WORCESTER, MA -- Researchers have determined how the most common gene mutation in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) disrupts normal cell function, providing insight likely to advance efforts to develop targeted therapies for these brain diseases. Scientists from the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital led the research, which appeared in the science journal Nature. Investigators reported evidence that mutation of C9ORF72 interferes with the movement of RNAs and proteins into and ...

A new national survey conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and researchers at Yale University found that fewer than 1 in 3 Americans, and 40 percent of Catholics, are aware of Pope Francis's efforts to publicize global warming as a priority issue for the Catholic Church. While there is relatively low awareness of the papal encyclical, a majority of Americans say it is appropriate for the pope to take a public position on the issue of global warming. This is true even though very few Americans consider global warming as an issue of religion, ...

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Aug. 26, 2015 - In mere seconds, a system developed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory can identify and characterize a solid or liquid sample, providing a valuable tool with applications in material science, forensics, pharmaceuticals, biology and chemistry. The device and technique, created by Gary Van Berkel and Vilmos Kertesz of ORNL's Chemical Sciences Division, is described in the journal Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry. The appeal of this open port sampling interface, researchers note, is its elegance, speed and ...

Monkeys and humans exhibit greater motor recovery than rats after similar spinal cord injury, according to a study conducted in Grégoire Courtine's lab at EPFL. The study results have been published in Science Translational Medicine. Spontaneous improvement occurs during the first six months after a spinal cord injury, allowing a hemiplegic patient to recover partial motor control. The researchers are using this observation to improve clinical trials and patient therapies. The neuronal mechanisms underlying this extensive recovery in primates are nearly absent in ...

Scientists have developed a blood test for breast cancer able to identify which patients will suffer a relapse after treatment, months before tumours are visible on hospital scans. The test can uncover small numbers of residual cancer cells that have resisted therapy by detecting cancer DNA in the bloodstream. Researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust were able to track key mutations that cancer accumulates as it develops and spreads, without the need for invasive biopsy procedures. They hope that by deciphering ...

Using DNA sequencing, researchers have accurately painted a clear picture of fish spawning activities in a marine protected area (MPA) and have created a baseline for continuing studies on the effects of climate variability on fish populations. A group of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego researchers led by Ron Burton and Alice Harada collected 260 samples off the Ellen Browning Scripps Memorial Pier over a two-year period and used DNA barcoding to accurately identify over 13,000 fish eggs. This study was also a collaborative effort between the Scripps ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- You're driving on a busy road and you intend to switch lanes when you suddenly realize that there's a car in your blind spot. You have to put a stop to your lane change -- and quickly. A new study by Duke University researchers suggests that this type of scenario makes a person less likely to remember what halted the action -- for example, the make and model of the car in the blind spot. People and non-human primates excel at "response inhibition." Our sophisticated brains allow us to cancel an action even when it's something engrained, like driving ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - After hours harvesting forage, managing livestock and milking cows, new Cornell University agricultural economic research shows family members who work on the family dairy farm make $22,000 less annually than comparable hired managers, but are handsomely compensated with "socioemotional" wealth. "While $22,000 seems like a large penalty, there are nonfinancial rewards they experience working for the family business," said Loren Tauer, professor at Cornell's Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, who with lead author Jonathan Dressler ...

Compounds found in purple potatoes may help kill colon cancer stem cells and limit the spread of the cancer, according to a team of researchers. Baked purple-fleshed potatoes suppressed the growth of colon cancer tumors in petri dishes and in mice by targeting the cancer's stem cells. Colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the U.S. and responsible for more than 50,000 deaths annually, according to the American Cancer Society. Attacking stem cells is an effective way to counter cancer, according to Jairam K.P. Vanamala, associate professor ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Women who are obese have a higher risk and a worse prognosis for breast cancer, but the reasons why remain unclear. A Cornell study published this month in Science Translational Medicine explains how obesity changes the consistency of breast tissue in ways that are similar to tumors, thereby promoting disease. The study of mice and women shows obesity leads to a stiffening of a meshwork of material that surrounds fat cells in the breast, called the extracellular matrix, and these biomechanical changes create the right conditions for tumor growth. The findings ...

A new study conducted by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found that while the similarities to the rest of their generation are numerous, there are some distinct differences in the way that Hispanic and African American Millennials use technology to access news and information. The source of their information is one area of difference: these young adults are more likely to use YouTube and Instagram for news than Millennials in general, though all groups rely ...

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 ...