An Antarctic octopus that lives in ice-cold water uses an unique strategy to transport oxygen in its blood, according to research published in Frontiers in Zoology. The study suggests that the octopus's specialized blood pigments could help to make it more resilient to climate change than Antarctic fish and other species of octopus. The Antarctic Ocean hosts rich and diverse fauna despite inhospitable temperatures close to freezing. While it can be hard to deliver oxygen to tissues in the cold due to lower oxygen diffusion and increased blood viscosity, ice-cold waters ...

Studying the intricate fractal patterns on the surface of cells could give researchers a new insight into the physical nature of cancer, and provide new ways of preventing the disease from developing. This is according to scientists in the US who have, for the first time, shown how physical fractal patterns emerge on the surface of human cancer cells at a specific point of progression towards cancer. Publishing their results today, 11 March, in the Institute of Physics and Germany Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, they found that the distinctive repeating fractal ...

Voices in people's heads are far more varied and complex than previously thought, according to new research by Durham and Stanford universities, published in The Lancet Psychiatry today. One of the largest and most detailed studies to date on the experience of auditory hallucinations, commonly referred to as voice hearing, found that the majority of voice-hearers hear multiple voices with distinct character-like qualities, with many also experiencing physical effects on their bodies. The study also confirmed that both people with and without psychiatric diagnoses hear ...

During pregnancy, the mother supplies the fetus with nutrients and oxygen via the placenta. If placental development is impaired, this may lead to growth disorders of the embryo or to life-threatening diseases of the mother such as preeclampsia, a serious condition involving high blood pressure and increased urinary protein excretion. Now, Dr. Katharina Walentin and Professor Kai Schmidt-Ott of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch have discovered a new molecular signaling pathway which regulates the development of the placenta. Perturbations ...

In a study published in The Lancet on March 10, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) report that patients with a genetic sensitivity to warfarin - the most widely used anticoagulant for preventing blood clots - have higher rates of bleeding during the first several months of treatment and benefited from treatment with a different anticoagulant drug. The analyses from the TIMI Study Group, suggest that using genetics to identify patients who are most at risk of bleeding, and tailoring treatment accordingly, could offer important safety benefits, particularly ...

VANCOUVER, Wash.--Washington State University researchers have found a mechanism in the brain that facilitates the pathologically powerful role of memory in drug addiction. Their discovery opens a new area of research for targeted therapy that would alter or disable the mechanism and make drug addiction less compulsive. Turning off the mechanism is "diminishing the emotional impact or the emotional content of the memory, so it decreases the motivation to relapse," said Barbara Sorg, a professor of neuroscience at Washington State University, Vancouver. Her findings appear ...

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have uncovered new clues about the risk of cancer from low-dose radiation, which in this research they define as equivalent to 100 millisieverts or roughly the dose received from ten full-body CT scans. They studied mice and found their risk of mammary cancer from low-dose radiation depends a great deal on their genetic makeup. They also learned key details about how genes and the cells immediately surrounding a tumor (also called the tumor microenvironment) affect cancer ...

La Jolla, Calif., March 9, 2015 - Researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) have discovered a mechanism that explains why some breast cancer tumors respond to specific chemotherapies and others do not. The findings highlight the level of glutamine, an essential nutrient for cancer development, as a determinant of breast cancer response to select anticancer therapies, and identify a marker associated with glutamine uptake, for potential prognosis and stratification of breast cancer therapy. "Our study indicates that a protein called RNF5 ...

McGill researchers have discovered, for the first time, the importance of a key epigenetic regulator in the development of the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with learning, memory and neural stem cells. Epigenetic regulators change the way specific genes function without altering their DNA sequence. By working with mutant mice as models, the research team, led by Prof. Xiang-Jiao Yang, of McGill's Goodman Cancer Center & Department of Medicine, McGill University Health Center, was able to link the importance of a specific epigenetic regulator known as BRPF1 ...

The combination of stress and heavy depression can significantly increase heart patient's risk of death or heart attack, according to new research in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, an American Heart Association journal. The study examined the effect of high stress levels and high depressive symptoms among nearly 5,000 heart patients. Researchers concluded that risk is amplified when both conditions are present, thus validating the concept of a "psychosocial perfect storm." "The increase in risk accompanying high stress and high depressive symptoms ...

A review of nutrition and weight-loss interventions for people with impaired mobility found strategies are sorely lacking for people with neurological disabilities, according to a team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic. Interventions are overwhelmingly geared toward muscular disorders, leaving a gap in approaches that could help people with neurological disabilities become more active, eat healthier and lose weight, they conclude. The researchers wanted to learn more about interventions for people who, because of limited mobility, ...

Identifying loss of dignity and lack of respectful treatment as preventable harms in health care, researchers at Johns Hopkins have taken on the ambitious task of defining and ensuring respectful care in the high-stakes environment of the intensive care unit (ICU). Their novel, multi-method approach is presented in a dedicated supplement to the journal Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics. "In health care the importance of respect and dignity is often invoked, but has not been clearly defined in regard to treatment in the ICU," says Jeremy Sugarman, the Harvey M. Meyerhoff ...

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 10, 2015 -- Today marked the publication of the first ever genome-wide association study of rosacea, a common and incurable skin disorder. Led by Dr. Anne Lynn S. Chang of Stanford University's School of Medicine, and co-authored by 23andMe, the study is the first to identify genetic factors for this condition. Rosacea (pronounced roh-ZAY-sha) is estimated to affect more than 16 million people in the United States alone1. Symptoms typically include redness, visible blood vessels, and pimple-like sores on the skin of the central face, and ...

