Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists have discovered how the most common genetic defect in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis kills nerve cells. Their study suggests that the pores that allow molecules into and out of a cell's nucleus get jammed, a finding that could speed the search for other genes that promote this fatal illness. In people who have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the motor neurons that operate the muscles deteriorate. Over time, the disease deprives patients of the ability to walk, swallow, and breathe, and they usually die within three ...

A study led by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of California, Los Angeles has demonstrated a new, efficient way to accelerate positrons, the antimatter opposites of electrons. The method may help boost the energy and shrink the size of future linear particle colliders - powerful accelerators that could be used to unravel the properties of nature's fundamental building blocks. The scientists had previously shown that boosting the energy of charged particles by having them "surf" a wave of ionized ...

They're among the most powerful tools for shedding new light on cancer growth and evolution, but mathematical models of the disease for years have faced an either/or stand off. Though models have been developed that capture the spatial aspects of tumors, those models typically don't study genetic changes. Non-spatial models, meanwhile, more accurately portray tumors' evolution, but not their three-dimensional structure. A collaboration between Harvard, Edinburgh, and Johns Hopkins Universities including Martin Nowak, Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics ...

New insight into methanotrophs, bacteria that can oxidise methane, may help us develop an array of biotechnological applications that exploit methane and protect our environment from this potent greenhouse gas. Publishing in Nature, scientists led by Newcastle University have provided new understanding of how methanotrophs are able to use large quantities of copper for methane oxidation. They have identified a new family of copper storage proteins called Csp that are present in a range of bacteria. These proteins store metal in a way that has not been seen previously ...

It's not a huge mystery why Los Angeles experiences earthquakes. The city sits near a boundary between two tectonic plates -- they shift, we shake. But what about places that aren't along tectonic plate boundaries? For example, seismicity on the North American plate occurs as far afield as southern Missouri, where earthquakes between 1811 and 1812 estimated at around magnitude 7 caused the Mississippi River to flow backward for hours. Until now, the cause of that seismicity has remained unclear. While earthquakes along tectonic plate boundaries are caused by motion ...

The Pacific Northwest is abundantly dotted with wildfires in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. There are over 27 fires listed in the Inciweb database for the state of Washington. The largest active fire listed is the Okanogan Complex Fire which is currently at 256,567 acres and has 1,250 personnel working the fire. This fire began as a lightning strike on August 15, 2015. It is only 10% contained at present. Governor Inslee's request for a federal Emergency Declaration to provide additional resources to cover some of the costs related to multiple wildfires burning ...

Mostly untouched for 100 years, 15 Roman-era Egyptian mummy portraits and panel paintings were literally dusted off by scientists and art conservators from Northwestern University and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology as they set out to investigate the materials the painters used nearly 2,000 years ago. What the researchers discovered surprised them, because it was hidden from the naked eye: the ancient artists used the pigment Egyptian blue as material for underdrawings and for modulating color -- a finding never before documented. Because blue has to be manufactured, ...

UC San Francisco researchers have for the first time developed a method to precisely control embryonic stem cell differentiation with beams of light, enabling them to be transformed into neurons in response to a precise external cue. The technique also revealed an internal timer within stem cells that lets them tune out extraneous biological noise but transform rapidly into mature cells when they detect a consistent, appropriate molecular signal, the authors report in a study published online August 26 in Cell Systems. "We've discovered a basic mechanism the cell uses ...

Companies can promote creativity in employees by encouraging them to network beyond their immediate business networks, according to a new study by management experts at Rice University, Australian National University (ANU), Erasmus University Rotterdam, Monash University in Clayton, Australia, and the University of Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. "Social networks can be important sources of information and insight that may spark employee creativity," the authors said. "The cross-fertilization of ideas depends not just on access to information and insights through one's ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--For more than a decade, gene sequencers have been improving more rapidly than the computers required to make sense of their outputs. Searching for DNA sequences in existing genomic databases can already take hours, and the problem is likely to get worse. Recently, Bonnie Berger's group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has been investigating techniques to make biological and chemical data easier to analyze by, in some sense, compressing it. In the latest issue of the journal Cell Systems, Berger and colleagues ...

Among our greatest achievements as humans, some might say, is our cumulative technological culture -- the tool-using acumen that is passed from one generation to the next. As the implements we use on a daily basis are modified and refined over time, they seem to evolve right along with us. A similar observation might be made regarding the New Caledonian crow, an extremely smart corvid and the only non-human species hypothesized to possess its own cumulative technological culture. How the birds transmit knowledge to each other is the focus of a study by Corina Logan, a ...

Two studies and an editorial published online by JAMA Psychiatry examine associations between cannabis use and the brain. Cannabis, also known as marijuana, is a popular recreational drug and its legal status has been a source of enduring controversy. In the first study, David Pagliaccio, Ph.D., formerly of Washington University in St. Louis, and now at the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Md., and coauthors analyzed data from a group of twin/siblings (n=483 with 262 participants reporting ever using cannabis in their lifetime) to determine whether cannabis ...

