Using human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), researchers have gained new insight into what may cause schizophrenia by revealing the altered patterns of neuronal signaling associated with this disease. They did so by exposing neurons derived from the hiPSCs of healthy individuals and of patients with schizophrenia to potassium chloride, which triggered these stem cells to release neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, that are crucial for brain function and are linked to various disorders. By discovering a simple method for stimulating hiPSCs to release neurotransmitters, ...

Mice treated with antibiotics to remove most of their intestinal bacteria or raised under sterile conditions have impaired antibody responses to seasonal influenza vaccination, researchers have found. The findings suggest that antibiotic treatment before or during vaccination may impair responses to certain vaccines in humans. The results may also help to explain why immunity induced by some vaccines varies in different parts of the world. In a study to be published in Immunity, Bali Pulendran, PhD, and colleagues at Emory University demonstrate a dependency on gut ...

Bacteria that normally live in and upon us have genetic blueprints that enable them to make thousands of molecules that act like drugs, and some of these molecules might serve as the basis for new human therapeutics, according to UC San Francisco researchers who report their new discoveries in the September 11, 2014 issue of Cell. The scientists purified and solved the structure of one of the molecules they identified, an antibiotic they named lactocillin, which is made by a common bacterial species, Lactobacillus gasseri, found in the microbial community within the vagina. ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Living cells are like miniature factories, responsible for the production of more than 25,000 different proteins with very specific 3-D shapes. And just as an overwhelmed assembly line can begin making mistakes, a stressed cell can end up producing misshapen proteins that are unfolded or misfolded. Now Duke University researchers in North Carolina and Singapore have shown that the cell recognizes the buildup of these misfolded proteins and responds by reshuffling its workload, much like a stressed out employee might temporarily move papers from an overflowing ...

A study comparing how blood stem cells and leukemia cells consume nutrients found that cancer cells are far less tolerant to shifts in their energy supply than their normal counterparts. The results suggest that there could be ways to target leukemia metabolism so that cancer cells die but other cell types are undisturbed. Harvard Stem Cell Institute scientists at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Regenerative Medicine and the Harvard University Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology led the work, published in the journal Cell, in collaboration with ...

Using human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), researchers at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of California, San Diego have discovered that neurons from patients with schizophrenia secrete higher amounts of three neurotransmitters broadly implicated in a range of psychiatric disorders. The findings, reported online Sept. 11 in Stem Cell Reports, represent an important step toward understanding the chemical basis for schizophrenia, a chronic, severe and disabling brain disorder that affects an estimated one in 100 persons at some ...

Washington, DC—Postmenopausal women with diverse gut bacteria exhibit a more favorable ratio of estrogen metabolites, which is associated with reduced risk for breast cancer, compared to women with less microbial variation, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). Since the 1970s, it has been known that in addition to supporting digestion, the intestinal bacteria that make up the gut microbiome influence how women's bodies process estrogen, the primary female sex hormone. The colonies of bacteria ...

Higher HIV risk behaviors and prevalence have been reported among Puerto Rican people who inject drugs (PRPWID) since early in the HIV epidemic. Now that HIV prevention and treatment advances have reduced HIV among PWID in the US, researchers from New York University's Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR) examined HIV-related data for PRPWID in Puerto Rico (PR) and Northeastern US (NE) to assess whether disparities among PRPWID continue. The study, "Addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic among Puerto Rican people who inject drugs: the Need for a Multi-Region Approach," ...

A gambler's decision to stay or fold in a game of cards could be influenced by a chemical in the brain, suggests new research from the University of British Columbia. The rise and fall of dopamine plays a key role in decisions involving risk and reward, from a baseball player trying to steal a base to an investor buying or selling a stock. Previous studies have shown that dopamine signals increase when risky choices pay off. "Our brains are constantly updating how we calculate risk and reward based on previous experiences, keeping an internal score of wins and losses," ...

A joint work by EPFL, ETH Zürich and the CHUV has identified a pathological process that takes place in both mice and humans towards one of the most common diseases that people face in the industrialized world: type 2 diabetes. This work was conducted in Johan Auwerx's (EPFL) and Ruedi Aebersold's (ETH Zürich) laboratories, and succeeded thanks to the combination of each team's strengths. The relevance of their discovery, published today in Cell Metabolism, results from their joint effort. In Lausanne, the researchers carried out a detailed study of the genome and ...

A new class of compounds has now been shown to protect brain cells from the type of damage caused by blast-mediated traumatic brain injury (TBI). Mice that were treated with these compounds 24-36 hours after experiencing TBI from a blast injury were protected from the harmful effects of TBI, including problems with learning, memory, and movement. Traumatic brain injury caused by blast injury has emerged as a common health problem among U.S. servicemen and women, with an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the more than 2 million U.S. soldiers deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan ...

BOSTON – Proactive monitoring and dose adjustment of infliximab, a medication commonly used to treat inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), could improve a patient's chances of having a long-term successful response to therapy, a pilot observational study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center concludes. The study, published in the Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, evaluated the levels of infliximab, an antibody designed to bind to and block the effects of TNF-alpha, an inflammatory protein found in high levels in patients with IBD, such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, ...

BATON ROUGE – In a study that sheds light on the origin of bird species in the biologically rich rainforests of South America, LSU Museum of Natural Science Director and Roy Paul Daniels Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, Robb Brumfield, and an international team of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation, or NSF, published a paper this week challenging the view that speciation – the process by which new species are formed – is directly linked to geological and climatic changes to the landscape. The researchers, whose findings were published ...

