Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a leading tool for imaging, measuring, and manipulating materials with atomic resolution - on the order of fractions of a nanometer. AFM images surface topography of a structure by "touching" and "feeling" its surface by scanning an extremely fine needle (the diameter of the tip is about 5 nanometers, about 1/100 of light wavelength or 1/10,000 of a hair) on the surface. This technique has been applied to image solid materials with nanometer resolution, but it has been difficult to apply AFM for a soft and large sample like eukaryotic ...

Metastatic melanoma is the leading cause of skin cancer deaths in the United States; once melanoma has spread (metastasized), life expectancy for patients can be dramatically shortened. At present, the reference therapy for patients diagnosed with metastatic melanoma is Dacarbazine (DTIC), which is associated with poor patient outcomes. In a study published in Molecular Cancer Research, March 12, 2015, the laboratory of Mary J.C. Hendrix, PhD, in collaboration with other scientists found that standard treatments for metastatic melanoma are not effective against a growth ...

An FDA-approved drug for high blood pressure, guanabenz, prevents myelin loss and alleviates clinical symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS) in animal models, according to a new study. The drug appears to enhance an innate cellular mechanism that protects myelin-producing cells against inflammatory stress. These findings point to promising avenues for the development of new therapeutics against MS, report scientists from the University of Chicago in Nature Communications on Mar. 13. "Guanabenz appears to enhance the cell's own protective machinery to diminish the loss of ...

Almost all patients with a group of blood cancers called B-cell malignancies have two prominent "fingerprints" on the surface of leukemia and lymphoma cancers, called CD22 and CD19, Vallera explained. To develop the drug, Vallera and colleagues chose two antibody fragments that each selectively bind to CD19 and CD22. They used genetic engineering to attach these two antibodies to a potent toxin, the bacterial diphtheria toxin. When the antibody fragments bind to the two targets on the cancer cell, the entire drug enters the cell, and the toxin kills the cell. Vallera; ...

Boston, Mass., USA - Today at the 93rd General Session and Exhibition of the International Association for Dental Research, researcher Bertha A. Chavez Gonzalez, Universidade de Minas Gerias, Lima, San Borja, Peru, will present a study titled "Birth Weight and Pregnancy Complications Associated With the Enamel Defects." The IADR General Session is being held in conjunction with the 44th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research and the 39th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research. This cross-sectional representative study ...

Boston, Mass., USA - Today at the 93rd General Session and Exhibition of the International Association for Dental Research, researcher Aderonke A. Akinkugbe, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, will present a study titled "Environmental Tobacco Smoke is Associated With Periodontitis in U.S. Non-smokers." The IADR General Session is being held in conjunction with the 44th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research and the 39th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research. Periodontitis affects approximately 47% of ...

Leading public health researchers today [Friday 13 March 2015] call for the sale of tobacco to be phased out by 2040, showing that with sufficient political support and stronger evidence-based action against the tobacco industry, a tobacco-free world - where less than 5% of adults use tobacco - could be possible in less than three decades. Writing in a major new Series in The Lancet, an international group of health and policy experts, led by Professors Robert Beaglehole and Ruth Bonita from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, call on the United Nations (UN) to ...

Estoril, Portugal: Treating respiratory disease is often difficult because drugs have to cross biological barriers such as respiratory tissue and mucosa, and must therefore be given in large quantities in order for an effective amount to reach the target. Now researchers from Germany, Brazil and France have shown that the use of nanoparticles to carry antibiotics across biological barriers can be effective in treating lung infections. Doing so allows better delivery of the drug to the site of infection, and hence prevents the development of antibiotic resistance which ...

Highlights Among pregnant women, the risk for adverse pregnancy outcomes--such as preterm delivery or the need for neonatal intensive care--increased across stages of chronic kidney disease. The risks of intrauterine death or fetal malformations were not higher in women with chronic kidney disease. An estimated 26 million people in the United States have chronic kidney disease. Washington, DC (March 12, 2015) -- Even mild kidney disease during pregnancy may increase certain risks in the mother and baby, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Political scientists at the University at Buffalo and Pennsylvania State University have published new research investigating how partisan differences in macroeconomic policy have contributed to substantial and rising economic inequality in the United States. The negative consequences of such policy decisions, researchers found, have a greater impact on people at the lower end of the economic spectrum, but are "significantly more muted" for those at the higher end of the spectrum. The study, "Partisan Differences in the Distributional Effects of Economic ...

WORCESTER, MA - A new "app" for finding and mapping chromosomal loci using multicolored versions of CRISPR/Cas9, one of the hottest tools in biomedical research today, has been developed by scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. This labeling system, details of which were published in PNAS and first presented at the American Society for Cell Biology/International Federation for Cell Biology annual meeting in Philadelphia in December, could be a key to understanding the spatial and temporal regulation of gene expression by allowing researchers to measure ...

Television advertisements for e-cigarettes may be enticing current and even former tobacco smokers to reach for another cigarette. That is the finding by researchers Erin K. Maloney, Ph.D. and Joseph N. Cappella, Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, as reported in the journal Health Communication (online, March 2015). The researchers studied more than 800 daily, intermittent, and former smokers who watched e-cigarette advertising, and who then took a survey to determine smoking urges, intentions, and behaviors. Using a standard ...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. The subterranean ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth's surface. Identifying liquid water is crucial in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth and for the search of life as we know it. "This discovery marks a significant milestone, highlighting what only Hubble can accomplish," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington. "In its 25 years ...

