Scientists studying brain diseases may need to look beyond nerve cells and start paying attention to the star-shaped cells known as "astrocytes," because they play specialized roles in the development and maintenance of nerve circuits and may contribute to a wide range of disorders, according to a new study by UC San Francisco researchers. In a study published online April 28, 2014 in Nature, the researchers report that malfunctioning astrocytes might contribute to neurodegenerative disorders such as Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS), and perhaps even to developmental disorders ...

It is generally well known that men have an overall shorter life expectancy compared to women. A recent study, led by Uppsala University researchers, shows a correlation between a loss of the Y chromosome in blood cells and both a shorter life span and higher mortality from cancer in other organs. Men have a shorter average life span than women and both the incidence and mortality in cancer is higher in men than in women. However, the mechanisms and possible risk factors behind this sex-disparity are largely unknown. Alterations in DNA of normal cells accumulate throughout ...

Stanford scientists have identified significant changes in the patterns of extreme wet and dry events that are increasing the risk of drought and flood in central India, one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. The discoveries, detailed in the April 28 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change, are the result of a new collaboration between climate scientists and statisticians that focused on utilizing statistical methods for analyzing rare geophysical events. These new approaches reveal that the intensity of extremely wet spells and the number of extremely ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Trampoline accidents sent an estimated 288,876 people, most of them children, to hospital emergency departments with broken bones from 2002 to 2011, at a cost of more than $400 million, according to an analysis by researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Including all injuries, not just fractures, hospital emergency rooms received more than 1 million visits from people injured in trampoline accidents during those 10 years, boosting the emergency room bills to just over $1 billion, according to the study. The research, published online ...

An international team of researchers has found that a subset of common butterfly species are emerging later than usual in urban areas located in warmer regions, raising questions about how the insects respond to significant increases in temperature. "We know that butterflies emerge earlier in North Carolina than they do in New England, because it's warmer," says Tyson Wepprich, a Ph.D. student at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work. "We also know that cities are heat sinks that are warmer than outlying areas. So we wanted to see whether butterflies would ...

Who had the privilege to spend eternal life next to the pharaoh? Close to the royal tombs in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings, excavations by Egyptologists from the University of Basel have identified the burial place of several children as well as other family members of two pharaohs. Basel Egyptologists of the University of Basel Kings' Valley Project have been working on tomb KV 40 in the Valley of the Kings close to the city of Luxor for three years. From the outside, only a depression in the ground indicated the presence of a subterranean tomb. Up to now, nothing ...

If a sibling commits a violent criminal act, the risk that a younger sibling may follow in their footsteps is more likely than the transmission of that behavior to an older sibling, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Lund University in Sweden. The findings provide insight into the social transmission of violent behaviors and suggest that environmental factors within families can be important when it comes to delinquent behavior. Down the road, the results may be used to inform strategies for prevention and treatment ...

Research at the University of Illinois has demonstrated that smartphone sensors — not just the ones meant to track your location — can leave real-time fingerprints unique to each individual device. An attacker could use such sensor data from a given smartphone to identify it ever after, almost making the user-trackable. Research by Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Professor Romit Roy Choudhury and graduate students Sanorita Dey and Nirupam Roy, demonstrated that these fingerprints exist within smartphone sensors, mainly because of imperfections during the ...

PITTSBURGH—Soft and cuddly aren't words used to describe the plastic or metal things typically produced by today's 3D printers. But a new type of printer developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research Pittsburgh can turn wool and wool blend yarns into fabric objects that people might actually enjoy touching. The device looks something like a cross between a 3D printer and a sewing machine and produces 3D objects made of a form of loose felt. Scott Hudson, a professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute who developed the felting printer with Disney ...

The isolation of graphene at the University in 2004 led to the discovery of many other 2D crystals. While graphene has an unrivalled set of superlatives, these crystals cover a large range of properties: from the most conductive to isolating, from transparent to optically active. The next step is to combine several of these crystals in a 3D stack. This way, one can create 'heterostructures' with novel functionalities – capable of delivering applications as yet beyond the imagination of scientists and commercial partners. The first examples of such heterostructures already ...

(PHILADELPHIA) -- Most cancer vaccines have not lived up to their promise in clinical trials. The reason, many researchers suspect, is that the immune cells that would help the body destroy the tumor – even those reactions boosted by cancer vaccines – are actively suppressed. Now, researchers at Thomas Jefferson University have found that a single cell type is actively suppressed in several experimental cancer vaccines, paving the way toward methods to break suppression and improve the effectiveness of cancer vaccines. The work was published this week online in the European ...

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have observed magnetic properties typically associated with those observed in rare-earth elements in iron. These properties are observed in a new iron based compound that does not contain rare earth elements, when the iron atom is positioned between two nitrogen atoms. The discovery opens the possibility of using iron to provide both the magnetism and permanence in high-strength permanent magnets, like those used in direct-drive wind turbines or electric motors in hybrid cars. The results appeared in Nature Communications. In ...

New Michigan State University research aims to help doctors estimate the size of newborns with a new set of birth weight measurements based on birth records from across the country. "More than 7 million records were reviewed," said Nicole Talge, an assistant professor in MSU's Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, who co-led the study which is now available in the journal Pediatrics. "Our research looked at live births in the United States during 2009-2010 and using a newly developed method, corrected unlikely gestational ages during that time. This led to changes ...

