EAST LANSING, Mich. - Take two poisonous mushrooms, and call me in the morning. While no doctor would ever write this prescription, toxic fungi may hold the secrets to tackling deadly diseases. A team of Michigan State University scientists has discovered an enzyme that is the key to the lethal potency of poisonous mushrooms. The results, published in the current issue of the journal Chemistry and Biology, reveal the enzyme's ability to create the mushroom's molecules that harbor missile-like proficiency in attacking and annihilating a single vulnerable target in the ...

Some National Football League (NFL) players have been seeking out unproven stem cell therapies to help accelerate recoveries from injuries, according to a new paper from Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. While most players seem to receive treatment within the United States, several have traveled abroad for therapies unavailable domestically and may be unaware of the risks involved, the paper found. The paper is published in the 2014 World Stem Cell Report, which is a special supplement to the journal Stem Cells and Development and is the official publication ...

Today's smartphones are designed to entertain and are increasingly marketed to young adults as leisure devices. Not surprisingly, research suggests that young adults most often use their phones for entertainment purposes rather than for school or work. With this in mind, three Kent State University researchers, Andrew Lepp, Ph.D., Jacob Barkley, Ph.D. and Jian Li, Ph.D., and a Kent State graduate student, Saba Salehi-Esfahani, surveyed a random sample of 454 college students to examine how different types of cell phone users experience daily leisure. The trio from ...

Boston, MA - A study published this week in Genetics in Medicine is the first to explore new parents' attitudes toward newborn genomic testing. The findings suggest that if newborn genomic testing becomes available, there would be robust interest among new parents, regardless of their demographic background. The study, led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Boston Children's Hospital, found that the majority of parents surveyed were interested in newborn genomic testing. As next-generation whole-exome and genome sequencing is integrated into clinical ...

TORONTO, Dec. 4, 2014 - Results from an ongoing survey conducted by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) show that 2.2 per cent of adults --or over 230,000 people in Ontario, Canada -- seriously contemplated suicide in the last year. The 2013 edition of the CAMH Monitor, released today, included questions about suicidal ideation for the first time in the survey's history. "Suicide is a major public health issue, and these data confirm that large numbers of Ontario adults report having suicidal thoughts," said Dr. Hayley Hamilton, CAMH scientist and co-principal ...

Insecticides aimed at controlling early-season crop pests, such as soil-dwelling grubs and maggots, can increase slug populations, thus reducing crop yields, according to researchers at Penn State and the University of South Florida. "Neonicotinoids are the most widely used insecticides in the world," said Margaret Douglas, graduate student in entomology, Penn State. "Seed applications of neonicotinoids are often viewed as cheap insurance against pest problems, but our results suggest that they can sometimes worsen pest problems and should be used with care." According ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- It's no secret that low-birth-weight babies face significantly greater risks for certain health problems early on, such as respiratory distress or infection. Now, a new study from researchers at the University of Florida and Northwestern University shows that lower weights at birth also have an adverse effect on children's performance in school, which is likely due to the early health struggles small babies often face. Using a unique set of data that matched birth and school records from 1.6 million children born in Florida between 1992 and 2002, ...

Nalmefene (trade name Selincro) has been approved since February 2013 for people with alcohol dependence who currently drink a lot of alcohol, but who do not have physical withdrawal symptoms and who do not require immediate detoxification. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether the drug offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapy in this patient group. According to the findings, such an added benefit is not proven: In its dossier, the drug manufacturer only presented data for ...

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reveals the role of a receptor protein derived from a gene that has been linked to human growth. Co-author Stefano Costanzi, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biochemistry at American University, developed the three-dimensional computer model of the receptor that appears in the study. "As the study reveals the receptor's role in growth, it may ultimately lead to the development of drugs to treat those affected with conditions that alter growth, such as gigantism or dwarfism," Costanzi said. "The construction of the ...

The intermittent light emitted by pulsars, the most precise timekeepers in the universe, allows scientists to verify Einstein's theory of relativity, especially when these objects are paired up with another neutron star or white dwarf that interferes with their gravity. However, this theory could be analysed much more effectively if a pulsar with a black hole were found, except in two particular cases, according to researchers from Spain and India. Pulsars are very dense neutron stars that are the size of a city (their radius approaches ten kilometres), which, like lighthouses ...

A University of Texas at Dallas professor applied robot control theory to enable powered prosthetics to dynamically respond to the wearer's environment and help amputees walk. In research available online and in an upcoming print issue of IEEE Transactions on Robotics, wearers of the robotic leg could walk on a moving treadmill almost as fast as an able-bodied person. "We borrowed from robot control theory to create a simple, effective new way to analyze the human gait cycle," said Dr. Robert Gregg, a faculty member in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer ...

New Rochelle, NY, December 4, 2014--Recommendations by physician groups to avoid bedsharing among mothers and their babies are intended to reduce sleep-related infant deaths. But evidence suggests that the risks of bedsharing have been over-emphasized, advice never to bedshare is unrealistic, and avoiding bedsharing may interfere with breastfeeding, according to an article in Breastfeeding Medicine, the official journal of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Breastfeeding Medicine website ...

New genetic research reveals that a small group of hunger-gatherers now living in Southern Africa once was so large that it comprised the majority of living humans during most of the past 150,000 years. Only during the last 22,000 years have the other African ethnicities, including the ones giving rise to Europeans and Asians, become vastly most numerous. Now the Khoisan (who sometimes call themselves Bushmen) number about 100,000 individuals, while the rest of humanity numbers 7 billion. Their lives and ways have remained unaltered for hundreds of generations, with only ...

