NEW YORK, NY (June 19, 2014) — For the first time, a therapy has been found that can delay progression of metastatic uveal melanoma, a rare and deadly form of melanoma of the eye. Results from a multicenter clinical trial show that a new drug called selumetinib increases progression-free survival, the length of time during and after treatment that a patient with metastases lives with the disease without it progressing. The findings were published today in the online edition of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Although the effects of the drug were ...

New Rochelle, NY, June 19, 2014—Plasminogen activators are proteins involved in the breakdown of blood clots, and an elevated level of plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) is associated with an increased risk for clotting and cardiovascular disease. No PAI-1 inhibitors are currently available for clinical use, but a novel therapeutic approach using a targeted RNA aptamer drug that has been shown to block PAI-1 activity and prevent PAI-1-associated vascular events is described in Nucleic Acid Therapeutics, a peer-reviewed journal from Nucleic Acid Therapeutics. The ...

Covert changes of mind can be discovered by tracking neural activity when subjects make decisions, researchers from New York University and Stanford University have found. Their results, which appear in the journal Current Biology, offer new insights into how we make decisions and point to innovative ways to study this process in the future. "The methods used in this study allowed us to see the idiosyncratic nature of decision making that was inaccessible before," explains Roozbeh Kiani, an assistant professor in NYU's Center for Neural Science and the study's lead author. ...

UCLA researchers led by Dr. Brigitte Gomperts have discovered the inner workings of the process thought to be the first stage in the development of lung cancer. Their study explains how factors that regulate the growth of adult stem cells that repair tissue in the lungs can lead to the formation of precancerous lesions. Findings from the three-year study could eventually lead to new personalized treatments for lung cancer, which is responsible for an estimated 29 percent of U.S. cancer deaths, making it the deadliest form of the disease. The study was published online ...

Equine influenza viruses from the early 2000s can easily infect the respiratory tracts of dogs, while those from the 1960s are only barely able to, according to research published ahead of print in the Journal of Virology. The research also suggests that canine and human influenza viruses can mix, and generate new influenza viruses. Canine influenza is a relatively new disease. The first appearance is believed to be in 2003, as a result of direct transfer of a single equine influenza virus to dogs in a large greyhound training facility and was subsequently carried to ...

A University of Central Florida research team has developed a facial recognition tool that promises to be useful in rapidly matching pictures of children with their biological parents and in potentially identifying photos of missing children as they age. The work verifies that a computer is capable of matching pictures of parents and their children. The study will be presented at the nation's premier event for the science of computer vision - the IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Columbus, Ohio, which begins Monday, June 23. Graduate Student ...

(Vancouver – June 19, 2014) – A new mobile app developed by researchers at the Child & Family Research Institute (CFRI) at BC Children's Hospital and the University of British Columbia can measure respiratory rate in children roughly six times faster than the standard manual method. According to findings published this month in PLOS One, RRate can reliably measure respiratory rate in an average of 9.9 seconds. Currently, health care workers typically measure respiratory rate by counting a patient's breaths for 60 seconds using a stop watch. "Mobile phones are changing ...

A team of scientists, led by principal investigator David D. Schlaepfer, PhD, professor in the Department of Reproductive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that small molecule inhibitors to a protein called focal adhesion kinase (FAK) selectively prevent the growth of ovarian cancer cells as tumor spheroids. The findings come in a pair of studies published online this week in the journals Gynecologic Oncology and Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. Ovarian cancer is a leading cause of female cancer death in the United States. On ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a technique to control populations of the Australian sheep blowfly – a major livestock pest in Australia and New Zealand – by making female flies dependent upon a common antibiotic to survive. Dr. Max Scott, professor of entomology at NC State, and his research team genetically modified lines of female Australian sheep blowflies (Lucilia cuprina) so that they required doses of tetracycline in order to live. Female blowflies that did not receive the antibiotic died in the late larval or pupal stages, before ...

HOUSTON – (June 19, 2014) – Rice University scientists have created a one-step process for producing highly efficient materials that let the maximum amount of sunlight reach a solar cell. The Rice lab of chemist Andrew Barron found a simple way to etch nanoscale spikes into silicon that allows more than 99 percent of sunlight to reach the cells' active elements, where it can be turned into electricity. The research by Barron and Rice graduate student and lead author Yen-Tien Lu appears in the Royal Society of Chemistry's Journal of Materials Chemistry A. The more ...

The circuitry of the central nervous system is immensely complex and, as a result, sometimes confounding. When scientists conduct research to unravel the inner workings at a cellular level, they are sometimes surprised by what they find. Patrick Keeley, a postdoctoral scholar in Benjamin Reese's laboratory at UC Santa Barbara's Neuroscience Research Institute, had such an experience. He spent years analyzing different cell types in the retina, the light-sensitive layer of tissue lining the inner surface of the eye that mediates the first stages of visual processing. The ...

THUNDER BAY – June 19, 2014 – With the Ontario government poised to spend $1 billion to promote development in the Ring of Fire, a new paper from Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Canada and Ecojustice identifies risks inherent in the current planning legislation and provides a solution. Ontario's Far North is the world's largest ecologically intact area of boreal forest. It contains North America's largest wetlands, is home to a number of at-risk species, including caribou and lake sturgeon, and is a one of the world's critical storehouses of carbon. First Nations ...

Following a thorough peer-review process, the researchers who previously announced the detection of B-mode polarization in a patch of the microwave sky have published their findings today in the journal Physical Review Letters (PDF available at http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.241101). The researchers provide some evidence that the signals they have found may be the result of gravitational waves from the earliest moments of the universe's existence and thus might constitute the first observation of phenomena from the rapid expansion of the universe ...

