This news release is available in German and French. In Switzerland, between 7000 and 8000 persons fall ill with a campylobacter infection annually. This makes it the most frequent bacterial disease transmitted through food. Contamination of chicken meat with campylobacter bacteria during the slaughtering process is one of the known causes of the infection. An increase of campylobacteriosis case numbers is being observed throughout Europe. Human cases of campylobacteriosis must be reported to the relevant authorities in Switzerland. In Switzerland, an unusual increase ...

Persons with reduced levels of the TREM2 protein could be at greater risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease or frontotemporal dementia, according to an international study which included the participation of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Sant Pau Biomedical Research Institute (IIB Sant Pau). The study, published in Science Translational Medicine, reveals the molecular mechanism by which the mutated forms of this protein prevent the amyloid waste cleaning process from functioning correctly and detects a lower level of ...

"Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part," wrote Herman Melville in Moby Dick. Today, we no longer dread whales, but their subtlety remains. "For a long time, whales have been considered too rare to make much of a difference in the oceans," notes University of Vermont conservation biologist Joe Roman. That was a mistake. In a new paper, Roman and a team of biologists have tallied several decades of research on whales from around the world; it shows that whales, in fact, make a huge difference—they ...

A new paper by Dr. Jeremy Ross from the University of Oklahoma describes the use of tiny devices strapped to birds' backs called geolocators, which capture the individual migration routes of lark sparrows in North America. By sensing the light levels, these backpacks can pinpoint the location of a bird anywhere in the world, even if retrieving the data-logger can sometimes pose a major problem. This study, published in the online journal Animal Migration, mapped for the first time the routes traveled by three lark sparrows after they left their breeding grounds in Ohio. ...

There's more to trying to slow down climate change than just cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Technology, policies or plans that aim to do so should also take environmental factors such as water usage into account. A more integrated approach might make some options considerably more attractive than others, especially when implemented in arid countries such as Australia, advise Philip Wallis of Monash University in Australia and colleagues, in an article in Springer's journal Climatic Change. The researchers considered the example of Australia to show how water usage ...

VIDEO: Tree frogs reach great heights with their jumps, but do not cover much distance. Click here for more information. A frog's jump is not as simple as it seems....Australian scientists have discovered that different species adopt different jumping styles depending on their environment. Lead researcher, Miss Marta Vidal-Garcia ( PhD candidate, Australian National University ), found that tree dwelling frogs reached great heights but didn't cover much distance with their ...

AURORA, Colo. (July 3, 2014) – Physicians from the University of Colorado School of Medicine in collaboration with an international team of researchers have demonstrated that screening of genetically susceptible infants can lead to the diagnosis of celiac disease at a very early age. The collaborative group studied 6,403 children with specific genetic markers from birth to identify the factors involved in the development of both celiac disease and type 1 diabetes. The children are from the United States, Finland, Germany and Sweden and are part of The Environmental Determinants ...

Every organism has one aim: to survive. Its body cells all work in concert to keep it alive. They do so through finely tuned means of communication. Together with cooperation partners from Berlin and Cambridge, scientists at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg have now successfully revealed for the first time the laws by which cells translate signals from their surroundings into internal signals. Like an isolated note in a symphony orchestra, an isolated signal in the cell is of subordinate importance. "What is important ...

How nutrients are metabolised and how neurons communicate in the brain are just some of the messages coded by the 3 billion letters that make up the human genome. The detection and characterisation of the genes present in this mass of information is a complex task that has been a source of ongoing debate since the first systematic attempts by the Human Genome Project more than ten years ago. A study led by Alfonso Valencia, Vice-Director of Basic Research at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and head of the Structural Computational Biology Group, and ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Deep inside the brains of people with dementia and Lou Gehrig's disease, globs of abnormal protein gum up the inner workings of brain cells – dooming them to an early death. But boosting those cells' natural ability to clean up those clogs might hold the key to better treatment for such conditions. That's the key finding of new research from a University of Michigan Medical School physician scientist and his colleagues in California and the United Kingdom. They reported their latest findings this week in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. Though ...

Iron is present in tiny concentrations in seawater. On the order of a few billionths of a gram in a liter. "I did a calculation once on a ton of ocean water," says Seth John, an assistant professor in the department of marine science at the University of South Carolina. "The amount of iron in that ton of water would weigh about as much as a single eyelash." Given that there is so little iron in seawater, one might conclude that its presence there is inconsequential. Hardly. Iron is one of the essential elements of life. Found in enzymes like myoglobin and hemoglobin ...

The July feature of Science Elements, the American Chemical Society's (ACS') weekly podcast series, shines the spotlight on the science of fireworks, just in time for the July 4th holiday. The episode is available at http://www.acs.org/scienceelements. Independence Day is a time for picnics, parades and, of course, fireworks. Those beautiful explosions in the sky would be nothing without chemistry. In today's episode, Science Elements talks to the man who literally wrote the book on fireworks. "Everything you see in a fireworks display is chemistry in action," says ...

With this week marking the tenth anniversary of the rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, prominent marine scientists from around the world have gathered in Canberra to discuss its successes - both expected and unexpected. "At the time, the rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park was the largest marine conservation measure in the world," says Professor Garry Russ from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE). "The Reef went from being five percent protected to about 30 percent. So now, a third of it is green, or no-take, zones." Designed ...

