TORONTO, ON – In many species, the possession of X and Y chromosomes determines whether an individual develops into a male or female. In humans, for example, individuals who inherit their father's Y chromosome become male (XY), and individuals who inherit their father's X chromosome become female (XX). This system of sex determination has evolved independently multiple times and a striking feature of its evolution is that Y chromosomes have degenerated genetically, losing many genes over time. What is not well understood, however, is what happens to the Y chromosome during ...

The diversity of the world's life forms — from corals to carnivores — is under assault. Decades of scientific studies document the fraying of ecosystems and a grim tally of species extinctions due to destroyed habitat, pollution, climate change, invasives and overharvesting. Which makes a recent report in the journal Science rather surprising. Nick Gotelli, a professor at the University of Vermont, with colleagues from Saint Andrews University, Scotland, and the University of Maine, re-examined data from one hundred long-term monitoring studies done around the world ...

May 13, 2014 – (BRONX, NY) – Healthy stem cells work to restore or repair the body's tissues, but cancer stem cells have a more nefarious mission: to spawn malignant tumors. Cancer stem cells were discovered a decade ago, but their origins and identity remain largely unknown. Today, the Ruth L. and David S. Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University hosted its second Stem Cell Symposium, focusing on cancer stem cells. Leading scientists from the U.S., Canada and Belgium discussed ...

With the commodification of digital cameras, digital video has become so easy to produce that human beings can have trouble keeping up with it. Among the tools that computer scientists are developing to make the profusion of video more useful are algorithms for activity recognition — or determining what the people on camera are doing when. At the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June, Hamed Pirsiavash, a postdoc at MIT, and his former thesis advisor, Deva Ramanan of the University of California at Irvine, will present a new activity-recognition ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — May 13, 2014 — A Mayo Clinic review of 47 studies found that 30-day readmissions can be reduced by almost 20 percent when specific efforts are taken to prevent them. Key among these are interventions to help patients deal with the work passed on to them at discharge. The results of the review are published in this week's issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. "Reducing early hospital readmissions is a policy priority aimed at improving quality of care and lowering costs," says Aaron Leppin, M.D., a research associate in Mayo Clinic's Knowledge and Evaluation ...

The devastating loss of memory and consciousness in Alzheimer's disease is caused by plaque accumulations and tangles in neurons, which kill brain cells. Alzheimer's research has centered on trying to understand the pathology as well as the potential protective or regenerative properties of brain cells as an avenue for treating the widespread disease. Now Prof. Illana Gozes, the incumbent of the Lily and Avraham Gildor Chair for the Investigation of Growth Factors and director of the Adams Super Center for Brain Studies at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine and a member ...

PHILADELPHIA (May 13, 2014)— Kryptoglanis shajii is a strange fish – and the closer scientists look, the stranger it gets. This small subterranean catfish sees the light of day and human observers only rarely, when it turns up in springs, wells and flooded rice paddies in the Western Ghats mountain region of Kerala, India. It was first described as a new species in 2011. Soon after that, John Lundberg, PhD, one of the world's leading authorities on catfishes, started taking a closer look at several specimens. "The more we looked at the skeleton, the stranger it got," ...

A new study by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston is the first to show that premature aging of the placenta due to oxidative stress is the cause of many preterm births. The study appears today in the American Journal of Pathology. Researchers took fetal membranes, exposed them to oxidative stress in a lab setting (specifically cigarette smoke extract) and examined whether it caused rapid aging of the placental tissue. It did. Oxidative stress factors include environmental toxins and pollution and are an inevitable component of normal ...

Johns Hopkins researchers have found evidence in mice that a tuberculosis (TB) infection in the lungs triggers immune system signaling to the gut that temporarily decreases the diversity of bacteria in that part of the digestive tract. The Johns Hopkins researchers showed that this decrease in diversity of gut bacteria as measured in fecal samples happened quickly — within six days after mice were exposed to an aerosol mixture of M. tuberculosis, the TB bacteria. This prompt shift in diversity, they say, suggests that the immune system is attacking the gut bacteria, decreasing ...

Putting off tasks until later, or procrastination, is a common phenomenon – but new research suggests that "pre-crastination," hurrying to complete a task as soon as possible, may also be common. The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that people often opt to begin a task as soon as possible just to get it off their plate, even if they have to expend more physical effort to do so. "Most of us feel stressed about all the things we need to do – we have to-do lists, not just on slips of paper ...

ARLINGTON, Va — Stronger storms, rising seas, and flooding are placing hundreds of millions people at risk around the world, and big part of the solution to decrease those risks is just off shore. A new study finds that coral reefs reduce the wave energy that would otherwise impact coastlines by 97 percent. "Coral reefs serve as an effective first line of defense to incoming waves, storms and rising seas," said Dr. Michael Beck, lead marine scientist of The Nature Conservancy and a co-author of the study, "200 million people across more than 80 nations are at risk if ...

LA JOLLA—Using new stem cell technology, scientists at the Salk Institute have shown that neurons generated from the skin cells of people with schizophrenia behave strangely in early developmental stages, providing a hint as to ways to detect and potentially treat the disease early. The findings of the study, published online in April's Molecular Psychiatry, support the theory that the neurological dysfunction that eventually causes schizophrenia may begin in the brains of babies still in the womb. "This study aims to investigate the earliest detectable changes in the ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Depression in preschool teachers is associated with behavioral problems ranging from aggression to sadness in children under the teachers' care, new research suggests. The study identified one contributing factor to this link: a poor-quality atmosphere in the child care setting that exists as a result of the teacher's depressive symptoms. In this study, "teacher" refers to both classroom instructors and in-home child care providers. Researchers conducted the study using data from a large national study that collected family information primarily from ...

