Researchers at the National Eye Institute (NEI) have described the functions of a gene responsible for anchoring cilia – sensory hair-like extensions present on almost every cell of the body. They show in a mouse model that without the gene Cc2d2a, cilia throughout the body failed to grow, and the mice died during the embryonic stage. The finding adds to an expanding body of knowledge about ciliopathies, a class of genetic disorders that result from defects in the structure or function of cilia. NEI is part of the National Institutes of Health. The findings are published ...

Mental illness accounts for 90 percent of all reported suicides and places the largest burden of any disease on social and economic infrastructures worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. There is a dire need for support services to assist clinicians in the evaluation and treatment of those suffering from mental illness. New technology developed by researchers at Tel Aviv University is poised to transform the way in which patients with mental illnesses are monitored and treated by clinicians. Dr. Uri Nevo, research team engineer Keren Sela, and scientists ...

Engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated a class of walking "bio-bots" powered by muscle cells and controlled with electrical pulses, giving researchers unprecedented command over their function. The group published its work in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. "Biological actuation driven by cells is a fundamental need for any kind of biological machine you want to build," said study leader Rashid Bashir, Abel Bliss Professor and head of bioengineering at the U. of I. "We're trying to integrate ...

Since white-tailed deer serve as the primary host for the adult blacklegged tick (Ixodes scapularis) — the vector for Lyme disease — scientists have wondered whether reducing the number of deer in a given area would also mean fewer cases of Lyme disease. Now, after a 13-year study was conducted, researchers in Connecticut have found that reduced deer populations can indeed lead to a reduction in Lyme disease cases. The results of their study are published in the Journal of Medical Entomology . The researchers surveyed 90󈟎% of all permanent residents in a Connecticut ...

This news release is available in German. Harald Janovjak, Assistant Professor at IST Austria, together with Michael Grusch, Associate Professor at the Institute of Cancer Research of the Medical University of Vienna, "remote-controlled" the behaviour of cancer cells with light, as reported this week in EMBO Journal (DOI: 10.15252/embj.201387695). This work is the first application of the new field of optogenetics to cancer research. To understand the dynamics of cellular signaling, researchers need to activate and inactivate membrane receptor proteins, which ...

Experiments aimed at devising new types of photodetectors have been triggered by the increasing use of optoelectronic devices in personal electronics, cameras, medical equipment, computers and by the military. Professor Zhao Kun and co-researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Petroleum Resource and Prospecting, part of the China University of Petroleum in Beijing, have proposed a new type of infrared photodetector. Photodetectors, which can convert photons to electrical signals, are used to observe and measure the wavelength or energy of light, including infrared light, ...

Friends may be the key to stopping their mates drink walking, a risky behaviour that kills on average two Australians every week, a QUT study has found. Researcher Dr Ioni Lewis, from QUT's Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety - Queensland (CARRS-Q), said in a survey of young people aged 17 to 25, friends were the strongest influence on their intentions to drink walk. "Drink walking, or walking while intoxicated in a public place, is linked to increased risk of injury and fatality," Dr Lewis said. In a survey, published in Transportation Research, more than ...

Drug developers are facing the perfect storm. They are confronted with major patent expiries, increased payer scrutiny, changing priorities, shifting business models, increased risk averseness, increased clinical trial costs, not to mention issues concerning R&D productivity. There needs to be a better way to identify new candidate drugs. There needs to be a new drug development pathway that is compatible with research aimed at understanding the biology of a cancer and simultaneously able to support the design and conduct of subsequent confirmatory trials, but building ...

A discovery by Australian immunologists, uncovering an additional role for antibody-making 'B cells', is considered important enough by the American Association of Immunologists to rank it among the top 10% of articles in the latest issue of The Journal of Immunology, off the press today. The finding by Senior Research Assistant Stacey Walters and Associate Professor Shane Grey, from Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research, shows that B cells also participate in the development of 'regulatory T cells'. T cells develop in the thymus gland, a soft triangular organ ...

The most detailed analysis to date of the spread of the H1N1 2009 pandemic influenza virus, known informally as 'swine flu', has found that short-range travel was likely the primary driver for the 2009 pandemic in the United States, in contrast with popularly accepted views on the way diseases spread. The study, based on data gathered from health insurance claims made throughout 2009, found that international air travel, which was previously thought to be important in the pandemic, played only a minor role in its spread within the US. A team of researchers from University ...

The risk of developing cancer increases with age. Factors like smoking and regular aspirin use also affect the risk of cancer – although in the opposite sense. Researchers from the University of Basel were now able to show that aspirin use and smoking both influence aging processes of the female genome that are connected to colorectal cancer. The Journal of the National Cancer Institute has published their results. Already in the 1990s, scientists discovered that regular use of aspirin over long periods of time decreases the cancer risk. Since then, numerous studies have ...

Li Haijun and fellow researchers at Minzu University of China, in Beijing, conducted a series of geometric morphometric analyses of the contours of the side face and variations in the Tu and Zang (Tibetan) ethnic minorities from Qinghai Province, in northwestern China. Their study, entitled "Morphometric analysis of the Chinese facial profile: Contours of the side face and variations in the Tu and Zang ethnic minorities", was published (in Chinese) in the Chinese Science Bulletin, 2014, Vol 59(16). The team of researchers used advanced digital cameras and image processing ...

