Suddenly there was a word for chili peppers. Information about archaeological remains of ancient chili peppers in Mexico along with a study of the appearance of words for chili peppers in ancient dialects helped researchers to understand where jalapeños were domesticated and highlight the value of multi-proxy data analysis. Their results are from one (Kraig Kraft et al.) of nine papers presented in a special feature issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on plant and animal domestication edited by Dolores Piperno, staff scientist emerita at the Smithsonian ...

New Rochelle, NY, April 17, 2014—The development of stem cell therapies to cure a variety of diseases depends on the ability to characterize stem cell populations based on cell surface markers. Researchers from the Finnish Red Cross have discovered a new marker that is highly expressed in a type of stem cells derived from human umbilical cord blood, which they describe in an article in BioResearch Open Access, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the BioResearch Open Access website. Heli Suila and colleagues, ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. April 17 – In the most densely forested and most densely populated quadrant of the United States, forests reflect two centuries of human needs, values and practices. Disturbances associated with those needs, such as logging and clearing forests for agriculture and development, have set the stage for management issues of considerable concern today, a U.S. Forest Service study reports. The report – Five anthropogenic factors that will radically alter forest conditions and management needs in the Northern United States – was published recently by the journal ...

AURORA, Colo. (April 17, 2014) – Two recent papers by a University of Colorado School of Medicine researcher and colleagues may help scientists develop treatments or vaccines for Dengue fever, West Nile virus, Yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis and other disease-causing flaviviruses. Jeffrey S. Kieft, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the School of Medicine and an early career scientist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and colleagues recently published articles in the scholarly journals eLife and Science that explain how flaviviruses ...

Ancient Earth might have had an extraterrestrial supply of vitamin B3 delivered by carbon-rich meteorites, according to a new analysis by NASA-funded researchers. The result supports a theory that the origin of life may have been assisted by a supply of key molecules created in space and brought to Earth by comet and meteor impacts. "It is always difficult to put a value on the connection between meteorites and the origin of life; for example, earlier work has shown that vitamin B3 could have been produced non-biologically on ancient Earth, but it's possible that an added ...

Like a balloon bobbing along in the air while tied to a child's hand, a tracer has been found in the sun's atmosphere to help track the flow of material coursing underneath the sun's surface. New research that uses data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, to track bright points in the solar atmosphere and magnetic signatures on the sun's surface offers a way to probe the star's depths faster than ever before. The technique opens the door for near real-time mapping of the sun's roiling interior – movement that affects a wide range of events on the sun from ...

At one point in history, Greenland was actually green and not a country covered in ice. An international team of researchers, including a scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has discovered that ancient dirt in Greenland was cryogenically frozen for millions of years under nearly two miles of ice. More than 2.5 million years ago. Greenland looked like the green Alaskan tundra, before it was covered by the second largest body of ice on Earth. The ancient dirt under the Greenland ice sheet helps to unravel an important mystery surrounding climate change: ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A drug under clinical trials to treat tuberculosis could be the basis for a class of broad-spectrum drugs that act against various bacteria, fungal infections and parasites, yet evade resistance, according to a study by University of Illinois chemists and collaborators. Led by U. of I. chemistry professor Eric Oldfield, the team determined the different ways the drug SQ109 attacks the tuberculosis bacterium, how the drug can be tweaked to target other pathogens from yeast to malaria – and how targeting multiple pathways reduces the probability of pathogens ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — One of the most popular vaccine brands for children may not be the most cost-effective choice. And doctors may be overlooking some cost factors when choosing vaccines, driving the market toward what is actually a more expensive option, according to a new study by University of Illinois researchers. "The choice of vaccines to administer can be driven by numerous factors," says Sheldon H. Jacobson, a co-author of the study and a professor of computer science and of mathematics at the U. of I. "In an environment where vaccines are under growing public scrutiny, ...

MANHASSET, NY – In a review published in the April issue of Immunity, Kevin J. Tracey, MD, president of The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, says it's time to take a fresh look at the medical community's approach to treating sepsis, which kills millions worldwide every year, including more than 200,000 Americans. Sepsis occurs when molecules released into the bloodstream to fight an injury or infection trigger inflammation throughout the body. Inflammation is necessary for maintaining good health – without inflammation, wounds and infections would never be ...

Le Bonheur Children's Hospital Pediatrician-in-Chief Jon McCullers, MD, was recently invited to submit a review in the April issue of Nature Reviews Microbiology, one of the world's foremost scientific publications. Dr. McCullers, a world-renowned infectious disease specialist, and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, analyzed the epidemiology and microbiology of co-infections during the 1918, 1957 and 1968 pandemics, as well as more recent 2009 novel H1N1 pandemic. He reviewed the co-pathogenesis of influenza viruses ...

A Northwestern University synthetic biology team has created a new technology for modifying human cells to create programmable therapeutics that could travel the body and selectively target cancer and other sites of disease. Engineering cell-based, biological devices that monitor and modify human physiology is a promising frontier in clinical synthetic biology. However, no existing technology enabled bioengineers to build such devices that sense a patient's physiological state and respond in a customized fashion. "The project addressed a key gap in the synthetic biology ...

