DALLAS – May 28, 2014 – UT Southwestern Medical Center cancer researchers have identified a protein critical to the spread of deadly cancer cells and determined how it works, paving the way for potential use in diagnosis and eventually possible therapeutic drugs to halt or slow the spread of cancer. The protein, Aiolos, is produced by normal blood cells but commits a kind of "identity theft" of blood cells when expressed by cancer cells, allowing the latter to metastasize, or spread, to other parts of the body. Metastatic cancer cells have the ability to break free from ...

Clinical guidelines conflict on testing teens and adults whose symptoms point to a possible strep throat. A chief contention is whether negative tests results from a rapid analysis of a throat swab, done in a doctor's office, should be confirmed through a follow-up laboratory culture. The rapid test detects certain antigens, one of the body's efforts to fight off strep bacteria. Attempting to grow bacteria from a throat specimen double checks for the presence or absence of Group A Streptococcus bacteria, as well as a few other bacterial infections. A study published ...

PITTSBURGH—Keeping your friends close and your enemies closer may not be the best advice if you are 50 or older. New research from Carnegie Mellon University's Rodlescia Sneed and Sheldon Cohen shows that unpleasant or demanding interpersonal encounters increase hypertension risk among older adults. Published in the American Psychological Association's journal Health Psychology, the study provides some of the first concrete evidence that negative social interactions not only influence psychological well-being but also physical health – in this case, blood pressure ...

Sequenta, Inc. today announced publication of a study done in collaboration with researchers from UCSF and UCLA that used the company's proprietary LymphoSIGHT™ immune repertoire sequencing platform to investigate the effects of anti-CTLA-4 antibody on the number and types of T cells present in a patient's blood. The results, which appear in the May 28 issue of Science Translational Medicine, shed light on the mechanism of action of this type of cancer immunotherapy and suggest that immune repertoire sequencing could be used to predict which patients will have improved ...

Indiana University researchers put male rats to the test to determine the role amphetamines play when used in conjunction with exercise. When people or animals exercise in the heat, exhaustion is a safety gauge telling the body it is time to stop. Exhaustion occurs when the body's core temperature reaches a potentially dangerous point. The use of amphetamines is banned in many sports because they increase time to exhaustion. What they found: Amphetamines can delay exhaustion during exercise in the heat by increasing the temperature at which it occurs. This potentially ...

A Harvard-led team is the first to demonstrate the ability to use low-power light to trigger stem cells inside the body to regenerate tissue, an advance they reported in Science Translational Medicine. The research, led by Wyss Institute Core Faculty member David Mooney, Ph.D., lays the foundation for a host of clinical applications in restorative dentistry and regenerative medicine more broadly, such as wound healing, bone regeneration, and more. The team used a low-power laser to trigger human dental stem cells to form dentin, the hard tissue that is similar to bone ...

Alexandria, Va. — When author John-Manuel Andriote returned to his hometown in New England after years away, he noticed something that had been invisible to him while growing up there — the old stone walls tumbling off into the forests. The realization that the crumbling and overgrown walls meant those forests had once been cleared farm lands set Andriote on a years-long journey of discovery that highlights the intersections of geologic and human history. The story of New England's stone walls begins with the glaciers of the last ice age, meanders through the Colonial ...

SAN FRANCISCO – May 28, 2014 – There may be a connection between taking vasodilators and developing early-stage age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of vision loss and blindness among Americans who are age 65 and older, according to a study published online in Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. AMD – the deterioration of the eye's macula, which is responsible for the ability to see fine details clearly – affects an estimated 11 million people in the United States. In addition to increased age, the cause of AMD ...

Viewed as one of the most unfortunate outcomes of breast cancer treatment, lymphedema is characterized by an accumulation of lymph fluid in the interstitial spaces of the affected limb, leading to chronic ipsilateral limb swelling causing psychosocial distress and physical challenges for patients. Even conservative estimates suggest that 3% of women who have had sentinel lymph node biopsy and 20% of those who have had axillary lymph node dissection may develop lymphedema a year after breast cancer surgery. Two established risk factors for lymphedema are compromised ...

A treatment for dry eye—a burning, gritty condition that can impair vision and damage the cornea—could some day result from computer simulations that map the way tears move across the surface of the eye. Kara Maki, assistant professor in Rochester Institute of Technology's School of Mathematical Sciences, contributed to a recent National Science Foundation study seeking to understand the basic motion of tear film traversing the eye. "Tear Film Dynamic with Evaporation, Wetting and Time Dependent Flux boundary Condition on an Eye-shaped Domain," published in the journal ...

The first evidence for massive and abrupt iceberg calving in Antarctica, dating back 19,000 to 9,000 years ago, has now been documented by an international team of geologists and climate scientists. Their findings are based on analysis of new, long deep sea sediment cores extracted from the region between the Falkland Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula. The study in the May 28, 2014 issue of Nature bears witness to an unstable Antarctic ice sheet that can abruptly reorganize Southern Hemisphere climate and cause rapid global sea level rise. "One of the iceberg events ...

By cataloging over 18,000 proteins, researchers from TUM have produced an almost complete inventory of the human proteome. This information is now freely available in the ProteomicsDB database, which is a joint development of TUM and software company SAP. The database includes information for example on the types, distribution, and abundance of proteins in various cells and tissues as well as in body fluids. The investigations show that, on the one hand, around 10,000 proteins are concerned with housekeeping processes in many different places. On the other hand, it was ...

