MADISON, Wis. – The small but charismatic Hawaiian bobtail squid is known for its predator-fooling light organ. To survive, the nocturnal cephalopod depends on a symbiotic association with a luminescent bacterium that gives it the ability to mimic moonlight on the surface of the ocean and, in the fashion of a Klingon cloaking device, deceive barracuda and other fish that would happily make a meal of the small creature. The relationship between the squid and the bacterium Vibrio fischeri is well chronicled, but writing in the current issue of the journal Proceedings ...

The Synthetic Biology Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is releasing the results of a new set of focus groups, which find continued low awareness of synthetic biology among the general public. The focus groups also sought opinions on the emerging field of neural engineering. The focus group results support the findings of a quantitative national poll conducted by Hart Research Associates in January 2013, which found just 23 percent of respondents reported they had heard a lot (6 percent) or some (17 percent) about synthetic biology. The ...

The fixed combination of the drugs dapagliflozin and metformin (trade name: Xigduo) has been approved since January 2014 for adults with type 2 diabetes in whom diet and exercise do not provide adequate glycaemic control. In an early benefit assessment pursuant to the Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products (AMNOG), the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) now examined whether this new drug combination offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapy. No such added benefit can be derived from the dossier, however, ...

Depressive symptoms seem to focus mothers' responses on minimizing their own distress, which may come at the expense of focusing on the impact their responses have on their children, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Depressive symptoms are common among mothers, and these symptoms are linked with worse developmental outcomes for children. The new study, which followed 319 mothers and their children over a two-year period, helps to explain why parenting competence seems to deteriorate as parents' ...

PRINCETON, N.J.—Stories about wartime atrocities and torture methods, like waterboarding and beatings, often include justifications – despite whether the rationale is legitimate. Now, a study by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School shows how those justifications actually creep into people's memories of war, excusing the actions of their side. The researchers report in Psychological Science shows how Americans' motivation to remember information that absolves American soldiers of atrocities alters their memories. "People are motivated to remember information ...

WORCESTER, MA – It only takes one time. That's the message of a new study by scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School on binge drinking. Their research found that a single episode of binge drinking can have significant negative health effects resulting in bacteria leaking from the gut, leading to increased levels of toxins in the blood. Published online in PLOS ONE, the study showed that these bacterial toxins, called endotoxins, caused the body to produce immune cells involved in fever, inflammation, and tissue destruction. "We found that a single ...

Ann Arbor, MI, May 15, 2014 – E-cigarettes are gaining mainstream attention as a competitor to traditional cigarettes. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign wanted to examine changes in e-cigarette awareness, how harmful people believe them to be, and if those attitudes have any connection to smoking cessation attempts. They found that while awareness of e-cigarettes has increased significantly, smokers are less inclined to consider them safer than cigarettes. Also, investigators discovered that awareness did ...

A team of Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) researchers have proposed that an "on and off" epigenetic switch could be a common mechanism behind the development of different types of cancer. Epigenetics is the phenomena whereby genetically identical cells express their genes differently, resulting in different physical traits. Researchers from the Boston University Cancer Center recently published two articles about this in Anticancer Research and Epigenomics. The current paradigm states that cancer develops from environmental and genetic changes to cancer ...

New Rochelle, NY, May 15, 2014—Type 2 diabetes greatly increases a person's risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD). A new study showing that cardiovascular risk factors such as elevated blood pressure and cholesterol levels differ significantly between men and women is published in Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics (DTT), a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the DTT website at http://www.liebertpub.com/dtt. Joni Strom Williams, MD, MPH and coauthors from Medical University of South Carolina and Ralph ...

VIDEO: A new study uses carbon isotope dating to determine the first precise age for this bed, and ties the western coast of Africa to 30 million years of global geologic... Click here for more information. Paleontologists at Southern Methodist University have measured the carbon isotopes in marine fossils to precisely date for the first time 30 million years of sediments along Africa's South Atlantic shoreline. The researchers matched the pattern of ratios of carbon-13 and ...

Jupiter's trademark Great Red Spot — a swirling storm feature larger than Earth — is shrinking. This downsizing, which is changing the shape of the spot from an oval into a circle, has been known about since the 1930s, but now these striking new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images capture the spot at a smaller size than ever before. Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a churning anticyclonic [1]. It shows up in images of the giant planet as a conspicuous deep red eye embedded in swirling layers of pale yellow, orange and white. Winds inside this Jovian storm rage at immense ...

NANOGENERATORS are innovative self-powered energy harvesters that convert kinetic energy created from vibrational and mechanical sources into electrical power, removing the need of external circuits or batteries for electronic devices. This innovation is vital in realizing sustainable energy generation in isolated, inaccessible, or indoor environments and even in the human body. Nanogenerators, a flexible and lightweight energy harvester on a plastic substrate, can scavenge energy from the extremely tiny movements of natural resources and human body such as wind, water ...

Beverly, MA, May 15, 2014 – Less aggressive anticoagulation therapy, combined with low-dose aspirin, can be used safely in conjunction with a newer generation mechanical heart valve. These findings from the first phase of a randomized clinical trial are published in The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, an official publication of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery. Patients under 65 years of age requiring heart valve replacement have had to choose between a mechanical valve that may last a lifetime but requires aggressive anti-clotting treatment ...