CHICAGO --- A father's depression during the first years of parenting - as well as a mother's - can put their toddler at risk of developing troubling behaviors such as hitting, lying, anxiety and sadness during a critical time of development, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study. This is one of the first studies to show that the impact of a father's depression from postpartum to toddlerhood is the same as a mother's. Previous studies have focused mostly on mothers with postpartum depression and found that their symptoms may impact their children's behavior during ...

Unique proteins newly discovered in heat-loving bacteria are more than capable of attaching themselves to plant cellulose, possibly paving the way for more efficient methods of converting plant matter into biofuels. The unusual proteins, called tapirins (derived from the Maori verb 'to join'), bind tightly to cellulose, a key structural component of plant cell walls, enabling these bacteria to break down cellulose. The conversion of cellulose to liquid biofuels, such as ethanol, is paramount to the use of renewable feedstocks. In a paper published online in the Journal ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - March 12, 2015 - A recently developed risk-evaluation protocol can help hospital emergency department personnel more efficiently determine which patients with acute chest pain can be sent home safely, according to a randomized trial conducted at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. The study, published in the current online issue of the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, found that chest-pain patients who were evaluated with the new protocol, called the HEART Pathway, had 12 percent fewer cardiac tests, ...

The Brazilian Navy Hydrographic Centre reported that a sub-tropical storm had formed on March 11 near east of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, the southeastern most state in Brazil. NOAA's GOES-East satellite provided imagery of the Atlantic that showed Subtropical Cyclone 90Q off the southeastern coast of Brazil at 17:45 UTC (1:45 p.m. EDT). The system appeared to have fragmented banding of thunderstorms around the low-level center. The image was created by NASA/NOAA's GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. At 1200 UTC (8 ...

For more than 100 years, marine biologists at Friday Harbor Laboratories have studied the ecology of everything from tiny marine plants to giant sea stars. Now, as the oceans are undergoing a historic shift in chemistry, the lab is establishing itself as a place to study what that will mean for marine life. And the University of Washington laboratory is uniquely placed in naturally acidic waters that may be some of the first pushed over the edge by human-generated carbon emissions. A paper published last month in Limnology and Oceanography tracks about two years of ...

Case Western Reserve scientists have discovered that speed matters when it comes to how messenger RNA (mRNA) deciphers critical information within the genetic code -- the complex chain of instructions critical to sustaining life. The investigators' findings, which appear in the March 12 journal Cell, give scientists critical new information in determining how best to engage cells to treat illness -- and, ultimately, keep them from emerging in the first place. "Our discovery is that the genetic code is more complex than we knew," said senior researcher Jeff Coller, PhD, ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A new molecule-making machine could do for chemistry what 3-D printing did for engineering: Make it fast, flexible and accessible to anyone. Chemists at the University of Illinois, led by chemistry professor and medical doctor Martin D. Burke, built the machine to assemble complex small molecules at the click of a mouse, like a 3-D printer at the molecular level. The automated process has the potential to greatly speed up and enable new drug development and other technologies that rely on small molecules. "We wanted to take a very complex process, ...

A new study finds that Interleukin-3 (IL-3), an inflammatory factor most associated with allergic reactions, appears to have an important role in the overwhelming, life-threatening immune reaction called sepsis. In the March 13 issue of Science, investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) describe finding that the presence of IL-3 is essential to the development of sepsis in a mouse model of the condition and that IL-3 levels in human patients with sepsis are higher in those at greater risk of dying. "Sepsis is an extremely dangerous conditions that claims ...

An international research team has shed new light on the diet of some of the earliest recorded humans in Sri Lanka. The researchers from Oxford University, working with a team from Sri Lanka and the University of Bradford, analysed the carbon and oxygen isotopes in the teeth of 26 individuals, with the oldest dating back 20,000 years. They found that nearly all the teeth analysed suggested a diet largely sourced from the rainforest. This study, published in the early online edition of the journal, Science, shows that early modern humans adapted to living in the rainforest ...

An international study involving the University of Southampton suggests there could be a rise in measles cases of 100,000 across the three countries most affected by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa due to health system disruptions. The research in the journal Science, led by Princeton and Johns Hopkins University in the USA, predicts that the size of a measles outbreak will increase from 127,000 at the start of the Ebola epidemic in early 2014, to 227,000 after 18 months of the outbreak. This would result in an additional 5,000 measles deaths, and potentially as many ...

Irvine, Calif. - What does it mean to be happy? Is it how happy you say you are, or is it how happy you act? Previous research has found that political conservatives report being happier than political liberals. But UC Irvine psychologists have discovered that those on the left exhibit happier speech patterns and facial expressions. "The so-called 'happiness gap' between liberals and conservatives is more complicated than we thought," said Sean Wojcik, a doctoral student in psychology & social behavior at UCI and lead author of the study, which appears this month in Science. Prior ...

This is shown in a study to be published in the renowned journal Science by a team of researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. They link the findings to changes in the Arctic caused by man-made global warming. "When the great air streams in the sky above us get disturbed by climate change, this can have severe effects on the ground," says lead-author Dim Coumou. "While you might expect reduced storm activity to be something good, it turns out that this reduction leads to a greater persistence of weather systems in the Northern hemisphere mid-latitudes. ...