Irvine, Calif., Nov. 20, 2014 -- Recent studies showing acid ceramidase (AC) to be upregulated in melanoma, lung and prostate cancers have made the enzyme a desired target for novel synthetic inhibitor compounds. This week in Angewandte Chemie, a top journal in chemistry, UC Irvine and Italian Institute of Technology scientists describe the very first class of AC inhibitors that may aid in the efficacy of chemotherapies. AC, which is encoded by the ASAH1 gene, plays an important role in the regulation of cell fate, setting the balance between pro-aging/death and pro-life ...

A Washington family of four must spend 46 percent more on average to make ends meet today than 13 years ago, according to a new report from the University of Washington. The Self-Sufficiency Standard for Washington State 2014, released Thursday (Nov. 20), provides a sobering look at how much it costs individuals and families statewide to meet basic needs -- and how far short they're falling. The study found that Washington families with two adults, a preschooler and a school-aged child saw the costs of meeting their most basic requirements jump as much as 72 percent ...

A new discovery about the atomic structure of uranium dioxide will help scientists select the best computational model to simulate severe nuclear reactor accidents. Using the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility, researchers from DOE's Argonne National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory, along with Materials Development, Inc., Stony Brook University, and Carnegie Institution of Washington, found that the atomic structure of uranium dioxide (UO2) changes significantly when it melts. UO2 is the primary ...

The economic burden of diabetes in America continues to climb, exceeding more than $322 billion in excess medical costs and lost productivity in 2012, or more than $1,000 for every American, according to a study being published in the December issue of Diabetes Care that also includes a state-by-state breakdown of the prevalence and costs associated with diabetes. Additionally, increased costs associated with prediabetes and undiagnosed diabetes highlight the growing importance of prevention and early intervention. The study, which follows up on a similar report published ...

TAMPA, Fla. - Moffitt Cancer Center researchers are taking a unique approach to understanding and investigating cancer by utilizing evolutionary principles and computational modeling to examine the role of specific genetic mutations in the Darwinian struggle among tumor and normal cells during cancer growth. Cells become malignant by acquiring genetic mutations that lead to increased survival and reproduction. Many researchers in the past have viewed cancer progression as the result of unlimited accumulation of these genetic mutations. However, Moffitt researchers ...

Fast facts: The study shows that obesity leads to subclinical heart muscle injury and increases the risk for heart failure even among people without overt heart disease and independently of other cardiovascular risk factors such as diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. The silent heart damage was detected by using an ultrasensitive test that measures the levels of a protein released by the cells of the heart muscle during injury. The findings suggest that obesity is an independent driver of heart muscle damage, and that obese individuals, even when free ...

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators have developed a system to accurately track the dynamic process of falling asleep, something has not been possible with existing techniques. In their report in the October issue of the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology, the research team describes how combining key physiologic measurements with a behavioral task that does not interfere with sleep onset gives a better picture of the gradual process of falling asleep. In addition to being a powerful tool for future research, the system could provide valuable ...

New findings by a Johns Hopkins University-led team reveal long unknown details about carbon deep beneath the Earth's surface and suggest ways this subterranean carbon might have influenced the history of life on the planet. The team also developed a new, related theory about how diamonds form in the Earth's mantle. For decades scientists have had little understanding of how carbon behaved deep below the Earth's surface even as they learned more and more about the element's vital role at the planet's crust. Using a model created by Johns Hopkins geochemist Dimitri ...

Twenty-five years ago this month, the countries that compose the United Nations reached a landmark agreement that laid the foundation for much-needed strengthening of children's rights and protections in nearly every country around the world. Today, the Convention on the Rights of the Child remains the only formal global effort to improve children's rights and the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. Only three U.N. member nations have not ratified the treaty: Somalia, South Sudan and the United States. "The Convention on the Rights of the Child is a ...

Ebola GP protein covers the virus' surface and is shed from infected cells during infection. A study published on November 20th in PLOS Pathogens reports that shed GP can trigger massive dysregulation of the immune response and affect the permeability of blood vessels Ebola virus has seven genes. One of them, called GP, codes for two related proteins: a shorter secreted one and a longer one that spans the viral wall and sticks out of its surface. During virus infection, some of the surface GP is cut off by a human enzyme and is subsequently shed from infected cells. High ...

Researchers from the Montreal Neurological Institute have used a model inspired by patterns of epidemic disease spreading to map how misfolded proteins propagate within the brain. Proteins which fail to configure correctly (misfolded proteins) are associated with aging and several human neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's. In research published in this week's PLOS Computational Biology, Yasser Iturria Medina and colleagues analyze over 700 individual Amyloid-beta proteins imaging datasets to conclude that the propagation of these misfolded proteins, associated ...

An international team of researchers has shown that it may be possible to improve the effectiveness of the seasonal flu vaccine by 'pre-empting' the evolution of the influenza virus. In a study published today in the journal Science, the researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, describe how an immunological phenomenon they refer to as a 'back boost' suggests that it may be better to pre-emptively vaccinate against likely future strains than to use a strain already circulating in the human population. Influenza is a notoriously difficult virus against which to ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - Yellow fever is a disease that can result in symptoms ranging from fever to severe liver damage. Found in South America and sub-Saharan Africa, each year the disease results in 200,000 new cases and kills 30,000 people. About 900 million people are at risk of contracting the disease. Now a research team led by a biomedical scientist at the University of California, Riverside has determined that the yellow fever virus, a hemorrhagic fever virus, replicates primarily in the liver. Therefore, other organ failures that often follow in people with the ...

