also begun to use CRISPR-Cas9 variants as gene regulation tools to reversibly turn genes on or off at whim. Both of these tasks, genome engineering and gene regulation, are initiated ...

Researchers have, for the first time, levitated individual nanodiamonds in vacuum. The research team is led by Nick Vamivakas at the University of Rochester who thinks their work will make extremely sensitive instruments for sensing tiny forces and torques possible, as well as a way to physically create larger-scale quantum systems known as macroscopic Schrödinger Cat states. While other researchers have trapped other types of nanoparticles in vacuum, those were not optically active. The nanodiamonds, on the other hand, can contain nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers that ...

National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Starr Cancer Consortium, Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Simons Foundation, Susan G. Komen Foundation, Prostate Cancer Foundation, CSHL Cancer Center, WSBS Cold Spring Harbor, NY - Seemingly similar cells often have significantly different genomes. This is often true of cancer cells, for example, which may differ one from another even within a small tumor sample, as genetic mutations within the cells spread in staccato-like bursts. Detailed knowledge of these mutations, called copy number variations, in individual ...

Scientists at the University of Cambridge University have published new results in the journal PLoS ONE from the largest ever study of people with autism taking the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' test. Whilst typical adults showed the predicted and now well-established sex difference on this test, with women on average scoring higher than men, in adults with autism this typical sex difference was conspicuously absent. Instead, both men and women with autism showed an extreme of the typical male pattern on the test, providing strong support for the 'extreme male brain' theory ...

A 'gene signature' that could be used to predict the onset of diseases, such as Alzheimer's, years in advance has been developed in research published in the open access journal Genome Biology. The study aimed to define a set of genes associated with 'healthy ageing' in 65 year olds. Such a molecular profile could be useful for distinguishing people at earlier risk of age-related diseases. This could improve upon the use of chronological age and complement traditional indicators of disease, such as blood pressure. Lead author James Timmons, from King's College London, ...

A study led by Dr. Bing Hu at Plymouth University Peninsula Schools of Medicine and Dentistry and involving other researchers from China and Switzerland, suggests for the first time that the use of local anaesthetic may affect tooth cell growth and the development of children's teeth. The study is published today, Monday 7th September 2015, in Cell Death Discovery, a new leading translational medical research journal from Nature Publishing Group, and comes at a time when more children than ever before are subjected to dental surgery - and local anaesthetic - because of ...