This news release is available in German. The human immune system is very complex. A large number of different cells with various functions ensure that invading microorganisms such as viruses or bacteria can quickly be rendered innocuous and the entire organism stays healthy. The immune system also includes natural killer cells (NK cells), which recognise and eliminate tumour or virus-infected cells. NK cells therefore combat the body's own stressed cells to prevent them from becoming a potential hazard. However, this bears its risks. Other immune cells, the specific ...

In the past 20 years, the Laboratory for Shock Wave and Detonation Physics Research in Institute of Fluid Physics (IFP), China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) has conducted the research in hypervelocity launch technology. The State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing of Wuhan University of Technology participated in the research as a cooperator, and took charge of the flier processing. In this project, significant progresses have been made in optimization of the physical design, material processing and experimental measurement ...

Confined water exists widely and plays important roles in natural environments, particularly inside biological nanochannels. Professor Lei Jiang and his group from State Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, set out to study this unified bionic frontier. After several years of innovative research, they developed a series of biomimetic nanochannels, delivered a strategy for the design and construction of smart nanochannels and applied the nanochannels in energy conversion systems. The author thought the inner surface property ...

The gradually increasing complexity of user requirements and runtime environments of software demands software to be of more capabilities and thus become more complex than ever. In the past several decades, there was a trend that the scale of software has been increasing continuously. Nowadays, there are tens or even hundreds of million lines of code in a large scale software system. For example, the Windows operating system scales from 15 million lines of code in 1995 to 60 million lines of code in 2007; in 2011, the scale of software in BMW 7 Series reaches 200 million ...

Research carried out by the Copenhagen Centre for Team Sport and Health in Denmark shows that street football (soccer) improves fitness and multiple health markers in homeless men. After only 12 weeks, the participants had better postural balance and higher muscle mass and bone mineralization, along with lower fat percentage and LDL cholesterol and higher aerobic fitness and exercise capacity. Sixteen original scientific articles about the health effects of football were published on June 19 in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports. One of these articles ...

There are many open questions that the Standard Model cannot answer. One of them is the smallness of the Higgs expectation value vh compared with the Planck scale. In their latest work, Dr Yuta Hamada, Dr Hikaru Kawai and Dr Kiyoharu Kawana at Kyoto University, consider the radiation S of the universe at the late stage as a function of vh, and they show that S reaches its maximum around the observed value vh = 246 GeV. "If we demand that S should be maximized, this conclusion can be the explanation to the above question. The main contribution to S comes from the decay ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (June 23, 2014) – A key cancer-causing gene, responsible for up to 20 percent of cancers, may have a weak spot in its armor, according to new research from the Masonic Cancer Center, University of Minnesota. The partnership of MYC, a gene long linked to cancer, and a non-coding RNA, PVT1, could be the key to understanding how MYC fuels cancer cells. The research is published in the latest issue of the journal Nature. "We knew MYC amplifications cause cancer. But we also know that MYC does not amplify alone. It often pairs with adjacent chromosomal ...

SEATTLE –Using two yeasts that have been used to brew tea and beer for centuries, researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have revealed how reproductive barriers might rapidly arise to create species boundaries. Schizosaccharomyces pombe has been used to brew beer in Africa, whereas its close relative S. kombucha is a component of kombucha tea commonly found in health-food stores. A team of researchers led by Dr. Sarah Zanders of the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutch, has uncovered why hybrids between these yeasts (commonly referred to as fission yeasts) ...

LOS ANGELES (June 24, 2014) – Although deep brain stimulation can be an effective therapy for dystonia – a potentially crippling movement disorder – the treatment isn't always effective, or benefits may not be immediate. Precise placement of DBS electrodes is one of several factors that can affect results, but few studies have attempted to identify the "sweet spot," where electrode placement yields the best results. Researchers led by investigators at Cedars-Sinai, using a complex set of data from records and imaging scans of patients who have undergone successful DBS ...

Ottawa/Toronto, CANADA – June 25, 2014 – Pediatric emergency medicine researchers at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) together with the Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation (ONF) today launch the first comprehensive pediatric concussion guidelines. "There have been recommendations and policies on concussion available in the past, but they tend to have focused on sports-related injury and not on children and youth," said Dr. Roger Zemek, project leader, scientist at CHEO, and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at the University of Ottawa. ...

The incarceration rate has nearly quadrupled since the U.S. declared a war on drugs, researchers say. Along with that, racial disparities abound. Incarceration rates for black Americans are more than six times higher than those for white Americans, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. To explain these growing racial disparities, researchers at Virginia Tech are using the same modeling techniques used for infectious disease outbreaks to take on the mass incarceration problem. By treating incarceration as an infectious disease, the scientists demonstrated ...

Optimality principles have been used, in a holistic approach, to describe flow processes in several important geosystems. Optimality principles refer to the state of a physical system that is controlled by an optimal condition subject to physical and/or resource constraints. While significant successes have been achieved in applying them, some principles appear to contradict each other. For example, scientists have found that the formation of channel networks in a river basin follows the minimization of energy expenditure (MEE) rate, while the Earth-atmosphere system ...

