A leading U.S. Ebola researcher from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston has gone on record stating that a blend of three monoclonal antibodies can completely protect monkeys against a lethal dose of Ebola virus up to 5 days after infection, at a time when the disease is severe. Thomas Geisbert, professor of microbiology and immunology, has written an editorial for Nature discussing advances in Ebola treatment research. The filoviruses known as Ebola virus and Marburg virus are among the most deadly of pathogens, with fatality rates of up to 90 percent. ...

Dartmouth researchers explored the type and number of connections in transcription factor networks (TFNs) to evaluate the role assortativity plays on robustness in a study published in PLOS Computational Biology in August. The study found that the assortativity signature contributes to a network's resilience against mutations. "In simulations, it seems that varying the out-out assortativity of TFN models has a greater effect on robustness than varying any of the other three types of assortativity," said Dov A. Pechenick, PhD, lead author and former researcher at the ...

Raloxifene is a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved treatment for decreasing fracture risk in osteoporosis. While raloxifene is as effective at reducing fracture risk as other current treatments, this works only partially by suppressing bone loss. With the use of wide- and small-angle x-ray scattering (WAXS and SAXS, respectively), researchers carried out experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory that revealed an additional mechanism underlying raloxifene action, providing an explanation ...

Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine have identified one way the Ebola virus dodges the body's antiviral defenses, providing important insight that could lead to new therapies, in research results published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe. In work performed at Beamline 19ID at Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source, the researchers developed a detailed map of how a non-pathogenic Ebola protein, VP24, binds to a host protein that takes signaling molecules in and out of the cell nucleus. Their map revealed that the viral protein ...

Making something new is never easy. Scientists constantly theorize about new materials, but when the material is manufactured it doesn't always work as expected. To create a new strategy for designing materials, scientists at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory combined two different approaches at two different facilities to synthesize new materials. This new strategy gives faster feedback on what growth schemes are best, thus shortening the timeframe to manufacture a new, stable material for energy transport and conversion applications. A recent ...

Boulder, Colorado, USA – In the September issue of GSA Today, Paul Bierman of the University of Vermont–Burlington and colleagues present a cosmogenic view of erosion, relief generation, and the age of faulting in southernmost Africa. By measuring beryllium-10 (10Be) in river sediment samples, they show that south-central South Africa is eroding at the slow rate of about five meters per million years, consistent with rates in other non-tectonically active regions. By measuring 10Be and aluminum-26 (26Al) in exposed quartzites, Bierman and colleagues find that undeformed ...

EDMONTON, AB – A new study from the research group of Dr. John Lewis at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, AB) and the Lawson Health Research Institute (London, ON) has confirmed that "invadopodia" play a key role in the spread of cancer. The study, published in Cell Reports, shows preventing these tentacle-like structures from forming can stop the spread of cancer entirely. Roughly 2 in 5 Canadians will develop cancer in their lifetime, and one in four of them will die of the disease. In 2014, it's estimated that nine Canadians will die of cancer every hour. Thanks ...

Water scarcity is not a problem just for the developing world. In California, legislators are currently proposing a $7.5 billion emergency water plan to their voters; and U.S. federal officials last year warned residents of Arizona and Nevada that they could face cuts in Colorado River water deliveries in 2016. Irrigation techniques, industrial and residential habits combined with climate change lie at the root of the problem. But despite what appears to be an insurmountable problem, according to researchers from McGill and Utrecht University it is possible to turn the ...

Toronto, Canada – Older adults who stay active by volunteering are getting more out of it than just an altruistic feeling – they are receiving a health boost! A new study, led by the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences and published online this week in Psychological Bulletin, is the first to take a broad-brush look at all the available peer-reviewed evidence regarding the psychosocial health benefits of formal volunteering for older adults. Lead investigator Dr. Nicole Anderson, together with scientists from Canadian and American academic centres, ...

Satellite imagery shows Hurricane Cristobal racing through the North Atlantic on Friday, August 29 while losing its tropical characteristics. An image from NOAA's GOES-East satellite showed Cristobal headed south of Greenland. The previous day, NASA's TRMM satellite saw heavy rainfall occurring in the hurricane. In a visible image from NOAA's GOES-East satellite on August 29 at 7:45 a.m. EDT, Hurricane Cristobal was moving through the North Atlantic about 500 miles southwest of Greenland. The image was created by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight ...

To understand how the repeated climatic shifts over the last 120,000 years may have influenced today's patterns of genetic diversity, a team of researchers led by City College of New York biologist Dr. Ana Carnaval developed a new biodiversity metric called "phylogeographic endemism." It quantifies the degree to which the genetic variation within species is restricted in geographical space. Dr. Carnaval, an assistant professor of biology, and 14 other researchers from institutions in Brazil, Australia and the United States, analyzed the effects of current and past climatic ...

This news release is available in German. Nitrite-oxidizing bacteria are key players in the natural nitrogen cycle on Earth and in biological wastewater treatment plants. For decades, these specialist bacteria were thought to depend on nitrite as their source of energy. An international team of scientists led by Holger Daims, a microbiologist at the University of Vienna, has now shown that nitrite-oxidizing bacteria can use hydrogen as an alternative source of energy. The oxidation of hydrogen with oxygen enables their growth independent of nitrite and a lifestyle outside ...

VIDEO: This video of NOAA's GOES-West satellite imagery from Aug. 26-29 shows Hurricane Marie winding down into a post-tropical storm. Click here for more information. NOAA's GOES-West satellite keeps a continuous eye on the Eastern Pacific and has been covering Hurricane Marie since birth. NASA's GOES Project uses NOAA data and creates animations and did so to show the end of Hurricane Marie. At 5 a.m. EDT (0900 UTC) on Friday, August 29, Marie became a post-tropical storm ...

