One of the most widely used tools in epigenetics research - the study of how DNA packaging affects gene expression - is chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP), a technique that allows researchers to examine interactions between specific proteins and genomic regions. However, ChIP is a relative measurement, and has significant limitations that can lead to errors, poor reproducibility and an inability to be compared between experiments. To address these issues, scientists from the University of Chicago have developed a new technique that calibrates ChIP experiments with an ...

About one-third of patients admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) will develop delirium, a condition that lengthens hospital stays and substantially increases one's risk of dying in the hospital, according to a new study led by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers appearing in the British Medical Journal. "Every patient who develops delirium will on average remain in the hospital at least one day longer," says one of the study's authors, Robert Stevens, M.D., a specialist in critical care and an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. ...

[EMBARGOED UNTIL THURSDAY, JUNE 4] Although treatment advances have dramatically reduced deaths from opportunistic infections related to AIDS, a new study drawing on 30 years of data from more than 20,000 patients in San Francisco suggests there is still ample room to improve. About a third--35 percent--of AIDS patients diagnosed with their first opportunistic infection from 1997 to 2012 in that city died within five years, according to the study, published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. "While recent research suggests that many opportunistic infections in the ...

Philadelphia, PA, June 4, 2015 - Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are often picky eaters, which can lead parents to suspect that their children might not be getting adequate amounts of vitamins and minerals. This sometimes leads parents of children with ASD to try nutritional supplements and dietary regimens such as gluten-free and casein-free (GFCF) diets without professional supervision. In the largest study of its kind, published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, researchers report that these well-intentioned efforts can result in ...

In a new study, scientists have gathered all available NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope data on the four outer moons of Pluto to analyse the system in more depth than ever before. The observations show that at least two of Pluto's moons are not neatly rotating on their axes but are in chaotic rotation while orbiting around Pluto and its companion Charon. The study also hints that one of the moons has a mysterious jet-black colouring. These surprising results appear in the 4 June issue of the journal Nature. Almost every moon in the Solar System, including our moon, rotates ...

SALT LAKE CITY, June 4, 2015 - At times during the past 10,000 years, cottontails and hares reproduced like rabbits and their numbers surged when the El Niño weather pattern drenched the Pacific Coast with rain, according to a University of Utah analysis of 3,463 bunny bones. The study of ancient rabbit populations at a Baja California site may help scientists better understand how mammals that range from the coast to the interior will respond to climate change, says anthropology doctoral student Isaac Hart. He is first author of the study to be published in the ...

A rare and elusive rabbit has been found, held and photographed by a researcher from the University of East Anglia (UEA). The Annamite Striped rabbit, found in the forests of Laos and Vietnam, was first documented by rabbit expert Dr Diana Bell and colleagues from UEA's School of Biological Sciences in the journal Nature in 1999. It has rarely been seen since. Researcher Sarah Woodfin, who is studying for a Masters in Applied Ecology and Conservation at UEA, set out on a three-month expedition to track the recently-discovered rabbit and study its habitat. But she ...

Many aquatic species have a reputation for negligent parenting. Having cast their gametes to the currents, they abandon their offspring to their fate. However, hands-on parenting is taken to a whole new dimension in the Syngnathidae fish family. Instead of leaving the responsibility to the females, seahorse and pipefish males take the pledge to care for their young even before the eggs are fertilized. The females depart soon after placing their eggs directly into the male's brood pouch, leaving the soon-to-be fathers to incubate the developing embryos. Ines Braga Goncalves ...

Cancer has overtaken cardiovascular disease, which includes heart disease and stroke, as the UK's No 1 killer--but only among men, reveals research published online in the journal Heart. Cardiovascular disease is still the most common cause of death among women, and kills more young women than breast cancer, the figures show. The researchers used the latest nationally available data (2012-13) for each of the four UK countries and the Cardiovascular Disease Statistics 2014 report compiled for the British Heart Foundation (BHF) to quantify the prevalence of cardiovascular ...

Researchers have developed a score that predicts an individual's risk of dying within 5 years for people aged between 40 and 70 years old in the UK, according to new research published in The Lancet. The score, which uses measures that can be obtained by simple questionnaires without any need for physical examination, such as self-rated health and usual walking speed, could be used by individuals to improve awareness of their health status, and by doctors to identify high-risk individuals for further treatment, say the authors. Individuals can calculate their personalised ...

Women aged 50-69 years who attend mammography screening reduce their risk of dying from breast cancer by 40 per cent compared to women who are not screened - according to a major international review of the latest evidence on breast cancer screening. Overall, women who are invited to attend mammography screening have a 23 per cent risk reduction in breast cancer death (owing to some attending and some not), compared with women not invited by routine screening programmes. In the UK, this relative risk translates to around eight deaths prevented per 1,000 women regularly ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Day in and day out, for years on end, millions of people with diabetes prick their fingers to test their blood sugar level. And many may wonder if all the careful eating, exercise and medication it takes to keep those levels under control is really worth it. A major new study should encourage them to keep going for the long haul, to protect their hearts from diabetes-related damage. But it should also prompt them to work with their doctors on other ways to reduce their cardiovascular risk. The key finding: that keeping blood sugar levels under good ...