During the development of mammals, the growth and organization of digits are orchestrated by Hox genes, which are activated very early in precise regions of the embryo. These "architect genes" are themselves regulated by a large piece of adjacent DNA. A study led by Denis Duboule, professor at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, reveals that this same DNA regulatory sequence also controls the architect genes during the development of the external genitals. The results published in Science magazine, indicate ...

If you are an active senior who wants to stay younger, keep on running. A new study involving the University of Colorado Boulder and Humboldt State University shows that senior citizens who run several times a week for exercise expend about the same amount of energy walking as a typical 20-year-old. But older people who walk for exercise rather than jog expend about the same amount of energy walking as older, sedentary adults, and expend up to 22 percent more energy walking than the 20-something crowd. The study, led by Humboldt State Professor Justus Ortega, was published ...

Animal teeth, bones and plant remains have helped researchers from Cambridge, China and America to pinpoint a date for what could be the earliest sustained human habitation at high altitude. Archaeological discoveries from the 'roof of the world' on the Tibetan Plateau indicate that from 3,600 years ago, crop growing and the raising of livestock was taking place year-round at hitherto unprecedented altitudes. The findings, published today in Science, demonstrate that across 53 archaeological sites spanning 800 miles, there is evidence of sustained farming and human ...

China's second great wall, a vast seawall covering more than half of the country's mainland coastline, is a foundation for financial gain - and also a dyke holding a swelling rush of ecological woes. A group of international sustainability scholars, including Jianguo "Jack" Liu, director of Michigan State University's Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, in a paper published today in Science magazine, outline the sweeping downsides of one of China's efforts to fuel its booming economy, downsides that extend beyond China. China's coastal regions are only ...

The Himalaya features some of the most impressive gorges on Earth that have been formed by rivers. The geologic history of the famous Tsangpo Gorge, in the eastern Himalaya, now needs to be rewritten. A team of German, Chinese, and American geoscientists have namely discovered a canyon, filled with more than 500 m of sediments beneath the bed of the present-day Yarlung Tsangpo River upstream from the gorge. Using drill cores, the scientists were able to reconstruct the former valley floor of this river, which allowed them to reconstruct the geological history of the Tsangpo ...

Doctors have long been mystified as to why HIV-1 rapidly sickens some individuals, while in others the virus has difficulties gaining a foothold. Now, a study of genetic variation in HIV-1 and in the cells it infects reported by University of Minnesota researchers in this week's issue of PLOS Genetics has uncovered a chink in HIV-1's armor that may, at least in part, explain the puzzling difference -- and potentially open the door to new treatments. HIV-1 harms people by invading immune system cells known as T lymphocytes, hijacking their molecular machinery to make more ...

A team of researchers from Caltech and the China Earthquake Administration has discovered an ancient, deep canyon buried along the Yarlung Tsangpo River in south Tibet, north of the eastern end of the Himalayas. The geologists say that the ancient canyon--thousands of feet deep in places--effectively rules out a popular model used to explain how the massive and picturesque gorges of the Himalayas became so steep, so fast. "I was extremely surprised when my colleagues, Jing Liu-Zeng and Dirk Scherler, showed me the evidence for this canyon in southern Tibet," says Jean-Philippe ...

Bangkok (Thailand)- A recent study from the Thai-Myanmar border highlights the severe and previously under-reported adverse impact of readily treatable tropical rickettsial illnesses, notably scrub typhus and murine typhus, on pregnancy outcomes, finding that more than one third of affected pregnancies resulted either in stillbirth or premature and/or low birth weight babies. Conducted by Prof Rose McGready and Assoc. Prof Daniel Henry Paris from the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit (SMRU) in Mae Sot, Thailand, and the Mahidol Oxford Research Unit (MORU) in Bangkok, affiliated ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Nov. 20, 2014) - A landmark study published today in the journal Science by an international group of scientists, led by the laboratory of Dr. Jayakrishna Ambati, professor & vice chair of the Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the University of Kentucky, reports that HIV/AIDS drugs that have been used for the last 30 years could be repurposed to treat age-related macular degeneration (AMD), as well as other inflammatory disorders, because of a previously undiscovered intrinsic and inflammatory activity those drugs possess. AMD is a progressive ...

Scientists developed a new method which allows to estimate the magnetic field of a distant exoplanet, i.e., a planet, which is located outside the Solar system and orbits a different star. Moreover, they managed to estimate the value of the magnetic moment of the planet HD 209458b.The group of scientists including one of the researchers of the Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia) published their article in the Science magazine. In the two decades which passed since the discovery of the first planet outside the Solar system, astronomers have made a great progress ...

MADISON, Wis. -- As real as that daydream may seem, its path through your brain runs opposite reality. Aiming to discern discrete neural circuits, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have tracked electrical activity in the brains of people who alternately imagined scenes or watched videos. "A really important problem in brain research is understanding how different parts of the brain are functionally connected. What areas are interacting? What is the direction of communication?" says Barry Van Veen, a UW-Madison professor of electrical and computer engineering. ...

MADISON, Wis. - The influenza virus, like all viruses, is a hijacker. It quietly slips its way inside cells, steals the machinery inside to make more copies of itself, and then -- having multiplied -- bursts out of the cell to find others to infect. Most drugs currently used to treat influenza are designed to attack the virus, to render it incapacitated. But influenza viruses are sneaky, capable of mutating to avoid destruction by the drug. In a comprehensive new study published today in the journal Cell Host and Microbe, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Yoshihiro ...