A study published today in Nature Genetics has revealed mutations that could have a major impact on the future diagnosis and treatment of many human diseases. Through an international collaboration, researchers at the Montreal Heart Institute (MHI) were able to identify a dozen mutations in the human genome that are involved in significant changes in complete blood counts and that explain the onset of sometimes severe biological disorders. The number of red and white blood cells and platelets in the blood is an important clinical marker, as it helps doctors detect many ...

The Neurogrid circuit board can simulate orders of magnitude more neurons and synapses than other brain mimics on the power it takes to run a tablet computer. Stanford scientists have developed a new circuit board modeled on the human brain, possibly opening up new frontiers in robotics and computing. For all their sophistication, computers pale in comparison to the brain. The modest cortex of the mouse, for instance, operates 9,000 times faster than a personal computer simulation of its functions. Not only is the PC slower, it takes 40,000 times more power to run, ...

Would you sacrifice one person to save five? Such moral choices could depend on whether you are using a foreign language or your native tongue. A new study from psychologists at the University of Chicago and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona finds that people using a foreign language take a relatively utilitarian approach to moral dilemmas, making decisions based on assessments of what's best for the common good. That pattern holds even when the utilitarian choice would produce an emotionally difficult outcome, such as sacrificing one life so others could live. "This ...

Bacteria could mop up naturally-occurring and man-made leaks of natural gases before they are released into the atmosphere and cause global warming - according to new research from the University of East Anglia. Findings published today in the journal Nature shows how a single bacterial strain (Methylocella silvestris) found in soil and other environments around the world can grow on both the methane and propane found in natural gas. It was originally thought that the ability to metabolize methane and other gaseous alkanes such as propane was carried out by different ...

Junhao Lin, a Vanderbilt University Ph.D. student and visiting scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has found a way to use a finely focused beam of electrons to create some of the smallest wires ever made. The flexible metallic wires are only three atoms wide: One thousandth the width of the microscopic wires used to connect the transistors in today's integrated circuits. Lin's achievement is described in an article published online on April 28 by the journal Nature Nanotechnology. According to his advisor Sokrates Pantelides, University Distinguished Professor ...

NEW YORK, NY (April 28, 2014) – Using somatic cell nuclear transfer, a team of scientists led by Dr. Dieter Egli at the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute and Dr. Mark Sauer at Columbia University Medical Center has created the first disease-specific embryonic stem cell line with two sets of chromosomes. As reported today in Nature, the scientists derived embryonic stem cells by adding the nuclei of adult skin cells to unfertilized donor oocytes using a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Embryonic stem cells were created from one ...

The gene mutation that causes Huntington's disease appears in every cell in the body, yet kills only two types of brain cells. Why? UCLA scientists used a unique approach to switch the gene off in individual brain regions and zero in on those that play a role in causing the disease in mice. Published in the April 28 online edition of Nature Medicine, the research sheds light on where Huntington's starts in the brain. It also suggests new targets and routes for therapeutic drugs to slow the devastating disease, which strikes an estimated 35,000 Americans. "From ...

Scientists' inability to replicate research findings using mice and rats has contributed to mounting concern over the reliability of such studies. Now, an international team of pain researchers led by scientists at McGill University in Montreal may have uncovered one important factor behind this vexing problem: the gender of the experimenters has a big impact on the stress levels of rodents, which are widely used in preclinical studies. In research published online April 28 in Nature Methods, the scientists report that the presence of male experimenters produced a ...

Scientists at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, along with collaborators at institutions in India, Italy, and Japan, have identified the first gene linked to childhood-onset familial dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), one of the most common heart muscle diseases in children. It is a progressive and potentially fatal heart condition resulting from an enlarged and weakened heart muscle. The study, published in Nature Genetics, also revealed a link between DCM and excessive activation of the protein, mTOR. Currently, there are several existing FDA-approved blocking ...

In a study published in Nature Genetics, scientists from the RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies in Japan, in collaboration with the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, the University of Copenhagen and the Joint Genome Institute (Walnut Creek, California) have discovered that "jumping DNA" known as retrotransposons—viral elements incorporated into the human genome—may play a key role in the maintenance of pluripotency, the ability of stem cells to differentiate into many different types of body cells. This story is part of a fundamental rethinking taking ...

BOSTON – Inherited mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 tumor suppressor genes are by far the most frequent contributors to hereditary cancer risk in the human population, often causing breast or ovarian cancer in young women of child-bearing age. Attempts to test the role that the BRCA genes play in regulating a repair process associated with genome duplication have proven frustratingly difficult in living mammalian cells. Now investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) report a new mechanism by which BRCA gene loss may accelerate cancer-promoting chromosome ...

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign use a printing process to assemble tiny cells into multilayer stacks for extraordinary levels of photovoltaic conversion efficiency. As an energy source, the Sun has always been a dependable provider. Although it freely shines on everyone, the ability to capture and convert the Sun's abundant energy is anything but free. However, new technologies aimed at achieving "full spectrum" operation in utility-scale photovoltaics may soon make solar energy a viable option. "A few simple ideas in materials science ...

