BELLINGHAM, Washington (USA) — The Journal of Medical Imaging (JMI) has launched, with freely accessible articles on new research on earlier and more accurate diagnosis and monitoring of cancer and other diseases, image quality assessment, 3D imaging, and other topics. Published by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, the quarterly journal is available online in the SPIE Digital Library, with each peer-reviewed article published as it is approved. JMI will also be issued in print. JMI covers fundamental and translational research and applications ...

The Antarctic Peninsula, the northern most region of Antarctica, is experiencing some of the most dramatic changes due to climate warming, including population declines of some penguin species. This is not the first time that region has felt the effects of climate warming. How did penguins respond to the melting of snow and ice cover 11,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age? Today, scientists have traced the genetics of modern penguin populations back to their early ancestors from the last Ice Age to better understand how three Antarctic penguin species – gentoo, ...

A study of how penguin populations have changed over the last 30,000 years has shown that between the last ice age and up to around 1,000 years ago penguin populations benefitted from climate warming and retreating ice. This suggests that recent declines in penguins may be because ice is now retreating too far or too fast. An international team, led by scientists from the Universities of Southampton and Oxford, has used a genetic technique to estimate when current genetic diversity arose in penguins and to recreate past population sizes. Looking at the 30,000 years before ...

For nearly 100 years, we have known that type 1 diabetes (T1D) is a disease fundamentally about the progressive loss of insulin-producing beta cells, but measuring that loss has continued to elude researchers—at least until now. In a recent scientific publication, JDRF-funded researchers used a radiotracer or marker and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scanning as a non-invasive technique to follow changes in how many active beta cells a person has. Dr. Olle Korsgren and his colleagues at the University of Uppsala in Sweden used the technique in a clinical study ...

This news release is available in Spanish. Joint research between the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and the University of Nottingham has identified, for the first time, the structural damage caused at a molecular level to the brain by the chronic excessive abuse of alcohol. In concrete, the research team has determined the alterations produced in the neurones of the prefrontal zone of the brain (the most advanced zone in terms of evolution and that which controls executive functions such as planning, designing strategies, working memory, selective ...

In nature, it is very rare to find a proverbial much smaller David able to overpower and kill a Goliath for supper. This is exactly the modus operandi of a solitary tiny spider from the Negev desert in Israel that routinely kills ants up to almost four times its own size. Details about how it attacks and kills its prey with a venomous bite is published in Springer's journal Naturwissenschaften – The Science of Nature. The study was led by Stano Pekár of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. Pekár's team observed the natural prey and predatory behavior of the minute ...

New research reports that survivors of childhood liver transplant remain nutritionally compromised over the long-term. Findings published in Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and the International Liver Transplantation Society, indicate that the recipients' return to normal weight post-transplant was due to an increase in fat mass as body cell mass remained low, indicating a slim body composition with little lean muscle mass or "skinny fat." Children with end-stage liver disease may be malnourished due to inadequate ...

Obesity and diabetes are among the fastest growing health problems in the world, and the hunt is in for a pill that can fight the problem. Now a Danish/British team has come up with a smart tool that will speed up the scientific hunting process, and we may be one step closer to a pill against obesity. The body has a variety of functions that decide if we get overweight or not. For instance hormones control our appetite and the uptake of food. In recent years science has taken on the quest of investigating these physiological functions and finding a medical way to fight ...

Children are showing signs of social withdrawal are more susceptible to parental influences than others. These children were also more prone to distress caused by the impacts of guilt-inducing parenting. The researchers of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, have found that children showing signs of social withdrawal are more susceptible to parental influences than others. The researchers followed up about 300 children across the first three years of primary school and monitored the children's social skills and problem behaviors. At the same time, mothers' and fathers' ...

The studies, published in the acclaimed Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, show that 24 weeks of twice-weekly recreational football training sessions lower blood pressure and improves heart function in men with high blood pressure and men with type 2 diabetes. Furthermore, men with type 2 diabetes lost 12 % of their abdominal fat and reduced their blood sugar 20% more than inactive control subjects. These effects are likely to reduce the risk of developing heart diseases including heart failure and myocardial infarction, and the participants had a reduced ...

Women with weight problems were more impulsive than average in a food-related psychology test, a new research paper has shown. This suggested that they are more instinctively stimulated by images of food as well as lacking contemplative will power. Further, some women reported food craving even if they had eaten recently, a symptom of possible food addiction. "All addictions are similar in that the sufferer craves to excess the feel-good buzz they receive from chemical neurotransmitters produced when they eat, gamble, smoke, have sex or take drugs," commented Claus Voegele, ...

Certain processes used to sterilize blood products could potentially cause serious health issues in transfusion recipients, according to an international study published in the journal Platelets and led by Dr. Patrick Provost of Université Laval's Faculty of Medicine and the CHU de Québec Research Center. These processes purportedly alter the blood platelets to the extent of preventing them from carrying out their functions correctly and may be the cause of hemorrhages observed in patients having received treated blood. The function of platelets goes far beyond their ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- When people get together in groups, unusual things can happen — both good and bad. Groups create important social institutions that an individual could not achieve alone, but there can be a darker side to such alliances: Belonging to a group makes people more likely to harm others outside the group. "Although humans exhibit strong preferences for equity and moral prohibitions against harm in many contexts, people's priorities change when there is an 'us' and a 'them,'" says Rebecca Saxe, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT. "A group ...

