Leading immunologists expect to see some clear advances in the fight against tuberculosis, an infectious disease that is widespread the world over. Professor Stefan Kaufmann, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, echoed these sentiments at today's launch of the scientific programme for the 64th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting at Lindau, Germany. "In the past ten years, numerous attempts have been made to develop an improved vaccine. We are now justified in hoping that our vaccine will be effective," explained Professor Kaufmann. The vaccine ...

Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany have discovered that molybdenum trioxide nanoparticles oxidize sulfite to sulfate in liver cells in analogy to the enzyme sulfite oxidase. The functionalized Molybdenum trioxide nanoparticles can cross the cellular membrane and accumulate at the mitochondria, where they can recover the activity of sulfite oxidase. Sulfite oxidase is a molybdenum containing enzyme located in the mitochondria of liver and kidney cells, which catalyzes the oxidation of sulfite to sulfate during the protein and lipid metabolism ...

WASHINGTON, June 30, 2014 — The Fourth of July is just days away, and that means millions of Americans will soon enjoy eye-popping fireworks displays around the country. These dazzling light shows are actually carefully crafted chemical reactions. This week's Reactions episode features John Conkling, Ph.D., the professor who literally wrote the book on pyrotechnics. In the video, Conkling explains the chemistry that creates those amazing fireworks displays. The video is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPHegSulI_M. Subscribe to the series at Reactions YouTube, ...

Washington, DC, June 30, 2014 – Anesthesia providers are missing opportunities to clean their hands during surgical procedures, according to a study published in the July issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). In the study, researchers at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center used video observation to map patterns of anesthesia provider hand contact with anesthesia work environment surfaces to assess hand hygiene compliance. Researchers observed an average ...

At the start of their research, paleobiologists Christine Janis and Borja Figueirido simply wanted to determine the hunting style of an extinct marsupial called Thylacine (also known as the "marsupial wolf" or the "Tasmanian tiger"). In the end, the Australian relic, which has a very dog-like head but with both cat- and dog-like features in the skeleton, proved to be uniquely unspecialized, but what emerged from the effort is a new classification system that can capably predict the hunting behaviors of mammals from measurements of just a few forelimb bones. "We realized ...

VIDEO: This is a video of the study about the dynamics of microtubule minus ends in the human mitotic spindle. Click here for more information. The division of a cell in two requires the assembly of the mitotic spindle, an extremely complex structure, which is the result of the coordinated action of a multitude of proteins and a finely tuned balance of their activities. A large part of the time that a cell requires to divide is devoted to assembling the mitotic spindle, which, ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- A child's illness and hospitalization are extremely stressful for both the child and the parents. A new study reports that the Four Habits Model of Highly Effective Clinicians, a core set of communication skills developed to help physicians communicate with patients, can successfully prepare inexperienced nurses for emotionally difficult conversations with parents of pediatric patients. The evidence-based Four Habits Model was co-developed 20 years ago by Regenstrief Institute investigator Richard Frankel, Ph.D., a sociologist and medical educator whose ...

Scientists at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University have identified a drug that appears to make memories of fearsome events less durable in mice. The finding may accelerate the development of treatments for preventing PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). The drug, called osanetant, targets a distinct group of brain cells in a region of the brain that controls the formation and consolidation of fear memories. The results were published in the journal Neuron. "Potentially, drugs that act on this group of cells could be used to block fear memory ...

Green spaces in towns and cities need extra consideration as they may be damaging buildings in the area, according to new research from the Universities of Southampton and Surrey. When organic chemicals from trees and vegetation mix with air pollutants the resulting corrosive gas can increase the erosion of building materials, including stone, concrete and steel. Southampton's Dr Abhishek Tiwary, who is based within the Centre for Environmental Sciences, and Dr Prashant Kumar, from the University of Surrey, found that heritage buildings, built from limestone and sandstone, ...

Physicists from Umeå University and Humboldt University in Berlin have solved a mystery that has puzzled scientists for half a century. They show with the help of powerful microscopes that the distance between graphite oxide layers gradually increases when water molecules are added. That is because the surface of graphite oxide is not flat, but varies in thickness with "hills" and "valleys" of nanosize. The new findings are published in the scientific journal Nano Letters. "Now we can better understand the mechanisms of solvent insertion between layers of graphene oxide. ...

Carbon nanotubes "unzipped" into graphene nanoribbons by a chemical process invented at Rice University are finding use in all kinds of projects, but Rice scientists have now found a chemical-free way to unzip them. The Rice lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan discovered that nanotubes that hit a target end first turn into mostly ragged clumps of atoms. But nanotubes that happen to broadside the target unzip into handy ribbons that can be used in composite materials for strength and applications that take advantage of their desirable electrical properties. The ...

With the plethora of research and published studies on stem cells over the last decade, many would say that the definition of stem cells is well established and commonly agreed upon. However, a new review article appearing in the July 2014 issue of The FASEB Journal , suggests that scientists have only scratched the surface of understanding the nature, physiology and location of these cells. Specifically, the report suggests that embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells may not be the only source from which all three germ layers in the human body (nerves, liver or ...

The research shows that managers hold more negative attitudes to private use of social media at work than subordinates. About 11,000 Norwegian employees participated in the researchers' study Predictors of Use of Social Network Sites at Work. "It is very interesting that top executives, who are negative to private web-surfing during working hours, are the ones who surf the most for private purposes when at work," says Doctor Cecilie Schou Andreassen at UiB's Department of Psychosocial Science. She suggests that this can be explained by the fact that top executives have ...