ANN ARBOR--Each year, millions of people lose billions of dollars in NCAA March Madness basketball pools. Still, most return the following year for another pummeling. But flipping a coin yields better results than carefully selecting brackets, says Dae Hee Kwak, assistant professor of sport management at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology. "I completed my own (informal) bracket alongside our study by literally flipping a coin 63 times," Kwak said. "I wanted to see if this outperformed the hard thought-out selections made by the study participants in ...

The sugar industry used several tactics to influence the setting of research priorities for the 1971 US National Caries Program (NCP), according to a study published by Cristin Kearns, Stanton Glantz and Laura Schmidt from the University of California San Francisco, US, in this week's PLOS Medicine. The researchers analyzed an archive of 319 internal sugar industry documents from 1959 to 1971 (the "Roger Adams papers") and US National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR) documents to explore how the sugar industry sought to influence the setting of research priorities ...

A newly discovered cache of industry documents reveals that the sugar industry worked closely with the National Institutes of Health in the 1960s and '70s to develop a federal research program focused on approaches other than sugar reduction to prevent tooth decay in American children. An analysis of those papers by researchers at UC San Francisco appears March 10, 2015 in the open-source scientific journal, PLOS Medicine. The archive of 319 industry documents, which were uncovered in a public collection at the University of Illinois, revealed that a sugar industry ...

A new technique for creating artificial DNA that is faster, more accurate and more flexible than existing methods has been developed by scientists at Imperial College London. The new system - called BASIC - is a major advance for the field of synthetic biology, which designs and builds organisms able to make useful products such as medicines, energy, food, materials and chemicals. To engineer new organisms, scientists build artificial genes from individual molecules and then put these together to create larger genetic constructs which, when inserted into a cell, will ...

Most military battlefield casualties die before reaching a surgical hospital. Of those soldiers who might potentially survive, most die from uncontrolled bleeding. In some cases, there's not much medics can do -- a tourniquet won't stop bleeding from a chest wound, and clotting treatments that require refrigerated or frozen blood products aren't always available in the field. That's why University of Washington researchers have developed a new injectable polymer that strengthens blood clots, called PolySTAT. Administered in a simple shot, the polymer finds any unseen ...

How much does health care really cost? UCLA researchers have for the first time described cost across an entire care process for a common condition called benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) using time-driven activity-based costing. They found a 400 percent discrepancy between the least and most expensive ways to treat the condition. The finding takes on even further importance as there isn't any proven difference in outcomes between the lower and higher cost treatments, said study first author Dr. Alan Kaplan, a resident physician in the UCLA Department of Urology. "The ...

Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris have identified a method for manufacturing longer-lasting and stronger forms of glass. The research could lead to more durable display screens, fiber optic cables, windows and other materials, including cement. Glasses are liquids that are cooled in the manufacturing process to reach a stable "frozen liquid" state. However, as glass ages and is exposed to temperature variations, it continues to flow or "relax," causing it to change shape. This ...

The sun emitted two mid-level solar flares on March 9, 2015: The first peaked at 7:54 pm EDT and the second at 11:24 pm EDT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured images of the flares, which were classified as an M5.8-class and an M5.1-class, respectively. These were the second and third flares from the same active region -- numbered Active Region 12297 -- after it rotated over the left side of the sun on March 7. INFORMATION: ...

An in-car alarm that sounds when sensors on the vehicle detect an imminent crash could cut crash rates from 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 for drivers over the of 60 suffering tiredness on long journeys, according to a study published in the International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics. Psychologist Carryl Baldwin of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA, and colleagues there and at the Sentara Norfolk General Sleep Center, emphasize how fatigue poses a persistent threat to transportation safety. Alarms that sound when a vehicle senses an imminent collision or ...

NASA's Terra satellite provided an outside look at Tropical Cyclone Pam while the RapidScat instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station provided an inside look at the surface winds generated by the storm. The GPM core satellite provided another inside look at Pam and provided data on where the heavy rainfall was occurring within the storm. On March 9 and 10, Tropical Cyclone Pam strengthened to hurricane-force as it neared Vanuatu in the Southern Pacific Ocean. On March 10 (11 p.m. local time), the Vanuatu Meteorology and Geo-Hazards Department (VMGD) ...

In an analysis of about 2,600 hospitalizations for severe sepsis, readmissions within 90 days were common, and approximately 40 percent occurred for diagnoses that could potentially be prevented or treated early to avoid hospitalization, according to a study in the March 10 issue of JAMA. Patients are frequently rehospitalized within 90 days after having severe sepsis. Little is known, however, about the reasons for readmission and whether they can be reduced. Hallie C. Prescott, M.D., M.Sc., of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and colleagues examined the most ...

The prevalence of type 2 diabetes among 25,000 patients with familial hypercholesterolemia (a genetic disorder characterized by high low-density lipoprotein [LDL] cholesterol levels) was significantly lower than among unaffected relatives, with the prevalence varying by the type of gene mutation, according to a study in the March 10 issue of JAMA. Statins have been associated with increased risk for diabetes, but the cause for this is not clear. One theory is that statins increase expression of LDL receptors and increase cholesterol uptake into cells including the pancreas, ...