DURHAM, N.C. -- A Duke University study in rats finds that gut worms can protect babies' brains from long-term learning and memory problems caused by newborn infections. Baby rats with tapeworms avoided the brain inflammation that plagued worm-free rats after exposure to immune triggers in adulthood. What's more, the benefits began early, while still in the womb. Expectant mother rats with tapeworms passed similar protection on to their worm-free pups, the researchers found. The findings could point to new ways to treat or prevent the chronic brain inflammation ...

When modern football helmets were introduced, they all but eliminated traumatic skull fractures caused by blunt force impacts. Mounting evidence, however, suggests that concussions are caused by a different type of head motion, namely brain and skull rotation. Now, a group of Stanford engineers has produced a collection of results that suggest that current helmet-testing equipment and techniques are not optimized for evaluating these additional injury-causing elements. The ideal way to test any protective gear is to gain a sense of what causes the trauma, set up a system ...

Angelina Jolie received widespread media attention in 2013 when she told the public that she'd tested positive for BRCA1, a gene associated with an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancers, and subsequently had a double mastectomy. Now research shows that this publicity did influence some women's intentions to seek out similar genetic testing. "We put a questionnaire online within three days of Jolie's announcement, to see if the announcement influenced anyone's intention to get genetic testing," says Kami Kosenko, an associate professor of communication at North ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Researchers on Mayo Clinic's Florida campus have identified key differences between patients with sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease) and those with the most common genetic form of ALS, a mutation in the C9orf72 gene. Their findings, reported online today in Nature Neuroscience, demonstrate that ALS patients show abnormalities in levels and processing of ribonucleic acids (RNA), biological molecules that determine what gene information is used to guide protein synthesis. More than 30,000 Americans live with ALS, ...

VANCOUVER, B.C. and DURHAM, N.C. - Results from HPTN 067, a Phase II, randomized, open-label study, demonstrate most study participants had higher coverage of sex events and better adherence when they were assigned to the daily dosing arm, investigators from the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) reported today at the 8th International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Vancouver, Canada. HPTN 067, also known as the ADAPT Study, was designed to evaluate the feasibility of non-daily pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) regimens. The ...

VANCOUVER, B.C. and DURHAM, N.C. - Antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV infection provides lasting protection against the sexual transmission of the virus from infected men and women to their HIV-uninfected sexual partners, investigators from the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) reported today at the 8th International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Vancouver, Canada. The study, known as HPTN 052, began in 2005 and enrolled 1,763 HIV sero-discordant couples - where one person is HIV-infected and the other is not - at 13 ...

WASHINGTON --Emergency physicians can safely reduce x-rays in children with hurt ankles by as much as 23 percent and save emergency patients both money and time. The results of a cost analysis of the Low Risk Ankle Rule (LRAR) were published online Tuesday in Annals of Emergency Medicine "Cost Consequence Analysis of Implementing the Low Risk Ankle Rule in Emergency Departments". "Currently, x-rays are ordered for up to 95 percent of children who come to emergency departments with ankle injuries, though only 12 percent of those x-rays show fractures," said lead study ...

Solar panels are an investment -- not only in terms of money, but also energy. It takes energy to mine, process and purify raw materials, and then to manufacture and install the final product. Silicon-based panels, which dominate the market for solar power, usually need about two years to return this energy investment. But for technology made with perovskites -- a class of materials causing quite a buzz in the solar research community -- the energy payback time could be as quick as two to three months. By this metric, perovskite modules are better than any solar technology ...

Tropical Depression Halola is getting stronger. NASA data pinpointed the area of strongest sustained winds on July 19 and the extent of those winds expanded on July 20 as Halola became a tropical storm again. NASA also gathered infrared data that showed cloud top temperatures getting colder, indicating more uplift or strength in the storm. On July 19 at 2 p.m. GMT (10 a.m. EDT), the RapidScat instrument aboard the International Space Station gathered data on surface winds in Tropical Depression Halola. RapidScat saw the strongest sustained winds were on the northeastern ...

Antiretroviral treatment that consistently suppresses HIV is highly effective at preventing sexual transmission of the virus in heterosexual couples where one person is HIV-infected and the other is not, investigators report today at the 8th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment & Prevention (IAS 2015) in Vancouver, Canada. The finding comes from the decade-long HPTN 052 clinical trial funded primarily by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and conducted by the NIH-funded ...

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have discovered a way of improving biotech drugs. Better, cheaper and more effective drugs to combat cancer, arthritis and many other disorders. This is the result of a ground-breaking new technique developed by a group of researchers from the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. The method can improve a large number of so-called glycoprotein-based pharmaceuticals used to treat a variety of diseases. The technique has recently been described in one of the world's most distinguished scientific ...

No one likes to lose a friend, especially adolescents. But why do friendships end? Researchers in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science at Florida Atlantic University sought to answer this question with a study examining whether adolescent friendships end because of undesirable characteristics of friends, because of differences between friends, or both. Findings from this long-term longitudinal study of 410 adolescents involved in 573 friendships are published in the current issue of Psychological Science. Adolescent friendships are fleeting. The majority dissolve ...