Heavy social drinkers who report greater stimulation and reward from alcohol are more likely to develop alcohol use disorder over time, report researchers from the University of Chicago, May 15 in the journal Biological Psychiatry. The findings run counter to existing hypotheses that innate tolerance to alcohol drives alcoholism. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled study, a team led by Andrea King, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago, analyzed the subjective response of 104 young adult heavy social drinkers to alcohol ...

A biologist and a psychologist at the University of York have joined forces with a drug discovery group at Lundbeck in Denmark to develop a potential route to new therapies for the treatment of Parkinson's Disease (PD). Dr Chris Elliott, of the Department of Biology, and Dr Alex Wade, of the Department of Psychology, have devised a technique that could both provide an early warning of the disease and result in therapies to mitigate its symptoms. In research reported in Human Molecular Genetics, they created a more sensitive test which detected neurological changes before ...

WASHINGTON - Trusting a stranger may have more to do with feeling morally obligated to show respect for someone else's character than actually believing the person is trustworthy, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. "Trust is crucial not just for established relationships, it's also especially vital between strangers within social groups who have no responsibility toward each other outside of a single, transitory interaction. eBay or farmers' markets couldn't exist without trust among strangers," said lead author David Dunning, ...

Exploding supernovae are a phenomenon that is still not fully understood. The trouble is that the state of nuclear matter in stars cannot be reproduced on Earth. In a recent paper published in EPJ E, Yves Pomeau from the University of Arizona, USA, and his French colleagues from the CNRS provide a new model of supernovae represented as dynamical systems subject to a loss of stability, just before they explode. Because similar stability losses also occur in dynamical systems in nature, this model could be used to predict natural catastrophes before they happen. Previous ...

An international study, led by the University of Southampton, has led to the creation of the world's first global database of jellyfish records to map jellyfish populations in the oceans. Scientific and media debate regarding future trends, and subsequent ecological, biogeochemical and societal impacts, of jellyfish and jellyfish blooms in a changing ocean is hampered by a lack of information about jellyfish biomass and distribution from which to compare. To address this knowledge gap, scientists used the Jellyfish Database Initiative, or JeDI, to map jellyfish biomass ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 15, 2014 ─ "Mischievous responders" play the game of intentionally providing inaccurate answers on anonymous surveys, a widespread problem that can mislead research findings. However, new data analysis procedures may help minimize the impact of these "jokester youths," according to research published online today in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). VIDEO: Author Joseph P. Robinson-Cimpian discusses key findings: http://youtu.be/WFFaA74sygI. "Inaccurate Estimation of ...

Good news for Dads: Harvard researchers say the key to being a better parent is – literally – all in your head. In a study in mice, Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Howard Hughes Investigator Catherine Dulac have pinpointed galanin neurons in the brain's medial preoptic area (MPOA), that appear to regulate parental behavior. If similar neurons are at work in humans, it could offer clues to the treatment of conditions like post-partum depression. The study is described in a May 15 paper published in Nature. "If you look across different animal ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — First things first. If cancer patients are having trouble tolerating chemotherapy after chemoradiation and surgery, then try administering it beforehand. Reordering the regimen that way enabled all but six of 39 patients to undergo a full course of standard treatment for rectal cancer, according to research to be presented at the American Society for Clinical Oncology annual meeting in Chicago. Studies have shown that only about 60 percent of rectal cancer patients comply with postoperative chemotherapy, said lead researcher Dr. Kimberly ...

The scientists - Boris Kuzin, Ekaterina Nikitina, Roman Cherezov, Julia Vorontsova, Mikhail Slezinger, Olga Zatsepina, Olga Simonova, Grigori Enikolopov and Elena Savvateeva-Popova - studied Drosophila flies, in whose genome weak mutations of two different genes were combined. The paper is published in the PLoS One. They concluded that these mutations synergistically strengthen their mutual phenotypic expression. In other words, the aggregate effect of these mutations is much greater than that which can be produced by one of them individually. The mutant flies bred by ...

The scientists – Alexander Zhavoronkov, Anton Buzdin, Andrey Garazha, Nickolay Borisov and Alexey Moskalev– have based the new research on their previously-developed methods in the study of cancer cells. Each cell uses particular schemes of molecular interaction, which physiologists call intercellular signaling pathways. A signaling pathway is a chain of sequential events of interaction between certain molecules which make the cell respond to stimulation. For example, hormone molecules first interact with the cell's membrane receptors, then the receptors engage with the ...

(TORONTO, Canada – May, 15, 2014) -- The overall quality of death of cancer patients who die in an urban Canadian setting with ready access to palliative care was found to be good to excellent in the large majority of cases, helping to dispel the myth that marked suffering at the end of life is inevitable. "Fear of dying is something almost every patient with advanced cancer or other life-threatening illness faces, and helping them, to achieve a "good death" is an important goal of palliative care," says Dr. Sarah Hales, Coordinator of Psychiatry Services, Psychosocial ...

Lincoln, Neb., May 15, 2014 -- In many rural communities hard hit by decades of population declines, young men increasingly outnumber young women, a new study of Kansas and Nebraska census data shows. In places with 800 or fewer residents, the proportion of young men increased by an average of nearly 40 percent as people went from their teens to their 20s. Those findings suggest leaders should consider the needs of young women in their economic and community development plans, said Robert Shepard, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln doctoral candidate ...