What seemed to be rock-solid assumptions about the nature of small asteroids may end in collections of rubble or even a cloud of dust, but in such findings lies the lure of the unexpected. Northern Arizona University researchers David Trilling and Michael Mommert, while playing a well-defined role in the NASA Asteroid Initiative, are beginning to wonder if they have found a separate path of investigation. The two researchers presented their findings about asteroid 2011 MD on Thursday during a NASA event updating progress on the path to capturing a small asteroid and ...

Only 15% of patients with squamous cell lung cancer – the second most common lung cancer – survive five years past diagnosis. Little is understood about how the deadly disease arises, preventing development of targeted therapies that could serve as a second line of defense once standard chemotherapy regimens fail. Published online in Cell Reports on June 19, Huntsman Cancer Institute investigators report that misregulation of two genes, sox2 and lkb1, drives squamous cell lung cancer in mice. The discovery uncovers new treatment strategies, and provides a clinically relevant ...

WASHINGTON, June 19, 2014—Before they excise a tumor, surgeons need to determine exactly where the cancerous cells lie. Now, research published today in The Optical Society's (OSA) journal Optics Letters details a new technique that could give surgeons cheaper and more lightweight tools, such as goggles or hand-held devices, to identify tumors in real time in the operating room. The new technology, developed by a team at the University of Arizona and Washington University in St. Louis, is a dual-mode imager that combines two systems—near-infrared fluorescent imaging to ...

Astronomers have discovered strange and unexpected behaviour around the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy NGC 5548. The international team of researchers detected a clumpy gas stream flowing quickly outwards and blocking 90 percent of the X-rays emitted by the black hole. This activity could provide insights into how supermassive black holes interact with their host galaxies. The discovery of the unusual behaviour in NGC 5548 is the result of an intensive observing campaign using major ESA and NASA space observatories, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space ...

LIVERMORE, Calif. – Imagine a material with the same weight and density as aerogel -- a material so light it's called 'frozen smoke' -- but with 10,000 times more stiffness. This material could have a profound impact on the aerospace and automotive industries as well as other applications where lightweight, high-stiffness and high-strength materials are needed. Lawrence Livermore and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a material with these properties using additive micro-manufacturing processes. The research team's findings are published ...

URBANA, Ill. – What social skills does a three-year-old bring to interactions with a new peer partner? If he has strong bonds to his parents, the child is likely to be a positive, responsive playmate, and he'll be able to adapt to a difficult peer by asserting his needs, according to a new University of Illinois study published in Developmental Psychology. "Securely attached children are more responsive to suggestions or requests made by a new peer partner. A child who has experienced a secure attachment relationship with caregivers is likely to come into a new peer relationship ...

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. – June 19, 2014) St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists have discovered how an important "on" switch is attached to the machinery that cells rely on to adapt thousands of proteins to meet changing conditions. The research appears in the current issue of the journal Cell. The switch is a small protein called NEDD8. Problems with NEDD8 have been associated with several cancers, developmental disorders and infectivity of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS. Drugs that target NEDD8 are in anti-cancer clinical trials. The ability ...

NEW YORK, NY (June 19, 2014) — For the first time, a therapy has been found that can delay progression of metastatic uveal melanoma, a rare and deadly form of melanoma of the eye. Results from a multicenter clinical trial show that a new drug called selumetinib increases progression-free survival, the length of time during and after treatment that a patient with metastases lives with the disease without it progressing. The findings were published today in the online edition of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Although the effects of the drug were ...

New Rochelle, NY, June 19, 2014—Plasminogen activators are proteins involved in the breakdown of blood clots, and an elevated level of plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) is associated with an increased risk for clotting and cardiovascular disease. No PAI-1 inhibitors are currently available for clinical use, but a novel therapeutic approach using a targeted RNA aptamer drug that has been shown to block PAI-1 activity and prevent PAI-1-associated vascular events is described in Nucleic Acid Therapeutics, a peer-reviewed journal from Nucleic Acid Therapeutics. The ...

Covert changes of mind can be discovered by tracking neural activity when subjects make decisions, researchers from New York University and Stanford University have found. Their results, which appear in the journal Current Biology, offer new insights into how we make decisions and point to innovative ways to study this process in the future. "The methods used in this study allowed us to see the idiosyncratic nature of decision making that was inaccessible before," explains Roozbeh Kiani, an assistant professor in NYU's Center for Neural Science and the study's lead author. ...

UCLA researchers led by Dr. Brigitte Gomperts have discovered the inner workings of the process thought to be the first stage in the development of lung cancer. Their study explains how factors that regulate the growth of adult stem cells that repair tissue in the lungs can lead to the formation of precancerous lesions. Findings from the three-year study could eventually lead to new personalized treatments for lung cancer, which is responsible for an estimated 29 percent of U.S. cancer deaths, making it the deadliest form of the disease. The study was published online ...

Equine influenza viruses from the early 2000s can easily infect the respiratory tracts of dogs, while those from the 1960s are only barely able to, according to research published ahead of print in the Journal of Virology. The research also suggests that canine and human influenza viruses can mix, and generate new influenza viruses. Canine influenza is a relatively new disease. The first appearance is believed to be in 2003, as a result of direct transfer of a single equine influenza virus to dogs in a large greyhound training facility and was subsequently carried to ...

A University of Central Florida research team has developed a facial recognition tool that promises to be useful in rapidly matching pictures of children with their biological parents and in potentially identifying photos of missing children as they age. The work verifies that a computer is capable of matching pictures of parents and their children. The study will be presented at the nation's premier event for the science of computer vision - the IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Columbus, Ohio, which begins Monday, June 23. Graduate Student ...