As part of a series of experiments designed to resolve one of the deepest mysteries of physics today, researchers from RIKEN, in collaboration with the University of Mainz, GSI Darmstadt and the Max Planck Institute for Physics at Heidelberg, have made the most precise ever direct measurement of the magnetic moment of a proton. The work, published in Nature today, seeks to answer the fundamental question of why we exist at all. It is believed that the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago generated equal amounts of matter and antimatter-which annihilate when they collide-and ...

Striving for the protein equivalent of the Human Genome Project, an international team of researchers has created an initial catalog of the human "proteome," or all of the proteins in the human body. In total, using 30 different human tissues, the team identified proteins encoded by 17,294 genes, which is about 84 percent of all of the genes in the human genome predicted to encode proteins. In a summary of the effort, to be published May 29 in the journal Nature, the team also reports the identification of 193 novel proteins that came from regions of the genome not predicted ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study has found that the Antarctic Ice Sheet began melting about 5,000 years earlier than previously thought coming out of the last ice age – and that shrinkage of the vast ice sheet accelerated during eight distinct episodes, causing rapid sea level rise. The international study, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, is particularly important coming on the heels of recent studies that suggest destabilization of part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun. Results of this latest study are being published this week in the journal ...

A mechanism that enables the development of resistance to Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) anticancer drugs, thereby leading to relapse, has been identified by Kathy Borden of the University of Montreal's Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) and her collaborators. Kathy Borden is a Principal Investigator at IRIC and a professor at the university's Department of Pathology and Cell Biology. The development of drug resistance is one of the main problems in clinical oncology and the cause of relapse in many patients. The new discovery, recently published in ...

Hurricane Amanda has weakened to a tropical storm, but not before NASA's TRMM satellite took a look under its clouds at the rate of heavy rainfall it was generating. After weakening to a tropical storm, NASA's Aqua satellite identified that those strong thunderstorms were limited to the area around the center of its circulation. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite known as TRMM passed over Amanda on Saturday May 24, 2014 at 2150 UTC (5:50 p.m. EDT). TRMM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency known as JAXA. At NASA's ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study by researchers at Oregon State University suggests that wild coho salmon that choose mates with disease-resistant genes different from their own are more likely to produce greater numbers of adult offspring returning to the river some three years later. The researchers also found that hatchery-reared coho – for some unknown reason – do not appear to have the same ability to select mates that are genetically diverse, which may, in part, explain their comparative lower reproductive success. Results of the study have been published in this ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Charitable fundraising once depended primarily upon a charity's size, efficiency and longstanding reputation. That was before Razoo, Chipin, Facebook and Twitter came to town. In the first academic study to look at what determines charitable giving on social-media sites, researchers found that those media have created a more level playing field in the nonprofit world, one in which successful use of technology can make up for limited organizational size. Technology and social media, it turns out, can not only raise the online profile of even small organizations, ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – As new treatments for hepatitis C virus (HCV) are approved, biomedical scientists are exploring their mechanisms and what they reveal about the virus. An online publication this month in Hepatology is the first to report real-time tracking of viral decay in the liver and blood in 15 patients with HCV. Led by Andrew H. Talal, MD, University at Buffalo professor of medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition and corresponding author, the study is the first to trace in real-time how the drug telaprevir inhibits viral replication ...

A multicenter team of researchers report that a commercial test designed to rule out the presence of genetic biomarkers of prostate cancer may be accurate enough to exclude the need for repeat prostate biopsies in many — if not most — men. "Often, one biopsy is not enough to definitively rule out prostate cancer," says study researcher Jonathan Epstein, M.D., director of the Division of Surgical Pathology and a professor of pathology, urology and oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "Our research finds that by looking for the presence or absence ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and unplanned pregnancies are associated with poorer health and lower rates of educational and economic achievement for women and their children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, research shows that the desire to avoid pregnancy does not necessarily increase women's use of contraceptives, although this discrepancy is not well understood. Now, MU researchers have found that levels of prior sex education and moral attitudes toward contraception influence ...

Why are some 75-year-olds downright spry while others can barely get around? Part of the explanation, say researchers writing in the Cell Press journal Trends in Molecular Medicine on May 28, is differences from one person to the next in exposure to harmful substances in the environment, chemicals such as benzene, cigarette smoke, and even stress. While the birth date on your driver's license can tell you your chronological age, that might mean little in terms of the biological age of your body and cells. The researchers say that what we need now is a better understanding ...

This news release is available in French. Listening to a conversation in the context of a cocktail party presents a great challenge for the auditory system. Without realizing it, one must extract, from a complex mixture of sound, the sound of a single voice to understand and track it. Researchers at Queen's University, lead by Dr. Ingrid Johnsrude, are studying how our brains meet that challenge, and allow us to distinguish specific voices in crowded, noisy and distracting environments. Her studies have revealed that the brain does not simply rely on the incoming ...

This news release is available in French. Research presented by Morris Moscovitch, from the Rotman Research Institute at the University of Toronto, shows that memory is more dynamic and changeable than previously thought. Dr. Moscovich's results reveal that important interactions between the hippocampus and the neocortex, two regions of the brain, have different yet complementary roles in remembering places and events. These results highlight that different forms of memories exist in the brain, and that these are encoded in different, but interacting parts of the ...