It turns out that the same types of drugs that help reduce watery eyes and runny noses during allergy season might also help ward off tumors too. A new research report appearing in the July 2014 issue of The Journal of Leukocyte Biology suggests that antihistamines may have significant anti-cancer properties as they interfere with the function of a type of cell that is known to reduce the body's ability to fight tumors (called "myeloid derived suppressor cells"). "This research is very exciting as it draws a connection between two diseases that aren't commonly linked: ...

(PHILADELPHIA) – Heavy drinking damages the body in many ways. In addition to liver failure, alcoholics are at a much greater risk of developing pneumonia and life threatening acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), for which there is no treatment. Researchers suspect that alcoholics are more susceptible to these lung diseases because the immune system in the lung is no longer strong enough to protect from infection and damage, but, it had been unclear why the immune system in the lung fails. Now, researchers at Thomas Jefferson University have discovered that one ...

A team of physicists from the Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik (PDI) in Berlin, Germany, NTT Basic Research Laboratories in Atsugi, Japan, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has used a scanning tunneling microscope to create quantum dots with identical, deterministic sizes. The perfect reproducibility of these dots opens the door to quantum dot architectures completely free of uncontrolled variations, an important goal for technologies from nanophotonics to quantum information processing as well as for fundamental studies. The complete findings are ...

Singapore, 30 June 2014—Scientists from the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB), a research institute under the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), have discovered that obese individuals lack a protein that is essential for regulating blood glucose levels, causing them to face higher risks of developing diabetes. The protein is one of the first molecular links found between obesity to diabetes and is potentially a target for treatment or prevention of diabetes in obese individuals. Obesity and diabetes are two common health problems faced ...

Bethesda, MD (June 30, 2014) — A team of representatives from five gastroenterology and hepatology societies have created a toolbox designed to help gastroenterology training directors meet the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Internal Medicine Subspecialty Reporting Milestones requirements while training fellows to independently care for patients. Thirteen core tasks, known as "entrustable professional activities," or EPAs, have been identified that define the work of gastroenterologists and hepatologists. A toolbox for each task includes, among ...

Water splitting is one of the critical reactions that sustain life on earth, and could be a key to the creation of future fuels. It is a key in the process of photosynthesis, through which plants produce glucose and oxygen from water and carbon dioxide, using sunlight as energy. However, there are still significant mysteries about the process. Nature's own water-splitting catalysts?which are based on manganese rather than more common elements such as iron, copper, or nickel?are incredibly efficient, and scientists have long been studying why this is so and how we can mimic ...

Researchers have made a giant leap towards the goal of 'bio-printing' transplantable tissues and organs for people affected by major diseases and trauma injuries, a new study reports. Scientists from the Universities of Sydney, Harvard, Stanford and MIT have bio-printed artificial vascular networks mimicking the body's circulatory system that are necessary for growing large complex tissues. "Thousands of people die each year due to a lack of organs for transplantation," says study lead author and University of Sydney researcher, Dr Luiz Bertassoni. "Many more are ...

A group of researchers from Russia, Belarus and Spain, including Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology professor Yury Lozovik, have developed a microscopic force sensor based on carbon nanotubes. The device is described in an article published in the journal Computational Materials Science and is also available as a preprint. The scientists proposed using two nanotubes, one of which is a long cylinder with double walls one atom thick. These tubes are placed so that their open ends are opposite to each other. Voltage is then applied to them, and a current of about ...

The ability of microorganisms to overcome antibiotic treatments is one of the top concerns of modern medicine. The effectiveness of many antibiotics has been reduced by bacteria's ability to rapidly evolve and develop strategies to resist antibiotics. Bacteria achieve this by specific mechanisms that are tailored to the molecular structure or function of a particular antibiotic. For example, bacteria would typically develop drug resistance by evolving a mutation that breaks down the drug. Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem set out to determine if they could ...

Water is the limiting factor for many plants and trees. Consequently, there are grave concerns that the rainfall patterns altered by climate change could trigger a forest decline on a global scale. According to climate researchers, Switzerland is also affected: The climate models even project hotter and drier summers for this country. An international research team headed by Michael O'Brien, an ecologist at the University of Zurich, is now studying which factors govern the resistance of tropical trees to periods of drought. As the scientists reveal in their study published ...

The World Health Organisation has recommended an intervention developed and tested by partners in four countries and UCL researchers to improve maternal and newborn health. The intervention involves groups of women working together in a four-stage facilitated process: 1) Identifying problems during pregnancy, delivery, and post-partum; 2) Developing strategies to address these problems; 3) Implementing these strategies; and 4) Evaluating the strategies. A meta-analysis of research into Participatory Women's Groups was conducted by Dr Audrey Prost and others, largely ...

Philadelphia, PA, June 30, 2014 – Current pharmacotherapies for addiction follow the dictum "one size fits all". Medications are prescribed in the same way for all patients, regardless of whether they have just started experimenting with a drug or have an established drug habit. Even more troubling, there are no FDA-approved pharmacotherapies for some addictions, such as compulsive cocaine use. Perhaps testing drugs in ways that focus on particular phases of addiction or particular clinical features of addiction, such as a patient's level of impulsivity, might advance ...