Toronto, CANADA - Male teens who experiment with cannabis before age 16, and have a high genetic risk for schizophrenia, show a different brain development trajectory than low risk peers who use cannabis. The discovery, made from a combined analysis of over 1,500 youth, contributes to a growing body of evidence implicating cannabis use in adolescence and schizophrenia later in life. The study was led by Baycrest Health Sciences' Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and is reported in JAMA Psychiatry (online) today, ahead of print publication. Adolescence is a period ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (Aug. 26, 2015) - Liver transplantation is currently the only established treatment for patients with end stage liver failure. However, this treatment is limited by the shortage of donors and the conditional integrity and suitability of the available organs. Transplanting donor hepatocytes (liver cells) into the liver as an alternative to liver transplantation also has drawbacks as the rate of survival of primary hepatocytes is limited and often severe complications can result from the transplantation procedure. In an effort to find potential therapeutic ...

Washington, DC--New research from a team led by Carnegie's Robert Hazen predicts that Earth has more than 1,500 undiscovered minerals and that the exact mineral diversity of our planet is unique and could not be duplicated anywhere in the cosmos. Minerals form from novel combinations of elements. These combinations can be facilitated by both geological activity, including volcanoes, plate tectonics, and water-rock interactions, and biological activity, such as chemical reactions with oxygen and organic material. Nearly a decade ago, Hazen developed the idea that the ...

PHILADELPHIA - In the midst of a growing trend for Medicare patients to receive observation care in the hospital to determine if they should be formally admitted, a new study from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania shows that for more than a quarter of beneficiaries with multiple observation stays, the cumulative out-of-pocket costs of these visits exceeds the deductible they would have owed for an inpatient hospital admission. According to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, there were 1.8 million observation patients ...

BATON ROUGE - Ten years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast, LSU researchers have analyzed and documented the recovery effort for the state. Initial reports have been released this week. Due to the unprecedented destruction of the 2005 storm season, recovery efforts traditionally supported by insurance and FEMA were supplemented by a unique set of programs funded through $13.4 billion of Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery, or CDBG-DR funds. The researchers from the LSU AgCenter and E. J. Ourso College of Business focused on ...

New Haven, Conn. -- Nearly one in four patients with chronic hepatitis C (HCV) are denied initial approval for a drug therapy that treats the most common strain of the infection, according to a Yale School of Medicine study. The finding, published Aug. 27 in PLOS ONE, identifies a new barrier to caring for patients with this severe condition. Prior to the FDA approval of novel antiviral therapies for HCV in 2014, treatment options for patients were limited, requiring weekly injections of interferon-based therapy that caused severe side effects. The new regimens revolutionized ...

For astronauts living in space with objects zooming around them at 22,000 miles per hour like rogue super-bullets, it's good to have a backup plan. Although shields and fancy maneuvers could help protect space structures, scientists have to prepare for the possibility that debris could pierce a vessel. In the journal ACS Macro Letters, one team reports on a new material that heals itself within seconds and could prevent structural penetration from being catastrophic. It's hard to imagine a place more inhospitable to life than space. Yet humans have managed to travel ...

The Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM mission core satellite measured rainfall as Tropical Depression Twelve was upgraded to Tropical Storm Ignacio. Tropical Depression 12E strengthened into Tropical Storm Ignacio at 5 p.m. EDT yesterday, August 25. At that time, it became the ninth named tropical storm of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season. The GPM core observatory satellite saw Ignacio on August 25, 2015 at 2256 UTC. GPM's Dual-Frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) found rain falling at a rate of over 74 mm (2.9 inches) per hour with storm tops reaching to altitudes ...

Treatments for cystic fibrosis (CF) have added years to the lives of thousands of Americans. But they can be difficult to administer, and most don't fix the underlying cause. Scientists have now found that a small molecule, when tested in yeast, can substitute for a protein and restore a key cellular function related to those missing in people with CF and similar conditions. Their report appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. CF is caused by a genetic mutation that affects certain cellular proteins that make up "channels," which act like gates managing ...

Nobody likes flight delays, but they are a common occurrence: In 2011, about 20 percent of U.S. flights were at least 15 minutes behind schedule. Those delays irritate passengers and, in 2010, added an estimated $6.5 billion to U.S. airlines' operating costs. Delays tend to hit some airlines harder than others, due to the approach the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses to resolve them. This approach places an emphasis on minimizing aggregate system delays, nationwide -- a policy that affects some airlines much more than others at a given time. But now a study ...

While exploring the remote coral reefs of Raja Ampat in Indonesia, Dr. James Thomas from the Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography, Florida, and his colleagues from Naturalis Natural History museum in the Netherlands, stumbled across a small but extraordinary crustacean living inside another reef invertebrate in a commensal association (without causing any harm, nor benefit to its host). In his amazement to the amphipod's unusual form, Dr. Tomas called it L. eltoni after musician and actor Sir Elton John. The research is available in the open access journal ...

Female mice exposed in utero, or in the womb, to low levels of arsenic through drinking water displayed signs of early puberty and became obese as adults, according to scientists from the National Institutes of Health. The finding is significant because the exposure level of 10 parts per billion used in the study is the current U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standard, or maximum allowable amount, for arsenic in drinking water. The study, which appeared online August 21 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, serves as a good starting point for examining ...

The Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM mission core satellite can measure rainfall from space, and saw heavy rainfall in the Central Pacific's Loke when it was a hurricane. Hurricane Loke formed southwest of the Hawaiian Islands on August 21, 2015 but Loke has not been a threat to Hawaii because it intensified to hurricane strength while moving well west of Hawaii over the open waters of the Pacific Ocean. The GPM core observatory satellite measured precipitation within the hurricane as it flew above the most powerful thunderstorms in the hurricane on August 25, ...