To the careful observer, a person's face has long provided insight into what is going on beneath the surface. Now, with the assistance of a web camera and software algorithms, the face can also reveal whether or not an individual is experiencing atrial fibrillation, a treatable but potentially dangerous heart condition. A pilot project, the results of which were published online today in the journal Heart Rhythm, demonstrates that subtle changes in skin color can be used to detect the uneven blood flow caused by atrial fibrillation. The technology was developed in a ...

Some species of marine phytoplankton, such as the prolific bloomer Emiliania huxleyi, can grow without consuming vitamin B1 (thiamine), researchers have discovered. The finding contradicts the common view that E. huxleyi and many other eukaryotic microbes depend on scarce supplies of thiamine in the ocean to survive. "It's a really different way to think about the ocean," says CIFAR Senior Fellow Alexandra Worden, co-author on The ISME Journal paper with CIFAR fellows John Archibald (Dalhousie University), Adrián Reyes-Prieto (University of New Brunswick) and three lead ...

This news release is available in German. The exchange of chemical signals between organisms is considered the oldest form of communication. Acting as messenger molecules, pheromones regulate social interactions between conspecifics, for example, the sexual attraction between males and females. Fish rely on pheromones to trigger social responses and to coordinate reproductive behavior in males and females. Scientists at the Marine Science Center at the University of the Algarve in Faro, Portugal, and at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, ...

In almost 20 years, China's R&D expenditure as a percentage of its gross domestic product has more than tripled, reaching 1.98 per cent in 2012. This figure surpasses the 28 member states of the EU, which collectively managed 1.96 per cent. However, despite this, China saw a sharp decline in money spent on scientific research, in particular applied research. Basic research funding plummeted from 5.2 per cent in 1995 to 4.7 per cent in 2011, and applied research funding fell from 26.4 per cent to 11.8 per cent in the same years. This is Dr Cao's second Science article ...

Boulder, Colo., USA - The rise of the Tibetan plateau -- the largest topographic anomaly above sea level on Earth -- is important for both its profound effect on climate and its reflection of continental dynamics. In this study published in GSA Bulletin, Katharine Huntington and colleagues employ a cutting-edge geochemical tool -- "clumped" isotope thermometry -- using modern and fossil snail shells to investigate the uplift history of the Zhada basin in southwestern Tibet. Views range widely on the timing of surface uplift of the Tibetan Plateau to its current high ...

Auckland, New Zealand (29 August) — Science advice to governments has emerged as a discipline in its own right, which is both art and science. This is what delegates to the world's first summit of science advice heard at a meeting in Auckland, which closed today with a strong call to strengthen international collaboration, an agreement to formalise the network and meet again in 2016. Convened by the International Council for Science (ICSU) and hosted by New Zealand's Chief Science Advisor, Sir Peter Gluckman, this historic summit marks a turning point in the global awareness ...

Adults who have been hospitalized for a burn as a child experience higher than usual rates of depression and suicidal thoughts, according to new research at the University of Adelaide. A 30-year follow up of childhood burns victims has been conducted by the University's Centre for Traumatic Stress Studies. They found that 42% of people surveyed had suffered some form of mental illness and 30% suffered depression at some stage in their lives. The results, now published in the journal Burns, also found that long-term depression was an issue among the group, and 11% had ...

Only a handful of CPR and basic life support (BLS) videos available on YouTube provide instructions which are consistent with recent health guidelines, according to a new study published in Emergency Medicine Australasia, the journal for the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (ACEM). Early recognition and treatment of sudden cardiac arrest are known to improve survival for victims. A team of Turkish emergency medicine specialists put together the study, which reviewed educational videos from the last three years accessed via YouTube when the search terms ...

FK506 possesses a well-studied neuroregenerative effect, stimulating neurite extension in the presence of nerve growth factor in vitro, and enhancing nerve regeneration following nerve crush injury and isografting. However, the use of FK506 to stimulate nerve regeneration is limited because of the risk of renal failure and hypertension, and its considerable cost. With long-term allografts, FK506 alone or combined with other drugs reportedly cause life-threatening infections. Like FK506, rapamycin is an immunosuppressant and FKBP-12-binding ligand, and has a neuroregenerative ...

The MERS coronavirus has caused disease outbreaks across the Arabian Peninsula and spread to Europe several times. The severe pneumonia virus has claimed the lives of several hundred people since its discovery in 2012. For a long time, scientists have been puzzled over how easily the pathogen spreads from human to human. An international team of researchers led by virologists from the University of Bonn have now come to the conclusion, through direct observation, that the rate of human transmission is low. Still, a third of infected persons with symptoms die. The results ...

A group of astrophysicists, including researchers from MIPT, have detected the formation of radioactive cobalt during a supernova explosion, lending credence to a corresponding theory of supernova explosions. Details are given in the journal Nature, one of the most cited scientific publications in the world. The article's main author, Yevgeny Churazov (Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences), together with his co-authors, including Sergei Sazonov of the Space Research Institute and MIPT, reported the results of their analysis of data collected with ...

Women college students spend an average of 10 hours a day on their cellphones and men college students spend nearly eight, with excessive use posing potential risks for academic performance, according to a Baylor University study on cellphone activity published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions. "That's astounding," said researcher James Roberts, Ph.D., The Ben H. Williams Professor of Marketing in Baylor's Hankamer School of Business. "As cellphone functions increase, addictions to this seemingly indispensable piece of technology become an increasingly realistic ...