About seven days after conception, something remarkable occurs in the clump of cells that will eventually become a new human being. They start to specialize. They take on characteristics that begin to hint at their ultimate fate as part of the skin, brain, muscle or any of the roughly 200 cell types that exist in people, and they start to form distinct layers. Although scientists have studied this process in animals, and have tried to coax human embryonic stem cells into taking shape by flooding them with chemical signals, until now the process has not been successfully ...

Stem cell scientists had what first appeared to be an easy win for regenerative medicine when they discovered mesenchymal stem cells several decades ago. These cells, found in the bone marrow, can give rise to bone, fat, and muscle tissue, and have been used in hundreds of clinical trials for tissue repair. Unfortunately, the results of these trials have been underwhelming. One problem is that these stem cells don't stick around in the body long enough to benefit the patient. But Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) scientists at Boston Children's Hospital aren't ready ...

If you've gone grocery shopping lately, you've probably bought palm oil. Found in thousands of products, from peanut butter and packaged bread to shampoo and shaving cream, palm oil is a booming multibillion-dollar industry. While it isn't always clearly labeled in supermarket staples, the unintended consequences of producing this ubiquitous ingredient have been widely publicized. The clearing of tropical forests to plant oil palm trees releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas fueling climate change. Converting diverse forest ecosystems to these ...

Sharks were a tolerant bunch some 50 million years ago, cruising an Arctic Ocean that contained about the same percentage of freshwater as Louisiana's Lake Ponchatrain does today, says a new study involving the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Chicago. The study indicates the Eocene Arctic sand tiger shark, a member of the lamniform group of sharks that includes today's great white, thresher and mako sharks, was thriving in the brackish water of the western Arctic Ocean back then. In contrast, modern sand tiger sharks living today in the Atlantic Ocean ...

UC San Francisco researchers have completed the first Internet-based clinical trial for children with autism, establishing it as a viable and cost effective method of conducting high-quality and rapid clinical trials in this population. In their study, published in the June 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the researchers looked at whether an Internet-based trial was a feasible way to evaluate whether omega-3 fatty acids helped reduce hyperactivity in children with autism. The authors found that not only was it a valuable ...

Researchers at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) are discovering that the current protective eyewear used by our U.S. armed forces might not be adequate to protect soldiers exposed to explosive blasts. According to a recent study, ocular injuries now account for 13 percent of all battlefield injuries and are the fourth most common military deployment-related injury. With the support of the U.S. Department of Defense, UTSA biomedical engineering assistant professor Matthew Reilly and distinguished senior lecture in geological sciences Walter Gray have been ...

COLLEGE STATION, TX – Earth-Kind® roses are favorites with gardeners and landscapers. Chosen for their superior tolerance to heat, drought, and pests, as well as their outstanding performance in landscapes, Earth-Kind® roses can thrive in most environments, even with limited care. A new study focused on determining the best Earth-Kind® varieties for withstanding the challenges of salt stress. As alternative water sources such as reclaimed water are becoming more commonly used as irrigation for urban landscapes and agricultural crops, plants are being subjected to higher ...

New Rochelle, NY, June 30, 2014—Zebrafish, a model organism that plays an important role in biological research and the discovery and development of new drugs and cell-based therapies, can form embryonic stem cells (ESCs). For the first time, researchers report the ability to maintain zebrafish-derived ESCs for more than 2 years without the need to grow them on a feeder cell layer, in a study published in Zebrafish, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Zebrafish website. Ho Sing Yee and coauthors from the ...

Although scenes of people fleeing from dramatic displays of Mother Nature's power dominate the news, gradual increases in an area's overall temperature — and to a lesser extent precipitation — actually lead more often to permanent population shifts, according to Princeton University research. The researchers examined 15 years of migration data for more than 7,000 families in Indonesia and found that increases in temperature and, to a lesser extent, rainfall influenced a family's decision to permanently migrate to another of the country's provinces. They report in the ...

Sir Isaac Newton probably wasn't thinking about how animals urinate when he was developing his laws of gravity. But they are connected – by the urethra, to be specific. A new Georgia Institute of Technology study investigated how quickly 32 animals urinate. It turns out that it's all about the same. Even though an elephant's bladder is 3,600 times larger than a cat's (18 liters vs. 5 milliliters), both animals relieve themselves in about 20 seconds. In fact, all animals that weigh more than 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) urinate in that same time span. "It's possible because ...

SALINAS, CA – In the fertile growing regions of the central coast of California, scientists are looking for ways to increase organic production of strawberry and other crops. Because cover crops can provide weed and erosion control, determining the best method for establishing a uniform and dense cover crop stand as soon as possible after planting is a critical first step. The authors of a new study say that determining optimal planting strategies that accelerate cover crop emergence and reduce light penetration to weeds should be a primary focus. Eric Brennan and Jim Leap ...

CHICAGO (June 30, 2014): Surgical resection markedly improves survival among metastatic melanoma patients whose disease is isolated to a few areas in the liver, according to new study findings published in the July issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. These results mark a departure for melanoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer, that is most often considered fatal once it has spread to the liver and then, not amenable to surgical treatment. In the past, surgical treatment for liver metastases was not considered an option for most patients, as the ...