(Vancouver – June 19, 2014) – A new mobile app developed by researchers at the Child & Family Research Institute (CFRI) at BC Children's Hospital and the University of British Columbia can measure respiratory rate in children roughly six times faster than the standard manual method. According to findings published this month in PLOS One, RRate can reliably measure respiratory rate in an average of 9.9 seconds. Currently, health care workers typically measure respiratory rate by counting a patient's breaths for 60 seconds using a stop watch. "Mobile phones are changing ...

A team of scientists, led by principal investigator David D. Schlaepfer, PhD, professor in the Department of Reproductive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that small molecule inhibitors to a protein called focal adhesion kinase (FAK) selectively prevent the growth of ovarian cancer cells as tumor spheroids. The findings come in a pair of studies published online this week in the journals Gynecologic Oncology and Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. Ovarian cancer is a leading cause of female cancer death in the United States. On ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a technique to control populations of the Australian sheep blowfly – a major livestock pest in Australia and New Zealand – by making female flies dependent upon a common antibiotic to survive. Dr. Max Scott, professor of entomology at NC State, and his research team genetically modified lines of female Australian sheep blowflies (Lucilia cuprina) so that they required doses of tetracycline in order to live. Female blowflies that did not receive the antibiotic died in the late larval or pupal stages, before ...

HOUSTON – (June 19, 2014) – Rice University scientists have created a one-step process for producing highly efficient materials that let the maximum amount of sunlight reach a solar cell. The Rice lab of chemist Andrew Barron found a simple way to etch nanoscale spikes into silicon that allows more than 99 percent of sunlight to reach the cells' active elements, where it can be turned into electricity. The research by Barron and Rice graduate student and lead author Yen-Tien Lu appears in the Royal Society of Chemistry's Journal of Materials Chemistry A. The more ...

The circuitry of the central nervous system is immensely complex and, as a result, sometimes confounding. When scientists conduct research to unravel the inner workings at a cellular level, they are sometimes surprised by what they find. Patrick Keeley, a postdoctoral scholar in Benjamin Reese's laboratory at UC Santa Barbara's Neuroscience Research Institute, had such an experience. He spent years analyzing different cell types in the retina, the light-sensitive layer of tissue lining the inner surface of the eye that mediates the first stages of visual processing. The ...

THUNDER BAY – June 19, 2014 – With the Ontario government poised to spend $1 billion to promote development in the Ring of Fire, a new paper from Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Canada and Ecojustice identifies risks inherent in the current planning legislation and provides a solution. Ontario's Far North is the world's largest ecologically intact area of boreal forest. It contains North America's largest wetlands, is home to a number of at-risk species, including caribou and lake sturgeon, and is a one of the world's critical storehouses of carbon. First Nations ...

Following a thorough peer-review process, the researchers who previously announced the detection of B-mode polarization in a patch of the microwave sky have published their findings today in the journal Physical Review Letters (PDF available at http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.241101). The researchers provide some evidence that the signals they have found may be the result of gravitational waves from the earliest moments of the universe's existence and thus might constitute the first observation of phenomena from the rapid expansion of the universe ...

Pancreatic cancer tumors addicted to mutant Kras signaling for their growth and progression have a ready-made substitute to tap if they're ever forced to go cold-turkey on the mutant oncogene, scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report in the journal Cell. When researchers dialed up mutant Kras to spur pancreatic cancer growth in mice, and then shut it down, a group of recurrent tumors grew back independently of mutant Kras, reliant on a different oncogene. "There's a great deal of effort under way trying to find ways to target Kras or some ...

Biologists have long considered cells to function like self-cleaning ovens, chewing up and recycling their own worn out parts as needed. But a new study challenges that basic principle, showing that some nerve cells found in the eye pass off their old energy-producing factories to neighboring support cells to be "eaten." The find, which may bear on the roots of glaucoma, also has implications for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other diseases that involve a buildup of "garbage" in brain cells. The study was led by Nicholas Marsh-Armstrong, ...

DOHA, QATAR (June 17, 2014) -- HIV epidemics are emerging among people who inject drugs in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Though HIV infection levels were historically very low in the Middle East and North Africa, substantial levels of HIV transmission and emerging HIV epidemics have been documented among people who inject drugs in at least one-third of the countries of this region, according to findings published today in PLOS Medicine. The HIV epidemics among people who inject drugs (PWID) are recent overall, starting largely around 2003 and ...

A few years ago, a molecule known as "JQ1" was developed, which can block so called BET bromodomain proteins. This switch off the known cancer gene MYC thereby preventing cancer cells from dividing. The discovery was regarded as a major breakthrough. A problem was that JQ1 did not function optimally in animal experiments, and this means that it has not been possible to test the treatment on cancer patients. New molecule Jonas Nilsson and his research group have developed, in collaboration with the Canadian company Zenith epigenetics, a new molecule known as "RVX2135", ...

In a study that included long-term follow-up of obese patients with type 2 diabetes, bariatric surgery was associated with more frequent diabetes remission and fewer complications than patients who received usual care, according to a study in the June 11 issue of JAMA, a diabetes theme issue. Obesity and diabetes have reached epidemic proportions and constitute major health and economic burdens. Worldwide, 347 million adults are estimated to live with diabetes and half of them are undiagnosed. Studies show that type 2 diabetes is preventable. The incidence of diabetes ...