Rockville, MD – Accurate knowledge regarding Ebola is critical and pertinent for practicing physicians and clinicians given the current risk of hazardous global outbreak and epidemic. The Journal, Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness has launched a special issue, Ebola Virus and Public Health, to surround the public, medical professionals and media with necessary knowledge in this critical societal moment. On October 17, the journal published A Primer on Ebola for Clinicians. The primer was prepared by Dr. Eric Toner, internist and emergency physician, ...

Athens, Ga. – The disruption of a person's circadian rhythm—their 24-hour biological clock—has been linked to an increased risk of breast cancer, according to new University of Georgia research. The culprit, in this study in particular, is artificial light. "Exposure to artificial light leads to a significantly higher risk for developing breast cancer," said Chunla He, a biostatistics graduate student in the UGA College of Public Health. "To decrease the use of artificial light, people should avoid working at night and implement earlier bed times." Her ...

Recent studies showed that the color red tends increase our attraction toward others, feelings of jealousy, and even reaction times. Now, new research shows that female monkeys also respond to the color red, suggesting that biology, rather than our culture, may play the fundamental role in our "red" reactions. "Previous research shows that the color red in a mating context makes people more attractive, and in the fighting context makes people seem more threatening and angry," explained Benjamin Y. Hayden, a coauthor of the study and professor in brain and cognitive sciences ...

Images/release: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/cheaper-superconducting-computer-chips-1017 Computer chips with superconducting circuits — circuits with zero electrical resistance — would be 50 to 100 times as energy-efficient as today's chips, an attractive trait given the increasing power consumption of the massive data centers that power the Internet's most popular sites. Superconducting chips also promise greater processing power: Superconducting circuits that use so-called Josephson junctions have been clocked at 770 gigahertz, or 500 times the speed ...

University of Toronto study finds that action video games bolster sensorimotor skills A study led by University of Toronto psychology researchers has found that people who play action video games such as Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed seem to learn a new sensorimotor skill more quickly than non-gamers do. A new sensorimotor skill, such as learning to ride a bike or typing, often requires a new pattern of coordination between vision and motor movement. With such skills, an individual generally moves from novice performance, characterized by a low degree of coordination, ...

This news release is available in German. Why do male animals need millions of sperms every day in order to reproduce? And why are there two sexes anyway? These and related questions are the topic of the latest issue of the research journal Molecular Human Reproduction published today (Oct. 16th, 2014). The evolutionary biologist Steven Ramm from Bielefeld University Bielefeld has compiled this special issue on sperm competition. In nature, it is not unusual for a female to copulate with several males in quick succession – chimpanzees are one good example. 'The ...

Philadelphia, PA, October 16, 2014 – Traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating condition with few treatment options. Studies show that damage to the barrier separating blood from the spinal cord can contribute to the neurologic deficits that arise secondary to the initial trauma. Through a series of sophisticated experiments, researchers reporting in The American Journal of Pathology suggest that matrix metalloproteinase-3 (MMP-3) plays a pivotal role in disruption of the brain/spinal cord barrier (BSCB), cell death, and functional deficits after SCI. This ...

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have shown for the first time how bacteria can grow directly in the lungs of Cystic fibrosis patients, giving them the opportunity to get tremendous insights into bacteria behavior and growth in chronic infections. The study also discovered the bacterial growth in chronic lung infections among cystic fibrosis (CF) patients was halted or slowed down by the immune cells. The researchers discovered the immune cells consumed all the oxygen and helped "suffocate" the bacteria, forcing the bacteria to switch to a much slower growth. The ...

DNA analysis has become increasingly efficient and cost-effective since the human genome was first fully sequenced in the year 2001. Sequencing a complete genome, however, still costs around US$1,000. Sequencing the genetic code of hundreds of individuals would therefore be very expensive and time-consuming. In particular for non-human studies, researchers very quickly hit the limit of financial feasibility. Sequencing Groups Instead of Individuals The solution to this problem is pool sequencing (Pool-Seq). Schlötterer and his team sequence entire groups of fruit ...

Scientists have used computer simulations to show how bacteria are able to destroy antibiotics – a breakthrough which will help develop drugs which can effectively tackle infections in the future. Researchers at the University of Bristol focused on the role of enzymes in the bacteria, which split the structure of the antibiotic and stop it working, making the bacteria resistant. The new findings, published in Chemical Communications, show that it's possible to test how enzymes react to certain antibiotics. It's hoped this insight will help scientists to develop ...

The daily trimming of fingernails and toenails to make them more aesthetically pleasing could be detrimental and potentially lead to serious nail conditions. The research, carried out by experts in the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science at The University of Nottingham, will also improve our understanding of disease in the hooves of farm animals and horses. Dr Cyril Rauch, a physicist and applied mathematician, together with his PhD Student Mohammed Cherkaoui-Rbati, devised equations to identify the physical laws that govern nail growth, and used them to throw ...

This news release is available in German. To date, antidotes exist for only a very few drugs. When treating overdoses, doctors are often limited to supportive therapy such as induced vomiting. Treatment is especially difficult if there is a combination of drugs involved. So what can be done if a child is playing and accidentally swallows his grandmother's pills? ETH professor Jean-Christophe Leroux from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at ETH Zurich wanted to find an answer to this question. "The task was to develop an agent that could eliminate many different ...

Its central finding is that our nervous system uses past visual experiences to predict how blurred objects would look in sharp detail. "In our study we are dealing with the question of why we believe that we see the world uniformly detailed," says Dr. Arvid Herwig from the Neuro-Cognitive Psychology research group of the Faculty of Psychology and Sports Science. The group is also affiliated to the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) of Bielefeld University and is led by Professor Dr. Werner X. Schneider. Only the fovea, the central area of ...

