State-of-the-art military hardware could soon fight malaria, one of the most deadly diseases on the planet. Researchers at Monash University and the University of Melbourne have used an anti-tank Javelin missile detector, more commonly used in warfare to detect the enemy, in a new test to rapidly identify malaria parasites in blood. Scientists say the novel idea, published in the journal Analysis, could set a new gold standard for malaria testing. The technique is based on Fourier Transform Infrared (FITR) spectroscopy, which provides information on how molecules ...

Aberrant Wnt signaling is possibly related to the pathological changes in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Axin and β-catenin protein is closely related to Wnt signaling. Zhou Hua and his team, Hubei University of Chinese Medicine, China confirmed that moxibustion or electroacupuncture, or both, at Baihui (GV20) and Shenshu (BL23) acupoints decreased axin protein expression, increased β-catenin protein expression, and alleviated neuronal cytoplasmic edema. These findings suggest that the mechanism underlying the neuroprotective effect of acupuncture in AD is associated ...

Fructose-1,6-diphosphate is a metabolic intermediate that promotes cell metabolism. Whether it can alleviate hippocampal neuronal injury caused by febrile convulsion remains unclear. Dr. Jianping Zhou, the Second Affiliated Hospital, Medical College of Xi'an Jiaotong University, China and his team established a repetitive febrile convulsion model in rats aged 21 days, equivalent to 3𔃃 years in humans, intraperitoneally administered fructose-1,6-diphosphate at 1,000 mg/kg into the rat model. Results showed that high-dose fructose-1,6-diphosphate reduced mitochondrial ...

Chemokine receptor 4 is a chemokine receptor that participates in tumor occurrence, growth and metastasis in vitro and its expression is upregulated during neuroblastoma metastasis. Dr. Xin Chen, the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University, China successfully constructed chemokine receptor 4 sequence-specific small interfering RNA (siRNA) plasmids, transfected into SH-SY5Y cells and found that down-regulation of chemokine receptor 4 can inhibit in vitro invasion of neuroblastoma. This paper was published in Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 10, 2014). Article: ...

Accumulating evidence has demonstrated that the sodium-potassium-chloride co-transporter 1 (NKCC1) and potassium-chloride co-transporter 2 (KCC2) have a role in the modulation of pain transmission at the spinal level through chloride regulation in the pain pathway and by effecting neuronal excitability and pain sensitization. Dr. Yanbing He Zhujiang Hospital, Southern Medical University, China and his team found that intrathecal bumetanide could increase NKCC1 expression and decrease KCC2 expression in spinal cord neurons of rats with incisional pain. The authors presumed ...

Accumulating evidence suggests that the nucleus accumbens, which is involved in mechanisms of reward and addiction, plays a role in the pathogenesis of depression and in the action of antidepressants. Dandan Liu and her team, Bio-X Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China for the first time using electrophysiological method studied the signaling transduction pathway mediated by dopamine D2-like receptor in the medium spiny neurons in the core of the nucleus accumbens in the juvenile Wistar Kyoto rat model of depression. They concluded that impaired inhibition of ...

Regular attendance at HIV primary care visits and high adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) are vital for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA), as these health behaviors lead to lowered rates of morbidity and mortality, increased quality of life, and reducing the risk of HIV transmission to others. However, a large proportion of PLHA in the United States are not sufficiently engaged in care and not taking ART when it is medically necessary. A new study, "HIV-infected individuals who delay, decline, or discontinue antiretroviral therapy: Comparing clinic- and peer-recruited ...

A Brigham Young University ecologist is playing a role in the effort to curb a deadly disease affecting developing nations across equatorial Africa. Steven L. Peck, a BYU professor of biology, has lent his expertise in understanding insect movement to help shape a UN-sanctioned eradication effort of the tsetse fly—a creature that passes the fatal African sleeping sickness to humans, domestic animals, and wildlife. Using Peck's advanced computer models, crews from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization will know where to concentrate their efforts to eliminate the ...

WASHINGTON -- Age 10 to 14 years, a time when both girls and boys are constructing their own identities and are typically open to new ideas and influences, provides a unique narrow window of opportunity for parents, teachers, healthcare providers and others to facilitate transition into healthy teenage and adulthood years according to researchers from Georgetown University's Institute for Reproductive Health who note the lack worldwide of programs to help children of this age navigate passage from childhood to adulthood. An estimated 1.2 billion adolescents live in the ...

A new study finds that the more a woman self-identifies with her profession, the more paid hours she works and the less time she spends with the couple's children, but the more equal the childcare balance is between a couple. However, the more a woman identifies herself with motherhood, the less time the father spends with the children. And while the more a man self-identifies as a parent the more time he spends with children, this had no impact on the amount of time the woman spends on childcare – regardless of her self-identity. The study, from Cambridge University's ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – During the 2011 and 2012 migration seasons, University of Missouri researchers monitored mallard ducks with new remote satellite tracking technology, marking the first time ducks have been tracked closely during the entirety of their migration from Canada to the American Midwest and back. The research revealed that mallards use public and private wetland conservation areas extensively as they travel hundreds of miles across the continent. Dylan Kesler, an assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources ...

WOODS HOLE, Mass.— Proteomics, the study of large groups of proteins, can enhance our understanding of a wide range of organisms, with applications in medicine and developmental biology. Such analyses traditionally require a complete genome for the organism being studied in order to obtain a reference set of proteins. However, many organisms that hold potential for proteomic analysis do not yet have completely sequenced and well-interpreted genomes because the costs, in terms of both time and money, can be prohibitive. Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog, is one such ...