Pancreatic cancer tumors addicted to mutant Kras signaling for their growth and progression have a ready-made substitute to tap if they're ever forced to go cold-turkey on the mutant oncogene, scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report in the journal Cell. When researchers dialed up mutant Kras to spur pancreatic cancer growth in mice, and then shut it down, a group of recurrent tumors grew back independently of mutant Kras, reliant on a different oncogene. "There's a great deal of effort under way trying to find ways to target Kras or some ...

Biologists have long considered cells to function like self-cleaning ovens, chewing up and recycling their own worn out parts as needed. But a new study challenges that basic principle, showing that some nerve cells found in the eye pass off their old energy-producing factories to neighboring support cells to be "eaten." The find, which may bear on the roots of glaucoma, also has implications for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other diseases that involve a buildup of "garbage" in brain cells. The study was led by Nicholas Marsh-Armstrong, ...

DOHA, QATAR (June 17, 2014) -- HIV epidemics are emerging among people who inject drugs in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Though HIV infection levels were historically very low in the Middle East and North Africa, substantial levels of HIV transmission and emerging HIV epidemics have been documented among people who inject drugs in at least one-third of the countries of this region, according to findings published today in PLOS Medicine. The HIV epidemics among people who inject drugs (PWID) are recent overall, starting largely around 2003 and ...

A few years ago, a molecule known as "JQ1" was developed, which can block so called BET bromodomain proteins. This switch off the known cancer gene MYC thereby preventing cancer cells from dividing. The discovery was regarded as a major breakthrough. A problem was that JQ1 did not function optimally in animal experiments, and this means that it has not been possible to test the treatment on cancer patients. New molecule Jonas Nilsson and his research group have developed, in collaboration with the Canadian company Zenith epigenetics, a new molecule known as "RVX2135", ...

In a study that included long-term follow-up of obese patients with type 2 diabetes, bariatric surgery was associated with more frequent diabetes remission and fewer complications than patients who received usual care, according to a study in the June 11 issue of JAMA, a diabetes theme issue. Obesity and diabetes have reached epidemic proportions and constitute major health and economic burdens. Worldwide, 347 million adults are estimated to live with diabetes and half of them are undiagnosed. Studies show that type 2 diabetes is preventable. The incidence of diabetes ...

Law enforcement authorities need to better understand trafficking patterns of cocaine in the United States to address one of the world's largest illegal drug markets, according to a Michigan State University researcher whose new methodology might help. Siddharth Chandra, an economist, studied wholesale powdered cocaine prices in 112 cities to identify city-to-city links for the transit of the drug. He used data published by the National Drug Intelligence Center of the U.S. Department of Justice from 2002 to 2011, which field intelligence officers and local, regional and ...

A man with almost no hair on his body has grown a full head of it after a novel treatment by doctors at Yale University. There is currently no cure or long-term treatment for alopecia universalis, the disease that left the 25-year-old patient bare of hair. This is the first reported case of a successful targeted treatment for the rare, highly visible disease. The patient has also grown eyebrows and eyelashes, as well as facial, armpit, and other hair, which he lacked at the time he sought help. "The results are exactly what we hoped for," said Brett A. King, M.D., ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (June 19, 2014) – Researchers in Taiwan have found that peripheral blood stem cells can be "mobilized" by injection of a special preparation of granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) into rats that modeled osteoarthritis (OA). The bone marrow was stimulated to produce stem cells, leading to the inhibition of OA progression. The finding, they said, may lead to a more effective therapy for OA, a common joint disease that affects 10 percent of Americans over the age of 60. The study will be published in a future issue of Cell Transplantation and ...

New Rochelle, NY, June 19, 2014—An innovative system using automated 3D printing technology and advanced digital tools to create customized, prefabricated ceramic building blocks, called PolyBricks, is enabling the construction of mortar-less brick building assemblies at much greater scales than was previously possible. The new techniques that use 3D printers to produce modular ceramic bricks from a single material that then interlock and assemble easily into larger units for architectural applications are described in an article in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing ...

PHILADELPHIA (June 19, 2014) – We already know haters are predisposed to be that way. Now we see they also spend a lot of time at fewer activities than their non-hater counterparts. But in a twist of irony, that grumpy person at work may actually be pretty good at their job since they spend so much time on fewer activities, thereby giving them the opportunity to hone their skills in specific tasks. It's all covered in a new study published in the journal Social Psychology. It seems that a person's "dispositional attitude" – whether the person is a "hater" or a "liker" ...

A mathematical tool used by the Metropolitan Police and FBI has been adapted by researchers at Queen Mary University of London to help control outbreaks of malaria, and has the potential to target other infectious diseases. In cases of serial crime such as murder or rape, police typically have too many suspects to consider, for example, the Yorkshire Ripper investigation in the UK generated a total of 268,000 names. To help prioritise these investigations, police forces around the world use a technique called geographic profiling, which uses the spatial locations of ...

For thousands of years, Mother Nature has taken the blame for tremendous human suffering caused by massive flooding along the Yellow River, long known in China as the "River of Sorrow" and "Scourge of the Sons of Han." Now, new research from Washington University in St. Louis links the river's increasingly deadly floods to a widespread pattern of human-caused environmental degradation and related flood-mitigation efforts that began changing the river's natural flow nearly 3,000 years ago. "Human intervention in the Chinese environment is relatively massive, remarkably ...