New Rochelle, NY, July 7, 2014—Cycling is a popular activity that offers clear health benefits, but there is an ongoing controversy about whether men who ride have a higher risk of urogenital disorders such as erectile dysfunction, infertility, or prostate cancer. The results of a study of nearly 5,300 male cyclists who participated in the Cycling for Health UK Study are presented in an article in Journal of Men's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Journal of Men's Health website at http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/jomh.2014.0012 ...

This news release is available in French. How many patients receive an incorrect diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease? The answer is a surprisingly high number: over a third! To reduce the number of errors, the diagnostic criteria must be the most reliable possible, especially at the very early stages of the disease. For the last decade, an international team of neurologists, coordinated by Bruno Dubois (Inserm/Pierre and Marie Curie University/AP-HP Joint Research Unit 975) has been working towards this. In the June issue of The Lancet Neurology journal, we see how the ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — When landlords have followed Rhode Island's law requiring them to protect tenants from exposure to lead, their compliance has significantly reduced blood levels of the toxic metal in children. But in four of the state's major cities, only 20 percent of properties that are covered by the law were in compliance with the law even more than four years after it took effect, according to a study by researchers at Brown University, The Providence Plan, HousingWorks RI, and the Rhode Island Department of Health. "The law works when it is ...

WASHINGTON — College athletes who have abusive coaches are more willing to cheat in order to win than players with more ethical coaches, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association and based on surveys from almost 20,000 student athletes at more than 600 colleges across the country. "Ethical behavior of coaches is always in the spotlight," said lead researcher Mariya Yukhymenko, PhD, a visiting research associate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Our study found several negative effects related to abusive coaches, including ...

For the last century, the concept of crystals has been a mainstay of solid-state physics. Crystals are paragons of order; crystalline materials are defined by the repeating patterns their constituent atoms and molecules make. Now physicists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago have evidence that a new concept should undergird our understanding of most materials: the anticrystal, a theoretical solid that is completely disordered. Their work suggests that, when trying to understand a real material's mechanical properties, scientists would be ...

July 7, 2014, Shenzhen, China— Researchers from BGI, working within the Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract (MetaHIT) project, and in collaboration with other institutions around the world , have established the highest quality integrated gene set for the human gut microbiome to date- a close-to-complete catalogue of the microbes that reside inside us and massively outnumber our own cells. While the roughly 20,000 genes in the human genome have been available for over a decade, the gene catalog of the microbiome, our much larger "other genome", has to date been much ...

Because the adult mammalian central nervous system has only limited intrinsic capacity to regenerate connections after injury, due to factors both intrinsic and extrinsic to the mature neuron, therapies are required to support the survival of injured neurons and to promote the long-distance regrowth of axons back to their original target structures. The retina and optic nerve are part of the CNS and this system is much used in experiments designed to test new ways of promoting regeneration after injury. Testing of therapies designed to improve RGCs viability also has direct ...

New research shows projected changes in the winds circling the Antarctic may accelerate global sea level rise significantly more than previously estimated. Changes to Antarctic winds have already been linked to southern Australia's drying climate but now it appears they may also have a profound impact on warming ocean temperatures under the ice shelves along the coastline of West and East Antarctic. "When we included projected Antarctic wind shifts in a detailed global ocean model, we found water up to 4°C warmer than current temperatures rose up to meet the base of ...

Researchers at the Institute of Polymer Science and Engineering in Taipei, Taiwan, led by Dr. Hsu have been involved in peripheral nerve regeneration research for more than ten years. Dr. Hsu and her team have focused on development of polymeric nerve conduits to facilitate peripheral nerve regeneration. To better translate the research from animal experiments to human therapies, they have recently paid more attention on clinically available methods to visualize the peripheral nerve regeneration process. This mini-review in Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 10, ...

China's richest provinces have an outsized environmental impact on the country's water-scarce regions, according to new research from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the University of Maryland. Many developed regions in China are not only drawing from their own water resources but also contributing to water depletion in other water-scarce regions of the country through imports of food and other water-intensive goods, according to the new study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. This has environmental impacts ...

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have headed a study that provides new knowledge about the EphA2 receptor, which is significant in several forms of cancer. This is important knowledge in itself – but just as important is how this study, which is published in the highly respected journal Nature Methods, was conducted. The researchers used the method of DNA origami, in which a DNA molecule is shaped into a nanostructure, and used these structures to test theories about cell signalling. It was previously known that the EphA2 receptor played a part in several ...

Researchers at the University of Birmingham, UK, led by Dr. Ben Scheven, Dr. Wendy Leadbeater and Ben Mead have discovered that stem cells isolated from the teeth, termed dental pulp stem cells (DPSC), can protect retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) from death following injury and promote regeneration of their axons along the optic nerve. RGC loss is the leading cause of blindness and can arise through traumatic injury or degenerative diseases such as glaucoma. Neurotrophic factors (NTFs), which travel along the axon of a neuron to a cell body act as survival signals however, ...

Cerebral ischemia not only injuries neurons, but also involves the glial cells that provide a supportive scaffold to which the neurons are attached and the microvessels that provide energy for nervous tissue. Therefore, protection of a single neuron is not sufficient to recover nervous function, and more attention should be paid to maintenance of the function of entire neurovascular units. Houshiheisan compound is one of effective traditional Chinese compound prescriptions for stroke. The prescription is composed of wind-dispelling (chrysanthemun flower, divaricate saposhnikovia ...