Birdsongs automatically decoded by computer scientists Scientists from Queen Mary University of London have found a successful way of identifying bird sounds from large audio collections, which could be useful for expert and amateur bird-watchers alike. The analysis used recordings of individual birds and of dawn choruses to identify characteristics of bird sounds. It took advantage of large datasets of sound recordings provided by the British Library Sound Archive, and online sources such as the Dutch archive called Xeno Canto. Publishing in the journal PeerJ, ...

NEW YORK, NY — Evidence from human famines and animal studies suggests that starvation can affect the health of descendants of famished individuals. But how such an acquired trait might be transmitted from one generation to the next has not been clear. A new study, involving roundworms, shows that starvation induces specific changes in so-called small RNAs and that these changes are inherited through at least three consecutive generations, apparently without any DNA involvement. The study, conducted by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers, offers ...

Los Angeles, CA -- Breastfeeding is known to provide significant health benefits for both infants and their mothers. However, while many women intend to breastfeed despite returning to work, a new study finds that mothers who plan to breastfeed for at least three months but return to work full-time are less likely to meet their breastfeeding goals. Conversely, there is no association between women who return to work part-time and failure to reach the breastfeeding goal of at least three months. This new study was published today in the Journal of Human Lactation. Studying ...

A major challenge in renewable energy is storage. A common approach is a reaction that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen, and uses the hydrogen as a fuel to store energy. The efficiency of 'water splitting' depends heavily on a solid substance called a catalyst. However, only the surface of the catalyst acts on the reaction, while its bulk is inactive. This restricts how much catalyst can be used, and limits the efficiency of water splitting in energy systems. Publishing in Nature Communications, EPFL scientists have developed a new method for maximizing the catalyst's ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — When a medical emergency strikes, our gut tells us to get to the nearest hospital quickly. But a new study suggests that busier emergency centers may actually give the best chance of surviving – especially for people suffering life-threatening medical crises. In fact, the analysis finds that patients admitted to a hospital after an emergency had a 10 percent lower chance of dying in the hospital if they initially went to one of the nation's busiest emergency departments, compared with the least busy. The risk of dying differed even more for patients ...

Current guidelines do not distinguish between aspirin and more potent blood thinners for protecting against blood clots in patients who undergo major orthopedic operations, leaving the decision up to individual clinicians. A new analysis published today in the Journal of Hospital Medicine provides much-needed information that summarizes existing studies about which medications are best after different types of surgery. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Americans undergo major orthopedic surgery such as hip and knee replacements and hip fracture repairs. Patients undergoing ...

Patients likely to benefit the most from antiviral therapy for influenza were prescribed these drugs infrequently during the 2012-2013 influenza season, while antibiotics may have been overprescribed. Published in Clinical Infectious Diseases and now available online, the findings suggest more efforts are needed to educate clinicians about the appropriate use of antivirals and antibiotics in the outpatient setting. Influenza is a significant cause of mortality and morbidity, resulting in more than 200,000 hospitalizations in the U.S. each year, on average. While annual ...

SALT LAKE CITY, July 17, 2014 – By measuring how fast Earth conducts electricity and seismic waves, a University of Utah researcher and colleagues made a detailed picture of Mount Rainier's deep volcanic plumbing and partly molten rock that will erupt again someday. "This is the most direct image yet capturing the melting process that feeds magma into a crustal reservoir that eventually is tapped for eruptions," says geophysicist Phil Wannamaker, of the university's Energy & Geoscience Institute and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "But it does not provide ...

Corticosteroid drugs that are given by inhalers to children with asthma may suppress their growth, evidence suggests. Two new systematic reviews published in The Cochrane Library focus on the effects of inhaled corticosteroid drugs (ICS) on growth rates. The authors found children's growth slowed in the first year of treatment, although the effects were minimised by using lower doses. Inhaled corticosteroids are prescribed as first-line treatments for adults and children with persistent asthma. They are the most effective drugs for controlling asthma and clearly reduce ...

CHICAGO --- After 50 years of being a mainstay cholesterol therapy, niacin should no longer be prescribed for most patients due to potential increased risk of death, dangerous side effects and no benefit in reducing heart attacks and strokes, writes Northwestern Medicine® preventive cardiologist Donald Lloyd-Jones, M.D., in a New England Journal of Medicine editorial. Lloyd-Jones's editorial is based on a large new study published in the journal that looked at adults, ages 50 to 80, with cardiovascular disease who took extended-release niacin (vitamin B3) and laropiprant ...

Investigators have identified a gene that underlies a very rare but devastating autoinflammatory condition in children. Several existing drugs have shown therapeutic potential in laboratory studies, and one is currently being studied in children with the disease, which the researchers named STING-associated vasculopathy with onset in infancy (SAVI). The findings appeared online today in the New England Journal of Medicine. The research was done at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), part of the National Institutes of Health. "Not ...

Big websites usually maintain their own "data centers," banks of tens or even hundreds of thousands of servers, all passing data back and forth to field users' requests. Like any big, decentralized network, data centers are prone to congestion: Packets of data arriving at the same router at the same time are put in a queue, and if the queues get too long, packets can be delayed. At the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, in August, MIT researchers will present a new network-management system that, in experiments, reduced the average ...

The choice of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) by women with breast cancer (BC) diagnosed in one breast has recently increased in the US but may confer only a marginal life expectancy benefit depending on the type and stage of cancer, according to a study published July 16 in the JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute. To assess the survival benefit of CPM, Pamela R. Portschy, of the Department of Surgery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and colleagues, developed a model simulating survival outcomes of CPM or no CPM for women with newly diagnosed ...