The unusual habitat of the Krubera cave in the Western Caucasus remains a mystery. Researchers from two Spanish universities have discovered a new species of beetle in the depths of this cave. Cave beetles are one of the most iconic species found in subterranean habitats. They were historically the first living organisms described by science that are adapted to the conditions of hypogean or subterranean life. Now, a Portuguese scientist and a Spaniard have discovered a new species of beetle in the deepest cave known to man; a cave 2,140 metres deep. It is the Krubera ...

The simpler, the more heat-resistant – scientists uncover the key to adaptation limits of ocean dwellers Bremerhaven, Germany, 1 July 2014. The simpler a marine organism is structured, the better it is suited for survival during climate change. Scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research discovered this in a new meta-study, which appears today in the research journal Global Change Biology. For the first time biologists studied the relationship between the complexity of life forms and the ultimate limits of their adaptation ...

Philadelphia, PA, July 1, 2014 – Research suggests that people at increased risk for developing addiction share many of the same neurobiological signatures of people who have already developed addiction. This similarity is to be expected, as individuals with family members who have struggled with addiction are over-represented in the population of addicted people. However, a generation of animal research supports the hypothesis that the addiction process changes the brain in ways that converge with the distinctive neurobiology of the heritable risk for addiction. In other ...

LOS ANGELES (June 30, 2014) – When evaluating another person's emotions – happy, sad, angry, afraid – humans take cues from facial expressions. Neurons in a part of the brain called the amygdala "fire" in response to the visual stimulation as information is processed by the retina, the amygdala and a network of interconnected brain structures. Some of these regions respond just to the actual features of the face, whereas others respond to how things appear to the viewer, but it is unknown where in the brain this difference arises. Although the amygdala's importance in ...

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) and the University of Hawaii have uncovered the first step in the process that transforms gas-phase molecules into solid particles like soot and other carbon-based compounds. The finding could help combustion chemists make more-efficient, less-polluting fuels and help materials scientists fine-tune their carbon nanotubes and graphene sheets for faster, smaller electronics. In addition, the results could have implications for the burgeoning field of astrochemistry, potentially establishing ...

HUNTSVILLE, TX (7/1/14) -- Cyberbullying creates fear among students about being victimized at school, a recent study by Sam Houston State University found. While traditional bullying still creates the most fear among students, cyberbullying is a significant factor for fear of victimization at school among students who have experienced bullying or disorder At school, such as the presence of gangs. The fear from cyberbullying is most prominent in minority populations. "It cannot be overstated – online victimization has offline consequences, and those consequences may ...

This news release is available in French. Scientists don't fully understand how 'plastic' solar panels work, which complicates the improvement of their cost efficiency, thereby blocking the wider use of the technology. However, researchers at the University of Montreal, the Science and Technology Facilities Council, Imperial College London and the University of Cyprus have determined how light beams excite the chemicals in solar panels, enabling them to produce charge. "Our findings are of key importance for a fundamental mechanistic understanding, with molecular ...

VIDEO: This animation shows the three-atom thick crystal being pulled from a non-conductive to conductive state, and then being pushed back to the non-conductive state. Click here for more information. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. Those instructions were once printed on punch cards that fed data to mainframe computers. Today's smart phones process more data, but they still weren't built for being shoved into back pockets. In the quest to build gadgets that can survive such ...

Charlottesville, VA (July 1, 2014). Experts in the spine surgery community—neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons—banded together to evaluate the recent literature on lumbar spine fusion procedures and to publish up-to-date evidence-based recommendations on their use. The Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine is pleased to announce today's publication of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons/Congress of Neurological Surgeons Joint Section on Disorders of the Spine and Peripheral Nerves' updated guidelines for the performance of fusion procedures for degenerative disease ...

Munich, 1 July 2014: The rapid freezing technique of vitrification is set to revolutionise egg donation as a fertility treatment by enabling freeze-storage egg-banking. The cryopreservation of eggs was one of IVF's continuing challenges until the widespread introduction of vitrification; the older slow freezing methods induced the formation of ice crystals, which could cause damage to several structures of the egg. Thus, as demand for egg donation increases as a treatment for age-related infertility, egg banking with vitrification can theoretically provide a large pool ...

Munich, 1 July 2014: A project in Denmark whose aim is to assess the reliability of preconceptional lifestyle and biological factors as predictors of fertility has found a pronounced effect of the contraceptive pill on markers used to assess "ovarian reserve", a predictor of future reproductive lifespan. Available evidence of whether the Pill has an effect on fertility has so far been reassuring - and usual advice to those stopping the Pill is that cycles will soon revert to normal, with pregnancy likely within six months or so.(1) However, one continuing concern ...

Munich, 1 July 2014: With an ever-ageing female patient population, egg donation is an increasingly common treatment in infertility. ESHRE's own annual reports on fertility treatments in Europe show a rise in egg donation cycles from 15,028 in 2007 to 24,517 in 2010 (to 4.05% of all treatments). This proportion is still some way behind the USA, where egg donation now accounts for around 12% of all treatments. As women age their store of viable eggs reduces such that their "ovarian reserve" (and likelihood of pregnancy) declines. Once the eggs have gone, they cannot be ...

Munich, 1 July 2014: While the majority of younger women are aware of egg freezing as a technique of fertility preservation and consider it an acceptable means of reproductive planning, only one in five would consider it appropriate for them, according to the results of an internet survey performed in the UK and Denmark. The questionnaire, which was accessible online, was completed anonymously by 973 women with a median age of 31 years between September 2012 and September 2013. Results are reported today at the ESHRE Annual Meeting in Munich by Dr Camille Lallemant of ...