Progress has been made toward understanding the physiological mechanisms that underlie Gulf War illness and identifying possible treatments, according to a report released Monday by a Congressionally mandated panel of scientific experts and veterans. Treatment research has increased significantly since 2008, and "early results provide encouraging signs that the treatment goals identified in the 2010 Institute of Medicine report are achievable," the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses (RAC) said in a report presented Monday to VA Secretary Eric ...

The quality of kidney and liver donations is fundamentally important for the longevity of transplants and the health of recipients. That's why it's critical to know which organs are suitable for transplantation, as well as to use techniques that preserve an organ's function after donation. Several studies published in the BJS (British Journal of Surgery) address these issues and offer ways to maximize the use of donated organs. In the first study, Rajeev Desai, MRCP, of NHS Blood and Transplant, in the UK, led a team that assessed transplants from 17,639 donors, including ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Rhode Island's geography is famously small, but new measurements of the nitrogen cycle in its waterways suggest that even over a small distance, differences can be huge. Scientists report that the nitrogen-converting process anammox is almost completely absent in Narragansett Bay, even though it is going strong in Rhode Island Sound only 15 miles off the coast. The novel and somewhat surprising finding, documented in the journal Limnology and Oceanography, raises intriguing questions about why the bay seems inhospitable to an important ...

TORONTO, April 28, 2014—Gene expression profiling tests play a critical role when women with early-stage breast cancer decide whether to have chemotherapy, but many of them do not fully understand what some of the test results mean, new research suggests. Current guidelines for treating early-stage breast cancer—cancer that has not spread to nearby lymph nodes or other parts of the body—result in thousands of women receiving chemotherapy without benefitting from it. A gene expression profiling test can help differentiate women who might benefit from chemotherapy versus ...

TOKYO, JAPAN – To increase the sugar concentration and resulting marketability of tomato juice, growers have traditionally used techniques such as subjecting plants to salt and water stresses. In a new study published in HortTechnology (February 2014), Ken Takahata and Hiroyuki Miura from Tokyo University of Agriculture reported on a prototypic method known as "basal wire coiling" that shows potential as a simple and effective method for increasing the sugar concentration in tomato fruit juice. "We investigated whether coiling wire around the lower part of the plant stems ...

DURANT, OK – Growers who produce squash for market are increasingly interested in using more natural herbicides that are also effective in providing season-long weed control, but the options for controlling annual broadleaf weeds in summer squash are currently limited. The authors of a new study say that both organic and conventional producers will benefit from the identification of natural herbicides that effectively provide postemergent weed control. Charles Webber III, Merritt Taylor, and James Shrefler conducted a research study published in HortTechnology to determine ...

This news release is available in German. Early embryonic development of vertebrates is controlled by the genes and their "grammar". Decoding this grammar might help understand the formation of abnormalities or cancer or develop new medical drugs. For the first time, it is now found by a study that various mechanisms of transcribing DNA into RNA exist during gene expression in the different development phases of zebrafish. This study is presented by KIT researchers in the journal "Nature". After several genomes have been sequenced and human genetic material has been ...

HAMILTON, ON, April. 28, 2014 — Providing safe, stable and affordable housing first is the best way to help homeless in Hamilton, Ont., according to new research. Researchers from St. Michael's Hospital and McMaster University assessed the success of Hamilton's Transitions to Home program – a program designed to quickly find permanent housing for men who are frequent users of the city's emergency shelter system. Hamilton men who in the last year spent 30 nights or more in emergency shelters or on the streets are eligible for the program, which is run by the city's Wesley ...

CHICAGO – Two studies from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania reveal new information about the effects of weight gain and obesity among pregnant women. One study, examining weight gain during pregnancy, shows that despite updated guidelines from the Institute of Medicine (2009), the majority of patients are still unaware of the appropriate amount of weight they should gain. A second study evaluating the implications of prenatal tests on morbidly obese women, reveals the importance of testing for this group of patients who are at an increased ...

Researchers at the Rey Juan Carlos University and the Alcorcón Hospital (Madrid) have compared the volatile substances exhaled by eleven people with cancer of larynx, with those of another twenty healthy people. The results show that the concentrations of certain molecules, mainly ethanol and 2-butanone, are higher in individuals with carcinoma, therefore they act as potential markers of the disease. Human breath contains thousands of volatile organic compounds (VOC) and some of them can be used as non-invasive biomarkers for various types of head and neck cancers as ...

April 28, 2014 AUGUSTA, Ga. - Patients with highest levels of the most powerful version of the immune molecule HLA-G appear to have the lowest risk of rejecting their transplanted kidney, researchers report. A study of 67 transplant patients – 50 with no evidence of rejection and 17 with chronic rejection – showed those most tolerant of their kidney had naturally high levels of HLA-G dimer, where two of the immune molecules bind together, said Dr. Anatolij Horuzsko, immunologist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University. Knowing which form of HLA-G ...

A surprising recent rise in atmospheric methane likely stems from wetland emissions, suggesting that much more of the potent greenhouse gas will be pumped into the atmosphere as northern wetlands continue to thaw and tropical ones to warm, according to a new international study led by a University of Guelph researcher. The study supports calls for improved monitoring of wetlands and human changes to those ecosystems – a timely topic as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prepares to examine land use impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, says Prof. Merritt Turetsky, ...