SEATTLE--Pragmatic clinical trials--real-life tests done in real-world settings--are increasingly important for answering pressing questions about how best to deliver health care. But these pragmatic trials require close collaboration between two professional groups who often have contrasting styles. One group is researchers, who follow structure like classical musicians. The other is and health care providers and administrators, who may need to improvise like jazz musicians. How in the world can such disparate players make beautiful music together? "The key is not just ...

MAYWOOD, Il. - Medical schools have an ethical obligation to change admission policies in order to accept applications from undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers, according to an article in the December, 2014 issue of the journal Academic Medicine. Not allowing Dreamers to apply to medical school "represents a kind of unjustified discrimination and violates the basic ethical principle of the equality of human beings," write co-authors Mark G. Kuczewski, PhD and Linda Brubaker, MD, MS of Loyola University Chicago Stritch of Medicine. Academic Medicine is the journal ...

Taking inspiration from nature, researchers have created a versatile model to predict how stalagmite-like structures form in nuclear processing plants - as well as how lime scale builds up in kettles. "It's a wonderful example of how complex mathematical models can have everyday applications," said Dr Duncan Borman, from the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Leeds, a co-author of the study. The main aim of the research, which is published in print today in the journal Computers & Chemical Engineering, is to reduce the number of potentially harmful manual ...

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) and Penn State University in the United States have successfully discovered one of modern human's ancient lineages through the sequencing of genes. World-renowned geneticist from NTU, Professor Stephan Christoph Schuster, who led an international research team from Singapore, United States and Brazil, said this is the first time that the history of mankind populations has been analysed and matched to Earth's climatic conditions over the last 200,000 years. Their breakthrough findings are published today ...

Wetlands are among the most productive ecosystems on Earth. Yet with increasing urbanization and agricultural expansion, wetlands around the globe are in danger. Better mapping of wetlands worldwide will help in their protection. But compiling globe-spanning maps of wetlands is impeded by the dramatic diversity and evolving dynamics of wetlands, and by myriad difficulties in doing field work. To develop a better model, Gong Peng and other scientists at the State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing incorporated hydrologic, ...

A natural substance present in red wine, resveratrol, inhibits the formation of inflammatory factors that trigger cardiovascular diseases. This has been established by a research team at the Department of Pharmacology of the University Medical Center of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (JGU) working in collaboration with researchers of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena and the University of Vienna. Their results have recently been published in the scientific journal Nucleic Acids Research. Despite the fact that they eat more fatty foods, the French tend ...

When you go to bed, and how long you sleep at a time, might actually make it difficult for you to stop worrying. So say Jacob Nota and Meredith Coles of Binghamton University in the US, who found that people who sleep for shorter periods of time and go to bed very late at night are often overwhelmed with more negative thoughts than those who keep more regular sleeping hours. The findings appear in Springer's journal Cognitive Therapy and Research. People are said to have repetitive negative thinking when they have bothersome pessimistic thoughts that seem to repeat in ...

This news release is available in German. In quantum optics, generating entangled and spatially separated photon pairs (e.g. for quantum cryptography) is already a reality. So far, it has, however, not been possible to demonstrate an analogous generation and spatial separation of entangled electron pairs in solids. Physicists from Leibniz University Hannover and from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) have now taken a decisive step in this direction. They have demonstrated for the first time the on-demand emission of electron pairs from a semiconductor ...

Some patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have changes in the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene, which can drive the development of their cancer. A drug recently developed by Pfizer, crizotinib, targets ALK and is currently given to patients with ALK positive lung cancer when their cancer has worsened after initial chemotherapy. Now doctors have investigated the use of crizotinib in patients with ALK positive lung cancer who have not yet received any chemotherapy treatment. Dr Fiona Blackhall, a senior lecturer in The University of Manchester's Institute ...

New York | Heidelberg, 4 December 2014 Studying the motion of electrons in a disordered environment is no simple task. Often, understanding such effects requires a quantum simulator designed to expose them in a different physical setup. This was precisely the approach adopted by Denis Makarov and Leonid Kon'kov from the Victor I. Il'ichev Pacific Oceanological Institute in Vladivostok in a new study published in EPJ B. They relied on a simulator of electronic motion subjected to noise stemming from a flux of sound waves. Their findings could lead to semi-conductor devices ...

A new, innovative "dashboard" from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) won't help you drive your car, but it will help enable reproducible research in biology. In a recent paper in the journal Nature Communications,* an international multi-laboratory team demonstrates a new software tool, the "erccdashboard," to evaluate the performance of experimental methods used to study gene expression. The analysis tool is designed for use with RNA spike-in controls developed by the NIST-hosted External RNA Controls Consortium (ERCC**). These ERCC controls are ...

Scientists from the Institute of Zoology with the Chinese Academy of Sciences have devoted years of their careers to study the astounding diversity hidden in the depths of the Xishuangbanna tropical rain forests. In a recent paper published in the open access journal ZooKeys Prof. Shuqiang Li and his team reveal 30 new spider species, which constitutes a minor share of what is yet to be found in this biodiversity hotspot. Xishuangbanna is situated in the southern part of Yunnan with the Lancang (Mekong) River flowing through it. The region is well-known for its rich biodiversity ...