In the April issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine a multidisciplinary research team led by Drs. Rex Gaskins and Paul Kenis in the Institute of Genomic Biology (IGB) on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign describe their recent work on subcellular redox homeostasis. Intracellular reduction-oxidation reactions underlie a variety of cell functions including energy metabolism, signaling, and transcriptional processes. Due to these crucial roles in regulating normal cellular behavior, redox status has been recognized as a key area of biological research ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that older women, plucky individuals and those who have suffered a recent major loss are more likely to be compassionate toward strangers than other older adults. The study is published in this month's issue of the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. Because compassionate behaviors are associated with better health and well-being as we age, the research findings offer insights into ways to improve the outcomes of individuals whose deficits in compassion put them at risk for becoming ...

VIDEO: This animation depicts Kepler-186f, the first validated Earth-size planet orbiting a distant star in the habitable zone -- a range of distances from a star where liquid water might pool... Click here for more information. "What makes this finding particularly compelling is that this Earth-sized planet, one of five orbiting this star, which is cooler than the Sun, resides in a temperate region where water could exist in liquid form," says Elisa Quintana of the SETI Institute ...

MAYWOOD, Il. (April 17, 2014) – Doctors who treat patients with a severe and progressive respiratory disease called lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM) can face an agonizing treatment decision. The drug sirolimus can slow progression of the disease and help relieve shortness of breath. But some patients eventually may need lung transplants, and sirolimus can cause potentially fatal complications following transplantation. "It's a terrible situation," said pulmonologist Dr. Daniel Dilling, medical director of Loyola University Medical Center's LAM Clinic and Lung Transplantation ...

Adolescent drivers are often distracted by technology while they are driving, but loud conversations and horseplay between passengers appear more likely to result in a dangerous incident, according to a new study from the UNC Highway Safety Research Center. The work, which appears online today in the Journal of Adolescent Health, not only reinforces the importance of North Carolina's licensing system for newly minted drivers but also provides an interesting perspective on the role that technology plays in distracted driving. "Forty three states currently restrict ...

Notre Dame astrophysicist Justin R. Crepp and researchers from NASA working with the Kepler space mission have detected an Earth-like planet orbiting the habitable zone of a cool star. The planet which was found using the Kepler Space Telescope has been identified as Kepler-186f and is 1.11 times the radius of the Earth. Their research titled, "An Earth-sized Planet in the Habitable Zone of a Cool Star" will be published in the journal Science today. Kepler-186f is part of a multi-planet system around the star Kepler-186 which has five planets, one of which is in the ...

It's estimated that as many as 10 million older Americans suffer from depression, often brought on by feelings of loneliness and isolation. However, new research – a project that followed the lives of thousands of retired older Americans for six years – found that Internet use among the elderly can reduce the chances of depression by more than 30 percent. "That's a very strong effect," said Shelia Cotten, a Michigan State University professor of telecommunication, information studies and media who led the project. "And it all has to do with older persons being able ...

NEW YORK, NY (April 16, 2014) — The cause of neuronal death in Parkinson's disease is still unknown, but a new study proposes that neurons may be mistaken for foreign invaders and killed by the person's own immune system, similar to the way autoimmune diseases like type I diabetes, celiac disease, and multiple sclerosis attack the body's cells. The study was published April 16, 2014, in Nature Communications. "This is a new, and likely controversial, idea in Parkinson's disease; but if true, it could lead to new ways to prevent neuronal death in Parkinson's that resemble ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Wildfires across the western United States have been getting bigger and more frequent over the last 30 years – a trend that could continue as climate change causes temperatures to rise and drought to become more severe in the coming decades, according to new research. The number of wildfires over 1,000 acres in size in the region stretching from Nebraska to California increased by a rate of seven fires a year from 1984 to 2011, according to a new study accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal published by the American Geophysical ...

CHICAGO, IL, April 17, 2014-- Colic affects about one in five infants in the United States annually and accounts for numerous pediatric visits during the first several months after birth. Research into probiotic use for reduction of colic symptoms was showing promise; however, the April 1, 2014 issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ2014;348:g2107; Sung, Valerie) reported on a study, "Probiotics and Infant Colic," concluding that the use of the probiotic L reuteri for infant colic did not reduce crying or fussing in infants nor was it effective in improving infant sleep, ...

Boston—Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have discovered that the anti-seizure drug ezogabine, reduced alcohol consumption in an experimental model. The findings, reported in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, may lead to more effective treatments for alcoholism. Excessive consumption of alcohol is one of the leading causes of illness and death in the U.S. and has significant negative economic impact by limiting the productivity of workers and necessitating huge health care expenditures. According to the researchers, this study ...

Occurring in about one per eight hundred births, Down syndrome - or trisomy 21 - is the most frequent genetic cause of intellectual disability. It results from a chromosomal abnormality where cells of affected individuals contain a third copy of chromosome 21 (1% of the human genome). A study conducted by Stylianos Antonarakis and his team in the Department of Genetic Medicine and Development at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) Faculty of Medicine, published in Nature, shed light on how the extra chromosome 21 upsets the equilibrium of the entire genome, causing a wide ...

NEW YORK – April 17, 2014 – EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization that focuses on conservation and global public health issues, published a comprehensive review today examining the current state of knowledge of the deadly Ebola and Marburg virus. The review calls for improved global surveillance strategies to combat the emergence of infectious diseases such as the recent outbreak of Ebola in West Africa that has claimed the lives of 122 people in the countries of Guinea and Liberia. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the deadly Ebola virus can cause ...