Boston, MA - A new study by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that death rates among people over 65 are higher in zip codes with more fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) than in those with lower levels of PM2.5. It is the first study to examine the effect of soot particles in the air in the entire population of a region, including rural areas. The harmful effects from the particles were observed even in areas where concentrations were less than a third of the current standard set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). "Most of the ...

Operation IceBridge wrapped up its seventh Arctic deployment on May 21, when NASA's C-130 research aircraft with the mission's researchers and instruments on board departed Thule Air Base in Greenland and headed to NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. This Arctic field season, IceBridge, NASA's twice-yearly airborne survey of polar ice, carried out 33 eight-hour flights during ten weeks, collecting data over sea and land ice regions that have been evolving rapidly over the last decades. The mission also conducted over a dozen international research collaborations ...

Researchers at the University of Toronto (U of T) have uncovered new insights on the genetic causes of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which is also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. These findings could uncover a new way to detect a genetic predisposition to ALS before the disease strikes. A common mutation associated with ALS is an unstable repeated DNA sequence within the C9orf72 gene that could reach into the thousands. However, it is unknown how many repeats would be sufficient to cause the disease. A way to predict if the number of repeats increases to the damaging ...

In a paper published June 3, 2015 in the online journal PLOS ONE, University of Connecticut researchers Jan-Michael Hessenauer and Jason C. Vokoun, both in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, report on fisheries induced evolution (FIE) in recreational fisheries. Their research compared populations of largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) taken from unexploited reference populations in the state of Connecticut and compared their resting metabolic rates (RMR) with populations taken from popular inland recreational fisheries. Differences among ...

Each summer, Greenland's ice sheet -- the world's second-largest expanse of ice, measuring three times the size of Texas -- begins to melt. Pockets of melting ice form hundreds of large, 'supraglacial' lakes on the surface of the ice. Many of these lakes drain through cracks and crevasses in the ice sheet, creating a liquid layer over which massive chunks of ice can slide. This natural conveyor belt can speed ice toward the coast, where it eventually falls off into the sea. In recent years, scientists have observed more lakes forming toward the center of the ice sheet ...

PHILADELPHIA -- Sometimes even cells get tired. When the T cells of your immune system are forced to deal over time with cancer or a chronic infection such as HIV or hepatitis C, they can develop 'T cell exhaustion,' becoming less effective and losing their ability to attack and destroy the invaders of the body. While the PD-1 protein pathway has long been implicated as a primary player in T cell exhaustion, a major question has been whether PD-1 actually directly causes exhaustion. A new paper from the lab of E. John Wherry, Ph.D., a professor of microbiology and director ...

Researchers from the University of Exeter found that the severity of ranavirosis, a devastating disease that kills thousands of frogs each year, increases in the presence of exotic fish. The use of garden chemicals was also associated with increased severity of the disease. The study, which is published in the journal PLOS ONE, highlights the risks of releasing fish into garden ponds. Fish may amplify viral levels in the environment or cause stress hormone production that reduces immune function in wild frogs. Lead author Alexandra North from the Environment and Sustainability ...

PITTSBURGH, June 3, 2015 - Pregnant women living close to a high density of natural gas wells drilled with hydraulic fracturing were more likely to have babies with lower birth weights than women living farther from such wells, according to a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health analysis of southwestern Pennsylvania birth records. The finding does not prove that the proximity to the wells caused the lower birth weights, but it is a concerning association that warrants further investigation, the researchers concluded. The study was funded by The Heinz ...

PHILADELPHIA - Individuals with a higher level of moral reasoning skills showed increased gray matter in the areas of the brain implicated in complex social behavior, decision making, and conflict processing as compared to subjects at a lower level of moral reasoning, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in collaboration with a researcher from Charité Universitätsmediz in Berlin, Germany. The team studied students in the Masters of Business Administration (MBA) program at the Wharton ...

Researchers have analysed the genomes of thousands of women in the UK and the Netherlands to measure the extent to which a woman's genes play a role for when she has her first baby and how many children she will have. Significantly, they have found that some women are genetically predisposed to have children earlier than others, and conclude that they have passed down their reproductive advantage to the next generation. They also find, however, that while modern women who were born in the 20th century might be expected to have babies even earlier than previous generations ...

WYNNEWOOD, PA--June 3, 2015--a study led by Ellen Heber-Katz, PhD, of the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research (LIMR), part of Main Line Health (MLH), shows that a primordial form of energy production that still exists in mammals can be harnessed to achieve spontaneous tissue regeneration in mice, without the need for added stem cells. The study findings were reported in the June 3, 2015, issue of Science Translational Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Key collaborators in the study, which was supported by grants ...

A lot of problems, associated with the mixing of the liquid in the microchannels, could be solved via proper organization of the inhomogeneous slip on the walls of these channels. This is the conclusion made by the joint group of Russian and German scientists lead by Olga Vinogradova, who is a professor at the M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University and also a head of laboratory at the A.N. Frumkin Institute of Physical chemistry and Electrochemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The article describing their theory was published in the latest issue of the journal ...

Scientists are beginning to unwrap the biology behind why some people are more prone to major depression and other psychiatric disorders than others when experiencing stressful life events. The researchers found that cellular activity in response to stress hormone receptor activation differs from individual to individual. The study, led by Janine Arloth, Ryan Bogdan, and Elisabeth Binder at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Germany, also shows that the genetic variations underlying this difference in stress response correlate with dysfunction in the amygdala, a ...