Prof. Rivka Inzelberg of Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Sagol Neuroscience Center at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, documented the exceptional creativity of Parkinson's patients two years ago in a review for Behavioral Neuroscience. Since then, she has conducted the first empirical study to verify a link between Parkinson's disease and artistic inclination. That empirical study, now published in the Annals of Neurology, definitively demonstrates that Parkinson's patients are more creative than their healthy peers, and that those patients ...

Antibiotic resistance is depleting our arsenal against deadly diseases and infections, such as tuberculosis and Staph infections, but recent research shows promise to speed up the drug discovery process. In a study reported in ACS Chemical Biology, University of Illinois researchers developed a new technique to quickly uncover novel, medically relevant products produced by bacteria. Past techniques involved screening more than 10,000 samples to find a novel product, said principal investigator Doug Mitchell, assistant professor of chemistry and Institute for Genomic ...

Is cancer an inevitable consequence of aging? Although it is widely thought that cancer is an inevitable consequence of aging, the risk of developing several common cancers decreases with age. Researchers have long been puzzled by the apparent decrease with age in the risk of developing certain adult cancers. A possible solution to this puzzle was presented in a recent paper published in Biophysical Reviews and Letters by Professor James P. Brody of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. "Most cancers have a characteristic ...

For the Spanish Royal Academy, senescent is he who "begins to age". But laboratory biology results are contradicting the dictionary: not only is senescence not a synonym of ageing, it is also not intrinsically negative for the organism. Cellular senescence is such a badly named physiological process that those who do research in this area think it needs another name. That is the case of Manuel Serrano, from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), one of the world's leading experts on senescence, who has just published a review on this topic. Without actually ...

Washington D.C., July 14, 2014 – A recent study published in the July 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry confirms the validity of the DSM-5 change to the age of onset criterion for diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In DSM-5, age of onset criterion for ADHD, previously set at 7 in DSM-IV, has been raised to 12. As explained in DSM-5, age of onset is now set at 12, rather than an earlier age, to reflect the importance of clinical presentation during childhood for accurate diagnosis, while also ...

Philadelphia, PA, July 14, 2014 – The inability to ignore irrelevant stimuli underlies the impaired working memory and cognition often experienced by individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, reports a new study in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry. Our brains are usually good at focusing on the information that we are trying to learn and filtering out the "noise" or thoughts that aren't relevant. However, memory impairment in schizophrenia may be related in part to a problem with this filtering process, which Dr. Teal Eich at Columbia University and her colleagues ...

Superconductors are futuristic materials that will hopefully have a broad range of technological applications at some time in the future (medical imaging, transport…). Today's use is limited by the extremely low temperatures (close to absolute zero) required for superconductivity to manifest. However, some families of these materials work at "relatively" high temperatures (about - 200° C), and it's on these that scientists are focusing their attention. Among them are copper-based superconductors, which have very unique characteristics. A study conducted by researchers of ...

A new theory of how cancer works could lead to the next generation of treatments of the disease. The theory suggests that cancer forms when recently evolved genes are damaged, and cells have to revert to using older, inappropriate genetic pathways. Astrobiologists Dr Charley Lineweaver from The Australian National University and Professor Paul Davies from Arizona State University teamed up with oncologist Dr Mark Vincent from the University of Western Ontario to develop the new model. "The rapid proliferation of cancer cells is an ancient, default capability that ...

The creators of a unique kit containing anatomical body parts produced by 3D printing say it will revolutionise medical education and training, especially in countries where cadaver use is problematical. The '3D Printed Anatomy Series', developed by experts from Monash University, is thought to be the first commercially available resource of its kind. The kit contains no human tissue, yet it provides all the major parts of the body required to teach anatomy of the limbs, chest, abdomen, head and neck. Professor Paul McMenamin, Director of the University's Centre for ...

ATLANTA – July 14, 2014 –Physical fitness may buffer some of the adverse health effects of too much sitting, according to a new study by researchers from the American Cancer Society, The Cooper Institute, and the University of Texas. The study appears in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, and finds the association between prolonged sedentary time and obesity and blood markers associated with cardiovascular disease is markedly less pronounced when taking fitness into account. Sedentary behavior has been linked to an increase risk of obesity, metabolic syndrome, type ...

More than 140 years ago, Charles Darwin noticed something peculiar about domesticated mammals. Compared to their wild ancestors, domestic species are more tame, and they also tend to display a suite of other characteristic features, including floppier ears, patches of white fur, and more juvenile faces with smaller jaws. Since Darwin's observations, the explanation for this pattern has proved elusive, but now, in a Perspectives article published in the journal GENETICS, a new hypothesis has been proposed that could explain why breeding for tameness causes changes in such ...

Scientists at the University of East Anglia have shown how the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis could reduce tumor growth in cancer patients. Research published today reveals the existence of previously unknown signaling platforms which are responsible for the drug's success in shrinking tumours. It is hoped that the findings could help develop a synthetic equivalent with anti-cancer properties. The research was co-led with the Universidad Complutense de Madridin, Spain. The team used samples of human breast cancer cells to induce tumours in mice. They ...