Policymakers should conduct "net energy analyses" when evaluating the long-term sustainability of energy technologies, according to new Stanford University research. Net energy analysis provides a quantitative way to compare the amount of energy a technology produces over its lifetime with the energy required to build and maintain it. The technique can complement conventional energy planning, which often focuses on minimizing the financial cost of energy production, say Stanford researchers. "The clearest answer to 'why is net energy important?' is that net energy, ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Challenging risk assessment methods used for decades by toxicologists, a new review of the literature led by environmental health scientist Laura Vandenberg at the University of Massachusetts Amherst suggests that oral gavage, the most widely accepted method of dosing lab animals to test chemical toxicity, does not accurately mimic how humans are exposed to chemicals in everyday life. Oral gavage refers to the way researchers give chemicals to animals by putting a tube down their throats to deliver substances directly to the stomach. It has been used ...

TORONTO, June 25, 2014–There's good news for the 30 per cent or more of adults who suffer from insomnia--difficulty falling asleep, waking up for prolonged periods during the night or unwanted early morning awakenings. New research from St. Michael's Hospital has found that insomnia does not put them at increased risk of developing high blood pressure. Dr. Nicholas Vozoris, a respirologist at St. Michael's, said there is growing concern among patients and health care providers about the potential medical consequences of insomnia, especially on the cardiovascular system. If ...

The rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has declined. An international team of scientists, including one from Virginia Tech, reviewed published research about policy interventions and commodity market effects, and determined that positive incentives for farmers, counties, and states can do as much to preserve forests as public policies that call for penalties. "The challenge now is to build upon this progress," the team reports in an article in the June 6 issue of Science. "Some immediate and simple positive incentives for responsible, low-deforestation farmers ...

University freshers struggle to remember basic concepts from their A-level studies according to new research from the University of East Anglia. A new report published today shows that even grade-A students could only remember 40 per cent of their A-Level syllabus by the first week of term at university. Researchers tested nearly 600 students in their first week of term at five universities – three of which were in the prestigious Russell Group. It is hoped that the findings will assist the re-design of A-Levels to make them more relevant to higher education. The ...

Daily headlines on internet pages and blogs claim: "New ingredient X is harmful to your health." Such warnings can scare people into avoiding these ingredients without actually knowing the facts, leading some people to have food fears about ingredients such as sugar, fat, sodium, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), mono sodium glutamate (MSG), and others. While some of these food fears are merited, others can be misleading. A new Cornell University study published in Food Quality and Preference, investigated who might be most prone to food fears, why, and what can they do ...

Four years after falling in love with the disco clam – a cute little mollusk known for its underwater light show – Lindsey Dougherty has discovered the secret of its mirrored lips. A dive instructor and University of California, Berkeley, graduate student, Dougherty first encountered the two-inch clam in 2010 while diving with her mother and sister in Wakatobi, Indonesia. She and her sister even did a bit of underwater disco dancing to the clam's flashing beat. "I've dived with humpback whales and great white sharks," said Dougherty, who first learned to dive at age ...

Boston, MA – In a groundbreaking study, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have identified a related family of molecules believed to be a major root cause of pulmonary hypertension, a deadly vascular disease with undefined origins. This is one of the first studies to leverage advanced computational network modeling to decipher the molecular secrets of this complex human disease. The study is published online June 24, 2014 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. Despite the rising number of people diagnosed with the disease worldwide, pulmonary hypertension ...

Habitat loss is a primary driver of biodiversity loss – so it isn't surprising that optimising the amount of protected land is high on policy-makers' priorities. However, according to research to be published in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology on June 24 by Oscar Venter and colleagues, many protected areas are established in locations of low economic value, failing to protect the imperilled biodiversity found on more valuable land. More of the earth's land surface is set to be protected in the next decade, but the trend of using poor quality land seems set to continue. ...

Obesity levels are rising throughout the world. As obesity rates increase, so do the incidences of diabetes, heart disease, and other serious health conditions. The bacteria within an individual's gut can influence their susceptibility to these disorders. Therefore, altering the microbe population in the gut could prevent or reverse disease. A June 24th study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation demonstrates that modified bacteria can prevent weight gain in mice. Sean Davies and colleagues at Vanderbilt University made bacteria that produce a compound called NAPE, ...

Millions of women will develop breast cancer at some point in their lives. While many women will completely recover from this cancer, others will not respond to treatment, and predicting which women will not respond to treatment is currently difficult. Breast cancer cells divide rapidly, and treatments that can restrict their growth are of great interest. In a June 24th study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Rong Li and colleagues at the University of Texas determined that activation of the estrogen receptor β (ERβ) limits tumor cell growth. Cancer cells ...

Irvine, Calif. — A newly discovered biomarker – visible in brain scans for hours after febrile seizures – predicts which individuals will subsequently develop epilepsy, according to UC Irvine researchers. This diagnostic ability could lead to improved use of preventive therapies for the disorder. A team led by Dr. Tallie Z. Baram found that rats exhibiting this novel signal in magnetic resonance imaging scans of their brains manifested symptoms of epilepsy months after experiencing very long febrile seizures. Those that did not possess this biomarker remained free of ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – There are new clues about malfunctions in brain cells that contribute to intellectual disability and possibly other developmental brain disorders. Professor Linda Van Aelst of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has been scrutinizing how the normal version of a protein called OPHN1 helps enable excitatory nerve transmission in the brain, particularly at nerve-cell docking ports containing AMPA receptors (AMPARs). Her team's new work, published June 24 in the Journal of Neuroscience, provides new mechanistic insight into how OPHN1 defects can ...