Around 12,800 years ago, a sudden, catastrophic event plunged much of the Earth into a period of cold climatic conditions and drought. This drastic climate change—the Younger Dryas—coincided with the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna, such as the saber-tooth cats and the mastodon, and resulted in major declines in prehistoric human populations, including the termination of the Clovis culture. With limited evidence, several rival theories have been proposed about the event that sparked this period, such as a collapse of the North American ice sheets, a major volcanic ...

LAWRENCE — A study from the University of Kansas finds that people can accurately detect the personality traits of strangers through Facebook activity; however, changes to the social media site in the past three years could be making it harder to do so. Researchers sampled 100 Facebook users, paralleling the demographics of the social networking site, and asked them to fill out a personality survey. A group of coders looked at each person's Facebook activity, 53 cues in all, to see whether certain personality types were more likely to do specific activities. The researchers ...

Don't get mad the next time you catch your teenager texting when he promised to be studying. He simply may not be able to resist. A University of Iowa study found teenagers are far more sensitive than adults to the immediate effect or reward of their behaviors. The findings may help explain, for example, why the initial rush of texting may be more enticing for adolescents than the long-term payoff of studying. "The rewards have a strong, perceptional draw and are more enticing to the teenager," says Jatin Vaidya, a professor of psychiatry at the UI and corresponding ...

The sixth tropical depression of the Atlantic Ocean Hurricane Season formed in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean and NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured it. A visible image of Tropical Depression 6 was taken by NOAA's GOES-East satellite at 7:45 a.m. EDT on September 11 as it developed. The image was created by NASA/NOAA's GOES Project at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. In addition to using GOES imagery and data from other NOAA and NASA satellites, The National Hurricane Center also uses measurements from the Advanced Scatterometer or ASCAT instrument ...

An NJIT research team has estimated the total mass of oil that reached the Gulf of Mexico shore in the wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout. It's the first time such an estimate was reported, and the study is published in the August issue of Environmental Science and Technology. The researchers found that 22,000 tons of oil reached the Gulf shoreline in 2010. This finding will help officials determine the persistence of oil on the shore and identify potential harm to the ecosystem. The study was conducted by the Center for Natural Resources Development and Protection ...

PHILADELPHIA – Amid recent discussion about the Ebola crisis in West Africa, Penn Medicine physicians say that high-income countries like the United States have an obligation to help those affected by the outbreak and to advance research to fight the deadly disease — including in the context of randomized clinical trials of new drugs to combat the virus. The two new editorials, which will appear "online first" in JAMA on September 11th, are written by faculty members in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Department of Social Science, ...

A team of Iranian researchers from the Rice Research Institute of Iran have discovered that Gynnodomorpha permixtana, a well-known moth species from Europe and Asia, has changed its host preferences in order to adjust to Iran's northern region environmental conditions. The importance of this adaptation for biological control of problematic weeds in rice fields and the biology of the moth on new host plant have been described in the open access journal Nota Lepidopterologica. The larvae of G. permixtana have been so far reported to feed on the seeds and flowers of plant ...

Sept. 11, 2014 - New research from Arizona State University and the University of Tokyo that analyzes transmission rates of Ebola in West African countries shows how rapidly the disease is spreading. Researchers Gerardo Chowell-Puente, ASU School of Human Evolution and Social Change Associate Professor, and Hiroshi Nishiura of the University of Tokyo found that transmission rates for each single case of Ebola consistently showed at least one new case of the disease being transmitted. Country-specific analysis of transmission rates in Liberia and Sierra Leone showed on ...

One third of men in academic science are willing to scale back their careers to focus on family life, according to researchers. While traditional fatherhood roles may be shifting, men in the male-dominated field of academic science, such as physics and biology, face significant challenges in trying to balance work and family life, said Sarah Damaske, assistant professor of labor and employment relations and sociology, Penn State. The majority of men studied spoke of the pull of fatherhood and a desire to spend more time with children, yet they also acknowledged that academic ...

MAYWOOD, Ill – (Sept. 11, 2014) A deficiency of a single vitamin, B1 (thiamine), can cause a potentially fatal brain disorder called Wernicke encephalopathy. Symptoms can include confusion, hallucinations, coma, loss of muscle coordination and vision problems such as double vision and involuntary eye movements. Untreated, the condition can lead to irreversible brain damage and death, according to neurologists at Loyola University Medical Center. In the developed world, Wernicke encephalopathy typically occurs in people who have disorders such as alcoholism and anorexia ...

NEW YORK (September 10, 2014) – Members of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Montefiore Einstein Center for Cancer Care (MECCC) and Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University's NCI–designated Albert Einstein Cancer Center will present new study findings at the 56th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) revealing the impact socioeconomic status has on radiation treatment compliance, predictive indicators for clinical outcomes and on radiation therapy duration and dosing recommendations. ASTRO is being held September 14 ...

There are more than 150 species of beetles in the genus Calathus, 17 of which have only been found in the mountains of the Ethiopian Highlands. Now scientists have found two new ones — Calathus juan and Calathus carballalae — and have described them in Annals of the Entomological Society of America. C. juan is named for Juan Novoa, the son of one of the authors, in recognition of his help on various beetle-collecting expeditions. Adults are black and shiny, and are 9.5-11.5 millimeters long. It was found under stones at the base of giant, tree-like plants called lobelias ...