A study of juvenile rat brain cells suggests that the effects of a commonly used anesthetic drug on the connections between brain cells are temporary. The study, published in this week's issue of the journal PLOS ONE, was conducted by biologists at the University of California, San Diego and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York in response to concerns, arising from multiple studies on humans over the past decade, that exposing children to general anesthetics may increase their susceptibility to long-term cognitive and behavioral deficits, such as learning disabilities. An ...

DALLAS – July 28, 2014 – UT Southwestern Medical Center cancer researchers have found a molecule that selectively and irreversibly interferes with the activity of a mutated cancer gene common in 30 percent of tumors. The molecule, SML-8-73-1 (SML), interferes with the KRAS gene, or Kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog. The gene produces proteins called K-Ras that influence when cells divide. Mutations in K-Ras can result in normal cells dividing uncontrollably and turning cancerous. These mutations are particularly found in cancers of the lung, pancreas, and colon. ...

The genome of Solanum pennellii, a wild relative of the domestic tomato, has been published by an international group of researchers including the labs headed by Professors Neelima Sinha and Julin Maloof at the UC Davis Department of Plant Biology. The new genome information may help breeders produce tastier, more stress-tolerant tomatoes. The work, published July 27 in the journal Nature Genetics, was lead by Björn Usadel and colleagues at Aachen University in Germany. The UC Davis labs carried out work on the transcriptome of S. pennellii — the RNA molecules that are ...

A team of international researchers has discovered a new type of cool burning flames that could lead to cleaner, more efficient engines for cars. The discovery was made during a series of experiments on the International Space Station by a team led by Forman Williams, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Researchers detailed their findings recently in the journal Microgravity Science and Technology. "We observed something that we didn't think could exist," Williams said. A better understanding of the cool flames' ...

HIV research findings made possible by a test developed at University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (CU School of Pharmacy) AURORA, Colo (July 28, 2014) An influential new test, discovered and developed in the Colorado Antiviral Pharmacology Laboratory at the CU School of Pharmacy, helps monitor the effectiveness of the HIV prevention drug called Truvada (a combination of tenofovir/emtricitabine), which is taken once daily to prevent HIV infection. A study presented during the AIDS 2014 Conference and published in Lancet Infectious ...

Tropical Storm Hernan developed over this past weekend and reached hurricane strength before vertical wind shear kicked in and kicked the storm down. NASA's Terra satellite passed over Hernan when it was developing as a tropical depression near Baja California, Mexico. Tropical Storm Hernan was born on Saturday, July 26 at 5 a.m. EDT as Tropical Depression 8-E. By 5 p.m. EDT it strengthened into Tropical Storm Hernan. At 11 a.m. EDT on Sunday, July 27, Hernan's maximum sustained winds were already up to 70 mph, just four miles per hour shy of hurricane status. As Hernan ...

Eight of the top 10 U.S. cities that have seen an increase in so-called "nuisance flooding"--which causes such public inconveniences as frequent road closures, overwhelmed storm drains and compromised infrastructure--are on the East Coast, according to a new NOAA technical report. This nuisance flooding, caused by rising sea levels, has increased on all three U.S. coasts, between 300 and 925 percent since the 1960s. The report, Sea Level Rise and Nuisance Flood Frequency Changes around the United States, also finds Annapolis and Baltimore, Maryland, lead the list with ...

Washington, DC, July 28, 2014 – "Fist bumping" transmits significantly fewer bacteria than either handshaking or high-fiving, while still addressing the cultural expectation of hand-to-hand contact between patients and clinicians, according to a study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). In this study from the Institute of Biological, Environmental, and Rural Sciences at Aberystwyth University in the United Kingdom, researchers ...

SAN ANTONIO (July 28, 2014) -- Researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, the Texas Liver Institute and other institutions have identified a combination of pills that cures 9 of 10 hepatitis C patients. The combination of the drugs sofosbuvir and simeprevir, with or without ribavirin, cured 93 percent of patients in 12 weeks, and was well tolerated by patients, according to the study published today in The Lancet. National study conducted in the U.S. Eric Lawitz, M.D., clinical professor in the School of Medicine at the UT Health ...

Set goal, work to achieve goal, attain goal and react accordingly — that's the script we write when we set our sights on an achievement. But what happens when the script isn't followed, and you learn too soon that you will accomplish what you set out to do? New research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business finds that the positive reaction one would have when succeeding is lessened if it doesn't follow the expected course. In "Feeling Good at the Right Time: Why People Value Predictability in Goal Attainment," Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral ...

There is no cure for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, but the research community is one step closer to finding treatment. University of Washington bioengineers have a designed a peptide structure that can stop the harmful changes of the body's normal proteins into a state that's linked to widespread diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and Lou Gehrig's disease. The synthetic molecule blocks these proteins as they shift from their normal state into an abnormally folded form by targeting a toxic intermediate phase. The ...

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL, July 28, 2014...Mothers who live near green spaces deliver babies with significantly higher birth weights, according to a new study, "Green Spaces and Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes" published in the journal, Occupational and Environmental Medicine. A team of researchers from Israel and Spain, including Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), evaluated nearly 40,000 single live births from a registry birth cohort in Tel Aviv, Israel to determine the impact of green surroundings during pregnancy and birth outcomes. "We found that that overall, an increase ...