The popular idea that Northern Europeans developed light skin to absorb more UV light so they could make more vitamin D – vital for healthy bones and immune function – is questioned by UC San Francisco researchers in a new study published online in the journal Evolutionary Biology. Ramping up the skin's capacity to capture UV light to make vitamin D is indeed important, according to a team led by Peter Elias, MD, a UCSF professor of dermatology. However, Elias and colleagues concluded in their study that changes in the skin's function as a barrier to the elements made ...

DETROIT, Mich., Monday, June 30, 2014 – Recently published findings in Annals of Internal Medicine by Steven Lipshultz, M.D., Wayne State University professor and chair of pediatrics and pediatrician-in-chief at the Children's Hospital of Michigan, part of the Detroit Medical Center, and colleagues could help to reduce health care charges while also protecting childhood cancer survivors from heart ailments caused by drug therapy. That's the "very exciting and very hopeful" bottom line of the recently published study, said co-author Lipshultz, who has spent more than ...

Two international research studies, both led by investigators affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, have uncovered new information about genes that may increase the risk of serious cardiac arrhythmias. The studies recently received back-to-back advance online publication in Nature Genetics and Nature Methods. The Nature Genetics report identifies several new gene regions associated with variations in the QT interval – a stage in the heart's electrical cycle that, if prolonged, increases the risk of drug-induced ...

Like human societies--think New York City--bacterial colonies have immense diversity among their inhabitants, often generated in the absence of specific selection pressures, according to a paper published ahead of print in the Journal of Bacteriology. Microbiologists have long been aware of this phenomenon, and they credit it as a reason microbes have been able to colonize almost every conceivable terrestrial habitat from underground Antarctic lakes to hot springs to intensely radioactive pools, says corresponding author Ivan Matic, of INSERM, Paris. But none had tried ...

New Rochelle, NY, June 30, 2014—St. John's wort is the most frequently used complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatment in the U.S. for depression and similar psychiatric disorders. The many commonly prescribed medications that St. John's wort can interact with—sometimes with serious consequences such as serotonin syndrome or heart disease—are reviewed in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine ...

A new study by demographer John Bongaarts, Population Council Vice President and Distinguished Scholar, has found that mortality projections from most low-mortality countries are more pessimistic than they should be. The reason for this flaw is that existing projections fail to recognize that fewer people smoke today than used to. As a result, there will be a future decline in smoking-related mortality. This suggests that with more people living longer, pension and health care costs in coming decades will likely be higher than previously estimated. A country's future ...

NEW YORK — Widespread finger-pointing in the fallout from the 2008-2009 financial crisis is only exacerbated by the continuing legal battles between the big banks and SEC. Fair value accounting (FVA) is often cast as the culprit for accelerating the economic downturn, but a new study from Columbia Business School, published in the Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, examines FVA's role in the financial crisis and considers the advantages it offers relative to other methods of accounting. "Fair value accounting has been blamed for the near collapse of the US banking ...

TAMPA, Fla. (June 30, 2014) – Moffitt Cancer Center researchers developed a new way to identify possible therapeutic targets for patients with drug resistant melanoma. It involves using liquid chromatography-multiple reaction monitoring mass spectrometry to measure biomarkers or molecules in blood and tissue that indicates cancer is present. These measurements can help researchers determine if a patient is responding to treatment. Scientists have made significant strides identifying important molecules that contribute to melanoma growth and metastases, such as the proteins ...

NEW YORK—Jill Abramson was recently ousted from her position as the executive editor of The New York Times for being, among other things, too "pushy." But did Abramson—who has also been described by the media as "polarizing" and "brusque"—know during the course of her tenure that others viewed her as being overly assertive? A new study from the Columbia Business School suggests that there's a great chance she didn't. "Finding the middle ground between being pushy and being a pushover is a basic challenge in social life and the workplace. We've now found that the challenge ...

A relic from long before the age of supercomputers, the 169-year-old math strategy called the Jacobi iterative method is widely dismissed today as too slow to be useful. But thanks to a curious, numbers-savvy Johns Hopkins engineering student and his professor, it may soon get a new lease on life. With just a few modern-day tweaks, the researchers say they've made the rarely used Jacobi method work up to 200 times faster. The result, they say, could speed up the performance of computer simulations used in aerospace design, shipbuilding, weather and climate modeling, biomechanics ...

COLLEGE STATION, TX – Why is it important to understand a tree's carbon footprint? The authors of a new study say this vital information can help consumers appreciate the true benefits of planting trees in landscapes, and can also help differentiate horticultural products in the marketplace. According to researchers Charles R. Hall and Dewayne Ingram, authors of a study in the May 2014 issue of HortScience, a plant's carbon footprint is an "impact indicator of primary interest" to growers and consumers because it quantifies the global warming potential of the product. The ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – June 30, 2014 – St. John's wort, the leading complementary and alternative treatment for depression in the United States, can be dangerous when taken with many commonly prescribed drugs, according to a study by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. The researchers reported that the herbal supplement can reduce the concentration of numerous drugs in the body, including oral contraceptive, blood thinners, cancer chemotherapy and blood pressure medications, resulting in impaired effectiveness and treatment failure. "Patients may have a ...

This news release is available in German. As in a successful football match, all actors in a cell must play in perfect coordination. A typical example for this kind of cooperation can be seen in the heat shock protein Hsp90, which controls the proper folding of other proteins. Together with a second molecule, the co-chaperone P23, it splits the energy source ATP to release the energy it needs to do its work. However, while normal enzyme reactions often are easy to follow because the involved proteins alter their conformations clearly, the interaction between ...