Techniques for controlling ultra-cold atoms travelling in ring traps currently represent an important research area in physics. A new study gives a proof of principle, confirmed by numerical simulations, of the applicability to ultra-cold atoms of a very efficient and robust transport technique called spatial adiabatic passage (SAP). Yu Loiko from the University of Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues have, for the first time, applied SAP to inject, extract, and filter the velocity of neutral atoms from and into a ring trap. Such traps are key to improving our understanding ...

Scientists from North Carolina State University and the University of Florida have combined cookies, citizen science and robust research methods to track the diversity of ant species across the United States, and are now collaborating with international partners to get a global perspective on how ants are moving and surviving in the modern world. "We think our School of Ants project serves as a good model for how citizen science can be used to collect more data, more quickly, from more places than a research team could do otherwise," says Dr. Andrea Lucky, a researcher ...

Age limits on clinical trials need to be more flexible to allow more teenage cancer patients the chance to access new treatments, according to a report from the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI), published in the Lancet Oncology. The study, funded by the National Institute for Health Research and Teenage Cancer Trust, found that trials designed with broader age limits resulted in more teenagers and young adults going on clinical trials. The study showed this recommendation led to a 13 per cent rise in 15-19 year old cancer patients taking part in clinical trials ...

(PHILADELPHIA) -- In the largest study to date comparing sutures (stitches) versus surgical staples for closing a C-section, researchers found a 57 percent decrease in wound complications in women who were sutured versus those who received staples. By carefully addressing the concerns that previous studies had raised, the research shows a clear benefit of suture for women. "There has been ongoing debate in the field about the use of sutures versus staples," says senior author Vincenzo Berghella, M.D., director of Maternal Fetal Medicine in the Department of Obstetrics ...

(BRYAN, Texas) — A new test for tuberculosis (TB) could dramatically improve the speed and accuracy of diagnosis for one of the world's deadliest diseases, enabling health care providers to report results to patients within minutes, according to a study published this week in the journal Angewandte Chemie. Jeffrey Cirillo, Ph.D., professor at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, in collaboration with GBDbio, a Texas A&M spinoff company, and investigators at Stanford University, have identified a new chemical compound to spot the bacteria that cause ...

Alicia Boole Stott, the third daughter of mathematician George Boole, is probably best known for establishing the term "polytope" for a convex solid in four dimensions. Alicia was also a long time collaborator of HSM Coxeter, one of the greatest geometers of the 20th Century. Platonic solids are regular bodies in three dimensions, such as the cube and icosahedron, and have been known for millennia. They feature prominently in the natural world wherever geometry and symmetry are important, for instance in lattices and quasi-crystals, as well as fullerenes and viruses (see ...

This news release is available in French. Scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, McGill University and McGill University Health Centre have shown that a member of the protein family known as SUMO (small ubiquitin-like modifier) is a key to why tumour cells multiply uncontrollably, especially in the case of glioblastoma. The SUMO family proteins modify other proteins and the SUMOylation of proteins are critical for many cellular processes. Identifying SUMO's role in the cancer cell growth will lead to a new strategy for glioblastoma treatment. ...

VIDEO: On July 3, NASA's TRMM satellite passed over Arthur and saw intense bands of thunderstorms north of Arthur's well defined eye dropping rainfall at a rate of over 98.4 mm... Click here for more information. Hurricane Arthur made landfall in North Carolina on July 3, and today, July 4, it is bringing its own fireworks along the Mid-Atlantic and New England states. Those fireworks were in the form of "hot towers," powerful, high thunderstorms with heavy rainfall that indicate ...

The 64th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting ended with a panel discussion entitled "Science for the benefit of mankind" on Mainau Island, Lake Constance, Germany, today." 37 Nobel laureates and more than 600 selected young scientists from 80 countries had participated in the week-long meeting in the Bavarian city of Lindau since last Sunday. A boat trip to Mainau at the invitation of the State of Baden-Württemberg marked the finish of the programme which was devoted to medicine and physiology. In 1895 Alfred Nobel determined in his will that the Nobel Prizes shall be awarded ...

Institute for Basic Science (IBS), the main organization of the International Science and Business Belt project in South Korea, has announced that a group of researchers, led by professor Won Do Heo, have developed a new technology in the field of optogenetics that can remotely control specific receptors by light. They have named this new technology "OptoTrk" and it has succeeded with neuronal differentiation inducement. The most significant feature of OptoTrk technology is that it requires only light to activate neuronal functions without the need of other substances. ...

The PandaX experiment of China, which is located in the deepest underground laboratory, has released its technical design report recently. The full article will appear in SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy, 2014, 57(8): 1476-1494. The Particle and Astrophysical Xenon (PandaX) collaboration was established in 2009 and mainly supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education in China， the Natural Science Foundation of China，and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The experiment is suitable for both direct dark matter detection ...

RENO – Every year, wildfires clear millions of hectares of land and emit around 34-percent of global soot mass into the atmosphere. In certain regions, such as Southeast Asia and Russia, these fires can contribute as much as 63-percent of regional soot mass. In a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, a team of scientists led by Rajan Chakrabarty from Nevada's Desert Research Institute report the observation of a previously unrecognized form of soot particle, identified by the authors as "superaggregates," from wildfire emissions. These newly identified particles ...