White sharks are among the largest, most widespread apex predators in the ocean, but are also among the most vulnerable. A new study, the most comprehensive ever on seasonal distribution patterns and historic trends in abundance of white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) in the western North Atlantic Ocean, used records compiled over more than 200 years to update knowledge and fill in gaps in information about this species. Scientists from NOAA Fisheries and colleagues added recent unpublished records to previously published data to present a broad picture of 649 confirmed ...

The use of nanoparticles in cancer research is considered as a promising approach in detecting and fighting tumour cells. The method has, however, often failed because the human immune system recognizes the particles as foreign objects and rejects them before they can fulfil their function. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and at University College Dublin in Ireland have, along with other partners, developed nanoparticles that not only bypass the body's defence system, but also find their way to the diseased cells. This procedure uses fragments ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —The immune system maintains a rich abundance of "natural killer" cells to confront microbial invaders, but as the body gains the upper hand in various infections it sometimes starts to produce even more of the cells. For three decades, scientists haven't understood what purpose that serves. In a new paper, Brown University researchers show one: proliferation helps change the NK cells' function from stimulating the immune response to calming it down, lest it get out of hand. In a series of experiments now published online in the Journal ...

Proteins are chains of amino acids that, when folded into certain structural patterns and also when unfolded, exert functions within cells. Proteins receive signals that are transmitted from one to the next and that are essential for life. However, within a given protein, are there "highways" along which the signals travel, like a in a relay event? That is to say, how is the information transmitted in a given protein? "This is one of the key questions in biophysics," says Xavier Salvatella, ICREA Professor at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and ...

Since the days of Darwin, biologists have questioned why certain plants occur in widely separated places, the farthest reaches of North American and the Southern tip of South America but nowhere in between. How did they get there? An international team of researchers have now found an important piece of the puzzle: migratory birds about to fly to South America from the Arctic harbor small plant parts in their feathers. In the past several decades, scientists have discovered that the North – South distributions of certain plants often result from a single jump across the ...

VIDEO: Chimpanzees spontaneously cooperate with multiple partners of their choosing to remove a barrier and pull in a tray baited with food. Click here for more information. Without any pre-training or restrictions in partner choice among chimpanzees, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, found for the first time that chimpanzees housed in a socially complex, contained setting spontaneously cooperate with multiple partners of their choosing. ...

A new study presented today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2014) showed that erectile dysfunction (ED) is present in most men with gout and is frequently severe.1 In a survey of 201 men, 83 had gout, of whom a significantly greater proportion had ED (76%) compared with those patients without gout (52%) (p= 0.0007). Also, a significantly greater proportion of gout patients (43%) had severe ED compared with patients without gout (30%) (p=0.007).1 According to lead author Dr. Naomi Schlesinger, Chief, Division of Rheumatology and Professor ...

DNA methylation has been identified as a potential biomarker of response to etanercept and adalimumab in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) according to preliminary results from one of the largest methylome-wide investigations of treatment response to anti-TNF therapies.1 These data, presented today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2014), bring clinicians a step closer to being able to personalise a patient's treatment pathway. Anti-TNF therapies have proved a huge advance for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and have transformed ...

Research findings presented today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2014) suggest that exercise transiently suppresses local and systemic inflammation, reinforcing the beneficial effects of exercise and the need for this to be regular in order to achieve clinical efficacy in rheumatic disease. Chronic inflammation, swelling and pain in the joints characterise the more than 200 rheumatic diseases. Persistent inflammation over time can damage affected joints, but previous research has established that exercise can decrease joint inflammation ...

A new study presented for the first time today at the European League Against Rheumatism Annual Congress (EULAR 2014), shows that cranial ultrasound has a greater sensitivity than temporal artery biopsy,* and a comparable specificity in the diagnosis of Giant Cell Arteritis (GCA).1 Giant Cell Arteritis (GCA), a condition in which medium and large arteries mainly in the head and neck, become inflamed and narrowed, can cause blindness due to occlusion of the artery supplying the back of the eye. It is therefore essential that a prompt, accurate diagnosis of GCA is made ...

Teens who tried to act cool in early adolescence were more likely than their peers who didn't act cool to experience a range of problems in early adulthood, according to a new decade-long study. The study, by researchers at the University of Virginia, appears in the journal Child Development. While cool teens are often idolized in popular media—in depictions ranging from James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause to Tina Fey's Mean Girls—seeking popularity and attention by trying to act older than one's age may not yield the expected benefits, according to the study. Researchers ...

Children of parents who use subsidies to purchase center-based care in the toddler years are more likely to be enrolled in Head Start or public prekindergarten in their preschool years, according to a new study. The research, conducted at Georgetown University and Columbia University, appears in the journal Child Development. The federally funded child care subsidy program—the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF)—serves nearly 2 million children a month and is one of the government's biggest investments in the early care and education of low-income children. While the ...