PORTLAND, Ore. – The findings of a new study suggest two ways to effectively address the problem that birth control pills may not work as well in obese women, compared to women of a normal body mass index. Birth control pills are a one-size-fits-all method, researchers say, but as the population has increased in weight, concern has grown about how well the pill works for obese women. Studies have consistently found that obesity has a negative impact on drug levels in the body, which may in turn affect how well the pill prevents pregnancy. "Birth control pills have ...

A powerful new tool that can help advance the genetic engineering of "fuel" crops for clean, green and renewable bioenergy, has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a multi-institutional partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The JBEI researchers have developed an assay that enables scientists to identify and characterize the function of nucleotide sugar transporters, critical components in the biosynthesis of plant cell walls. "Our unique assay enabled us to analyze ...

A new strategy which enables molecules to be disconnected essentially anywhere, even remote from functionality, is described by researchers from the University of Bristol in Nature Chemistry today. The method is now being developed to explore the possibility of creating a tuberculosis (TB) vaccine. The organic synthesis strategy, developed by Professor Varinder Aggarwal and Dr Ramesh Rasappan in the School of Chemistry, involves a new method for combining smaller fragments together in which there is no obvious history in the product of their genesis. The paper describes ...

CHICAGO – A new study, published in the July, 2014, issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute by Northwestern Medicine® researchers, sheds new light on the risks associated with the growing popularity of endoscopic resection in the treatment of localized, early-stage esophageal cancer. Researchers found that the more traditional surgical resection, while more invasive, provided significantly better outcomes with an 87.6 percent five-year survival rate for patients than endoscopic resection, which had a 76 percent five-year survival rate. The study, "Treatment ...

Tropical Storm Genevieve may be a remnant low pressure area but there's still a chance it could make a comeback. Meanwhile, GOES-West satellite imagery showed there are two developing low pressure areas "chasing" Genevieve to the east. NOAA's Central Pacific Hurricane Center has suddenly become very busy tracking these three areas. NASA/NOAA's GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland provided an infrared image of the Central and Eastern Pacific on July 28 that showed Genevieve southeast of Hawaii, and two other low pressure areas behind ...

Dallas (SMU) — Smart phones and mobile devices are on the cusp of revolutionizing health care, armed with mobile health ("mHealth") apps capable of providing everything from cardiac measurements to sonograms. While tremendous potential exists to broaden access to medical treatment and control costs, several health law experts say in a just-published New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) report that more oversight is needed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure consumer confidence and safety. Out of some 100,000 mHealth apps on the market, only about ...

Fairfax, Va., July 28, 2014—A two-step decision tree analysis, incorporating Donabedian's model, is a feasible process to evaluate and distill the many available quality standards, guidelines, recommendations and indicators in order to update national and international quality standards for radiation therapy, according to a study published in the July-August 2014 issue of Practical Radiation Oncology (PRO), the official clinical practice journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). Guidelines, recommendations and indicators may be utilized to develop ...

(Boston)-- Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) report variants in a new gene, PLXNA4, which may increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). The discovery of this novel genetic association may lead to new drug treatment options that target PLXNA4 specifically. These findings appear in the Annals of Neurology. AD is the most frequent age-related dementia affecting 5.4 million Americans including 13 percent of people age 65 and older, and more than 40 percent of people age 85 and older. Genetic factors account for much of the risk for ...

MANHATTAN, Kansas — He calls himself the bug hunter, but the target of his work consists of viruses that can only be found and identified with special methods and instruments. Benjamin Hause, an assistant research professor at the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Kansas State University, recently published an article about one of his discoveries, porcine enterovirus G, which is an important find in the United States. "We had isolated a virus in cells, but didn't know what it was," Hause said. "We used next-generation sequencing to identify it, and it turned ...

The guiding philosophy for educating children with disabilities has been to integrate them as much as possible into a normal classroom environment, with the hope that peers' skills will help bring them up to speed. A new study provides empirical evidence that peers really can have an impact on a child's language abilities, for better or worse. While peers with strong language skills can help boost their classmates' abilities, being surrounded by peers with weak skills may hinder kids' language development. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal ...

A St. Jude Children's Research Hospital study found that 73 percent of adult survivors of childhood cancer more than doubled their risk of developing metabolic syndrome and related health problems by failing to follow a heart-healthy lifestyle. The results appear in the current issue of the journal Cancer. Almost 32 percent of the 1,598 adult survivors of childhood cancer in the study had metabolic syndrome, an umbrella term for health risk factors like high blood pressure, abdominal obesity, elevated triglyceride and other abnormalities that often occur together. The ...

HOUSTON – (July 28, 2014) – Rice University researchers are using magnetic beads and DNA "springs" to create chains of varying flexibility that can be used as microscale models for polymer macromolecules. The experiment is visual proof that "bead-spring" polymers, introduced as theory in the 1950s, can be made as stiff or as flexible as required and should be of interest to materials scientists who study the basic physics of polymers The work led by Rice chemical and biomolecular engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal and graduate student Julie Byrom was published this month in ...

Some 15% of adults suffer from fertility problems, many of these due to genetic factors. This is something of a paradox: We might expect such genes, which reduce an individual's ability to reproduce, to disappear from the population. Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science that recently appeared in Nature Communications may now have solved this riddle. Not only can it explain the high rates of male fertility problems, it may open new avenues in understanding the causes of genetic diseases and their treatment. Various theories explain the survival of harmful mutations: ...