Scientists studying brain diseases may need to look beyond nerve cells and start paying attention to the star-shaped cells known as "astrocytes," because they play specialized roles in the development and maintenance of nerve circuits and may contribute to a wide range of disorders, according to a new study by UC San Francisco researchers. In a study published online April 28, 2014 in Nature, the researchers report that malfunctioning astrocytes might contribute to neurodegenerative disorders such as Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS), and perhaps even to developmental disorders ...

It is generally well known that men have an overall shorter life expectancy compared to women. A recent study, led by Uppsala University researchers, shows a correlation between a loss of the Y chromosome in blood cells and both a shorter life span and higher mortality from cancer in other organs. Men have a shorter average life span than women and both the incidence and mortality in cancer is higher in men than in women. However, the mechanisms and possible risk factors behind this sex-disparity are largely unknown. Alterations in DNA of normal cells accumulate throughout ...

Stanford scientists have identified significant changes in the patterns of extreme wet and dry events that are increasing the risk of drought and flood in central India, one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. The discoveries, detailed in the April 28 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change, are the result of a new collaboration between climate scientists and statisticians that focused on utilizing statistical methods for analyzing rare geophysical events. These new approaches reveal that the intensity of extremely wet spells and the number of extremely ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Trampoline accidents sent an estimated 288,876 people, most of them children, to hospital emergency departments with broken bones from 2002 to 2011, at a cost of more than $400 million, according to an analysis by researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Including all injuries, not just fractures, hospital emergency rooms received more than 1 million visits from people injured in trampoline accidents during those 10 years, boosting the emergency room bills to just over $1 billion, according to the study. The research, published online ...

An international team of researchers has found that a subset of common butterfly species are emerging later than usual in urban areas located in warmer regions, raising questions about how the insects respond to significant increases in temperature. "We know that butterflies emerge earlier in North Carolina than they do in New England, because it's warmer," says Tyson Wepprich, a Ph.D. student at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work. "We also know that cities are heat sinks that are warmer than outlying areas. So we wanted to see whether butterflies would ...

Who had the privilege to spend eternal life next to the pharaoh? Close to the royal tombs in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings, excavations by Egyptologists from the University of Basel have identified the burial place of several children as well as other family members of two pharaohs. Basel Egyptologists of the University of Basel Kings' Valley Project have been working on tomb KV 40 in the Valley of the Kings close to the city of Luxor for three years. From the outside, only a depression in the ground indicated the presence of a subterranean tomb. Up to now, nothing ...

If a sibling commits a violent criminal act, the risk that a younger sibling may follow in their footsteps is more likely than the transmission of that behavior to an older sibling, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Lund University in Sweden. The findings provide insight into the social transmission of violent behaviors and suggest that environmental factors within families can be important when it comes to delinquent behavior. Down the road, the results may be used to inform strategies for prevention and treatment ...

Research at the University of Illinois has demonstrated that smartphone sensors — not just the ones meant to track your location — can leave real-time fingerprints unique to each individual device. An attacker could use such sensor data from a given smartphone to identify it ever after, almost making the user-trackable. Research by Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Professor Romit Roy Choudhury and graduate students Sanorita Dey and Nirupam Roy, demonstrated that these fingerprints exist within smartphone sensors, mainly because of imperfections during the ...

PITTSBURGH—Soft and cuddly aren't words used to describe the plastic or metal things typically produced by today's 3D printers. But a new type of printer developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research Pittsburgh can turn wool and wool blend yarns into fabric objects that people might actually enjoy touching. The device looks something like a cross between a 3D printer and a sewing machine and produces 3D objects made of a form of loose felt. Scott Hudson, a professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute who developed the felting printer with Disney ...

The isolation of graphene at the University in 2004 led to the discovery of many other 2D crystals. While graphene has an unrivalled set of superlatives, these crystals cover a large range of properties: from the most conductive to isolating, from transparent to optically active. The next step is to combine several of these crystals in a 3D stack. This way, one can create 'heterostructures' with novel functionalities – capable of delivering applications as yet beyond the imagination of scientists and commercial partners. The first examples of such heterostructures already ...

(PHILADELPHIA) -- Most cancer vaccines have not lived up to their promise in clinical trials. The reason, many researchers suspect, is that the immune cells that would help the body destroy the tumor – even those reactions boosted by cancer vaccines – are actively suppressed. Now, researchers at Thomas Jefferson University have found that a single cell type is actively suppressed in several experimental cancer vaccines, paving the way toward methods to break suppression and improve the effectiveness of cancer vaccines. The work was published this week online in the European ...

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have observed magnetic properties typically associated with those observed in rare-earth elements in iron. These properties are observed in a new iron based compound that does not contain rare earth elements, when the iron atom is positioned between two nitrogen atoms. The discovery opens the possibility of using iron to provide both the magnetism and permanence in high-strength permanent magnets, like those used in direct-drive wind turbines or electric motors in hybrid cars. The results appeared in Nature Communications. In ...

New Michigan State University research aims to help doctors estimate the size of newborns with a new set of birth weight measurements based on birth records from across the country. "More than 7 million records were reviewed," said Nicole Talge, an assistant professor in MSU's Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, who co-led the study which is now available in the journal Pediatrics. "Our research looked at live births in the United States during 2009-2010 and using a newly developed method, corrected unlikely gestational ages during that time. This led to changes ...