Scientists at a coral reef symposium in Canberra this week are examining degraded reefs off the Northwest Australian coast in an effort to determine what lies ahead for the Great Barrier Reef. "Reefs north of Exmouth have experienced large-scale bleaching in the past five years," says Professor Malcolm McCulloch from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at the University of Western Australia. McCulloch is in the midst of an autopsy of this Pilbara bleaching event, collecting and analysing both living and dead stony coral. He says the bleaching ...

A new report, Technological Breakthroughs for Scientific Progress (TECHBREAK), has been published today by the European Science Foundation. The European Science Foundation (ESF) was contacted at the end of 2009 to conduct a foresight activity for the European Space Agency (ESA), addressing the matter of technological breakthroughs for space originating in the non-space sector. A "Forward Look" project jointly funded by ESA and ESF and called 'TECHBREAK' was initiated as a result. Its goals were to forecast the development of such breakthrough technologies to enable novel ...

Researchers from the University of Cadiz have made an unprecedented discovery: they have shown that there are five large accumulations of plastic debris in the open oceans, coinciding with the five main ocean gyres in the surface waters of the ocean. As well as the well-known accumulation of plastic rubbish in the North Pacific, these experts have proven the existence of similar accumulations in the centre of the North Atlantic, the South Pacific, the South Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. And they have gone one step further to state that the surface water of the centre ...

Under the tutelage of Junior Professor Dr Simon Ebbinghaus, researchers from Bochum have demonstrated that the water surrounding the dissolved substances inside the cell plays a crucial role with regard to protein stability, which has frequently been neglected in the past. The researchers have published the results of their study, gained by means of simple model systems and thermodynamic analyses, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). The results have been obtained following a collaboration under the umbrella of the Excellence Cluster RESOLV. The researchers ...

Researchers at the Royal Veterinary College have identified a highly specialised ligament structure that is thought to prevent giraffes' legs from collapsing under the immense weight of these animals. "Giraffes are heavy animals (around 1000 kg), but have unusually skinny limb bones for an animal of this size" explained lead investigator Christ Basu, a PhD student in the Structure & Motion Lab. "This means their leg bones are under high levels of mechanical stress." In giraffes, the equivalents to our metatarsal bone (in the foot) and metacarpal bone (in the hand) are ...

Contrary to what was thought, sequences of DNA called enhancers – which control a gene's output – find their targets long before they are activated during embryonic development, scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, have found. Their study, published online today in Nature, also reveals that, surprisingly, the degree of complexity of enhancers' interactions in the 'simple' fruit fly Drosophila is comparable to what is seen in vertebrates. "As an embryo develops, there are huge changes in transcription, much of which drives ...

An international team of researchers identified a pathogenic mechanism that is common to several neurodegenerative diseases. The findings suggest that it may be possible to slow the progression of dementia even after the onset of symptoms. The relentless increase in the incidence of dementia in aging societies poses an enormous challenge to health-care systems. An international team of researchers led by Professor Christian Haass and Gernot Kleinberger at the LMU's Adolf-Butenandt-Institute and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), has now elucidated ...

Paleontologists of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich are currently studying a new specimen of Archaeopteryx, which reveals previously unknown features of the plumage. The initial findings shed light on the original function of feathers and their recruitment for flight. A century and a half after its discovery and a mere 150 million years or so since it took to the air, Archaeopteryx still has surprises in store: The eleventh specimen of the iconic "basal bird" so far discovered turns out to have the best preserved plumage of all, permitting detailed comparisons ...

Researchers from the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group, hosted at LSTM, conducted an independent review of the effects of adding a single dose of primaquine (PQ) to malaria treatment to prevent the transmission of the disease. Mosquitoes become infected with Plasmodium falciparum when they ingest gametocyte-stage parasites from an infected person's blood. PQ is an antimalarial drug that does not cure malaria illness, but is known to kill the gametocyte stage of the P falciparum parasite, thus potentially limiting transmission to further humans. PQ is known to have potentially ...

Various manual tasks in everyday life require the use of the right hand or are optimized for right-handers. Around 90 percent of the general population is right-handed, only about 10 percent is left-handed. The study of Ulrich Tran, Stefan Stieger, and Martin Voracek comprised two large and independent samples of nearly 13000 adults from Austria and Germany. As in modern genetic studies, where a discovery-and-replication-sample design is standard, the use of two samples allowed testing the replicability and robustness of findings within one-and-the-same study. Overall, ...

Let us imagine, for a moment, the arm of a robot that lifts a cup of coffee to its "lips" over and over again. The joint of this robotic arm needs a certain flexibility plus an electric motor to drive the upward and downward movements. So orders have to be sent to the motor so that the joint can perform the corresponding movements. "The motors need to receive orders constantly. In fact, the motor has to know at all times what angle its axis has to be at. However, current digital controllers only issue orders at specific moments (in discrete time); they can be described ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A tool to help brain surgeons test and more precisely remove cancerous tissue was successfully used during surgery, according to a Purdue University and Brigham and Women's Hospital study. The Purdue-designed tool sprays a microscopic stream of charged solvent onto the tissue surface to gather information about its molecular makeup and produces a color-coded image that reveals the location, nature and concentration of tumor cells. "In a matter of seconds this technique offers molecular information that can detect residual tumor that otherwise ...