This news release is available in French. A gas giant has been added to the short list of exoplanets discovered through direct imaging. It is located around GU Psc, a star three times less massive than the Sun and located in the constellation Pisces. The international research team, led by Marie-Ève Naud, a PhD student in the Department of Physics at the Université de Montréal, was able to find this planet by combining observations from the the Gemini Observatories, the Observatoire Mont-Mégantic (OMM), the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) and the W.M. Keck Observatory. A ...

A study which will be published in the May 2014 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine was aimed at determining whether an EGFR-targeted therapy combined with chemo-radiotherapy can improve local tumor control effectively, compared to cytotoxic agents or irradiation alone. Dr. Haizhu Song and co-workers from Jinling Hospital and the Medical School of Nanjing University in China demonstrated that nimotuzumab could enhance chemo-radiosensitivity by promoting autophagic cell death in esophageal squamous carcinoma (ESCC) cells. Nimotuzumab is a humanized anti-EGFR monoclonal ...

Eyewitness accuracy declines steadily and quite measuredly as the distance increases. Additionally, a good deal of guess work or so-called "false alarms" also comes into play as the distance increases. These findings have implications for the trustworthiness of eyewitness accounts that are used to solve criminal cases. Research led by James Lampinen of the University of Arkansas in the US and published in Springer's journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review sheds light on the matter. Eyewitness identification plays a crucial role in approximately 80,000 criminal cases per ...

New findings published by researchers at the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering are helping to unravel the complex interplay between alcohol and social behavior and may lead to new therapies for mitigating the negative impacts of alcohol use and abuse. Their experiments, published in the current issue of Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research, center not on patrons at a local happy hour, but on far simpler creatures: zebrafish. A team led by Maurizio Porfiri, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the school's ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – The human body is full of proteins called enzymes that help nearly every function in the body. Scientists have been studying enzymes for decades in order to learn how they work and how to create better drugs and medical treatments for many ailments. Now, University of Missouri researchers have completed a 3-D map of an enzyme called Proline utilization A (PutA). PutA facilitates metabolism by adding oxygen to molecules. John Tanner, a professor in the MU Department of Biochemistry, says mapping this enzyme will give researchers a better understanding of ...

HANOVER, NH – Providing patient-centered care consistently in clinical practice requires practitioners who are able to recognize that different clinical situations require different approaches and are skilled enough to adapt. Across the range of health-care problems, patient-centered care has been found to be associated with improved patient outcomes, including improved self-management, patient satisfaction, and medication adherence, and some studies have found evidence for improved clinical outcomes. Data from surveys and research indicate that clinicians often do not ...

A shortened version of a questionnaire used by psychologists to assess risk factors for obsessive-compulsive disorder also may help determine the risk of depression and anxiety, according to a Baylor University study. The revision may be a good fit for assessing the risk of mental health issues stemming from certain beliefs — such as seeing threats as greater than they are and feeling that things are not right unless they are perfect. Such dysfunctional beliefs are central to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), said researcher Thomas Fergus, Ph.D., assistant professor ...

ALLENDALE, Mich. — New research shows that nations with greater women's empowerment win more medals and send more athletes to the Summer Olympics. The effect of women's empowerment held for both men and women, although it was stronger for female athletes, according to a study by Grand Valley State University researchers. The findings were published in April 2014 in the Journal of Sports Economics. The research, led by Aaron Lowen, associate professor of economics at Grand Valley State, provides evidence for the popular but previously untested hypothesis that women's empowerment ...

Fifty-million-year-old fossil beetles that fed only on palm seeds are giving Simon Fraser University biologists Bruce Archibald and Rolf Mathewes new information about ancient climates. According to their research, published online this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these fossil beetles indicate that during a period of global warming in the geological past, there were mild, frost-free winters extended even in the uplands of ancient western North America. Working with co-authors Geoffrey Morse of the University of San Diego, California, ...

Forgiving ourselves for hurting another is easier if we first make amends — thus giving our inner selves a "moral OK," according to Baylor University psychology researchers. The research, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, is significant because previous studies show that the inability to self-forgive can be a factor in depression, anxiety and a weakened immune system, researchers said. "One of the barriers people face in forgiving themselves appears to be that people feel morally obligated to hang on to those feelings. They feel they deserve to feel bad. ...

Researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Tokyo have created electronic devices that become soft when implanted inside the body and can deploy to grip 3-D objects, such as large tissues, nerves and blood vessels. These biologically adaptive, flexible transistors might one day help doctors learn more about what is happening inside the body, and stimulate the body for treatments. The research, available online and in an upcoming print issue of Advanced Materials, is one of the first demonstrations of transistors that can change shape and ...

Astrophysicists at UC San Diego have measured the minute gravitational distortions in polarized radiation from the early universe and discovered that these ancient microwaves can provide an important cosmological test of Einstein's theory of general relativity. These measurements have the potential to narrow down the estimates for the mass of ghostly subatomic particles known as neutrinos. The radiation could even provide physicists with clues to another outstanding problem about our universe: how the invisible "dark matter" and "dark energy," which has been undetectable ...