Weizmann Institute scientists have demonstrated for the first time a photonic router – a quantum device based on a single atom that enables routing of single photons by single photons. This achievement, as reported in Science magazine, is another step toward overcoming the difficulties in building quantum computers. At the core of the device is an atom that can switch between two states. The state is set just by sending a single particle of light – or photon – from the right or the left via an optical fiber. The atom, in response, then reflects or transmits the next incoming ...

Serendipity leads University of Kansas scientists to the discovery and description of Rhipidocyrtus muiri - a 107 year old, lost in collections specimen, which turned out to represent a new genus and species. The long and tortuous history of the enigmatic ripidiine wedge beetle from Borneo is discussed in a recent paper published in the open access journal ZooKeys. The holotype male, and only known specimen of Rhipidocyrtus muiri, was collected 107 years ago in Borneo but subsequent to this it was transferred among several researchers in the early 1900s. The specimen ...

Honey bees with roots in the local environment manage much better in the struggle for survival than imported honey bees from foreign environments. A world without bees would be a whole lot poorer – literally. In Denmark alone an additional 600 million to 1 billion Danish kroner are earned annually due to the work done by bees making honey and pollinating a wide range of crops from apples to cherries and clover. Unfortunately, bees all over the world are under pressure from pesticides, mites, viruses, bacteria, fungi and environmental changes, among other things. The ...

The Roquin protein, discovered in 2005, controls T-cell activation and differentiation by regulating the expression of certain mRNAs. In doing so, it helps to guarantee immunological tolerance and prevents immune responses against the body's own structures that can lead to autoimmune disease. Roquin is thus an immune regulator. Autoimmune diseases affect between five and ten per cent of the population. They usually occur as a result of complex environmental influences when a genetic predisposition exists. Only in rare cases the development of the disease is determined by ...

In close collaboration with Jürg Schönenberger and Yannick Städler from the Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research of the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, 14 developmental stages of the flower of Arabidopsis thaliana from very early meristematic floral initiation to fully developed seeds were monitored with micro-computed tomography in 3D. From the same set of developmental stages a full metabolic profile using mass spectrometry was measured covering hundreds of biochemical pathways. "Smallest changes in floral organ development were thus correlated ...

Early maize farmers selected for genes that improved the harvesting of sunlight, a new detailed study of how plants use 'doubles' of their genomes reveals. The findings could help current efforts to improve existing crop varieties. Oxford University researchers captured a 'genetic snapshot' of maize as it existed 10 million years ago when the plant made a double of its genome – a 'whole genome duplication' event. They then traced how maize evolved to use these 'copied' genes to cope with the pressures of domestication, which began around 12,000 years ago. They discovered ...

Rutgers researchers have developed a technology that could overcome a major cost barrier to make clean-burning hydrogen fuel – a fuel that could replace expensive and environmentally harmful fossil fuels. The new technology is a novel catalyst that performs almost as well as cost-prohibitive platinum for so-called electrolysis reactions, which use electric currents to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The Rutgers technology is also far more efficient than less-expensive catalysts investigated to-date. "Hydrogen has long been expected to play a vital role ...

MADISON, Wis. — The ability to reliably and safely make in the laboratory all of the different types of cells in human blood is one key step closer to reality. Writing today in the journal Nature Communications, a group led by University of Wisconsin-Madison stem cell researcher Igor Slukvin reports the discovery of two genetic programs responsible for taking blank-slate stem cells and turning them into both red and the array of white cells that make up human blood. The research is important because it identifies how nature itself makes blood products at the earliest ...

A new analysis has found that rates of testicular cancer have been rising dramatically in recent years among young Hispanic American men, but not among their non-Hispanic counterparts. Published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the findings indicate that greater awareness is needed concerning the increasing risk of testicular cancer in Hispanic adolescents and young adults, and that research efforts are needed to determine the cause of this trend. Testicular cancer is one of the most common types of cancer among adolescent ...

COPENHAGEN – Participation in activities that promote mental activity, and moderate physical activity in middle age, may help protect against the development of Alzheimer's disease and dementia in later life, according to new research reported today at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference® 2014 (AAIC® 2014) in Copenhagen. Research reported at AAIC 2014 also showed that sleep problems – especially when combined with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – may increase dementia risk in veterans. Additionally, in a population of people age 90 and older, ...

VIDEO: Researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center have found that women who ate a high-fat meal the day after a stressful event metabolized food more slowly, and the... Click here for more information. COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study in women suggests that experiencing one or more stressful events the day before eating a single high-fat meal can slow the body's metabolism, potentially contributing to weight gain. Researchers questioned study participants about ...

An archaeological dig in southeast Turkey has uncovered a large number of clay tokens that were used as records of trade until the advent of writing, or so it had been believed. But the new find of tokens dates from a time when writing was commonplace – thousands of years after it was previously assumed this technology had become obsolete. Researchers compare it to the continued use of pens in the age of the word processor. The tokens – small clay pieces in a range of simple shapes – are thought to have been used as a rudimentary bookkeeping system in prehistoric ...

An editorial published today in The Lancet Neurology calls for sports authorities to take into consideration the long term neurological problems that repeated concussions can cause. Cerebral concussion is the most common form of sports-related traumatic brain injury (TBI), and the long-term effects of repeated concussions may include dementia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and other neurological disorders, say the journal editors. However, what is perhaps more concerning, is that even when the symptoms of concussion are delayed, or if they come and go quickly, neurological ...