WASHINGTON, July 20, 2015 -- If you're stumped in the wine aisle of the store, then you're not alone. Every bottle has unique nuances of taste and smell. How can something made of grapes smell buttery or taste like grass? Learn about the complex chemistry behind wine and then impress your friends at your next party thanks to Reactions. Check out our wine chemistry primer here: http://youtu.be/_UaS743_aEs. Subscribe to the series at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions, and follow us on Twitter @ACSreactions to be the first to see our latest videos. INFORMATION: The American ...

Nearly a third of breast cancer survivors in Appalachia are not taking the critical, potentially life-saving follow-up treatment - despite having insurance that would pay for it, a troubling new study has found. Researchers cross-examined cancer registries with Medicare claims data and determined that of 428 women, approximately 30 percent failed to follow through with their prescribed adjuvant hormone therapy, a treatment to prevent the cancer's recurrence. "Almost a third of the prescriptions for adjuvant hormone therapy were not filled, which is much, much higher ...

ATLANTA--States' regulations of health insurance and practitioners significantly influence when patients receive colorectal or breast cancer diagnoses, especially among people younger than the Medicare-eligible age of 65, according to a new study by researchers at Georgia State University's School of Public Health and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study suggests that where people live is a strong predictor of whether they will receive potentially life-saving cancer screenings. Dr. Lee Rivers Mobley, associate professor of spatial science and health ...

Oceans have absorbed up to 30 percent of human-made carbon dioxide around the world, storing dissolved carbon for hundreds of years. As the uptake of carbon dioxide has increased in the last century, so has the acidity of oceans worldwide. Since pre-industrial times, the pH of the oceans has dropped from an average of 8.2 to 8.1 today. Projections of climate change estimate that by the year 2100, this number will drop further, to around 7.8 -- significantly lower than any levels seen in open ocean marine communities today. Now a team of researchers from MIT, the University ...

Marine species that already roam far and wide throughout our oceans are extending their territories further and faster in response to climate change, according to new research involving the University of Southampton and an international team of biodiversity experts. The study found that while species that have large ranges are able to make their way to cooler waters, small-ranging species are in increased jeopardy as our planet's oceans continue to warm. "Our findings indicate that animals which already have wide-latitudinal ranges, habitat generalists, and species with ...

New Haven, Conn. -- Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have successfully treated patients with moderate to severe eczema using a rheumatoid arthritis drug recently shown to reverse two other disfiguring skin conditions, vitiligo and alopecia areata. The study is evidence of a potential new era in eczema treatment, they report. The research findings are published early online in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. Eczema (atopic dermatitis) is a chronic condition that causes severe itching and leaves the skin red and thickened. It can adversely affect ...

A slow-down in global warming is not a sign that climate change is ending, but a natural blip in an otherwise long-term upwards trend, research shows. In a detailed study of more than 200 years' worth of temperature data, results backed previous findings that short-term pauses in climate change are simply the result of natural variation. The findings support the likelihood that a current hiatus in the world's year-on-year temperature increases - which have stalled since 1998 - is temporary. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh analysed real-world historic ...

Research findings obtained over the past decades increasingly indicate that stored memories are coded as permanent changes of neuronal communciation and the strength of neuronalinterconnections. The learning process evokes a specific pattern of electrical activity in these cells, which influences the response behavior to incoming signals, the expression of genes and the cellular morphology beyond the learning process itself. "You might say that these changes define the cellular correlate of the memory engram" says Friedrich Johenning, researcher at the Neuroscience Research ...

Researchers from the Institute and Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of São Paulo, (Brazil); the Imperial College of London, (UK); the University of Western Australia (Australia) and the University of Toronto (Canada) have just published a study in the Journal of Psychopharmacology suggesting that what had been clustered as anxiety disorders is not homogenous in terms of functioning of the serotonergic system. The researchers reanalyzed the results of six other studies that had evaluated the effects of the acute reduction of tryptophan, the ...

Microbial ecosystems such as biological wastewater treatment plants and the human gastrointestinal tract are home to a vast diversity of bacterial species. Scientists of the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) and the Life Science Research Unit (LSRU) of the University of Luxembourg, in collaboration with US researchers, have now succeeded for the first time in determining key functional genes and the organisms encoding these in such ecological systems, working from extensive data of bacterial genetics and bacterial metabolism. Keystone species are species ...

The term intellectual disability covers a large number of clinical entities, some with known cause and others of uncertain origin. For example Down syndrome is due to an extra copy of chromosome 21 and Rett syndrome is in part caused by a mutation in the control switch gene called MeCP2. In other cases the mechanisms by which they are produced are not clearly identified. It is the case of most of those disorders classified under the large umbrella of autism. An study published in the journal Genetics in Medicine, by Manel Esteller, director of the Program Epigenetics ...

Barbara Hinney and her colleagues from the Institute for Parasitology at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, screened 298 faecal samples taken from cats across Austria for single-cell intestinal parasites, so called enteric protozoa. The samples came from private households, catteries and animal shelters. Of the 298 cats sampled, 56 tested positive with at least one intestinal parasite. Multi-cat households often affected A significantly higher rate of positive samples was registered in households with more than one cat. Households with kittens are also ...

This study has developed a unique bioinformatics approach for identifying associations between molecules from a range of vast data sources. Applied to studies with the aim to measure metabolism in tissues under variating conditions e.g. genetics, diets and environment. Opposed to current methods that apply statistical analysis to data sets as a whole, the proposed workflow breaks the initial data into smaller groups determined by known molecular interactions. Statistical methods can then be applied to these groups resulting in more accurate results than if the analysis ...