People who have suffered spinal cord injuries are often susceptible to bladder infections, and those infections can cause kidney damage and even death. New UCLA research may go a long way toward solving the problem. A team of scientists studied 10 paralyzed rats that were trained daily for six weeks with epidural stimulation of the spinal cord and five rats that were untrained and did not receive the stimulation. They found that training and epidural stimulation enabled the rats to empty their bladders more fully and in a timelier manner. The study was published in ...

In a first step toward future human therapies, researchers at The Saban Research Institute of Children's Hospital Los Angeles have shown that esophageal tissue can be grown in vivo from both human and mouse cells. The study has been published online in the journal Tissue Engineering, Part A. The tissue-engineered esophagus formed on a relatively simple biodegradable scaffold after the researchers transplanted mouse and human organ-specific stem/progenitor cells into a murine model, according to principal investigator Tracy C. Grikscheit, MD, of the Developmental Biology ...

LOS ANGELES (Oct. 16, 2014) – Male and female brains are not equal when it comes to the biological response to a high-fat diet. Cedars-Sinai Diabetes and Obesity Research Institute scientist Deborah Clegg, PhD, and a team of international investigators found that the brains of male laboratory mice exposed to the same high-fat diet as their female counterparts developed brain inflammation and heart disease that were not seen in the females. "For the first time, we have identified remarkable differences in the sexes when it comes to how the body responds to high-fat ...

New research into a rare pathogen has shown how a unique evolutionary trait allows it to infect even the healthiest of hosts through a smart solution to the body's immune response against it. Scientists at the University of Birmingham have explained how a particular strain of a fungus, Cryptococcus gattii, responds to the human immune response and triggers a 'division of labour' in its invading cells, which can lead to life-threatening infections. Once inhaled, the pathogen can spread through the body to cause pneumonia or meningitis. The outbreak strain of this fungus ...

(Vienna, October 17, 2014) Two new pill-only regimens that rapidly cure most patients with genotype 1 hepatitis C (HCV) infection could soon be widely prescribed across Europe. Two recently-published studies1,2 confirmed the efficacy and safety of combination therapy with two oral direct-acting antiviral agents (DAAs), with around 90% of patients cured after just 12-weeks of treatment. At the 22nd United European Gastroenterology Week (UEG Week 2014) in Vienna, Austria, Professor Michael P. Manns from Hannover Medical School in Germany will be presenting this data and ...

A group of researchers led by Melina Bersten of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe recently presented a model that provides the first characterization of the progenitor for a hydrogen-deficient supernova. Their model predicts that a bright hot star, which is the binary companion to an exploding object, remains after the explosion. To verify their theory, the group secured observation time with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to search for such a remaining star. Their findings, which are reported in the October 2014 issue of The Astronomical ...

Peering through a giant cosmic magnifying glass, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a tiny, faint galaxy -- one of the farthest galaxies ever seen. The diminutive object is estimated to be more than 13 billion light-years away. This galaxy offers a peek back to the very early formative years of the universe and may just be the tip of the iceberg. "This galaxy is an example of what is suspected to be an abundant, underlying population of extremely small, faint objects that existed about 500 million years after the big bang, the beginning of the universe," explained ...

NASA is carrying out its sixth consecutive year of Operation IceBridge research flights over Antarctica to study changes in the continent's ice sheet, glaciers and sea ice. This year's airborne campaign, which began its first flight Thursday morning, will revisit a section of the Antarctic ice sheet that recently was found to be in irreversible decline. For the next several weeks, researchers will fly aboard NASA's DC-8 research aircraft out of Punta Arenas, Chile. This year also marks the return to western Antarctica following 2013's campaign based at the National Science ...

NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) has provided scientists with five new findings into how the sun's atmosphere, or corona, is heated far hotter than its surface, what causes the sun's constant outflow of particles called the solar wind, and what mechanisms accelerate particles that power solar flares. The new information will help researchers better understand how our nearest star transfers energy through its atmosphere and track the dynamic solar activity that can impact technological infrastructure in space and on Earth. Details of the findings appear ...

Parasitic bacteria were the first cousins of the mitochondria that power cells in animals and plants – and first acted as energy parasites in those cells before becoming beneficial, according to a new University of Virginia study that used next-generation DNA sequencing technologies to decode the genomes of 18 bacteria that are close relatives of mitochondria. The study appears this week in the online journal PLOS One, published by the Public Library of Science. It provides an alternative theory to two current theories of how simple bacterial cells were swallowed ...

The need for food, animal feed and fuel in the Sahel belt is growing year on year, but supply is not increasing at the same rate. New figures from 22 countries indicate falling availability of resources per capita and a continued risk of famine in areas with low 'primary production' from plants. Rising temperatures present an alarming prospect, according to a study from Lund University in Sweden. The research has investigated developments between the years 2000 and 2010 in the Sahel belt, south of the Sahara Desert. Over this ten-year period, the population of the region ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – How many times have we seen Superman swoop down from the heavens and rescue a would-be victim from a rapidly oncoming train? It's a familiar scenario, played out hundreds of times in the movies. But the dramatic scene is reenacted in real life every time a cell divides. In order for division to occur, our genetic material must be faithfully replicated by a highly complicated machine, whose parts are tiny enough to navigate among the strands of the double helix. The problem is that our DNA is constantly in use, with other molecular machines ...